Gamification: Let’s play the world
Originally published on STEMI Blog by Marko Luka Zubcic
We humans are a strange bunch. We need to have things presented to us in special ways in order to pay attention to them, grasp them and be moved by them. We need those things to make sense in our immediate lives. Otherwise, we tend to either ignore them or even become frustrated by them.
This is what people from marketing know all too well, and they use the stories we tell ourselves about our lives to make their products more desirable to us. Despite all its bad reputation, this is not necessarily a sinister practice — for the ways products are marketed signal an obligation to the way of life we find valuable and worth pursuing. And while their real goal might be profit, even merely “going through the motions” of moral or aesthetic promises they made can have serious consequences. A company need not be sincerely interested in global warming as long as it says it will manufacture their products in the eco-friendly way — and does that. In this sense, the belief is irrelevant as long as the appropriate action is taken. And when it is taken, they may be rewarded for it — by profit.
Now, this is surely not the whole story of the market, but rather a simplification of one tiny segment of it. However, it points out an aspect of the market not unique to that segment — it sounds like a game. If you get to communicate with the consumers clearly, and that communication conveys a message about what is relevant to them, and you do as you say you will, you will get rewarded by trust and, well, money.
When it comes to what consumers regard as “the relevant message”, the game structure appears again. Consumers tend to find relevant what they believe others find relevant as well. Will this be a certain ethical standards or an aggressively narcissistic lifestyle or something entirely else depends on the general social atmosphere the product is communicating with — in so many words, a target group. If you have a certain thing, a thing that signals clearly a set of beliefs your social world finds valuable, then you yourself signal to your social world that you find that set of beliefs valuable. The relevant message conveyed by the product is thus not only a part of the game of selling it, but also of buying it. And in this sense, when you think about it (and many philosophers and sociologists have), the whole of our social reality appears to be a game. We learn the rules of appropriate behaviour, some of us are more skillful at playing then others, we are awarded for behaviours that our social groups find desirable, and we get a special prize if we are better at playing then others.
Recently, this thought has emerged as the guiding principle in designing more motivating environments for a variety of practices. From marketing to organization to education to a wide array of meaningful engagements with the world around us — they thought that the way to render the experiences of playing our lives more stimulating and enjoyable is to make the game explicit.
How gamification works
If we take education as an example, we might notice that it has always essentially been gamified. Only it has been so poorly. For, what are grades if not badges? Gamification, in this sense, is merely a sophistication of the usual education.
But it is the sophistication that counts.
Gamification tries to understand and use the motivating power of explicit games. And this motivating power lies primarily in the fundamentally experiential value of the game — people love to immersed in the worlds of games. These worlds are an aesthetic experience, they look good and sound good, and they are somehow removed from the usual world, thus allowing you to reserve a significant portion of your cognition exclusively for the game being played. The game muffles out the distractions of your everyday life and its complexity, and cultivates something called “the flow“ — the focused, immersive experience of being engaged with the problem you are trying to solve. That is if the game is well designed, of course.
Another crucial aspect to gamification is the way rewards are structured and progress is presented. First of all, you get a reward for each tiny step you do in the course of playing. This cultivates a feeling of constant gratification, which in turn stimulates further engagement. But then another thing that significantly contributes to this feeling of progress is that it is explicitly presented to you in beautiful visuals. You are all the time reminded of how good you are doing, and this makes you more prone to continue doing good. It’s all down to neurochemistryreally. And it appears it could have amazing results in educational contexts.
The third relevant thing about games is that they are social — and this provides them with significant motivational power as well. Rewarding desirable behaviour appears to be a much more successful technique of maintaining it than punishing undesirable behaviour is. And growing your social status through your ability to perform desirably is not only a good way to establish social cohesion, but is also a rather strong personal incentive. We all want others to see the badges we got when we did well at something. Our self-esteem, but also the quality of our work, grows with the sense that others see effort and talent in us.
But there is also another, maybe even more important side, to the increasingly social nature of gamified education — and this has to do with group work. Group work presents problems to be solved as “our” problems, the problems we share as humans, which allows for the development of quite relevant soft social skills among students. Diverse groups also appear to give better results in numerous problem-solving situations than homogenous groups do — and this means that we want our students to be capable of being a valuable contributor to any problem-solving situation their complex future lives will bring. And this is another reason why gamification has become a go-to method for contemporary educational practice.
Gamification works
Just think about it. The world is online, the data travels lightly. The digital universes are created with more ease every day. And people love playing games.
Do you really need statistics? It is bound to work.
And it might change the world
The strange thing about gamification is that appears that it can do one very specific trick. It can motivate a certain behaviour in an easy, fun and engaging way among numerous individuals.
This much is clear by now, and this is why gamification, when done well, can be so successfully utilized in education. But this is just a part of a larger picture of what gamification appears to excel at. Namely — generating social good.
Aggregating behaviours of numerous individuals towards a certain goal is what gamification can do very well because performing these behaviours is something those individuals enjoy. And when this goal is something individuals find valuable, they enjoy it even more. The sheer amount of hours people are ready to devote to playing games appears to be an untapped resource of some kind. There has to be, the thought goes, a variety of causal chains that can be established between the joy of gaming and some socially valuable output. It takes certain imagination to make it happen — but can we really doubt whether it can be done?
The wave of gamification of social good is presently slowly picking up pace. For instance, charity is becoming gamified. Take an example ofFree Rice, which donates 10 grains of rice through World Food Programme to end hunger whenever you answer the question correctly. Or CrowdRise, which gamifies the experience of fundraising for a humanitarian cause.
And for all the sound ethical concerns about whether fixing the world should really depend on people playing games, the argument that cannot be overlooked is — it just might work. One problem of implementing certain public policies is that even policies that people regard as good in their essence usually require such a vast amount of behavioural reforms that those same people find themselves demotivated halfway through the policy-implementation. This usually generates new, big and small, problems. And it renders the policy, in significant ways, unsuccessful. While certain policies simply cannot be gamified, there is something interesting in the idea that policy-implementation should be thought out in terms of user experience.
The problem, some might say, is that this might numb the critical stance we expect the democratic citizenship to have towards policies. The political struggle would be won and lost depending not on who’s got the better policy, but who’s got the better game.
Conclusion
Games today teach, market, organize, collect data and motivate people to engage with the world’s problems. Games tomorrow might become even more of an ubiquitous experience, especially considering the rise of Internet of Things, Virtual Reality and immersive environments. And where they work, they seem to do wonders. But, as is usual with matters of technological progress, we must keep an eye on games where they overstep their reach and become a troubling gratification devices that render us unable to approach the world soberly, seriously and with a greater scope of understanding then the shiny clamour of scoring points allows. We should not be infantilized into believing games will save the world. People save the world. And some of them just might do it by playing games.
