1984: Gamification Style

I know you're jealous of my Paint skills

Who would think that Gamification would come under such a firestorm?  Take a gander at this article from Rough Type, where the author deals with whether-or-not companies who use gamification to enhance their work quantity and quality are really just exploiting people.  Business are increasingly relying on their customers to fix, market, make, and even develop some of their products.  This is what the Economist has referred to as "unsourcing", where you can simply drop your employees and force your customers to work for you.

This sounds like a horrible, dystopic future in which we'll will be forced to make our own french fries via a "game" at McDonalds.  Companies will no longer have employees, but only customers who will have to spend their own time to create their consumable.  However, we have seen that this really can't be the case.  In order to make an "unsourced" model, you need to be able to offer some carrot to your customers.  While fame and love do act as motivation in terms of crowd-sourcing, they can't be the only contributing factors when you're making demands as a company.  The most successful crowd-sourcing examples through gamification have primarily been non-profits such as Fold-It. It will be much, much harder to convince the public to work for your for-profit business, even if it has an element of gamification behind it.  So before your company drops all your employees and tries to gamify the business such as Topcoder did, you ought to think twice.

Therefore do not fret.  Gamification is not an evil.  You will not be seeing "War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength" on this blog anytime soon.

Put the FUN in FUNdraising

There’s nothing better than the feeling you get from helping others, and that alone should be a good reason to do it. However, if you have ever tried to rally people around a cause you know how hard it is. Sometimes there are barriers that prevent them from really connecting with the cause, maybe they just don’t see the benefit they get from helping... and let’s face it, for some, the warm and fuzzy feeling is just not enough.

This is where gamification comes in! If you are in the process of developing a fundraising campaign, here are 5 things you should know that will help you get closer to your goal.

1. Educate about the issue. But we don’t mean it in the boring way! Engage your audience; make them see the problem through different eyes so they become more aware and receptive. See here a great example by McKinney and Urban Ministries of Durham.

2. Reward user behavior. You can provide tangible or intangible rewards for EVERY contribution. Points  can be exchanged for discounts from your local partners or badges that provide a sense of accomplishment and encourage repeated behavior.

3. Build a community around your cause. Leaderboards motivate people to participate and help everyone keep the goal in mind. Engage users and create friendly competition to benefit the cause.

4. Leverage Social Media. Let people brag about it! Allowing users to share their contributions in social media will not only validate their participation, but it will also help drive incremental traffic to your cause and consequently, more support!

5. Make it FUN! Take a look at some of the examples we have provided through our blog. There is no doubt that even the most serious and not so serious activities can benefit from gamification.

We hope this helps you and good luck!

Lolcats and Fantasy Leagues

I promise you, this is somewhat relevant

I was reading yet another article about Gamification, since that has seem to become my primary hobby these days, and came to a small realization: that gamification is superficial.  Now, I know that this directly conflicts with some of our previous entries such as how gamification is helping hospitalized children, but for 99% of the applications... gamification is superficial.

Now before we pack up this blog because we feel hurt by this fact, the author at Gamemaki made a good point, which is "So what?"  So what if most of the applications are superficial?  The vast majority of our lives are based around the small, inconsequential elements of our daily lives.  And while it is true that gamification has immense impacts on education, job hunting, and such... the fact remains that the vast majority of our day revolves around LoLcats and Memes.  Therefore, if gamification helps enrich our lives in those areas, perhaps it can still be a good and important thing.

After thinking about Clay Shirky's TED talk on Cognitive Surplus, I came to the realization that in order to develop the good sort of gamification (education, jobs, etc), we have to have the bad elements of gamification (fantasy leagues, Areyouhotornot, etc).  The principles that have helped form the positives were initially tested in order to simply entertain us all.  Therefore, I must agree with our friends at Gamemaki... it is true that gamification is 99% superficial.  So what?

Gamification in Education Pt 3

How I wish...

In our on-going series of gamification in education, we have seen quite a bit of the positives that come along with an increased emphasis on making learning fun for students.  While I am not going to go all negative on you like some of my colleagues have done, I do believe that this new article puts a little bit of a damper on the effort.  While gamification still has high hopes, it is simply not a panacea for poor teachers.  As a quote from the article states:

“To be honest, I am probably the limiting factor in my students’ enjoyment and full appreciation of it.”

Therefore, what you put in is what you get out.  It becomes evident that while you read the article, this teacher was being a bit tough on herself; however the main principle holds.  I can tell you from personal experience that teaching games, by themselves, will not improve your class.  The games have to not only be designed well, but also have to be managed well in the class.  And while the payoff may be nice, there tends to be a lot of work involved in it compared to simply teaching.

I believe though that what we ought to really focus on here is the replicability of said games.  Given that software (especially freeware) is incredibly cheap to replicate and to receive, a unified platform for teachers to pass and share new games would be tremendously helpful and time-saving.  While it is true that many of the major education businesses do offer such services as a price, teachers themselves can not typically afford it.  Therefore, some sort of combination between open-source and gamification would do a lot of good for teachers and students.

Hmmm... perhaps there is an idea for a new website / business (Ive obviously spent too much time at IE)...