Is 'gamification' the future?

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/25/nesta-gamification-david-rowan

by jrbedard • 16 years ago

20 25 16 years ago

wired.co.uk

jlees3• 16 years ago

Gamification is simply the application of a ton of learnings (and in some cases, pure intuition) about how humans behave, what drives us, and how to keep us engaged. In terms of "stick badges on it and people will keep using your product", gamification is not going to hang around all that long, ruined by poor execution and over-exposure (as with any UX trend).

However, the trend of humanification -- designing for and by humans, taking us away from an age of faceless software -- is well underway, and I don't think that's going away any time soon. I also think that's a Good Thing.

SideSwipe• 16 years ago

Agreed, Gamification as it's being executed now is pretty shallow but I believe that is going to change. We setup a small wiki for that very reason @ http://gamification.org to discuss the topic and open it up to collaboration and collective brainstorming.

jlees3• 16 years ago

Oh, interesting. I like the concept of open source game mechanics!

chailatte6• 16 years ago

Badges/leaderboard for pushing a button != game. More like cheese for the caged rat.

_delirium• 16 years ago

It's also not new; lots of it is new branding on an old concept. HN has long had karma points and a karma leaderboard, if just that is enough to count. Forum software since at least the 90s has had "levels" for posters depending on how long they've been there, how much they've posted, and on a few forums some attempt to measure of the quality of their postings. Even the old Experts Exchange had a "gamified" question-answering setup, with a system of points, levels, and features.

There was another big wave of it a few years ago when "crowdsourcing" became a big buzzword for a while, and people were designing game-like mechanics around that.

Lewisham• 16 years ago

Games only have value if you have emotional investiture in them. I have no investiture in Stack Overflow points at all, but I do like seeing my karma go up in HN (cue epic downvoting now) as I get some sense that I can hang with the cool kids.

People see World of Warcraft and say "it's just a bar going up", which is entirely true, but with investiture of that bar (say, for comparison, or sense of progress/reward etc etc) it becomes something else entirely.

j_baker• 16 years ago

That was actually the paper's author's point:

"Points and badges have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards. Gamification, as it stands, should actually be called pointsification, and is a bad thing because it's a misleading title for a misunderstood process… Games are good, points are good, but games ≠ points."

ig1• 16 years ago

I strongly believe that Game Mechanics are going to be huge on the order of magnitude of social or mobile.

Can you imagine what would happen if Zynga took their playbook and decided to build a weight-loss startup (the market for weight loss products in the US alone is $35 billion/year). Not to mentions the dozen of other billion-dollar self-help industries that can be transformed with game mechanics.

Sooner or later life is going to be like a MUD with standardized ways of measuring skills and comparing yourself against your friends. In a couple of generations time kids will grow up talking about "levelling up" in real life skills.

The application of game mechanics to real-life is only just beginning and it's going to have a huge transformative effect on how people live their lives.

chailatte6• 16 years ago

Why would the kids of this generation or the next few prefer to play real life vs virtual life? If anything, technologies in the future will allow one to better enjoy the virtual experience, complete with realistic sensations and freedom to modifying their world and create their own adventure. All for $9.99 a month.

Remember, real life is tough. Clicking a mouse is easy.

rsheridan63• 16 years ago

Because nobody in real life is impressed by your level 160 elf mage.

jlees3• 16 years ago

Check out Castronova's "Exodus to the Virtual World" for an entire book based around this concept -- if life in the virtual world is so much more fun than reality, surely we'll see full-on migrations to 100% virtual existence (caveat the baseline necessities to maintain vitality).

jules• 16 years ago

On a related note, today I have found the answer to the weight loss problem. There is a certain type of pine nut from China that kills your taste buds if you eat it raw, making everything that you eat taste very bitter (taste buds normally die and regrow every week or so, so it's not permanent).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_nut#Risks_of_eating_pine_n...

sayemm• 16 years ago

Gamification for me, is like the Wall St of the internet.

A lot of hype, little real value.

Big difference between the gaming industry (PS3, Nintendo, Zynga... which are awesome) and attempts at trying to make the world a game.

coryl• 16 years ago

Zyngas not quite there yet

bpm140• 16 years ago

What we are seeing is the backlash against the idea that just adding points and badges will create a compelling experience. This is no more accurate than if you replaced [your favorite game] with a series of menus and button presses and threw in some random point and badge awards. The experience itself must be rewarding.

That said, "gamification" techniques can be a wonderful thing. Points are a useful way to highlight positive interactions with users ("you did X, this is a good thing, these points help you realize that"). Badges are a good way of providing metagame elements, both at the beginning of an experience (to shorten the learning curve) and at the end (to provide extended engagement). This all relies on a compelling core experience, of course.

I think that Dennis has been clear that Foursquare is a social layer on top of physical locations, not a game. That people generally see it as a shallow game can be considered both an example of the compelling (and perhaps overriding) aspect of the gameplay elements and an indictment of the core 4Sq experience.

Is 'gamification' the future?

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