Gamification beyond the buzzword: why it’s not what you think
Gamification beyond the buzzword: why it’s not what you think
Gamification beyond the buzzword: why it’s not what you think
By Terry Pearce
August 03, 2020
Summary
Learning AI. All of these may have applications and benefits, but they're not the all-singing, all-dancing saviours their early buzz implied.
The shallowest and simplest way to do this for learning is to look at some of the most superficial aspects of games and copy and paste them into a learning experience.
Grab a cartoon character, send learners on a quest, and award badges for achievements.
It's about adapting those hooks and ideas, sometimes very subtly, always very carefully, to motivate people towards the behaviour we want from them, in learning or anywhere else.
In education and training, successes include companies from Deloitte to Duolingo, posting enviable figures on metrics like course completion, daily engagement with learning, learner numbers, grades and time spent learning.
What distances it much better - whatever we call it - is learning from its successes, especially those that look nothing like arcade games.
Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for programmers, is a well known example of social learning via gamification.
The results made Stack Overflow such a success that they've now exported and sold the framework as a product for other non-programming social learning and Q&A sites.
As the transferability of the system behind Stack Overflow shows, gamification is far more about 'how' than 'what', and this means we can use its ideas across L&D. It can go beyond social to individual learning, beyond digital to analog.
Whether it's a single activity in a session, a learning journey for an individual, or the structure of an entire learning portfolio for an organisation, gamification can help drive behaviour.
Reference
Pearce, T. (2020, August 03). Gamification beyond the buzzword: Why it's not what you think. Retrieved August 07, 2020, from https://www.trainingzone.co.uk/deliver/training/gamification-beyond-the-buzzword-why-its-not-what-you-think