Against Gamification

http://www.slate.com/id/2289302

by mcantelon • 15 years ago

4 6 15 years ago

lowprofile2• 15 years ago

First, I dislike gamification on a personal level, but from a business level it makes huge sense. Trading a reinforcer(badges) of no real value for something of value(data) is smart.

Gamification may be the wrong way to look at this, I believe most of our behavior has rules and rewards much like most games. Gamification is just an explicit way of generating a desired behavior, look at the cliched "gold" star on the top of a students paper, or a badge.

From a business model(using badges as a simple example), what happens when the reinforcer loses value, ie everyone else has all the same badges? Do you invent a new set of badges that are more special than the old ones? Or if the community no longer cares what kind or how many badges a person has?

Disclosure: I do my house chores to avoid an angry spouse.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

I do chores when the house is dirty

lowprofile2• 15 years ago

Me too, but there are differing definitions of dirty.

mindcrime• 15 years ago

And McGonigal, whose games are filled with top-secret missions in which you get to play the superhero, says "reality is broken" because people don't get to feel "epic" often enough. This is a child's view of how the world works.

I disagree. There seems to be good reason to believe that the need to "feel epic" is a basic drive. Look at how an archetypal story like the "hero's quest" emerges in a wide variety of cultures over the millennia of time[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

Do adults really need to pretend they're superheroes on secret missions to have meaning in their lives?

Very likely so. If you accept anything that evolutionary psychology suggests, then look at one of their fundamental tenets: Technology and culture "evolve" faster than humans do, and so we are evolutionarily "wired" for life in the Ancestral Environment... hunter / gatherer society in tribes of around 150 (or less) people. Modern life removes some of the challenges we are wired to face, and replaces them with different ones... it does not strike me as unreasonable to think that adults may actually have some inner drive / motivation that very naturally maps to the sensations we get from games; and that isn't easily found in "real life."

danneu• 15 years ago

...there are legitimate reasons why people feel they're achieving less. These include the boring literal truths of jobs shipped overseas, stagnant wages, and a taxation system that benefits the rich and hurts the middle class and poor.

The author is trying to make too much of a sociopolitical connection to the proliferation of gaming. Achieving virtual points directly appeals to reward pathways in humans because the achievement is objective and directly gratified. That's really all there is to it. Maybe you can find a correlation between escapism tendencies and quality of living, but it's tangential to the discussion.

If eating broccoli instead of Fun Dip increased some numbers on a real-time nutritional profile HUD on our forearm that we could check for gratification, we'd eat more greens. But the reality is that humans are incredibly dissonant. Forgoing dietary fiber for a morning Snickers bar might increase our chances of anal polyps in the future, but we don't really care. Achieving arbitrary points (like experience/level-up systems in games) appeals so well to our fundamental nature that taking successful games and adding this achievement level on top of it is a business model in itself.

The world would be a different place if you received a +1 on your Recycled Items counter on your personal profile before you hit the gym to add +2 to your Fitness Level. It's less about corporate interest doom and gloom, and more about the nature of humans.

wdewind• 15 years ago

I've always thought McGonigal completely misses the point. She's sort of right and sort of wrong about a lot of things at once:

1) People in general definitely are bored. The industrial revolution led to the death of a lot of artisanship and concentrated a lot of thinking power into the upper class. I'm not sure the answer to that is video games though: that's escapism. Now she uses other values of gaming, but those arguments don't make sense for the "people need to feel epic" facet of her general thesis.

2) She confuses gaming with design. This is my real issue: what's she's ultimately saying is if we use games to help guide people into solving problems we will be better off. The parts of this that are true can be attributed to good design in general: industrial, graphic, yes game and other types too. But gaming is just one small part of this.

Against Gamification

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