grown-ups and games

In light of my recent critique of gamification, you’ll not be surprised to learn that I loved this essay by Heather Chaplin. Here’s the conclusion:

Sometimes I feel bad for these gamification enthusiasts. Priebatsch longs to change the term valedictorian to White Knight Paladin. And McGonigal, whose games are filled with top-secret missions in which you get to play the superhero, says "reality is broken" because people don't get to feel "epic" often enough. This is a child's view of how the world works. Do adults really need to pretend they're superheroes on secret missions to have meaning in their lives?

In Reality Is Broken, McGonigal talks about a game she invented to help herself get over a concussion. SuperBetter, as she called it, involved her taking on a secret identity—Buffy the Concussion Slayer—and enlisting family and friends to call her to report on "missions." The purpose of SuperBetter, McGonigal writes, was to connect her with her support system. I felt sad when I read this. What, you couldn't just pick up the phone? You needed to jump through all those hoops just to talk to your friends?

Life is complex and chaotic. If some people need to do a little role-playing now and then to help them through the day, mazel tov. It's another thing entirely, though, to rely on role playing for human contact, or to confuse the comfort of such tricks with what's real. Having a firm grip on reality is part of being a sane human being. Let's not be so eager to toss it away.

gaming the system

Oliver Burkeman writes:

[Seth] Priebatsch's declared aim is to "build a game layer on top of the world" – which at first seems simply to mean that we should all use SCVNGR, his location-based gaming platform that allows users to compete to win rewards at restaurants, bars and cinemas on their smartphones. (You can practically hear the marketers in the room start to salivate when he mentions this.)

But Priebatsch's ideas run deeper than that, whatever the impression conveyed by his bright orange polo shirt, his bright orange-framed sunglasses, and his tendency to bounce around the stage like a wind-up children's toy. His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you've failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score? This kind of insight isn't unique to the world of videogames: these are basic insights into human psychology and the role of incentives, recently repopularised in books such as Freakonomics and Nudge. But that fact, in itself, may be a symptom of the vanishing distinction between online and off – and it certainly doesn't make it wrong.

Note the covert assumption here that, while we can totally reconfigure how we evaluate student performance, we can’t think of it as anything but “performance,” and we can't resist the student tendency to think in terms of competition for grades or professorial approval.

In this case I think gamification would simply make a fundamentally unhealthy, counterproductive way of thinking somewhat more fun — at least for those who thrive on competition. (For those who dislike competition, and there are more such people than is commonly realized, it would just make things worse.) I’d rather see if we can re-think our educational system to limit or channel the ethos of competition — which, I grant, would be much harder than game-ifying it.