The fourth video in my series of tutorials (finally!!)
This one is just a short (10 minute) look at points and badges in gamified systems and how to make some use of them. Not all that different from my Points and Badges: Not Totally Evil blog post, but also talks about balancing and best use case.
Enjoy!
A slightly cheating post today. Here are the mechanics and ideas that I have been using when supporting certain user types. I wanted to present them in a non usertype specific way. So instead of Player, here you see “Short term engagement, Activity”. This should help people see a little more clearly how to support different gamified activities.
The smaller / fainter the mechanic or idea, the less impact it has.
Click one of the links to jump straight to the activity.
Education | Innovation, Change | Creativity, Invention | Contribution, Help | Short term engagement, Activity | Collaboration
Yesterday I posted a tweet that got a few nice retweets.
Is there a middle ground where game designers and #gamification designers can meet and create amazing things? Surely yes!
— Andrzej Marczewski (@daverage) March 24, 2014
It is no secret that I would love to get the games industry to become more involved in gamification and have spoken to many people in the industry about it. Ian Bogost refereed to my original plea as a “gentle form of terrorism” saying that it was like me saying to the games industry
Using gamification on my kids is nothing new. I have openly written about my failure as a gamifier when it came to my eldest daughters reward chart! However, now I am trying a little experiment, one that is nice and low tech and involved no points or badges!
On our fridge we now have this little chart.
Throughout the day my wife and I alter the position of the arrow depending on how my daughter is behaving. We don’t tell her what the current reading is – she has to look at the feedback for herself. Of course this is on top of other verbal feedback we are giving her as well. However, this gives her a fixed reminder of how we feel she is doing.
So, for my final post of the week (as I seem to have subconsciously challenged myself to blog all week), I want to throw a curve ball out there. If I am honest it is a brain dump and a rant. So strap in and enjoy the ride.
I have talked about gamification being a benign form of manipulation in the past. I don’t think anyone within gamification who has any sense will disagree, gamification is manipulative. It is manipulative in the same way as marketing, or parenting. It is manipulative in the same way that society manipulates you on a day to day basis to go to work every day. Our society has been built on the idea that we should all be doing something. For some that is moving paper around. For others it is making the moving of paper more efficient. For very few people is it anything truly meaningful. If we are honest, very few jobs are meaningful. We are not all doctors or nurses or fire-fighters or teachers etc. We work to pay tax, to buy food and because that is what we are told to do.