Gamification of eLearning is hailed as a way to driveengagement, motivation, and performance—but if overdone, it can actually decreaseall of these.
“You wind up devaluing the thing itself if you shift toomuch of the emphasis to the game,” said Guild Master and consultant Julie Dirksen of Usable Learning. She cautions that excessive gamification and emphasis on awardscan reward the wrong behaviors or values. “If I am gamifying your involvementin a learning management system, I’m telling you that the reason to engage inthat learning management system is to get points or badges,” Dirksen said.“When really, it’s probably better motivation to say, ‘This could save yourlife in this safety circumstance, and that’s why it’s really important.’”
Another potential drawback: Not everyone enjoys competition;emphasis on the game aspects of learning rather than the opportunity to improvetheir skill set or performance can turn off some employees. “The problem is,you don’t know, in your target audience, whether or not competition is a goodmotivation for them,” Dirksen said. “When you use competition as a motivatorand you get people in your target audience who really don’t like competition,it can cause you to demotivate the behavior for them.”
Author and lecturer Alfie Kohn takes the extreme view that competition is inherently dysfunctional.Based on his 30 years of study, he said, “I have been unable to find a singleexample where competition, I believe, is ever healthy or sensible. At work, atschool, at play—it is never necessary to set things up so that you have to failin order for me to succeed.” Speaking to podcast host Dean Bokhari on TheMeaningful Show, “The Case Against Competition,” Kohn emphasized cooperation over competition andsaid that competition:
- Undermines psychological health and increasesanxiety
- Damages interpersonal relationships by settingup a dynamic that requires one person to lose in order for another to succeed
- Reduces interest in the actual learning orperformance task by shifting focus to the reward
- Harms creativity, innovation, and performance
“Competition is as destructive to the bottom line as it isto the human beings who are engaged in the working and learning,” Kohn said.
That certainly doesn’t mean that games and gamification areall bad. Collaborative or cooperative games can be as enjoyable as—or more funthan—competitive games. And, when done well, gamification can engage learners.
Noncompetitive games
A “Deconstructing Games” session at FocusOn Learning 2017analyzed social voting games, such as Apples to Apples, What Do You Meme?, andCards Against Humanity. These are all games that include card sets and askplayers to answer a question, make and defend a choice or position, or groupwords, images, or items—and explain their choices. There’s no “right” answer,and social voting games give players a chance to explore different possibleresponses to a situation—or solutions to a problem—as a group.
In other noncompetitive games, all the players cooperate towork toward a shared goal; they compete against the game rather than againstone another.
These types of games have potential benefits in corporatetraining and learning: They provide opportunities for colleagues to get to knowone another as they practice and improve soft skills like negotiation, clearcommunication, listening to others, and cooperation—all valuable skills forproject managers and teams, leaders, and anyone who works with others.
It’s not all soft skills, either; the content on the cardscan teach and reinforce facts, vocabulary, and concepts that apply to players’jobs. Colleagues can learn and solve problems related to the topics on thecards and learn from the discussion around questions raised or choices made inresponse to content on cards.
Getting gamification right
Lennart Nacke, research director of the HCI games group atthe University of Waterloo in Canada and an associate professor, describes five“gamification languages”—of which game mechanics is only one. The others are goals andchallenges; quality of content and context; incentives; and voluntaryinteraction. “Knowing all the languages allows you [to] travel around the worldof gamification without problems,” he writes.
Rewarding employees or learners and adding elements thatincentivize participation definitely have their place in eLearning, as do otherelements of gamification. But successful gamification requires more than justadding a few game elements on top of content. Sebastian Deterding, a designerof user experience and games, identifies three key “ingredients” that are oftenmissing from gamification:
- Meaning—Games or game elements mustconnect the activity to the learner’s goals or interests. Simply accruing pointsis meaningless; earning “bragging rights” for winning a badge that the playersand their community don’t value is equally meaningless. A game must be based onmeaningful goals.
- Mastery—Learning becomes fun when masteryof a skill or learning information is done via interesting challenges.Deterding says that pairing a goal with rules that determine how one may or maynot pursue the goal is what creates interesting challenges. To keep playersengaged, the goals must get progressively more challenging, and there must be amix of achievable short-term goals and longer-term goals. This provides somesuccess as well as opportunities to fail, learn from that failure, and continueadvancing toward a larger goal.
- Autonomy—Play is voluntary, and “if youadd an if/then reward to a specific activity, you curb the felt autonomy of theperson,” Deterding said in a Google Tech Talk, “Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right.” Placing contingent rewards on an activity can devaluethe activity and demotivate participants. The “core element of autonomy iseasily damaged if you slap some extrinsic reward on an activity,” he said.
Dirksen also emphasized the problematic nature of somerewards. “Rewards as an acknowledgement for real accomplishment, as just a wayto say, ‘You did something awesome, and we’re acknowledging that’—post hocrewards rather than contingent reward—is fine,” Dirksen said. But gamificationthat makes rewards contingent on performance can backfire. “Typically, if youbribe people into a behavior, they’ll only do the behavior for as long asthey’re being bribed,” she said. “A lot of times, the bribes need to get biggerover time to continue the behavior.”
As with most things, moderation is the best approach. “Alittle bit of gentle gamification around a one-time behavior probably isn’t sobad,” Dirksen said. “A consistent shifting of focus to gamification as thereason to do something—as opposed to ‘this will make you a better professional;this is tied to your identity; this tied to things that you value’—it can turninto a bit of an arms race around ‘I need to keep upping the stakes in order tokeep getting the behavior that I want to see.’”
