SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology | The Guardian
Depending on your degree of immersion in the digital world, it's possible that you've never heard the term "gamification" or that you're already profoundly sick of it. From a linguistic point of view, the word should probably be outlawed – perhaps we could ban "webinar" at the same time? – but as a concept it was everywhere in Austin. Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world's leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft. So why not apply that expertise to all those areas of life where we could use more engagement, commitment and fun: in education, say, or in civic life, or in hospitals? Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn't some of that energy be productively harnessed?
Seth Priebatsch has more ideas for gamification:
His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly
designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation
when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like
you've failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad
students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them
strive for the high score? This kind of insight isn't unique to the
world of videogames: these are basic insights into human psychology and the role of incentives, recently repopularised in books such as Freakonomics and Nudge.
