Gamification: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
In this post i want to express my opinion about Gamification and how it can be good, bad or ugly. For those who are not familiar with the term, Gamification is the proccess of adding game elements (such as progress levels, virtual points, rewards etc) in any activity.
Gamification in non-game systems
From my experience if this is implemented in a good non-intrusive way it can be really empowering and can benefit both you and the company behind the system. You can enforce good habits and behaviors for yourself and benefit from it. Some personal examples below:
Having good data on yourself and comparing for example your runs with your previous ones can motivate you to try harder and see when and how you are getting better. Runkeeper app also gives discounts in their store if you do a 5KM run in a month. This benefits both you if you want to buy something and the company of course. Zombies Run makes your run more interesting by telling you a story about a world that is full of zombies and you run from them. You collect virtual items for every run you do in the real world and you build your virtual city. Everything you have built in the virtual world it is earned by running in the real one.
In general it sometimes can give you a boost and re-enforce good behavior. Other examples include habit and goal hitting apps like Fabulous.
Gamification in most modern games
In the past many games didn't have elements such as levels rewards etc. You could play a game just for the challenge or the story and still enjoy it.
Gamification gone Ugly
To realize how people play those games you have to see the skinner box example. B. F. Skinner a physiologist made a series of experiments mostly in a lever box mostly known today as skinner box. You have an animal in a box and some kind of reinforcement such as food, water etc. To get the reinforcement the animal must press a lever or button. This can quickly make the animal learn and enforce a behavior about the lever (that it gives food). Many variations of this with negative reinforcements such as electric current or tweaking the times you have to press the button gave them enough data to analyze the best practice in each case.
How is this relevant in this case? Imagine that you are the animal and the game is the box? What does it give you to keep playing? Dopamine. By seeing yourself progress, fancy leveling up animations etc every while you get a pinch of dopamine and you keep playing. Most awful games in this category in my opinion are the clicker games. One example i played for a day or two until i realized that the game has no real purpose. You just earn more money and upgrade more stuff with no strategy or thought required to progress more. It only needs time or ...money. This isn't just bad design it is straight up ugly.
Thoughts
Some good reads on the subject:
Have you fallen into the trap? Do you actually enjoy the kind of games i mentioned? Maybe some times you want a time waster to relax and not a complex game. What are your thoughts about the current trends in recent games?
Have a great day! Follow for more - Chris Myll 