Comments on: Gamification Backlash Roundup

By: Gamification: managen op performance level | My blogs

Gamification: managen op performance level | My blogs — Sun, 21 Sep 2014 14:14:54 +0000

[…] Ook gaan waarschuwingen rond over extrinsieke beloningen die juist demotiverend kunnen werken. Een video game designer geeft in zijn blog een mooie opsomming van de ontevredenheid die er heerst over gamification. Wat is […]

By: Gamification: managen op performance level | Klantcontact.nl

Gamification: managen op performance level | Klantcontact.nl — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 16:08:12 +0000

By: The Key Questions of Cultural Heritage Crowdsourcing Projects | Trevor Owens

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 01:56:21 +0000

[…] J. (2011, April 2). Gamification Backlash Roundup. The […]

By: A Critical Perspective on Gamification

A Critical Perspective on Gamification — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:16:56 +0000

[…] Juul’s short article Gamification Backlash Roundup and a transcript of games scholar Cayden Mak’s lecture The Schema of Game […]

By: Kim Davis

Kim Davis — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 03:41:26 +0000

I wonder about the *quality*, or even the *nature*, of engagement gamification is suitable for? Light, first-time and casual engagement; or deep, continuous and risk-taking engagement? Put in another way, the question is about whether, how & why gamification can help solve “wicked” or “super-wicked” problems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem).

To illustrate the conundrum, I believe *most* gamification essentially rewards specific types of thinking in 2 major ways: i) explicitly by rewarding behaviors stated in the game rules, and ii) implicitly by recreating tiny clear-cut models of the world in which simplified situations exemplify real-world issues, and rules as well as rewards / reprimands are explicit. This therefore displaces problem-solving complexity issues from the questions: “Which personal and/or collective impacts do I wish to counteract?” and “What outcomes do I want?” to the much easier one: “Which incentives do I like best?”

Two thoughts stem from the above. First this “problem simplification” might be good to start engagement, but it also carries a strong seed of reductionism… Second to tackle “wicked” problems, we probably need stronger forms of engagement where personal risk-taking and/or commitment to personal change of behavior is needed. There are many examples of other mechanisms able to trigger those strong forms of engagement: moral imperatives, sense of outrage at injustice or unfairness, being stirred by the vulnerability, or courage, someone exhibits in the face of insurmountable odds, protecting one’s family or life, etc… The question for me is whether gamification can trigger this as well, and if so, how, and more to the point, why?

By: Jesper

Jesper — Fri, 13 May 2011 20:10:07 +0000

@Trevor I didn’t know Goodheart’s law, but it makes a lot of sense – it explains how “gaming” occurs in general.
It’s true that “naïve” gamficiation is completely oblivious to such problems.

By: Trevor Owens

Trevor Owens — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:45:00 +0000

Bringing in “Punished by Rewards” as a back story is a good idea. In the same vein, I think we could invoke Goodhearts law from economics, as originally formulated in 1975 “once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.” The idea being that the reactivity of using any metric as an indicator erodes its value. Part of the interesting shift here is that a few years back you could see people get into heated arguments about how displaying things like post-count next your posts in a forum leads to people “gaming the system.” In this context, the idea of “gaming the system” is explicitly a bad thing, where the pointisication idea of gamification seems to just be a way of saying gaming the system is in fact a good thing.
If we back up a bit with this too I think part of this issue is actually tied up in the idea of the “user” on this Tom Morris’s “I’m not an experience-seeking user, I’m a meaning-seeking human person
“post from last year is quite useful. http://blog.tommorris.org/post/3216687621/im-not-an-experience-seeking-user-im-a

I might suggest my own post from March on play the past, where i tried to connect gamification and some of what I see as related ideas behind crowdsourcing. http://www.playthepast.org/?p=1027

By: Jesper

Jesper — Sat, 07 May 2011 10:09:17 +0000

@Wolfshead and Christos Thanks! Will have a look.

By: Christos

Christos — Fri, 06 May 2011 23:20:07 +0000

I have recently finished my Master’s thesis on gamification.
I do not really hold a critical position to the concept of gamification, quite on the contrary I am trying to shape a different vision, diversifying it from the the utopian/dystopian ones being heavily debated and argued.

You can read it here: http://bit.ly/kxsrCH
[Christos Iosifidis, “Gamification: The application of game design in everyday life”, supervisor: Miguel Sicart.
Includes interviews with: Aki Järvinen, Jonas Löwgren, Kars Alfrink, Richard Bartle and Sebastian Deterding]

By: Wolfshead

Wolfshead — Mon, 02 May 2011 03:30:12 +0000

Thanks for the resource.

I just want to add that I’ve been writing about the evils of “gamification” in MMOs and virtual worlds for years now on my blog.

I’m not an academic just someone who’s actually designed and scripted a few commercial video games :)

http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/