Show HN: Gamification.org - Open Source Game Mechanics | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Gamification.org - Open Source Game Mechanics

gamification.org

76 pointsjrbedard25 comments

A mix of humor and thoughts on the site layout:

I harbored a tiny hope that this website would give me a progress bar for reading through it and that I could earn achievements for becoming knowledgeable in different areas of gamification. In addition, when I read about the collaboration, I thought it would be neat to earn collaboration points as an encouragement to share ideas and maybe get some badges that represent my gamification expertise.

I came away slightly disappointed and not surprised; gamification requires a bit of thinking about what behaviors you want to encourage from your audience. Because I do not see how this site can benefit me, I do not feel encouraged to play, er, contribute.

It would be great if the site about gamification used gamification, stood forth as an alluring example. Nice start, though. Humor aside, I genuinely am interested in looking through some of the material and seeing what I can learn.

I'm a game designer. I can tell you that seeing the "gamification" movement makes my stomach churn. These are just a bunch of f*ing reward schemes. Web developers don't have a clue what game design or game mechanics are, and with sites like these, they never will. I think we need a new term, perhaps "reward structures" is enough. Sadly it isn't as "trendy" as gamification sounds. Equating game design with reward structures blatantly disregards the "toy" aspect of games. Games are meant to be fun. Reward structure is part of that, but not nearly the entire thing.

Fellow game developer here. I can't wait for "gamification" to die. It represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what games are and can be. To make it more annoying, in practice, it often seems to be accompanied by a disrespect for the users.

I'm not saying artificial rewards systems are without any merit (e.g. check out the way people react to karma scores in places like HN), but I've seen no indication that this new buzzword has provoked any sort of actual intellectual interest in this stuff -- more just a race to add badges to everything.

Edit: And there's the downvote for raining on the parade! Shocking.

I agree. I think the adoption of the term "gamification" has caused a rift because really, this isn't about making things in to games or creating fun - it's about creating motivation. I think a big part of the backlash against "gamification" is this misdirection implied in the term. The feedback and reward mechanisms used are things that were honed in games - the idea is to take the ideas behind motivational and reward systems from games and move them into things that specifically aren't games - not to make these non-games into games.

I say this as a founder of a "gamification" or "game mechanics" 3rd party service provider. Unfortunately, the term is now lodged in our vernacular, I'm afraid.

The site covers an interesting idea; but I found it intensely off putting because a lot of the language sounds like "ad-speak".

It's also not clear to the un-initiated what on earth it's all about... the first page just launches into text with no explanation. It took me a second to get my bearings.

Wow. I feel like Jane McGonigal would hate this. Especially her video being used to promote it. Jane has said publicly that she wants to design games that change the world, not just "pointify" current products. I highly recommend watching Jesse Schell's talk on the Gamepocalypse (a vivid vision of the dystopic result of gamification). In fact, I believe Jane and Jesse are debating it at a conference later this year. Would be interesting to hear their thoughts on this.

To be fair, it looks like this page suggests a lot more than just adding points to things. I am reading it as a primer on human psychology.

The real question in my mind is this: What causes X behavior in my audience? The good guy in me wants to make things fun for people, to arouse excitement and enjoyment. What arouses these emotions in them?

Thus is gamification more of an art. You cannot just add some points and badges to a product and expect it to take off. You must appeal to the pleasure centers in ways that make sense.

It is interesting to see listed on this site what kinds of things have been proven to cause these favorable reactions in people. Maybe there are some fundamental concepts we can derive from the long lists. Maybe we can boil them down to some core principles vaguely reminiscent of Skinner. With this study, we are going to learn more about ourselves, our base, instinctual needs.

This is cool stuff. Why should anyone hate it? Perhaps there should be a disclaimer: "Don't read this as a list of TODOs. Read it as a guide towards proven motivators, and adapt what makes sense for your needs." This whole thing is entertainment. And as in all entertainment, various motivators will come in and out of fashion, be great today and boring tomorrow. This is a moving target.

Just a small note: Game mechanics can't be protected per [FL-108](http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html)

> Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.

So calling it "Open Source" is misleading, I think.

That's just copyright law. Patents are the real issue/problem, I think.

While you can patent a game, or game materials, you can't patent a game mechanic.

If its somewhat unique, be clever and call it a business method

You certainly can't copyright a game mechanic. But, as long as software, algorithms and business processes are patentable so are game mechanics.

Also, patents aren't so much about "what's patentable" as "How much are you willing to pay lawyers to uphold/get tossed out a patent"

You have that backwards. You can't patent a game or game materials (these can be copyrighted or trademarked or both), but you could patent game mechanics b/c they were "processes" which were patentable under the Federal Circuit's non-existent standard for patentability. In fact, several game mechanics have been patented.

Whether those patents remain valid is another question entirely. In 2007, the Supreme Court struck down the ridiculously low bar for patenting business methods and software processes, which includes most game-related patents.

> You can't patent a game or game materials

All the web material and notes I looked for said otherwise. The actual patent website is abysmally unhelpful. I'll have to take your word for it.

I feel the term Open Source in this context refers to open sharing of closed (proprietary rather than copyrighted) information, not specific copyright/patent-free work. Game mechanics may not be copyrightable, but the reasoning behind them/supporting research/metrics/design patterns can all be behind closed doors.

I applaud the idea, but perhaps there is a better term?

Our wiki is still primitive, but open for feedback and contributions. Akin to the SCVNGR's Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck, we include a repository of classic game mechanics at http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Mechanics. The difference is we want to make it open for collaboration and discussions through game mechanic definitions, implementation exemples, best practices, metrics, strategies, etc.

I think you should move away from Wikimedia as a CMS platform. It's crusty, looks terrible, and is a trademarked for "half-assed projects" as far as I'm concerned. To be brutally honest right now it looks like someone shuffled through the Wikimedia plugin bin and slapped it together without any thought to aesthetic.

A simple static website with the What, Why, and How as a portal to a better, light weight, CMS would be far more attractive.

We're evaluating with different CMS platforms. The good thing with MediaWiki is that the content is easily migratable :)

Though I like this idea, there are now several projects dedicated to cataloguing game mechanics. Is it possible to have some sort of consolidation of effort?

Two others:

* I believe the first one was the Game Ontology Project at http://gameontology.org/, which takes an approach somewhat tilted to the formal-analysis side.

* The biggest one with the most contributors is probably the videogame subsection of tvtropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideogameTropes

Story goes that a co-worker's wife heard him talking taking a call about game mechanics. When he was done with the call she was puzzled and ask, "Why are you guys so interested in gay mechanics?"

It's all I hear now.

This sounds wonderful.

However the "What is Gamification?" is a much better first page than the home page is, with respect to explaining things.

"Lets take anything to do with behavioural conditioning and fundamental incentive structures and call them game mechanics, just so we have an excuse to make up something new and forget that everything we're doing has been going under constant research and development since the dawn of the industrial revolution..."

I think this is a great resource. If integrated correctly (game layer) then I believe websites with decent traffic + communities built around them will be able retain users longer (sticky) and increase loyalty will equal more $$$ in the long term.

From the title I thought this would link to code: some sort of OSS library/abstraction-layer for providing common game mechanics. Is there anything like that yet, in any language?

DNS error for me, I am unable to load the site.

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