Recently my friend David Chandross wrote a great post about how serious games often miss their purpose, becoming more game than serious if you will. That it’s becoming less and less about the learning. That inspired me to reemphasise something I wrote about a while back.
Gamification should help people do things better. That’s it. But somewhere along the way, too many designers decided that the point was to make people play their systems, rather than benefit from them.
It’s easy to spot. You open an app or a training program and you’re immediately pulled into some shiny loop of collecting things, hitting targets, and chasing streaks. The problem is, you’re no longer learning or improving, you’re just playing. The system has become the goal.