Gamification is bullshit
m.bogost.com
m.bogost.com
I don't hate all the sites that are touted as successes of gamification, though. StackOverflow is great. But there is a profound difference between StackOverflow is doing, and what Farmville is doing.
StackOverflow is trying to produce community resources of lasting value. Their "game" system is merely a way of recording that value, and allocating resources. It is fundamentally based on the judgments of the community.
Meanwhile, Farmville is clever at making an activity which simply enriches the game's owners look like the construction of community resources, or look like competition to display valuable skills.
My view is that there is no "gamification". The metaphor is backwards. Games are mere simulations of the kinds of things humans like -- to compete, to be valued, to be trusted, to build things, to have rare resources. It's far better to make your site more like a community, than more like a game.
I agree that gamification brings out the human values of competitiveness, trust, credibility. But I don't think gamification by itself creates a long lasting business advantage. After all, people will get tired of playing these games some day.
Great post and makes me think about the 'herd mentality'!
People -do- care about pointless things like 'achievements' and such. I'm actually kind of ashamed that I care, but I -do- care. I am more likely to fully explore a site or product if there are external goals in play.
So maybe, instead of gamification, it's incentivization? Definitely a harder word to say and type out, but it's more indicative of what's going on and has less negative connotation.
Another issue is that people think gamification is the new SEO. Gamification will not magically bring new users to your site. It's as you said, about incentivizing or engaging with your current users.
His perceived ineptitude of the practitioners involved is a large part of why Bogost is calling out gamification as a marketing term here. Game designers don't call it gamification. Game designers make games.
I don't need games or rewards or incentives to buy products that meet these criteria.
In fact majority of people base purchase decisions on unrelated psychological factors such as making them feel good about themselves or validating their "success" or completion/reward mechanics. It is what advertising/marketing industries are ALL about, few massmarket products are sold or bought on their merits.
As an alternative to incentivizing via payment, it might actually be more related to Soviet attempts to use achievements and game-type competitions in factories to up production and build community/engagement, albeit obviously less coercive: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/soviet_gamification.html
The second is the notion of awards and 'achievements' which provide ego reinforcement for folks who might otherwise be appalled at how much time they are spending on an activity. This provides a convienient rationalization path so that folks don't say "I just wasted three hours on the TMZ site, instead they got three 'oscars' for finding all the Paula Abdul stories in under three hours."[1] Its a rationalization that they 'achieved' something by investing that time.
Affinity programs, (such as airline miles, green stamps, etc) are pretty straight forward since they give information that the customer has done a certain volume of business with you, you can afford to give them a discount (post facto) by discounting stuff with affinity 'points.' Achievement / Titles type programs are a way to tap into the human rationalization engine and generally only make the consumer feel better (or less bad) about the poor value they have received.
[1] Its an entirely fictitious example, only the web site, TMZ, is real and it really is a complete waste of anyone's time :-)
I'm sure there are some elements of truth and some valid points in what he says, but the anti-marketing stuff is so over-the-top that it obscures the deeper point(s), IMO.
His main point is that gamification is an empty relationship: nothing of value is exchanged by either party. That it "works" is an unfortunate product of our psychological wiring, and is thus more aptly described as "exploitationware."
It's important to note that Bogost has worked for many years on serious/persuasive games as a means of exposing systems. Allowing users to interact with those systems as a means of persuasion or education is, as far as he's concerned, a more enlightening experience.
[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_...
In a similar way, the word 'sustainable' -- which could be an extremely useful word -- has been abused into total semantic oblivion (such as the UK government's recently introduced presumption in favour of 'sustainable growth', by which they mean nothing more than 'growth').
It's called snobbery.
/me vomits.
What exactly does that mean to you?
Have you built a game that relies on salesforce as a user database?
We're also in the final rounds of a Salesforce.com app contest right now. Gamification is a huge deal in the world of sales.
Actually, thanks for giving us a concrete example.
The video you have posted here: http://iactionable.com/salesforce/
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.
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.
http://iactionable.com/gamification/what-is-gamification/
"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."
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.
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.
It seems like the concept fosters extrinsic motivation exclusively.
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).
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 ;) )
1) Language that conceals the truth, attempts to impress others or coerce people is bullshit.
2) Creating a word such as "gamification" is attempting to conceal the truth, impress others or coerce people.
3) The word "gamification" is used to conceal the truth, impress others or coerce people.
The first argument holds water but the other two are half truths at best.
Words are created all the time, but they are not just used to try and conceal the truth, impress others or coerce people. It is often used simply to make concepts easier to digest and understand. It gives people a common vocabulary so that they can have more in-depth discussions.
Yes, the words will be bastardized and used by people who really have no idea what they are talking about but to use them as the baseline of how you treat everyone using the word is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Simplifying a concept into a word so it's easier to understand is far from attempting to conceal the truth, impress others or coerce.
I like the idea that it can act as a better source of feedback. I think the Stack Exchange sites do a good of this. It obviously works - HN itself moved to make karma less noticeable because it was altering behaviors so much. The key will be to figure out how to best harness it apply it to a worthwhile end. We're working to use gamification to help people learn new systems faster, understand what is expected of them, and drive business goals. It's working pretty well towards those goals so far.
see - http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-bo...
Gamification coerces in that an organization can leverage the phrase, "we made your work more interesting, you have to do more."
It conceals in that the author feels there is no value add.
It impresses in that it's such a fad.
This tends to ignore Jane McGonigal's work on games as necessary because reality is broken. I'd be very curious about the author's thoughts on her work.
He disagrees with its approach in the end, but credits it with being much better than what he categorizes as gamification:
One can only hope that McGonigal's book scores an epic win against the trite, simplistic trends in "gamification" that her smart, sophisticated ideas overshadow.
The essay "On Bullshit" means something very specific when it talks about bullshit and bullshit's contrast with the lies or the truth.
The point is that truth/falsity is at best an inconvenience for bullshitters, it plays no material role in the things that they say, or assert.
So, there is a whole range of possible statements that bullshitters may make that are either so squishy they don't mean anything, or are formulated in such a way that they can't actually be assessed to be true or false.
The article author, by making the claim that 'gamification' is bullshit, is asserting that 'gamification' is not an actual thing that we can evaluate.
He's trying to place the onus of explaining what 'gamification' is and what it's import/role in the world is on the people touting it.
I'd go so far as to say that 'gamification' is a fraught term, because it's predicated on a definition of 'game', and given that word's controversial past both within and without the ludology world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies ), 'gamification' appears to be a marketing buzzword more than anything else.
In other words, bullshit.
[Edit for context: FTA: accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about]
Gamification is one way to motivate people. There are others.
Think about the normal job. We're given abstract goals and vague feedback. How do we "win" at getting a project done? Or even becoming a better developer? We can't. The result is too far in the future, and we easily become unmotivated, and demoralized when we can't see the result as quickly as possible. However, anything that helps measure our progress gives us motivation to continue on. Indicators that tell us how far we've improved keep us in the game.
Any goal that takes too long can benefit from these principles, whether it's language learning, work, etc. We don't need badges, points, etc. We just need something that feeds our desire for progress, improvement and achievement. We need that sense of "win". The same feeling you get when you finish cleaning your room, or heating something in the microwave for 1 minute.
Call it gamification, or whatever. To be honest, I don't even think it should have a term (it just causes people to screw things up as they try to apply it to stuff that don't need it). Things like loyalty cards, or racking up points for a flight is NOWHERE near where the real benefit lies. It's just marketing.
But saying it's bullshit is a disservice.
One must also wonder why such things are necessary now.
Game mechanics as it applies to business is essentially just the internet version of the sales contest applied to different orgs. The problem has been that areas like customer service and development have been harder to track than areas like sales. And even sales has had to define new metrics as the sales cycle gets longer and longer, it's no longer enough to just measure the outcome, you've got to measure what happens in between. These same techniques can and are being applied to other areas, and there's a lot more that can be done.
To some extent 'game mechanics/gamification' is just another buzzword but it also represents a pretty powerful concept that can be used to build more effective organizations.
This isnt a problem for me if I am acting from my 'core values' and doing work that I believe to be leading me towards a goal. Aligning my actions with my internal beliefs is far more effective than climbing the ranks of the leaderboard.
You have an excellent point. While I would not call it "gamifying", I certainly find that I go running more consistently and for longer distances when I make a point of logging more runs. It simply shows me clearly my progress (or lack thereof).
q.e.d