Gamification is not just points and badges

Ok, quick rant, move along if you don’t care about the future of our industry.

I recently read an article, that said the following

gamificationthe concept of points or rewards through the completion of tasks …

It is 2018, gamification has been maturing for several years now and most of the respected leaders in the industry have been trying to dispell this concept for some time now.

So why does it persist?

Because the industry does not speak openly about what it is actually doing. Case studies I am using now are the same ones I was using in 2011. This either means that people are so successful that they don’t want to share the goods, or they are failing so badly they are embarrassed to share.

There is fabulous research being done now, but so many in the industry still refuse to accept that academic research and even the rigour provided by research methods are important to the future of the gamification industry. This is can only be driven by laziness, ignorance or arrogance.

It is up to us to drive the industry forward and we can’t do that if we keep allowing our work to be misrepresented in lazy press releases or by lazy journalists in this way. We certainly can’t do this if we refuse to adapt and evolve.

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Also published on Medium.

1 thought on “Gamification is not just points and badges”

  1. Great rant Andrezj. I think you are right that the industry is not openly sharing what they do and it’s not because some are so good at it. I can’t tell you how many webinars and presentations I have sat through since 2011 where the company says “come watch this and learn about Gamification” and then you sit through 15 minutes of them telling you who they are followed by a whole lot of “if you go choose us we’ll do great things”. Then you wait to learn something other than the definition of gamification which I’ve heard a billion times because I have to explain it to my clients (I get that) but then….they never really tell you anything except to show you a few avatars (they have good artists at least) and not explain what they do or how they do it. They are so afraid that someone will steal their ideas that they won’t share anything and so the general pubic is no better informed. Only a small handful of designers like yourself will actually help people learn. Every time I speak at a conference I make sure people have learned something new when they walk away. It’s the only way we’ll be able to advance the industry. Well and that’s my rant about what we do 🙂

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