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Just to disclaim myself as a gray hair, I want a t-shirt that says (in VT-100 font) "USENET was my blog." The information age is good at historical amnesia, rebranding and reinvention. So I'm about to explain gamification to all of you from a boomer perspective.
Gamification is not new. Since the first sales guy got paid on commission, and the first toy got put in a Cracker Jacks box, gamification has been with us. Humans need dopamine -- that neurochemically transmitted psychological reward we get from achieving some goal.
For early humans, that may have been from filling a basket with berries so the family could have fruit for dinner, or taking down a large mammal, or finding a really nice sex partner. Humans like to create games for themselves; it's a collary to our ability to plan and set goals.
However, humans are pretty bad at setting goals for open-ended tasks. We are not good at building psychological frameworks for habits, or for activities that others want us to make as habits.
For example, a young child may not see any future facing goal to do math homework. The means of motivating her to do her math homework basically involve rewards and punishments. If you don't do you math homework, no dessert. Or, if you do your math homework, you get a gold star and bask in the warm approval of a good teacher. These methods of behavioral reinforcement are authentic and they work. This is not news, but in a basic way, it is gamification.
A kid might look at the cereal shelf and thinks, "This cereal had a cool toy last time we got cereal. I want to have more of those toys, and collect them." That kid is subject to gamification.
A salesperson looks at salesforce.com at the graphs of how his team is going this month, and thinks, "If I can pull out three more sales at the level of my average this month, I'll top out the ranks and get a bonus." That guy is subject to the gamification of his job.
A teenager who knows that if he pulls in a GPA greater than 3.0 that her grandfather will pay for spring break.
Puzzles on the side of the cereal box.
Sashes of badges in Girl or Boy Scouting
There is very little new in gamification, except the name. Marketers and managers have used reward structures for over a hundred years. It's the science of motivation. Motivational speakers teach you to set goals and reward structures for yourself. Time management strategies allow you to create rules for your own games.
When the telephone was invented, people bemoaned that a phone call was not "real" communication. We have had the same struggles over email, online chat, and virtual worlds. Today, no one would say that a person you know through business only as a voice on a phone is not a real business relationship. For email, most people would say the same. Soon it will be the same in virtual world acquaintances.
Today, many people in games and in marketing are saying that gamification is not authentic. I beleive that as it becomes less of a buzz word, both sides will come to understand that it's the same games humans have been playing since they embraced the concept of time and planning, and motivational tricks.
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I do think there are a place for games to help us see and understand worlds that we cannot access (like our bodies). I find the whole concept of Immune attack very fascinating by rendering the hidden world of life in ways that are much easier to grasp and understand.
http://www.fas.org/immuneattack/
Basically it's the emergence of simulation as a VIABLE teaching tool, unfortunately I think the 'gamification' cheerleaders are underestimating the timeline, I think it's going to take decades/century or so before their are tools that allow teachers to create vast swaths of educational content inexpensively.
I think what is happening is just that people see world of warcraft and they are underestimating (by a longshot) the timescale and amount of work it's going to take to make it feasible everyday kind of thing.
But I agree with Sting that it's further out than the next 5-10 years (a decade is the soonest I can see such plug&play teachtech emerging).
The point is not to use Civ as a replacement for teaching it's to aid teaching. Not everything has to be dry bookreading and long talks by the professor (which history has a lot of if you've taken any courses).
I think you could use Civ in a course on the philosophy of history, and the professor still would give us long talks about the notion of progress, evolutionary social theory etc ;)
Anyway, the thing here is that games aren't "objective" learning tools, and them being interactive doesn't mean they bring us closer to reality. The idea that through play we experience things "directly" is in itself a reduction. Games (or simulations, if you wish) are, after all, representations, reflecting an ideology, or in more contemporary terms, being a discourse on something by someone.
As an additional tool in the kit of an excellent teacher, digital sim will help us realize the dream of unlocking the huge potential in every kid. But in the hands of a lazy teacher, it's worse than worthless. I say that because I agree with Altug that calling a simulation 'direct' experience is reductionist, disagreeing only to the extent that a child's ability to fruitfully distinguish between the two is directly proportional to the state of development of their frontal lobe - a process which varies from individual to individual.
But that's all kinda tangential to the OP, sry :)
Then again, the school system seems to always want to move away from a competitive environment, so maybe logical solutions need a buzzword yet again.
This can do wonders for the motivation of small teams. In fact, the motivation value is so high, people will literally pay you for the opportunity. (see WOW guilds).
I think that's the part that scares off most critics. Although extrinsic motivation can have merit and is sometimes even necessary (try to imagine what happens to the world if people no longer need to earn a living), there are also many things in this world that are pointless if not done for its own merits. If allowed to be taken to an extreme, gamification will become the religion of a materialistic world.
For children -- because children have short attention spans and poor planning skills -- these programs were good framing for longer term goals.
On the other hand, many people feel that gamification is manipulative of adults...with short attention spans and poor planning skills. In some cases adults want to be manipulated (playing the point system for Weight Watchers), but in other cases, maybe the manipulation is for the state (America's Army) or commercial gain (Starbuck's Card) and might generate behavior that the individual might not engage in (enlisting in the military, buying lattes) at all, or as often, without the game attached.
The more games are institutionalized, the more the obligation to deprogram ourselves as individuals so we can see through the games and pick and choose how we want to play, and with whom.