The pitfalls of gamification
I’m worried about gamification. I’m worried that it’s going to be the next fall guy (or girl) in the marketing space as people begin to decide, “no one wants badges”.
Granted, the truth is that, yeah, no one wants badges. But that’s because it’s not the badge they want but the recognition of achievement, either from a game or from their friends. Since none of the badge-based games do particularly well, people don’t want badges, branded or otherwise.
So what’s the deal? Gaming touches on a set of core human functionality. A good game presents itself as an achievable challenge. Something we can do, that’s outside of our day-to-day life, which provides instant feedback to our actions and a place for us to try something over and over again. Physiologically, a good game create dopamine bursts in the brain that look a lot like what happens when we are happy, learning, or addicted (depending on which study you read). For any company, the idea of a hyper-committed audience is enticing. Burger King created and sold a series of games in 2006, none of which were particularly popular because they felt like an advertiser trying to make you play a video game. But there are deeper implications for more simple game mechanics to be introduced into our daily lives.
Heather Chaplin, in an article she wrote for Slate takes the perspective that gamification could eventually become a threat to employees. She sees the dangers of gamification as a means of paying lower wages while increasing performance for employees by providing “points” and “rewards” instead of pay.
“Indeed, gamification is an allegedly populist idea that actually benefits corporate interests over those of ordinary people. It’s strange that its advocates don’t seem to understand there’s a difference. In his talk at South by Southwest, Seth Priebatsch of the gamification startup SCVNGR said there were five problems we could solve if we built a game layer over the world. These nettlesome issues, he explained, included both ‘customer acquisition’ and ‘global warming.’”
She’s got a point. But that point will become antiquated over time. Look at Khan Academy’s new Practice section of their website which turns learning into a game with points and ranking. This site focuses squaring on transforming the way learning happens and it seems to be working.
If you were a student growing up within this system of encouragement, would you be offended if your employer or an advertiser created a game to incentivize your participation? What if there was real incentive and not simply “points” associated with achievement? We know that many workers in the finance industry operate on a bonus system that nets them compensation based on performance. There’s also the ever-present, though rarely committed to, trend that advertising agencies will begin billing based on measured effects on sales. These are both a form of gamification both with their positives and negatives. Our challenge is to define how brand and game mechanics can work together. This is not a binary debate about whether or not gamification should become ubiquitous. This is a debate about a range of features that can be added in layers, it’s also far from being figured out but I’m certain that someday it will be and the positives will win out over the negatives.
(Jacob Cohen @jstackhouse)
