Gamification Challenge: Can You Defeat Bigotry?

As I walked through town recently, I was reminded rather forcefully that homophobia and bigotry still exist in a big way.

As my family and I were walking through a charity store, a man was loudly saying the following to his 3 or 4-year-old son.

Don’t tell me you kissed a boy. Stop kissing boys, it ain’t natural!

I am a parent to two girls, both of whom are open about the fact they don’t label themselves in any specific way when it comes to their preferences towards gender. Hearing this made them both upset and mad as hell – as it did me.

So here is my challenge to you all. How would you use gamification to try and solve this kind of bigotry, to get through to this kind of Neanderthal that it is not ok to be like that?

My way involves behaviour modification and counting lost teeth, which is just as unacceptable in this day and age!

You and I have all the theory in the world by now and have applied much of it – but in reality, this is the sort of issue we should be trying to turn our skill to in our own time. Is the answer to creating training programmes that we have to somehow encourage them to take? Is it more about changing the way the government treats this sort of behaviour? Is it a social change that will take decades, but needs the likes of us to guide and design? I think we all know the answer, but I refuse to believe that we can’t make any impact on this problem, that there is no way with all our knowledge on behaviour that we can’t somehow make a difference.

Or is that where gamification becomes a lie? Is it just about making more money for others? Has my faith over the last 10 years or so been totally misplaced?

Prove me wrong, prove that gamification is more than a way to make people take mandatory training, buy more products or click more links. Prove to me that my children don’t have to live in a world like this and that we can make a real difference.

Who’s with me?

Similar Posts:


Also published on Medium.

Please wait...

1 thought on “Gamification Challenge: Can You Defeat Bigotry?”

Leave a Comment