Gameful Design

I thought this was a very interesting article by Chelsea Howe comparing "gameful design" to gamification.

Gameful Design

Gamification is the integration of game elements into services or applications with the purpose of incentivizing certain behaviors. It seems to me that gamification is an offshoot of nudges- the designer links some minor reward to the desired behavior making it more attractive to the agent. As Howe's post points out, if the goal is lasting behavioral change, these short term nudges will not be effective because they are not intrinsically motivated, they do not treat people as people, and they do not give players agency.

​You don’t actually play games for points or badges– those are just progress indicators that help you contextualize your improvements/skill (which is exciting). People love games because they are in control and can affect the world (this is called agency), because they can make meaningful choices and interesting decisions. They play because games are delightful, challenging, and filled with clear goals. Operant conditioning ignores all of those things, and tries to motivate using our most basic human instincts instead of the complex depth that makes us human.

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There’s a difference between celebrating accomplishment (“award”) and incentivizing actions (“reward”)....Getting an award is a great feeling – when you’ve worked for it. When it feels relevant and special to you. When it represents success at something appropriately challenging. There’s nothing wrong about celebrating accomplishment; it feels great to be recognized for what you’ve done, as long as what you’ve done is actually something worthwhile. If you go to certain sites you’ll find yourself with random badges for seemingly no reason at all, after just clicking through a few pages (and of course, you have to sign up to keep them). Is that satisfying? (No.)

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