Gameful but not gamified User Experience

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash


Gamification

The definition for gamification has been properly given by Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled and Lennart Nacke in their paper with title From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining “Gamification”. That is:

"… use of game design elements in non-game contexts."

The term of gamification has been a bit of a buzz-word for the last few, maybe, years in the field of enterprise and consumer software. Apart from being used, it has been also clearly misused, bringing in mind mostly points, badges, top lists and attempts to motivation.

Until someday, while searching for the term gameful, I came up to this really interesting quote by Jane McGonigal from her session with title We don’t need no stinkin’ badges: How to re-invent reality without gamification:

"Within the video game and digital media industry, discontent with some interpretations have already led designers to coin different terms for their own practice (e.g., gameful design) to distance themselves from recent negative connotations."

So, happily I realized that I was not the only one heading to that direction!

Connotations of gamification

In my experience, there are more bad examples of gamified cases to talk about than successful ones. And here is why…

Marketing-wise

Gamification has been a huge bubble!

In the business-to-customer relations brought hopes for more downloads and clicks by users. In the business-to-business relations brought hopes for instant increase of the productivity. In both the above mentioned types of relations brought hopes for even more intensive and long-term interactions with systems and applications.

Software-wise

Gamification has been mostly about patches!

Regarding the engineering of software that applied gamified user exprience, there are more software patches as examples to refer to than complete design solutions based on gamification’s principles.

Design-wise

Gamification has been kitsch!

The blindly usage of badges, stars and points as a means of measurement and comparison in existing solutions has visually created really kitschy GUI based environments, bringing up on mind examples from earlier Kitsch movements in the pop art. No former research in terms of inclusive and proper design engineering had usually taken place and therefore no complete design solutions in terms of the visual language.

User Experience -wise

There has been a false interpretation!

Gamification has been considered as a Deus ex Machina, i.e. the definitive design solution fitting at all considered levels, not only that of the end-user’s interaction, but also that of strategic design, systems design and information’s architecture. Unfortunately, really few complete solutions have been developed; by that I mean design solutions for end-to-end processes on the level of their information architecture.

Actually, gamification has questioned smartly all these levels above the user interaction, perhaps not purposely, after settling some crucial arguments whether the issues in the problematic cases that it was asked to answer were lying on the UI level or on a strategic level, higher above. On that, I would like to quote bizplay’s 2014 main keynote by Steffen Waltz and his latest work.

Working environment-wise

Gamification has been a buzzword!

Really many people in the enterprise and consumer software quoted gamification as if they were specialists on its definition and application.

Game-experience-wise

Motivation is one of the principal aspects of game experience. Unfortunately, motivation is misused by those who make use of the term of gamification.

Especially in enterprise software, gamification struggles to balance on a really sensitive string among labour and play when quoting motivation as its scope. Labour and play have not always been distinct, however it’s really dangerous to make even use of the term motivation within working environments, when no former research has been conducted on the subject. On that, I would like to quote the begin of the work with the title Gamification and Post-Fordist Capitalism by PJ Rey:

"Work and play have not always been distinct phenomena. However, as Western civilization transitioned to capitalism, work became synonymous with alienation. Unlike play, alienated labor is not intrinsically rewarding, and it is certainly not fun."

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