Gamifying Participation: Felling the Talent Tree of Failure
Sean Duncan
Wed., June 15, 10:30–12:00, Browsing Library
Recently, the issue of “gamification” — the incorporation of game mechanics into non-game contexts — has been a controversial one for those who study and advocate good game design (see McGonigal, 2011; Bogost, 2011; Schell, 2010; Schell, et al, 2011). At the same time, prominent games and learning scholars (Squire, 2010; Gee, 2003) have advocated the use of games and game mechanics not as “teaching machines” (Skinner, 1958) to deliver academic content, but as critical tools to transform instruction and curricula, arguing that motivational structures and decisions within games may help to move institutional education from an inordinate focus on content toward situating learners in valuable forms of practice. In this presentation, I will discuss a recent experiment at “gamification” conducted in an undergraduate Game Studies classroom — one that was well-intentioned, hopefully adequately implemented, but was ultimately an egregious failure.
In Fall, 2010, this author attempted to “gamify” course participation within an undergraduate Game Studies course, as an experiment into building motivating structures that might fuel student engagement. Though there have been attempts to change grades to experience points (Sheldon, 2010), as well as add “badges” and “achievements” to instruction in the guise of “gamification,” I argue that these do not appropriate the most significant elements of games — complex mechanics, multifaceted decisions, and rewards tied to real consequences. Rather than “badgifying” a course, I chose an approach that took seriously that games were not fundamentally about rewards, but about decisions. I augmented course participation with a series of small assignments (“participation point” assignments) which acted as a form of novel in-class “currency,” earned through participation in the class. Students were enabled to spend the currency to customize their course experience by applying points toward a “course talent tree” that could affect the weight that certain assignments had in their course grade, the number of rewrites that were available to them on certain papers, the number of absences allowed in the course, and “unlocking” the ability to modify the topics and forms that their final projects could take.
The system was ambitious, ostensibly engaging, but failed miserably for several reasons that I will explore in this talk, including: (1) my underestimation of the course management costs of such a system; (2) the unequal real world weight of each manipulable outcome leading to an ultimately unbalanced “game” system; and (3) the jarring complexity that even a simple “talent tree” system featured compared to expected, standard space instructional methods. I will also discuss the utility of gamifying course participation specifically — how does the goal of attempting to turn participation into a game alter the learning culture of a collegiate course? Rather than simply letting this failed experiment fall by the wayside, I will attempt to spell out design implications that may help further the discussion on “gamification” and perhaps give us pause in reckless attempts to “gamify” instruction.
References
Bogost, I. (2011). Reality is alright: A review of Jane McGonigal‘s book Reality is Broken. Book review available online at http://www.bogost.com/blog/reality_is_broken.shtml.
Gee, J. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. New York: Penguin Press.
Schell, J. (2010). Design outside the box. Presented at DICE 2010. Las Vegas, NV.
Schell, J., Sawyer, B., McGonigal, J., Bogost, I., Falstein, N., Robertson, M., Smith, R. & Wallace, M. (2011). The great gamification debate. Panel presented at the 2011 Game Developer's Conference (GDC). San Francisco, CA.
Sheldon, L. (2010). Gaming the classroom. Course syllabus, available online at http://gamingtheclassroom.wordpress.com/syllabus/.
Skinner, B. F. (1958). Teaching machines. Science, 129, 969–977.
Squire, K. D. (2010). Videogames and education. Keynote presented at Games+Learning+Society 6.0. Madison, WI.