The gamification of employment, education, you name it

[Steve Terry]

 It's going to have a huge impact, I believe, on everything from here on.

http://www.economist.com/node/21555952

 

S>)

[Anne Sullivan]

I do games research, so I see gamification thrown around a lot, and
studied a lot. However, there has been push-back based on research
that shows that extrinsic rewards cause people to do things just for
the rewards, and they lose enjoyment of the thing itself. In one
particularly heavily cited experiment ( Effects of Extrinsic Rewards
on Children's Subsequent Intrinsic Interest -
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1128110?uid=3739776&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21100827182161
), children who enjoyed drawing would lose that enjoyment when
extrinsic rewards were given to them when they did the drawing.
Applying gamification to education is a huge mistake in my mind, and
that doesn't take into account that the point of education is to teach
people how to learn, which can not be easily quantified (but that's an
entirely different discussion).

With that said, what this article is about is not gamification
(applying rewards or achievements for taking a specific action), but
about creating games that use a desired aptitude so that employers can
test (in a low-risk environment and in a hopefully fun way) whether
the person has that aptitude. That seems interesting, although not
necessarily easy to globalize since researchers and game designers are
still trying to figure out ways to create games beyond certain tropes
such as dexterity puzzles. I'm pretty interested to see how well their
test works and where this goes, though. :)

-Anne

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[Jason Wehmhoener]

I'd be curious to understand how these "games" are any different than tests with a more entertaining name. 

Tests are notoriously "game-able". I've always had a knack for analyzing the structure and form of questions and answers as a means towards getting a higher score on a test than my level of studying should have allowed for. That means that while many standardized tests were a great measure of my ability to carry out meta-analysis on the test itself, they may not have been a very good measure of the thing they were actually intended to measure. 

Measurement and quantification go hand in hand. As Anne stated, lots of things don't lend themselves very well to numeracy. I for one would like to see a large increase in focus on qualitative methods of evaluation (of all things/people/etc we are interested in measuring). We've been made lazy by computers and their propensity for number crunching, forgetting that we also have extremely sophisticated thinking devices atop our shoulders, capable of doing incredible things computers can't possibly dream of. 

That being said, we've learned as business owners (the hard way) that quick conversations and simple tests are generally very poor at predicting on-the-job performance. Portfolio reviews don't fare much better. We've come to the conclusion that we'll never really be sure about a candidate until they've had some success or failure on a real world project, with all of its inherent complexity. Without that "in situ" context, it's all just a simulation, and we've gotten quite good as a society at gaming the system. The only thing that lives up to reality is reality.

-Jason

[Claire]

In education technology there's a lot of buzz about "gameification"

I find it useful to distinguish pointsification from gamification.
There's huge value to making user progress, achievements, and group
relationships more visible. Rewards can be motivating and fun. We've
seen them work!

But that really is different from a game situation where the challenge
is tied to the learning. When you give the user tools and allow them
to work through a challenge/game and arrive at a solution without
"giving" them the answer, you can generate a powerful experiential
learning experience.

I'll echo Anne and say it's really the difference between intrinsic
and extrinsic motivation. As a learning designer I plan to use both!