I've got calls with two big gamification companies coming up and am under some pressure from marketing to get these features added to our sites (which have 20mm UV/monthly), I'm so torn about the whole idea.
I vehemently object to the idea that you can add levels, achievements, or points to an arbitrary system and get a better system as a result.
What i do appreciate about the notion of gamification is that it can be used as a trojan horse for making developers/designers/product ppl to think about user experience.
That said, i treat nearly anything that talks about gamification with a jaundiced eye. I think that encouraging user interaction has little to do with games, and much more to do with understanding the position of one's product/system and what users' motivations are.
Is facebook's "poke" a "gameified" feature? Cause it certainly encouraged engagement, and fit in the sphere of what facebook was trying to accomplish. No points, no levels, no achievements, and yet it ended up kicking off a massive number of game-like descendants.
I think that's the real reason why the notion of 'gamification' is bullshit. It doesn't really mean anything. (If you can give me a suitable definition of "game" then i'll reassess ;) )
What this video has said to me is that you have found a new way for bean counters to track the behavior of employees through arbitrarily defined metrics, and make judgements about those employees.
Contests and competition to incentivize behavior are nothing new in the business world. What is new is the thin patena of presumed "fun" that "gamification" implies. Left unaddressed and unresolved are all of the problems and challenges involved in defining good metrics that correspond with business and employee success, or the social ramifications of competition.
tl;dr: this is just another way to track employee productivity.
Talking and sharing things with friends wasn't new before "social". Gamification is about better feedback for the end user in real time.
Yes, people have been doing it for a long time but they've been using low-tech means. I've seen a lot of "leaderboards" on white boards, Word docs, and emails. They get updated every few days. The data exists to make these measurements much more complex and yet present the results in a simplified, easy to consume fashion. Gamification is taking these existing practices and moving them into the modern age.
Managers get a lot of this data already, it's just often not exposed to the end user, and it might be confusing if done so in the same manner. Gamification allows us to present meaningful metrics to the end user to help them understand how they are meeting expectations. People may resent that information but not displaying it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Instead of getting feedback in an annual review now they can get it anytime they want.
Actually your interpretation of gamification is the problem with gamification. We specifically call out on our website that it's not about "fun", you implied that yourself.
No one said that this was a brand new concept. Just as twitter didn't invent communication, gamification didn't invent competition. The reason it's so popular now is because the archaic metrics and contests of the past can now be presented in a form that this generation is more familiar with. Progress bars, levels and instant notifications.
We put a lot of emphasis on the real-time nature. We work with Call Centers and they instantly see the value. They're already running these contests manually so what we bring is a way to give everyone visibility into what's really going on in the business automatically. When you level up or unlock an achievement because you made a huge sale, the entire floor is notified. It's all about status. The time savings alone usually close the deal.
"Here at IActionable we take the ideas and techniques around providing feedback to players from games and move them in to non-gaming applications. We are not trying to make things that are not games become games. We know you may want to take a common task and make it “fun” – but that’s not what we do – not directly. What we do is help users see how well they are performing or contributing, how they compare to other people, and provide goals for them to work towards.
Now, some people may find that fun. Some people like getting feedback and seeing improvement or validation. Some people like the competition amongst others. This kind of fun is a nice side effect, but incidental. It is not the primary goal. The primary goal varies for each company we work with but is generally tied directly to their business goals. We motivate users towards these goals by showing them what is expected and how well they are meeting those expectations. It’s all wrapped up in a game-like interface, but no one is going to think they are playing Space Invaders."
Yep, so that's the meat of the issue. Gamification then is a rebranding more than it is an innovation either technically or conceptually. I don't want to quibble over the definition of the word "game" but i strongly believe that the word "game" implies and is tied strongly to the notion of fun/play/things done in one's free time. [1]
I guess i'd say that's too bad, but businesses are going to do what businesses are gonna do.
I'm happy you've found a niche, and are running a business off it. I hope you're encouraging your customers to behave in humane ways (given my aforementioned criticism of competition in the workplace).
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[1] For example, there are linguistic tropes that people rely upon like "it's just a game!" or "this isn't a game!" which indicate the contrast that games have with topics of import/seriousness.
I suspect that Bogost would agree that nearly every 'great' game he's identified creates a very strong intrinsic motivation in its players - or at least a majority of them. And that the challenge of creating a great game is figuring out how to get people to be intrinsically motivated to play your game.
There's no book or program that tells you how to create an intrinsically motivated game; it's about experience, trial and error and mastery of game development.
But there is a book that tells you how to create extrinsically motivated task; that's the gamification industry. Hence he calls it 'bullshit' and hates it as the 'real' gamification of things would be redesigning processes/learning/work/etc. for intrinsic motivation rather than just giving people badges for swabbing the floor without customers complaining (and redesigning the world is much, much harder).
