Good Questions for Gamification
Altug Isigan lays out some useful questions for gamification advocates. It seems to me we ought to wrestle with these if we want to get inside it as a concept.
Altug Isigan lays out some useful questions for gamification advocates. It seems to me we ought to wrestle with these if we want to get inside it as a concept.
Good questions indeed.
I’ve already heard this one from teachers: “Doesn’t everyone have the right to not being gamified?”
Bryan Alexander - 12 April 2011 at 8:43 pm |
That’s a fair question, given how frequently that term is getting throw around.
Still, it comes off as a little unnecessarily fearful, as if administrators are going to start forcing it on them. But that goes to show how tenuous education is now (and perhaps always has been) for many teachers, that they would look at gamification as another lame-brained technique they’re going to be forced to implement.
bboessen - 13 April 2011 at 11:56 am |
Hm, not from administrators so much as the generalized desire to Catch Up With Those Crazy Kids.
Bryan Alexander - 13 April 2011 at 2:20 pm |
Ah, I see. That’s a very interesting perspective — Afraid the Crazy Kids are driving them to incorporate practices they’d rather not? But if that’s the case, isn’t it still ultimately conceived in terms of professional impact, ie, that if one doesn’t gamify, one will be seen as behind-the-times or a Luddite?
bboessen - 13 April 2011 at 2:31 pm |
Students as consumers, right?
Bryan Alexander - 18 April 2011 at 3:56 pm |
Right: if we’re supposed to cater to them, and they want to have their lives gamified….
But I don’t think they really do, which is what I take Isigan to be pointing toward. That gamification is, in some ways, a bastardization of the core principles that make great games so engaging (and playable).
And that very much parallels teachers’ sense that commodification of education is similarly bastardizing: yes, we should be catering to our students, but not in the sense of compromising complexity in favor of ease of use. We should always be striving to provide the most rich and complex expression of knowledge and understanding we can, in a way that truly engages our students. But the commodification/service-oriented approach reduces that to “make students happy; don’t give them anything too hard.” And gamification often similarly misunderstands the value of challenge (and failure) for growth.
bboessen - 18 April 2011 at 4:49 pm |
Excellent pushback!
Let’s see.
1. We should be careful of conflating commodification of education w/gamification. In education much of the former happens w/o the latter. Not all, but still.
2. Game principles *should* make us nudge students forward, into that zone of engagement, not into the student’s comfort zones.
I agree with everything else.
Bryan Alexander - 22 April 2011 at 12:37 am |
I think we *are* in agreement, actually, at least on those two points.
I guess I’m just wary of gamification now that it has become something of a marketing concept — I love to read McGonigal talk about how to bring game systems to real life; I just get uneasy when I hear corporations talk about it for some reason. No soul, maybe.
bboessen - 22 April 2011 at 1:15 am |