I was recently asked to write an article on the ethics of gamification for the ACM’s student publication XRDS. Here it is! It should download a PDF. I would love to hear your thoughts 🙂
Andrzej Marczewski XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 2017 frames are not supported If the ethics of gamification are of interest to you, why not sign up to the Open Gamification Code of Ethics?Gamification
A Challenge for My Readers – Micro Story Telling
It has been weeks since I last spoke about narratives and stories. I just wanted to pass a thought by you that fits in nicely with my stuff on Narrative Atoms and to set you a challenge. I saw a great article thanks to Rob Alvarez, Bucholska that had something very similar – 2 sentence horror stories.
This fit in brilliantly with something I had done recently, so got me to thinking. How much story can you fit on a post-it note? How much text do you need to create a story in the minds of your users/readers?
The Trouble With Types
Player Types and User Types, I’m not gonna lie, I love ’em. I imagine that is obvious considering I have spent so long making my own!
However, it’s time for a bit of a tidy up of misconceptions about types – a misconception my love of them may even have helped to perpetuate.
Misconceptions
Bartle has 4 Player Types
Actually, he has 8. He realised there were limitations and duality in his 4 types, so he created a set of 8 that accounted for this. https://mud.co.uk/richard/selfware.htm
Everyone is Just One Type
No matter what model or taxonomy you use, the likelihood is this is just not true. We probably display all types in our personality, just in different amounts and in different contexts (more on that in a moment)
Keeping it Real in Fantasy Worlds
A Game of Rules
Richard Bartle recently raised a really interesting point about certain fantasy based shows and games after watching Game of Thrones. His complaint was that even in fantasy worlds, there need to be rules and those rules need to be stuck to. Anything that is not explained by the new fantasy rules of the world should then default to the rules of the real world. One example he gives is that of Sam in Game of Thrones. Despite a very active lifestyle in GoT, he doesn’t lose as much weight as you might expect if it were the real world and there is no explanation for that. You can understand the existence of magic and dragons because the narrative introduces them early on — so they are part of the rules of the world. However, lack of weight loss in Sam’s instance seems to be very unlikely.
I Am Applying Gamification Because…
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, one of the key pitfalls of applying something like gamification is not knowing what the problem really is or why you are applying gamification in the first place!
A simple tool I like to use is this sentence,
I am ________, because ________.
You start by describing what you are doing or going to do, then you describe why you are doing it and what you hope to achieve by doing it!
I am adding a leaderboard, because the feedback I had from the users was that they wanted to be able to compare their performance to their peers.