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.
2.3 Games and Play
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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
It's important to distinguish the concept of games from that of play.
And, as we'll see, both of them are important for understanding how to be
effective in doing gamification. The thinker who best articulated this
division was a French intellectual named Roger Caillois.
And he described the opposition of the two concepts which he called Ludus on one
hand and Paidia on the other hand. Ludus from that same Latin word that we
talked about that basically means games, Paidia from the Greek for child, which we
can represent as play. And Caillois looked at these as basically
two different poles. Two opposites at some level.
So what does that mean? Think about it.
If you think just colloquially, what's the difference between play and games?
Obviously, they're connected. But is there some fundamental difference?
What do mean when we talk about play that's different from when we talk about
games? Here's some quotes from philosopher's and
game designers. First on the concept of play.
The first one comes from the philosopher Friedrich Schiller who talks about play
as the expenditure of exuberant energy. Santayana, another philosopher, says play
is done spontaneously for its own sake. Lev Vygotsky who was an influential
education theorist talked about play as creating a zone of proximal development.
This was a essential element in Vygotsky's educational theories.
Basically the notion is a child when he or she is learning, has a certain level
that they have obtained, but they have a potential capacity that substantially
greater than that. The zone of proximal development of a
great teacher and an educational system that can reach beyond themselves and
therefor move up, and advance, and learn. So Lev Vygotsky here says play.
Which we normally we think of as the stuff you do when you're not learning,
when you're not in class. He says play actually helps a child reach
that zone of proximal development. And in play, a child always behaves
beyond his average age. The final quote is from Katie Salen &
Eric Zimmerman two game designers who wrote an influential book called the
Rules of Play, which I'd encourage you to look at if you're interested in getting
deeper into these notions about what makes a game and how game designers
think. And they say play is free movement within
a more rigid structure. So what all these things are talking
about, is that play is Freedom. Play is doing whatever you want, but it's
within some structure. There are some limits.
Inside this world, you can be yourself and try out anything and just goof off.
But you're in an environment that constrains your ability to do that.
Sound familiar? Sounds a lot like the magic circle that
we talked about before in the work of [UNKNOWN].
Okay, that's play. think about the relevance of play to
gamification. This idea of exuberant energy.
This idea of doing something for its own sake.
Really powerful. Gets to the heart of fun and engagement
in some of things that, in a gamified system, we want to create for the
players. The second term is games.
So how are games different from play? Here's some quotes.
The first is from Tracy Fullerton and her two co-authors, the authors of a major
textbook on game design. And they say a game is a closed, formal
system that engages players in a structured conflict and resolves in an
unequal outcome. So, here we see something very different
than we were talking about play. Play was exuberant and for it's on sake
and so forth. Games are formal, they are structured and
they produce outcomes. Similarly Sid Meier, a famous game
developer. He wrote, most notably, the civilization
series of games, says that a game is a series of meaningful choices.
I love this quote. It encapsulates a lot of what's in the
previous quote, but boils it down to the essence.
There's a formal system. But that system, essentially, what it
does is creates a set of choices, and the choices have meaning.
Something happens based on what you do. The actions that you take produce
different results. And the game, therefore, is about taking
the right actions to produce the re-, the result that you're going for.
Thmoas Mallaby is a an anthropologist actually, at the University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee, who studies games and virtual worlds.
And he talks about games as a domain of contrived contingency that generates
interpretable outcomes. So here, the interpretable outcomes.
This is is very similar to the concept that we saw up here about outcomes.
The key point though that Mallaby had is this notion of contingency, randomness,
chance. And it's contrived.
The game manually puts that contingency in to create an environment where your
choices are meaningful. Finally, here, Jesse Schell the game
designer we met before from his DICE talk about gamification, he talks about a game
as a problem-solving activity approached with a playful attitude.
And hopefully, this notion of a playful attitude should look familiar.
Relating back to what I described in the prior video about suits notion of lusory
attitude, and it connects up the concept of games.
The problem solving activity, the structure within a set of rules to get an
outcome with the notion of play. So therefore a game looks something like
this. It's a branching path where we have a set
of choices, and each choice leads to various outcomes, and each choice we make
might give us other choices, and other choices, and other choices.
Some of them connect back up, some of them don't,
And whatever we do, it produces some result.
And in getting from one point to another, we start here and we finish here.
And this is the goal of the game moving through that pathway taking the the path
that we choose to take. Through this environment is play at some
level. We have freedom in what we do.
We could make a wrong turn and go down here, and not get to the result, but
let's assume we don't. We eventually get to the finish line.
We have that choice in what we do. The game design, the structure that is
put into place is what gives us an opportunity to make those choices, feel
that sense of freedom, actually have that freedom but being in an environment that
allows our choices to have meaning and to feel meaningful getting to a result.
So here' s an exercise that you might do based on what I've just described.
Make a list of things in your life that involve play.
And then make another list of things that involve games.
And to make it more challenging, don't list activities that are primarily
recreational or entertainment oriented. Try to think about things from work, or
from school, or from your social life, or from your interaction with say the
government, or with businesses. Think about things that are more
play-like and things that are more game-like and what distinguishes them.
Here's a few quick takeaways before we wrap up this segment for how the
philosophical discussion that I've given you relates back to gamification.
The first is to emphasize the concept of voluntariness.
This was in [UNKNOWN] definition of games as voluntarily overcoming unnecessary
obstacles. And it runs all the way through.
Especially for play, because play is free form exuberant action for no purpose.
But even for games, the user has to feel the choices are meaningful and therefore
they have to be voluntary choices. James P.
Cars who wrote a delightful little book called Finite and Infinite Games, he's a
professor at NYU says, and I'm paraphrasing, whoever must play cannot
play. If you're forced to do something, it's
not a game. This is a concept we'll come back to
later when we talk about gamification in enterprises, and in the workplace.
Second point here is that games involve learning or problem solving.
If they don't, they're play. Play, again, can just be spontaneous
energy. Games have some structure, some
objectives. And at some level, there has to be a
challenge, which is a problem to be solved.
And finally, designing a game is a balance.
We're going to come back to this when we talk about game design.
And it's a balance at least in part between the structure, the rules of the
game, and that open-ended, free-form, play like sense of exploration.
Too much of one and the game's not any fun because the possibilities are too
limited. Too much of the other and the game has no
purpose and it's just wandering around without getting anywhere, which doesn't
make the player have as much fun, typically, and really doesn't achieve the
objectives of the game designer, or in this case the organization that
implemented the gamified system.
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