I will relate this response to my dissertation topic of video game literacy, purely because I feel that education can benefit more from gamification than any other initiative or industry. However, I must first head off certain points my friend made about gamification first of all.
I will begin with the idea of Air Miles, an example used by Olly. This is the system of gaining discounts for flights with specific air-travel providers such as BA. Now I use this example for one reason. It existed long before the term 'gamification' was ever coined. It was derived as a scheme in 1988 by the Loyalty Management Group (LGM). Schemes such as this have existed when video games developers hadn't even realised the ramifications of how addictive the industry could become, and the term gamification is believed to have been first used in 2005. Loyalty schemes were created by big businesses to up sell products that weren't particularly productive, and to bring in more customers as value became more important to the average consumer.In some form, many of these concepts of loyalty, graduated reward and investment have been around so long as anybody has been trying to sell anything. As the games industry progressed, developers began to understand more about how we interact with systems such as video games and how other business industries increased their profit margins with their wares. Full teams are solely focused on research into this field to provide the industry with an ever increasing flow of customers.
Why is this important? Because I believe two things. One, that the transition between video game features of engagement and those of real life are reciprocal, and do NOT simply come from video games into the business world. Two, I believe that there are elements of games that do have a useful purpose in the real world, simply because they reflect how we as humans interact with our environment and those around us.
I feel that when Olly wrote his 'hate speech' as such, he was considering how cheap it felt in game to be driven forward, or driven to explore, via the use of experience bars, points to spend and so on. However, I pose this reality.Skyrim is built upon those very principles. You would struggle to get through a world where you never level up or gain experience. Skyrim would suffer incredibly without the ability to train the particular skills you wish to use. And you may say, "but that game gives you the freedom to use the ones you choose to", but it is still the illusion of choice. Whilst you might decide to be a mage, you would effectively suck at being an active member of the thieves guild without some ability to sneak. And if you use an armour perk to do so effectively, that cheapens the experience because it has nothing to do with your chosen attributes. You immediately break the illusion that your effort has been worth something; that you have been working for many an hour honing your abilities in a particular skill, only to have a piece of equipment render that training irrelevent.
I could continue for a long time about games that wouldn't be games without a certain level of attribution to abilities or assets that have no direct link to driving the story forward, but I take this opportunity to move onto their real world counterparts.
Gamification, as I've previously said, works. This is based in the fact that, games target our human desires directly, knowing that, for us as players to be truly satisfied, we need the game to target our needs for real life, and enhance them in a way that makes us feel empowered.
This works in real life. Feedback for example, is something that is becoming more and more important within business and educational systems. Authoritative people are realising that in order to make progress, all parts of that system must be consulted. For bottom feeders to feel appreciated, feel like they themselves are worthy assets, and that they are moving onwards and upwards, there needs to be communication filtering both up and down the chain, and for action to be taken that represents this transition.
I think there are specific literacies to be learned from video games that teach about how systems work, how to manipulate and develop those systems to further optimisation and efficiency, and how to navigate them effectively. Gamification can be considered a method for presenting these literacies. By splitting the focus of students, giving a staggered route of learning via minor rewards, undisclosed promise of greater reward, and taking statistics like the Noah Falstein Flow Channel into account when defining difficulty of the lessons taught, I believe that children would find themselves more engaged in those lessons. It becomes less about passing exams, more about personal learning.
Tom Chatfield gave a talk on gamification at the TED conference. He gives seven ways that games reward the brain, with a developing focus on how these qualities can be used for learning outside of the game world. I share this with you below:
I think if I were to summarise this post, it would all come to this. I do not believe that gamification is a fundamentally bad use of game principles. I would never argue against anybody who said that these principles are being exploited by big businesses to further profiteer from consumers who are trying to find the best value they can for their money in a climate that gradually makes each of us poorer. But I don't think that justifies negating it's worth entirely. We don't argue that medication is bad just because an addict might use it to satiate their fix. We don't argue that charity is worthless because governments may or may not withhold those funds from the people who need them the most. Nor can we do this here. Rather than casting it aside, we should be embracing such an opportunity, working to use it in the most beneficial ways, and developing our understanding of how we, as people, think and learn.
