Making Gamefication Sustainable

Although I couldn’t have succinctly articulated three months ago what exactly gamification is, I have really come to see that it is an essential tool for encouraging online learning (as well as even learning in the classroom). Using the structures for rewarding and giving feedback from video games such as points, leaderboards or even badges, which have becoming so ingrained in youth culture due to the popularity of gaming, just makes sense to me as a way to encourage fun and creative learning. I think open badges are a fantastic example of this, but there are of course many different others ways to reward learning in way that uses gamification.

But today I stumbled upon this study by Gartner, an East Coast research firm, which predicts that by 2014 80% of gamified apps will fail. Now this number is pretty large, and at first glance this is pretty worrying. Gartner suggests in their press release today that, “Poor game design is one of the key failings of many gamified applications today.”

"The focus is on the obvious game mechanics, such as points, badges and leader boards, rather than the more subtle and more important game design elements, such as balancing competition and collaboration, or defining a meaningful game economy. As a result, in many cases, organizations are simply counting points, slapping meaningless badges on activities and creating gamified applications that are simply not engaging for the target audience. Some organizations are already beginning to cast off poorly designed gamified applications.”

Interestingly, they seem to be implying that the problem isn’t with gamification, but instead the issue is with the lack of a corresponding infrastructure to make the gamification plausible. I think this is a very important point: that you can’t just slap a badge onto something just to make it popular. Or just because something will then resemble a video game more can it be expected to work. For the idea of gamification to really catch on, and for it really to encourage learning, these video-game-like features have to be inherent to the system. Not something just thrown on as a cheap ploy, but they need to be deeply embedded within the structure of learning and education.

I would really like to see more gamificationin school settings, with systems such as badges not only encourage students to learn about what interests them but to also begin to discuss it online with their friends and peers. I’ve come to see through the Mormon Badges Projects that it is essential to not only have to give out the online proof of learning but to create a tool to share that proof online with friends and family. Gamification initially may encourage someone to initially learn something, but it is only through well thought out application and design of these elements that an app or badge program can really expect to succeed and have a lasting effect.

Ultimately Gartner asserts that, “While game mechanics such as points and badges are the hallmarks of gamification, the real challenge is to design player-centric applications that focus on the motivations and rewards that truly engage players more fully. Game mechanics like points, badges and leader boards are simply the tools that implement the underlying engagement models.”