On Gamification: The Bad, The Good, and The Difficult

About a year ago a friend and fellow colleague, Dr. Paul Ralph, came to Vancouver for a visit and a conference. As we started to talk more we realised that no one in Information Systems was doing extensive work on gamification. The idea behind gamification is that you can make activities more engaging by adding leaderboards, points, quests and challenges to these activities. By using game elements you can direct behaviour and provide structure to learning and training tasks. We both thought that the idea of using game elements in non-game context was pretty interesting.

Now for the Bad. Gamification was/is a fad. Even consultants who had no game design experience were making big money by walking into companies and effectively saying "Want to spruce up your workplace? PUT SOME POINTS ON IT!"

Some game designers had noticed the trend and decided that gamification was a dead-end; a cynical ploy to swindle unsuspecting companies and consumers out of money. However the critique itself was rather cynical. What is being described is bad gamification. Is it not possible to use game elements in a way that is not abusive or deceptive to the player? Of course there are!

Now for the Good. Several researchers, and even consultants, have identified that there is a problem with how gamification has been implemented. They have realised that focusing on a limited reward structure rather than creating avenues of meaningful play will doom gamification to being what Bogost thinks it is: a cheap marketing ploy.

Now comes the Difficult part. How do we make meaningful gamification and serious games? Essentially this has been my area of research for the past year. And after three papers, and a few presentations and discussions, I believe that I am near to having an answer.