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Gamification is bullshit by design. Gameful mechanics may not be, but we're not there yet. Point 1 is that Zichermann (who wrote Games-Based Marketing) misrepr

Gamification is bullshit by design. Gameful mechanics may not be, but we're not there yet. Point 1 is that Zichermann (who wrote Games-Based Marketing) misrepresents the research into motivation. Whether this is maliciousness or incompetence is up for debate (personally I think the latter with a dose of arrogance). You can see Deturding shred his O'Reilly book, where he goes into this in a lot of detail [1]. One point that is made in the blog post is that most people are socializers, according to Bartle player types. Nick Yee has already shown those player types to be largely useless outside of MUDs, and Bartle never claimed them to be otherwise. In addition, there is no evidence that most people are socializers, and Zichermann doesn't cite this claim. I've not been able to find anyone who's tracked down any research which shows that this is true. It's odd that the author mentions Pink's Drive at the end, as it's pretty much the anti-thesis of Zichermann. Drive advocates intrinsic motivation, Zichermann is all about extrinsic. If you don't get a trinket, it isn't worth doing. Extrinsic motivation erodes intrinsic motivation. And that's why Bogost slams gamification in the first place: the trinkets you get are valueless, and present no expense to the company. At least frequent flier mile rewards do something. Point 2 is that this post makes no mention of the quality of interaction. When you play with small percentages of large absolute numbers, you're going to find a small minority of people who respond to this. Enough to fill a leaderboard. But what are they doing? Are they really rating stuff? Are they just hitting 5 stars on everything? We know that HITs in the Mechanical Turk suffer from poor interactions, and those people are getting paid (an extrinsic reward worth more than a leaderboard place, no?). What about the other 99% that aren't on the leaderboard? Point 3 is that, as gradstudent pointed out, context is highly important when discerning work from play. The research shows that artists, for example, make better work when they aren't being paid. Even if you change nothing in the environment but making the piece contracted, the quality of the work suffers. People know when they're working and when they aren't (this was in Drive). A leaderboard in Space Invaders might be fun, but a leaderboard at work is a really good way for middle management to find the worst 10% of performers, and becomes a tool for control, and people recognize this instantly. So yes, gamification is bullshit. It's so much bullshit, that Jane McGonigal, who popularized the use of such things, has had to back away from the term as it's so poisonous, and she's using "gameful" instead. What this all came about from was "People play games more so than doing other things, why is that?" Gamification took all the wrong elements. Games are all about feeding intrinsic motivation with tight feedback loops. Self-determination theory and Reiss' 16 Intrinsic Motivations provide much better frameworks for understanding games. Rigby and Ryan's Glued to Games looks at SDT, and Radoff's Game On has a section of the 16 motivations. For anyone interested in achieving the stated goals of gamification, but is concerned on how to do it right, should probably read Radoff. It's the most honest, and legitimate, treatment of the subject I have yet found, by someone who actually wears the game designer t-shirt and the businessman suit with equal comfort. [1]http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-copy-and-paste/ http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-cop...

oskarth 14y ago
Seeing as you seem to be well-read in the area - what's your opinion of the "gamification" on khanacademy?
- Lewisham 14y ago
  The reason I've been reading it all is because I'm writing my thesis on it :) I haven't spent too much time with Khan Academy, so can't say too much about it. There are two things to keep in mind: 1. Extrinsic motivation erodes intrinsic motivation. The most obvious example is asking a kid to take out the trash. Once you pay him/her, they'll only do it for money again. While this example is silly because no-one has any intrinsic motivation to take out the trash, it gets really dicey when you add rewards to things like reading. Are they reading to develop a love of reading, or for the carrot you put at the end? What happens when the carrot goes away? The research suggests that once the carrot disappears, so does the reading. The psychology isn't completely cut-and-dried on this, as no psychology seems to be, but it's compelling to me, at least. The problem is that some scholars, particularly Alfie Kohn, would say that things like gold stars are rewards, and thus you're eroding things that way. However, you have to balance that with providing legitimate feedback for knowing how well you're doing, as people want to feel competent. Both these come from self-determination theory (read up on it, it's neat). The trick is to make sure the reward doesn't try to control behavior, but rather provide feedback on behavior. eg. "you did x 5 times" (good) vs "you did x 5 times as required" (bad). It's a really fine line. As far as I can see, the main goals in Khan Academy seem to be informational and are good. 2. Badges are game systems themselves (I heard this from Nicole Lazzaro [1]), and they will result in increasing behavior of certain things for people that pay attention. They do not necessarily result in increased behavior of value. eg. a badge for posting 5 times is earned whether your posts are insightful, or whether they simply say "first post". And, again, these are extrinsic rewards, and once they dry up, people stop caring. There's also a strong possibility that rewards suffer from inflation, and you have to hit people with bigger and bigger rewards once they start relying on them. The badges at Khan Academy make me wary [2]. Check out this one: "Quickly & correctly answer five questions in a row." What's the goal here? Khan Academy's goal, one would think, is to encourage students to think deeply about problems and arrive to correct solutions. It spends a lot of time saying students are able to work at their own pace, and this is a benefit, but then we have a badge which encourages quick, possibly slap-dash, behavior. It's more controlling than informational, requesting the student do something not necessarily natural to him/her in order to achieve it. The ones given out for achieving proficiency are better; they align with what they want students to do and provide informational feedback that students have done it, increasing their motivation. ==== Now, this is not to say that all achievement systems are bad or doesn't work. Stack Overflow's seems to do really well. If it was doing poorly, we'd expect a large drop off of people when the extrinsic rewards dry up, largely at reputation 10,000, when you get moderator tools. The current data from Stack Overflow indicates only about 5% or so of users drop off once they get the tools (I can dig out references if you're interested). Upvotes and achievements provide useful feedback about your mastery of SO, so with that low attrition rate, it indicates they are doing things right. The elephant in the room that Stack Overflow presents is that it may indicate that gamification does work in its entirety, and that all this motivation theory is invalid in this domain for some reason. This is possible, but such a strong statement would require much harder evidence than we have. Right now, it's more plausible that Stack Overflow is simply doing things well and seems to be aligning with the recommendations of the research, rather than indicating a wider problem with the applicability of this stuff. [1] http://www.xeodesign.com/founder.html http://www.xeodesign.com/founder.html [2] http://www.khanacademy.org/badges http://www.khanacademy.org/badges

oskarth 14y ago

Seeing as you seem to be well-read in the area - what's your opinion of the "gamification" on khanacademy?

Lewisham 14y ago
The reason I've been reading it all is because I'm writing my thesis on it :) I haven't spent too much time with Khan Academy, so can't say too much about it. There are two things to keep in mind: 1. Extrinsic motivation erodes intrinsic motivation. The most obvious example is asking a kid to take out the trash. Once you pay him/her, they'll only do it for money again. While this example is silly because no-one has any intrinsic motivation to take out the trash, it gets really dicey when you add rewards to things like reading. Are they reading to develop a love of reading, or for the carrot you put at the end? What happens when the carrot goes away? The research suggests that once the carrot disappears, so does the reading. The psychology isn't completely cut-and-dried on this, as no psychology seems to be, but it's compelling to me, at least. The problem is that some scholars, particularly Alfie Kohn, would say that things like gold stars are rewards, and thus you're eroding things that way. However, you have to balance that with providing legitimate feedback for knowing how well you're doing, as people want to feel competent. Both these come from self-determination theory (read up on it, it's neat). The trick is to make sure the reward doesn't try to control behavior, but rather provide feedback on behavior. eg. "you did x 5 times" (good) vs "you did x 5 times as required" (bad). It's a really fine line. As far as I can see, the main goals in Khan Academy seem to be informational and are good. 2. Badges are game systems themselves (I heard this from Nicole Lazzaro [1]), and they will result in increasing behavior of certain things for people that pay attention. They do not necessarily result in increased behavior of value. eg. a badge for posting 5 times is earned whether your posts are insightful, or whether they simply say "first post". And, again, these are extrinsic rewards, and once they dry up, people stop caring. There's also a strong possibility that rewards suffer from inflation, and you have to hit people with bigger and bigger rewards once they start relying on them. The badges at Khan Academy make me wary [2]. Check out this one: "Quickly & correctly answer five questions in a row." What's the goal here? Khan Academy's goal, one would think, is to encourage students to think deeply about problems and arrive to correct solutions. It spends a lot of time saying students are able to work at their own pace, and this is a benefit, but then we have a badge which encourages quick, possibly slap-dash, behavior. It's more controlling than informational, requesting the student do something not necessarily natural to him/her in order to achieve it. The ones given out for achieving proficiency are better; they align with what they want students to do and provide informational feedback that students have done it, increasing their motivation. ==== Now, this is not to say that all achievement systems are bad or doesn't work. Stack Overflow's seems to do really well. If it was doing poorly, we'd expect a large drop off of people when the extrinsic rewards dry up, largely at reputation 10,000, when you get moderator tools. The current data from Stack Overflow indicates only about 5% or so of users drop off once they get the tools (I can dig out references if you're interested). Upvotes and achievements provide useful feedback about your mastery of SO, so with that low attrition rate, it indicates they are doing things right. The elephant in the room that Stack Overflow presents is that it may indicate that gamification does work in its entirety, and that all this motivation theory is invalid in this domain for some reason. This is possible, but such a strong statement would require much harder evidence than we have. Right now, it's more plausible that Stack Overflow is simply doing things well and seems to be aligning with the recommendations of the research, rather than indicating a wider problem with the applicability of this stuff. [1] http://www.xeodesign.com/founder.html http://www.xeodesign.com/founder.html [2] http://www.khanacademy.org/badges http://www.khanacademy.org/badges