
Coding Horror: The Gamification - Anon84
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-gamification.html
======
nathanb
I have found the gamification of Hacker News to be detrimental to my
experience. Insightful but unpopular comments end up getting buried by
retreads of the status quo. It's the tragedy of the commons: if every single
person can upvote, the most-upvoted comment will be the one which appeals to
every single person.

I prefer the threaded discussion style of kuro5hin back in the day where
comments might be upvoted, but they stayed in the same temporal order they
were posted in.

~~~
wanorris
Personally, I tend to want to respond to an article or discussion with
whatever thought I'm having at the moment. The HN karma (in particular, the
average) reminds me to try to filter my comments based on whether I'm saying
something that I think others will find useful or whether I'm just saying it
because I feel like saying it. I probably censor about half of what I would
otherwise post based on this guideline, and it's nearly always to the
betterment of my signal/noise ratio.

~~~
nathanb
I find myself willing to spend more time/thought crafting a response to an
article which I think will be read by more people. For example, I'm just
pounding this out stream-of-consciousness style since I know it will only be
read by those involved in this subthread, if that. Why not do the right thing
and focus on thoughtful, well-written comments for their own sake? Because I
have the karma carrot dangling in front of me. I feel like gamification has in
this case removed my motivation to do what is most beneficial to the site.

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wccrawford
About 2 years ago, I was looking at a forum that looked like the one pictured
and thought, "Why would anyone let this happen to their forum?"

Signatures started as a way to putting personality into your post, and they
still are, but it's gone way overboard. Many forums put a reasonable limit on
that stuff now. 2 lines, 100 characters, etc.

I never looked at StackExchange as a solution to that, though. Forums were for
everything from chatting to problem solving, and are usually conveniently
divided for such. StackExchange is just for problem solving.

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pavel_lishin
> Based on the original size of those screenshots, only 18 percent of that
> forum thread page is content. The other 82 percent is lost to signatures,
> avatars, UI doohickeys, and other web forum frippery that has somehow become
> accepted as "the way things are done".

Avatars are a quick and easy way to identify an author - and that in itself
carries quite a bit of information. (I'd trust someone I knew to be a mechanic
to post valid repair advice, vs. someone who posts all the time about their
car breaking because of dumb things they did.)

~~~
Periodic
I noticed something interesting on Reddit. I recently installed the Reddit
Enhancement Suite extension for my browser. One of the features is that it
displays next to a user's name above their comment the sum of +/- 1 votes I
have given them. It also colors them based on their distance from 0 (or
something similar to this). Suddenly I find myself reading comments
differently based on whether they a strong positive or negative rating _from
me_. I worried a little when I found myself upvoting a comment that was made
by a very common poster on the site, and I realized it was the sort of stupid
joke that doesn't contribute to the discussion that I would normally down-
vote.

The reputation the user had with me caused me to give their posts the benefit
of the doubt. It was a very odd experience.

On HN, I almost never read the name of the person who posted something until I
am about to vote on it. I enjoy trying to evaluate a post on its contribution
to the topic, and not on the authority or popularity of the author.

~~~
ericd
That odd experience sounds like most human interaction outside of the web.
With the added context, I guess you lose objectivity, but gain a sense of
community.

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Goladus
Gamification is a fad, it will almost certainly evolve into something more
sensible, such as "engage your users," once the frenzy ends. It's nice to see
Atwood highlighting the fact that they didn't set out to make StackOverflow
gamified, they set out to engage users and foster quality contributions.

~~~
Unseelie
Saying that 'engage your users' is a better terminoligy for what's going on
here than 'gamification' basically ignores the whole point of the idea, which
is that people like to be making progress towards goals..not 'engaged', but
metrically shown as advancing.

That is, at the very basic level, what gamification is, its making an activity
into an activity with specific measures of progress toward a goal, such that
people can rank themselves (and we do).

This isn't a new or faddish idea, its an insight into how people act, and an
attempt to use that bit of new understanding, as Atwood did, before being
aware of the term, to engage users using what are called 'game mechanics'
which are basically motivations outside of the actual reward structures of the
activity. I suspect "engage your users" is moving into the much more targeted
and practicable mode of "gamify your interface" rather than vice versa.

~~~
Goladus
Games are not games because they are scored and have goals. Games are games
because they are fun. Scoring is one aspect and usually present, but it's only
one aspect and will only appease a subset of people. You can play soccer for
2+ hours and not achieve a single goal. It's still fun. Even if goals are
scored, keeping track is entirely optional. Soccer is a game and fun, even
when you don't "gamify" it by keeping score.

Furthermore, "gamification" by that definition often begets "gaming" the
system. Because scoring, measuring, and mechanical details almost never
perfectly match the spirit and original intent of the game, these edge cases
cause dissonance and frequently disengagement. Examples: A baseball player
hitting 17 foul balls waiting for a good pitch, basketball players causing
fouls on purpose simply to stop the game clock, monks in Everquest using the
"feign death" skill to split mobs that would be unbeatable as a group; these
are real dynamics in successful game systems originally designed or evolved to
be that way. In other areas, such as academic grading or pay-for-performance,
the dissonance is significantly more profound.

People play foldit because it's _fun_ , and that's what "gamification" should
be about. The scoring metrics are merely a small piece of that.

~~~
Unseelie
Granted that's what games are about. But gamification is about using game
mechanics (mechanics being things like -scores- which let you understand your
position against that position of other people, and rules, which keep you from
doing whatever you like, as something completely aside from the point of the
'fun' of the game) to do something much more functional than make things fun:
to make things addictive or otherwise drive the user to pursue things outside
of their standard pattern.

Stack overflow's design isn't about making it fun, its about making the users
collaborate into something that is easy and valuable to the population. The
rules of a game in general aren't about making the games fun, they're about
providing a framework for competition.

~~~
Goladus
Right, and that's why I think "gamification" will be a fad. Eventually people
will see through transparent attempts to lead them by the nose through
otherwise completely unengaging content and will move on to something more
compelling.

Sure, designers will continue to include game mechanics to enhance engagement,
it just won't be this crazy concept that everyone obsesses about. It'll just
be a tool you can use sometime if the situation seems right.

And I disagree about stackoverflow on both counts. I believe it is fun, and
that competition is a nonessential component to the sites success. Some people
do thrive on competition, others do not. The core of stackoverflow is the
dialogue between askers and answerers. Maybe say "rewarding" instead of "fun."
The scores and rules are a nice enhancement to the core experience-- they
facilitate public recognition, sorting and organization, among other things.
There has been competition and recognition on Wikipedia for a long time, and
they have made no overt attempt to "gamify".

Another important thing that the stackoverflow game mechanics do is guide
users to functionality they might not know about. What you call "driving"
users I would call "leading." Hardcore completionist, achievement-oriented,
and competitive users are, of course, driven. The rest, however, are not, and
to them features like "badges" just bring attention to the wide variety of
ways the site can be engaging. The FAQ is well-written and very useful. The
"analytical" badge merely helps draw a little extra attention to it. vBulletin
has a boilerplate FAQ that probably no one has read in years since it's the
same on every single forum that uses the software.

------
joelhaus
What struck me most is Jeff's disregard for potential patent threats. Perhaps
inadvertent, but he also makes a strong case for why such "business method"
patents hinder innovation rather than promote it.

------
sayemm
Great post by Jeff Atwood here. It reminds me of this old RWW piece featuring
SO and some great quotes by Spolsky:
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/anthropology_the_art_of...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/anthropology_the_art_of_building_a_successful_soci.php)

"What we do have to think about [in the era of social networking] is human to
human interaction," he said. And according to Spolsky, to do that, you have to
think as an anthropologist does.

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akkartik
I read it as:

    
    
      Coding Gamification: The Horror

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michaelchisari
I've heard the quote as "bad artists borrow, great artists steal", which
always made more sense to me. A bad artist will take what someone else has
done, but it remains essentially the original artists vision and concept. A
great artist steals it, and claims total ownership, making it uniquely theirs,
despite the original source.

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codecaine
I like how I dont have to visit Coding Horror regularly to see whether there
is a new post but rather just check HN

