Gamification: Too Much Candy Crush, Not enough D&D

It happened again. I ended up attending another conference session that turned to a shallow look at gamification that likely does more harm than good.

I don’t know if I’m cursed, if I’ve broken too many mirrors, or if I’ve spent too much time underneath ladders but I keep ending up in conference sessions that talk about gamification. It’s not that gamification is a bad thing, not at all! But of sessions I’ve found myself in they’ve always been the shallowest of approaches to gamification. So what is gamification and how can we use it for good in education.

First let me start:

👏 GAMIFICATION 👏 IS 👏 NOT 👏 POINTS, 👏 BADGES, 👏 AND LEADERBOARDS 👏

These things are not intrinsically good or game-like, and the school system has already had all of these things in use for decades: points to grades; badges to credits; and leaderboards to honour rolls. Gamification talks that don’t go into depth beyond this have added nothing to the conversation.

One other failing of these talks is highlighting competition solely in terms of player vs. player or learner vs. learner. While these elements can be really engaging for some students (particularly the ones that society encourages to be highly competitive), it is worth asking whether turning your course into a competition is going to alienate and discourage other learners. There are definitely ways to design the competition to be less alienating (e.g. having a hi-score vs. your score leaderboard rather than a full ranking), but the obvious one that doesn’t come up is pitting the learners against something other than each other. For example you could do collaborative games where they’re trying to compete against a narrative, particularly for project based courses.

Before diving too deep into this I want to get back to the tweet that started this post:

For those of you who aren’t familiar Candy Crush Saga is a mobile match three game where you arrange pieces of candy match colours to clear the board, solve puzzles, accrue points, and advance through levels.

Alternatively Dungeons and Dragons is a game where you, a nerd, sit in a room with other nerds where you argue about throwing a fireball at the demogorgon.

Candy Crush Saga is a free-to-play game that makes money through sales of power-up boosters that give players advantages to clear levels. The game is very polished and is very deliberately designed to display your progression and achievement with the score meter on the left of the puzzle board, the demarkations for the 1-star, 2-star, and 3-star tiers for performance, as well as the pop-ups that praise you for big moves and good combos.

Dungeons and Dragons is a table-top role playing game, the game itself isn’t single player but generally needs a person running the game and a player or group of players who participate in the game-runner’s narrative. The D&D books aren’t the game itself but a very large set of instructions for how to play. There are also books that prepare a lot of the settings and encounters that players may experience as well as adding new rules to help run the game using that book.

A lot of the interface for this game is the character sheet. It’s the sheet that helps you track your character information during the story. It’s definitely not an intuitive piece, but there are elements in there for tracking experience points, level, and other signs of progression. A lot of the engagement for the game is in character planning and development, the story in your game, and whether those pesky dice are going to pull the rug out from under your feet. The game has less control over your experience and is less able to reinforce things like those feel good moments of clearing puzzles.

Both of these games are products trying to make money. But one is much more optimized to connect performance and progression with purchase. I wonder if the designers have clearly defined where they’re willing to go to design for engagement and whether that avoids or includes designing for addiction.

We’ve seen the business world adopt a lot of gamification techniques to drive engagement. Sites have progress bars when you’re building your profile to show how much information you’ve put into the site and to make you feel incomplete when you don’t enter elements. Foursquare added leaderboards for local check-ins and made visiting businesses a competition. There are a lot of ways that businesses use gamification to optimize engagement, but in a course we should be carefully considering how we want to engage our learners, what tools are on the table, and which ones are not.

So I said that gamification isn’t enough D&D, what parts might be worth adapting to a class environment? One piece is the way most D&D campaigns handle competition. It’s usually set up as non-player characters versus the player characters, or functionally the players collaborate with each other as they participate in the story of the game runner. With these collaborations you usually see groups specialize in roles, you get the rogue for sneaking around, the bard for smooth-talking your way out of trouble, and the paladin for nagging the party. Character creation is about players taking ownership over their characters and the newest edition of D&D builds in a bit more encouragement for players to invest some thought into who their character is. More elements are helping players see their progression, letting them make meaningful choices, and being flexible for the way they engage in the story (UDL anyone?). These things come together to make it easy to spend a lot of time with a textbook that is disguised as a game.

So D&D might be a pretty nerdy framing of some of these game elements with the magic, goblins, and dragons, but what are some ways you might adapt them to a class setting?

One method might be taking a narrative approach to a course. For example you might have a business course where groups of students are managing a business and as the instructor you might add elements to the story of that business to have students adapt to try and keep their business afloat. Maybe they have to choose between a couple of different resumes and those new hires will have different impacts on the business, maybe a competitor gets some bad press, maybe a pipe bursts in your back office.

Another business course example might be a stock picking game where students get so much money and have to manage a portfolio, but instead of pitting students against each other where only the top team gets a bonus, maybe you have the students try and match skills versus the instructor and players with a more profitable portfolio than the instructor receive that bonus, if there are any.

A bit more abstractly it might be looking at how you design your course for recognizing progression in your course. This might mean looking at threshold concepts in your course and identifying what strengths students tap into when they cross those thresholds. It might mean looking at how grades are set up in your course. In order to build progression into the Moodle gradebook I’ve set the default as a count from 0 grade, this means that when your gradebook is set up and a student does their first assignment in your course gets 9/10 on it, they see it as having 9% in the course that builds over time, rather than a 90% which can go up or down as they progress through the course.

Hopefully there’s an idea here that might spark something cool for a course, or at least no more of these shallow conference presentations on gamification. If you want to chat about taking some different approaches to your course, please send a message our way, we’d love to help: elearning@upei.ca.