Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. This course will teach you the mechanisms of gamification, why it has such tremendous potential, and how to use it effectively. For additional information on the concepts described in the course, you can purchase Professor Werbach's book For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business in print or ebook format in several languages.
2.2 What is a Game
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Gamification
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Gamification and Games
Gamification is a new field, but games are ancient. In this first module, we'll look at what gamification is, why organizations are applying it, and where it comes from. While there isn’t universal agreement on the scope of the field, a set of concepts are clearly representative of gamification. The second lesson explains why the concept of games is deeper than most people realize, and how game design serves as a foundation for gamification.
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Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
What is a game? Seems like a fairly obvious question, we all know what games
are, we all play games. So, it's easy to define, right? A game is a game. Turns out
that it's extraordinarily difficult when you think about it, to figure out what it
is that makes something a game. And we don't want to get too hung up on semantics
here. It's not that in order to do a gamification, you need to get some
approval by the official game board that what you're doing truly involves games.
But to understand how to tap into the power of games. And to understand how to
create things that are actually game-like, would help to have as a starting point an
understanding of what a game is. So, it turns out that this is a deep,
philosophical question. And there've been a number of works by major philosophers
that've taken on just this challenge, defining what a game is. And of course,
this is not a philosophy course, but it's helpful to understand some of those
perspectives because as we'll see, they teach lessons that are going to be very
valuable in understanding the power of games as used for gamification. The
starting point here is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Hello Ludwig. Famous
twentieth century philosopher and in his masterpiece philosophical investigations,
Wittgenstein used games as one of his core examples about the difficulty, in fact the
impossibility of using language to define things. The point that he made, or the
argument that he made, was that it is impossible to define what a game is. We
think that we know what games are and we have no trouble pointing to something in
the real world, and saying, aha, that's a game. Back here, I have Cranium, that's a
game. Back here, I have a bowling trophy, that's a trophy about someone playing a
game. We understand what games are, right? Well, it's gets harder to say what is the
framework that defines games? How can you give a concise definition of games that is
comprehensive? So, maybe think about it a little for yourself the question is, given
all the different kinds of games, what is it that ties together hopscotch, and Call
of Duty, and water polo and all of the different kinds of things that we talk
about as games, there is not one aspect that you can find in common. Many of them
have points or scoring, many of them have winning and loosing, many of them have
teams but, there's no one thing like that, that applies to all games. So,
Wittgenstein's point here in philosophical investigations, was you can't figure out,
as he says, how the concept of a game is bounded. What counts as a game and what no
longer does, he says, can you give the boundary, no. So, Wittgenstein's argument
is impossible to ask to define games. Well, fortunately that's not the endpoint
or we wouldn't have much to say here. Other philosophers took up this challenge.
One of the more interesting was a Candian philosopher named Bernard Suits, and Suits
took on Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein directly, and said, actually Ludwig, we
can define what a game is. Wittgenstein, of course, was really not trying to make a
point about games. He was trying to make a point about the indeterminacy of language,
and the nature of human thought. But Suits was focused specifically on games. And
what Suits says is, we can define every possible game based on three concepts. The
first is, that games have when he called a Pre-lusory Goal. Lusory here comes from
the Latin word ludus which means game. We'll see it again in a different context.
So the first thing Suits said was, in any game there's some objective of the game.
If you're playing ping pong, table tennis, the objective is to hit a ball over a net.
You can talk about a hitting a ball over a net without regard to the game of ping
pong. If the game is the 400-meter race, the goal is to get from the starting point
to the finish line of the race. If the game is checkers, the goal is to capture
all of your opponent's pieces. We can talk about that without necessarily referring
to all the rules of any of those games. So, first thing we need is a goal. We've
already talked about this, games have goal S. The second thing you need, is what
Suits called constitutive rules. A set of rules or limitations that make the
activity into a game. So if it's checkers, the rules include the fact that the pieces
can only move one space diagonally and only forward until they become a king. And
they can only capture by jumping over diagonally if there's an open square on
the other side. If it's Ping Pong, the rules include, the ball can't bounce twice
on your side, you have to hit it over the net, and it has to land on your opponents
side of the table. Any game has those rules, and those rules are what make it
game-like as supposed to just some work objective. The third element is what
Suits' called a lusory attitude. So, there's that word again lusory, a
game-like attitude. What that means is, the player follows the rules, and they do
so voluntarily. They do so because they have an attitude that says the game means
something. Sure, I could play ping pong with an air cannon and using a baseball
and fire it a hundred miles an hour across the table, not just at my opponent side of
the table, but directly at my opponents head. And I could do that and say ha, ha,
I had hit the ball over the net, I win the game, but that, whatever, that was,
[laugh] wouldn't be ping pong. And the point is, if I care about ping pong, then
I'm not going to do that, that's cheating. I can win the 400-meter race by racing
directly across the infield cutting across in a shortcut to the finish line but
that's cheating and that is doing something other than effectively playing
the game of a 400-meter race. So, the point here is if it's a game, it means
something to the players. They want to follow the rules of the game, even though
they limit the player's freedom. So, another way the Suits put this was the
game is voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles. There are obstacles on our
path, we don't have to overcome them and yet we do. Voluntarily, a game must be
voluntary for to be a game. So, think about how this relates to gamification.
First of all , think about how it relates to every game you can think of. Try and
think about different games and how they might fit into Suits three part tasks. But
then think about what it means if a game something that's voluntary, something that
has an objective, something that has limitations and something that has the
player thinking that the game has meaningful so that they follow the rules
of the game. The final piece of the puzzle comes from the work of an early to mid
twentieth century dutch philosopher named Johan Huizinga and he wrote a book that
became very influential called Homo Ludens. Ludens from that same Latin word
ludus as the lusory attitude that Bernard Suits talks about. And the book is an
extended argument that games and play are essential to what makes us human even to
the serious things in life like religion and government and the legal system. But
the point that I want to emphasize here is a concept that Huizinga developed in the
book called the Magic Circle. And his idea was that in a game there is a physical or
a virtual boundary that divides the world of the game from, what we could call, the
real world. In other words the game is different. It might be a traditional
physical boundary, like for example the lines around a soccer field. If you are on
the pitch, you are playing the game, if you are in the stands, you're not. But it
might also, might also be a conceptual boundary. When you sit down and started to
play a video game, you are in a virtual way embedding yourself in the game. And
the point is, when you are in the magic circle, the game rules matter, not the
rules of the real world. So, this ties in to Suit's notion of voluntariness and a
lusory attitude, but the notion is that we are essentially in a virtual environment.
Whether we are, again , on a playing field or looking at a computer screen, we're
thinking that the game matters and we should follow the rules of the game, more
so than focusing on following the rules of the real world. Now, gamification as I've
said, involves elements of ga mes, and concepts, and techniques from games rather
than full blown games. So, the challenge and the opportunity for gamification is to
put the player as much as possible in the magic circle. If you feel like the game
matters, whether that's Club Psyche, or KEAS, or the Speed Camera Lottery, or any
of the examples I've given. If the player feels like that's important, those are
real constraints, then they will be motivated to play and to respond to the
incentives that the gamified system provides.
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