

Show HN: Gamification.org - Open Source Game Mechanics - jrbedard
http://gamification.org

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Xurinos
A mix of humor and thoughts on the site layout:

I harbored a tiny hope that this website would give me a progress bar for
reading through it and that I could earn achievements for becoming
knowledgeable in different areas of gamification. In addition, when I read
about the collaboration, I thought it would be neat to earn collaboration
points as an encouragement to share ideas and maybe get some badges that
represent my gamification expertise.

I came away slightly disappointed and not surprised; gamification requires a
bit of thinking about what behaviors you want to encourage from your audience.
Because I do not see how this site can benefit me, I do not feel encouraged to
play, er, contribute.

It would be great if the site about gamification used gamification, stood
forth as an alluring example. Nice start, though. Humor aside, I genuinely am
interested in looking through some of the material and seeing what I can
learn.

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fatso784
I'm a game designer. I can tell you that seeing the "gamification" movement
makes my stomach churn. These are just a bunch of f __*ing reward schemes. Web
developers don't have a clue what game design or game mechanics are, and with
sites like these, they never will. I think we need a new term, perhaps "reward
structures" is enough. Sadly it isn't as "trendy" as gamification sounds.
Equating game design with reward structures blatantly disregards the "toy"
aspect of games. Games are meant to be fun. Reward structure is part of that,
but not nearly the entire thing.

~~~
bendotc
Fellow game developer here. I can't wait for "gamification" to die. It
represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what games are and can be. To
make it more annoying, in practice, it often seems to be accompanied by a
disrespect for the users.

I'm not saying artificial rewards systems are without any merit (e.g. check
out the way people react to karma scores in places like HN), but I've seen no
indication that this new buzzword has provoked any sort of actual intellectual
interest in this stuff -- more just a race to add badges to everything.

Edit: And there's the downvote for raining on the parade! Shocking.

~~~
ryanelkins
I agree. I think the adoption of the term "gamification" has caused a rift
because really, this isn't about making things in to games or creating fun -
it's about creating motivation. I think a big part of the backlash against
"gamification" is this misdirection implied in the term. The feedback and
reward mechanisms used are things that were honed in games - the idea is to
take the ideas behind motivational and reward systems from games and move them
into things that specifically aren't games - not to make these non-games into
games.

I say this as a founder of a "gamification" or "game mechanics" 3rd party
service provider. Unfortunately, the term is now lodged in our vernacular, I'm
afraid.

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ErrantX
The site covers an interesting idea; but I found it intensely off putting
because a lot of the language sounds like "ad-speak".

It's also not clear to the un-initiated what on earth it's all about... the
first page just launches into text with no explanation. It took me a second to
get my bearings.

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sts522
Wow. I feel like Jane McGonigal would hate this. Especially her video being
used to promote it. Jane has said publicly that she wants to design games that
change the world, not just "pointify" current products. I highly recommend
watching Jesse Schell's talk on the Gamepocalypse (a vivid vision of the
dystopic result of gamification). In fact, I believe Jane and Jesse are
debating it at a conference later this year. Would be interesting to hear
their thoughts on this.

~~~
Xurinos
To be fair, it looks like this page suggests a lot more than just adding
points to things. I am reading it as a primer on human psychology.

The real question in my mind is this: What causes X behavior in my audience?
The good guy in me wants to make things fun for people, to arouse excitement
and enjoyment. What arouses these emotions in them?

Thus is gamification more of an art. You cannot just add some points and
badges to a product and expect it to take off. You must appeal to the pleasure
centers in ways that make sense.

It is interesting to see listed on this site what kinds of things have been
proven to cause these favorable reactions in people. Maybe there are some
fundamental concepts we can derive from the long lists. Maybe we can boil them
down to some core principles vaguely reminiscent of Skinner. With this study,
we are going to learn more about ourselves, our base, instinctual needs.

This is cool stuff. Why should anyone hate it? Perhaps there should be a
disclaimer: "Don't read this as a list of TODOs. Read it as a guide towards
proven motivators, and adapt what makes sense for your needs." This whole
thing is entertainment. And as in all entertainment, various motivators will
come in and out of fashion, be great today and boring tomorrow. This is a
moving target.

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krainboltgreene
Just a small note: Game mechanics _can't_ be protected per
[FL-108](<http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html>)

> Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the
> method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea,
> system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing,
> merchandising, or playing a game. _Once a game has been made public, nothing
> in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on
> similar principles._ Copyright protects only the particular manner of an
> author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.

So calling it "Open Source" is misleading, I think.

~~~
mrkurt
That's just copyright law. Patents are the real issue/problem, I think.

~~~
krainboltgreene
While you can patent a _game_ , or _game materials_ , you can't patent a _game
mechanic_.

~~~
rprasad
You have that backwards. You can't patent a game or game materials (these can
be copyrighted or trademarked or both), but you could patent game mechanics
b/c they were "processes" which were patentable under the Federal Circuit's
non-existent standard for patentability. In fact, several game mechanics have
been patented.

Whether those patents remain valid is another question entirely. In 2007, the
Supreme Court struck down the ridiculously low bar for patenting business
methods and software processes, which includes most game-related patents.

~~~
krainboltgreene
> You can't patent a game or game materials

All the web material and notes I looked for said otherwise. The actual patent
website is _abysmally unhelpful_. I'll have to take your word for it.

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jrbedard
Our wiki is still primitive, but open for feedback and contributions. Akin to
the SCVNGR's Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck, we include a repository of
classic game mechanics at <http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Mechanics>. The
difference is we want to make it open for collaboration and discussions
through game mechanic definitions, implementation exemples, best practices,
metrics, strategies, etc.

~~~
krainboltgreene
I think you should move away from Wikimedia as a CMS platform. It's crusty,
looks terrible, and is a trademarked for "half-assed projects" as far as I'm
concerned. To be brutally honest right now it looks like someone shuffled
through the Wikimedia plugin bin and slapped it together without any thought
to aesthetic.

A simple static website with the What, Why, and How as a portal to a better,
light weight, CMS would be far more attractive.

~~~
jrbedard
We're evaluating with different CMS platforms. The good thing with MediaWiki
is that the content is easily migratable :)

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_delirium
Though I like this idea, there are now several projects dedicated to
cataloguing game mechanics. Is it possible to have some sort of consolidation
of effort?

Two others:

* I believe the first one was the Game Ontology Project at <http://gameontology.org/>, which takes an approach somewhat tilted to the formal-analysis side.

* The biggest one with the most contributors is probably the videogame subsection of tvtropes: <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideogameTropes>

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efields
Story goes that a co-worker's wife heard him talking taking a call about game
mechanics. When he was done with the call she was puzzled and ask, "Why are
you guys so interested in gay mechanics?"

It's all I hear now.

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simonsarris
This sounds wonderful.

However the "What is Gamification?" is a much better first page than the home
page is, with respect to explaining things.

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lzimm
"Lets take anything to do with behavioural conditioning and fundamental
incentive structures and call them game mechanics, just so we have an excuse
to make up something new and forget that everything we're doing has been going
under constant research and development since the dawn of the industrial
revolution..."

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gamediesel
I think this is a great resource. If integrated correctly (game layer) then I
believe websites with decent traffic + communities built around them will be
able retain users longer (sticky) and increase loyalty will equal more $$$ in
the long term.

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limist
From the title I thought this would link to code: some sort of OSS
library/abstraction-layer for providing common game mechanics. Is there
anything like that yet, in any language?

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edkennedy
DNS error for me, I am unable to load the site.

