Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. This course will teach you the mechanisms of gamification, why it has such tremendous potential, and how to use it effectively. For additional information on the concepts described in the course, you can purchase Professor Werbach's book For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business in print or ebook format in several languages.
1.4 Why Study Gamification
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從本節課中
Gamification and Games
Gamification is a new field, but games are ancient. In this first module, we'll look at what gamification is, why organizations are applying it, and where it comes from. While there isn’t universal agreement on the scope of the field, a set of concepts are clearly representative of gamification. The second lesson explains why the concept of games is deeper than most people realize, and how game design serves as a foundation for gamification.
與講師見面
Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
So, why should we study gamification?
Maybe I should ask you that, after all of you signed up
for this course, but it's worth pausing for a minute and asking the
question of why this is worth the kind of extended analysis that
we're going to do in this class, because its, its just games, right?
Well, there are four reasons I think
the systematic study of gamification is fruitful.
And we're going to see more and more gamification being a regular
subject that's taught about, both in,
training context and in, university educational context.
The first of these is that gamification is a significant emerging business practice.
We're seeing lots and lots of examples come up from many different kinds
of companies as well as in
non-business context where gamification is being applied.
So here's just a couple examples from, the recent press.
An article from Fortune magazine from October 2011.
Talking about gamification as the hot new business concept, and
while I certainly wouldn't say just follow something because it's a
hyped trend the important thing is many of them world's
most admired companies are starting to get on board with this.
It's not just something that's happening among kooky startups.
It's something that's being adopted by very large, established companies.
The second article here from the Wall Street Journal talking about how a
growing number of firms are incorporating elements
of video games into the work place.
So video games, as I'll talk about in
more detail, have become a huge and influential industry.
But what we're starting to see is more
and more examples of video games being the foundation,
not just for selling games, but for the
foundation of doing things at and around the workplace.
So gamification is something that is happening,
and as I said, it's happening very widely.
So here is a list of a few of
the companies that are applying gamification in substantial ways.
And as you'll see, they range from small very technology focused
startups, to big very consumer products
focused, established, bricks and mortar companies.
And some of these are companies that went out consciously and tried to
implement gamification around one of their business practices, and some of them are
companies that just developed something, that in hindsight was game like, and they
just, thought it was a good way to attack a particular problem they had.
But in both cases when we look at
what's happening out there, there's a growing recognition that
this set of techniques has value, and it has
value in a, a very broad set of circumstances.
The second reason to think that gamification is
worth, greater scrutiny is that games are powerful things.
We've probably all had the experience of saying wow, I
was really addicted to that game or, you know, time just seemed to fly by.
And maybe it's a video game, maybe you had
that experience with a, a board or a card game.
Maybe you had that experience playing sports.
But games have a real pull on us.
There's something that is extremely powerful when we think about it, given
that we think of them as experiences that are done just for enjoyment.
So what is it that makes games engaging?
What is it that allows games to support
sophisticated kinds of thinking and learning, as we'll see?
What is it about games, that makes them so engaging?
That's an important question to ask.
And it's a question that gets asked about,
among the community of people who study games
in their own right, but it's a question
that becomes relevant when the games are being used,
or at least the game elements and design
principles are being used in these non-game contexts,
it's worth starting to dig down and say
just what is it about games that's so significant?
The third reason to study gamification is because it
teaches us things about other areas of knowledge as well.
So, as we'll see when we get into
gamification, we're going to very quickly get into psychology.
Games have been around throughout all of human history because they
link to some very basic aspects of the way our minds work.
And so to understand how to design things that are
effectively gamified, we need to understand about, for example, motivation.
What is it that makes someone want to do something?
What are different kinds of motivation?
And what are different techniques that can
be used to help people achieve their goals?
So we'll learn about psychology.
We'll also learn about design.
As I've already talked about, gamification is a design practice.
So understanding how to do it necessarily gets us
into thinking about the very sophisticated complex world of design.
strategy, I teach it at business school.
And understanding gamification in the organization ties into lots of
things that people here talk about in understanding how to
do business, understanding what it means to lead in the
workplace, understanding what it means to design an effective marketing campaign.
These are all areas of knowledge that we're going
to bring to bear in understanding what makes gamification work.
And finally technology.
games, as I've said, have been around forever, and many games don't
involve any specificated technology, but the
ability of today's network information technology to
create rich immersive personalized experiences and
to track interactions in real time, and
aggregate and analyze them, and make use of them is incredibly powerful when
applied to gamification.
So, most of the examples that we're going to see are going to be examples
in the world of online activities, whether
online services or technology start-ups the gamification is
applied in a digital, internet-based context, and
so understanding what it is about that environment
that makes gamification successful will provide a
window into understanding aspects of technology as well.
And the final reason that we should study gamification is that it's not that easy.
It's not that obvious.
Once you understand what gamification is, you may think great, so I see
that Nike plus uses challenges and awards and trophies to
get people to do stuff, well I'll just put some challenges
and trophies in my business practice, and people will flock to it.
Turns out, it's not that easy.
Turns out that doing gamification well,
doing gamification ethically, doing gamification in a
way that fits in with your ultimate long term business objectives is not trivial.
It requires thought, it requires recourse through
those various different areas of knowledge that I
talked about, and so this is something that we can't just give you a cookbook.
I can't just say, here's the list of game elements, have at them.
You need to understand them within a broader context
and that's exactly what this course is intended to provide.
