I’ve got a copy of Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken sitting on my shelf. I’ve read about 2/3rds of it, and I keep meaning to go back to it and finish it because I feel like I have to finish it before I talk about how much I hate it.
And then I realized that 2/3rds of the way through it, and having heard her speak on a number of occasions, I don’t need to finish it, because I already know what I don’t like about it. For a little discussion on why, let me point you to Daniel Pink’s book, Drive.
There’s also a really charming video summary of Drive, and its main points, here:
If nothing else, watch the video.
The summary, which resonates deeply with me is:
- Extrinsic rewards, like monetary bonuses, are great at encouraging rote behavior
- They actually hinder performance for tasks that require creativity
- People are motivated by three main things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose
Now in Drive, Pink talks a lot about money. Monetary bonuses for performance. Gamification is largely about achievements, awards, experience, points, and the like. For all practical purposes, they are the same. They’re rewards that aren’t about the thing you’re doing, and the result is that you end up doing the thing you’re supposed to be doing worse.
So why are we talking about extrinsic motivators if we’re trying to change the world?
If you want to provide encouragement for people to optimize rote behavior, then by all means, gamify. Add a scoring system to your assembly line widget creation. Create a series of achievements for memorizing the crap they make you memorize & repeat verbatim in school. But you’re going to have an impossible time gamifying the process of learning, because even if you succeed, the science says that you’ll actually cause them to do worse.
Beyond that, it’s not just the science. I don’t want someone to learn to learn by consuming extrinsic rewards. I don’t want someone to learn to create by being motivated to score points, because as long as the motivation is extrinsic, it isn’t internalized by the learner/creator/whoever. All they’ve internalized is the hunger for more points. They aren’t motivated to understand anything deeper than, “How does this tie into the gamification layer?”
And that’s the thing – that feels terrible. It feels wrong. And it turns out, the science agrees and it is wrong. It’s harder to create when pushed by extrinsic motivators, because your brain will then focus on the specific task that you’re trying to optimize for, and it will be much harder to find the creative solution you actually need.
So what do you get by fixing reality with gamification? You get people who are encouraged to optimize rote tasks. You get a system that invisibly makes you worse at creativity and synthesis of information. And you get a world where your motivation and encouragement aren’t driven by your desire to seize control of your destiny, to become a better person, or to create a cause & believe deeply in it. You get a world where you’re in it for the points.
That’s not fixing a broken reality – it’s destroying everything in it that’s genuinely worthwhile.
I get that Reality is Broken is a nice story. It’s a nice thought that a bunch of nerds can change the world by adding videogamey things to everyday tasks. Who doesn’t love an achievement? But it’s a nice story that doesn’t work. It doesn’t address the real problems, and distracts from the things that are. The research has shown that it makes you worse at almost everything that matters.
Reality may suck sometimes. Gamification may be fun in the short term, but it’s fatally shortsighted. Throw it away. Spend time working on the stuff that matters. Understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. Improve how you do it. Look around you, and find the completely unexpected solutions to problems. Not just the ‘sploitz and the hacks. Believe passionately in something, dive deeply into it – fight through the parts that suck, because that’s usually where you’ll actually learn - and only then will you be the kind of person who can bend reality to their will.
And then ask yourself, can we make a game without gamification?
So to continue what I was saying on twitter…I personally like the character limits because it keeps me from doing what I am about to do. This comment is already TLDR. I was very interested in your post. It is something I’ve thought a lot about. I hope you’ll indulge me pouring out some of those thoughts here.
I think the argument you make is interesting on a philosophical level because there is a certain moral element to it. A very similar debate took place about the practice of rhetoric (in the sense of the power or skill of persuading). I think your argument is especially poignant because it gets to the second, and more fundamental part of the argument. I will go through the two in order.
1) The first is that rhetoric (read gamification) is dangerous–but not necessarily bad–because it allows the rhetor to “make the weaker argument the stronger and to teach others to follow his example.” So, we must rely on the morality of the rhetor to ensure that virtue is being taught. If you a highly skilled but malicious speaker, so the argument goes, bad things happen. I am willing to rely on the common sense and judgment of the people to stem the very worst of the possible consequences of this one—though there have been some jarring examples to keep you alert.
2) The second (and to my mind more compelling) argument is that the use of rhetoric generally leads to a slackness of thought, weakness of mind, and lack of real skill. Somewhere (I can’t recall where), and I think this parallels what you’ve written here, the rhetorician is compared to a pandering minion to the public-at-large, and the public are putty in his hands, unable to act think for themselves. I think this is very similar to the point you are making: if we become used to this sort of pandering (even if it is moral or in our interests) we become duller and less inventive and creative. I think there is some merit to that point.
I do, however, have some contrary thoughts. First, training in rhetoric led to a widespread engagement with ideas. Rhetorical ‘demonstrations’ came to be seen as public entertainment (Edutainment? Gamification?). Engagement with ideas became spectator sport. Children as part of rhetorical training were taught to engage ideas in utramque partem (from both sides)—the most notable example from, perhaps, its best practitioner are the competing funeral orations of Brutus and Mark Antony by Shakespeare. We owe some of the scientific advances of the Post-Socratic era and of the Renaissance to the promulgation of this type of sophistry. After arguing for two sides of an argument for long enough you know the cleverest kid is going to decide that the one everyone thinks is wrong might actually be right—probably just to aggravate the teacher.
I think you make a subtle, compelling, and very insightful point. Gamification can tend to incentivize people to optimize for rote tasks. Gamification does lead us to focus on extrinsic rewards. These things can make us less susceptible to intrinsic (and possibly more fulfilling) rewards, less inventive, and more reliant on others to guide us in changing the world. This is why gamification must be viewed as littérature engage. On the other hand, don’t we already have problems with focusing on extrinsic rewards? I won’t even mention all the rote-task optimization I see every day that is not from engagement but merely out of boredom. If gamification, thoughtfully and carefully applied, is a way to engage more people in making the world a better place to live, then let’s give it a try. Galileo whet his teeth writing dialogues that rhetorically argued from both sides. E pur si muove.
See, that’s what I *dislike* about Twitter. I don’t think you can condense a discussion like that to 140 characters without losing a ton of the content. But I’m also not someone who writes “short”, so hey.
I think I get what you’re saying about rhetoric as a parallel to gamification – that the “skill of rhetoric,” separate from maybe the content of the argument, forces you to focus on the wrong thing. If I’m understanding that correctly, then yeah, that seems like a reasonable parallel. It also seems like a reasonable parallel because in many ways the things that can potentially result from the “system” (rhetoric or gamification) can be good, but it relies on a complete understanding of the subject. The rhetors have to understand the content of the thing they’re arguing, then they apply the “mechanics” of rhetoric to drive the point home. Same thing here. In the hands of a skilled practitioner, I’m sure gamification can be used to enhance a point. To clear the “activation energy” required to learn something new, for instance – because a lot of learning *does* require some grind, and if that helps get through the grind, great.
On the other hand, in the hands of evil, or thoughtless people, it’s a tool that can go horrendously wrong. Look at politics these days – and I’m not even saying which side you have to look at. It’s all rhetoric, and no content. I’d argue that people are so engaged in the rhetoric that they don’t even *care* about content anymore, except for a very, very small percentage of people who are actually engaged. To me, that’s like the downside of gamification – everyone’s cranking away on things, but no one knows anything, because they’re not engaged with the content, they’re engaged with the mechanics.
In the end, honestly, I can definitely see arguments from both sides. I love achievements. I love racking up points. Clearly. We make games that are chock full of all manner of gamification, and I think that we try to use it in the service of “good” – you are rewarded, for instance, for cooperating in Fleck, instead of antagonizing other players. We try to use the mechanics to drive positive behavior, and I think that in the right hands, in the right conditions, it can be a powerful tool. But there are huge numbers of people advocating for incredibly widespread “gamification” of everything, and the problem, again, is that it’s not just that in some cases it doesn’t work – it’s not that it’s a neutral effect at worst.
It’s that by focusing on extrinsic rewards, you can actually make performance *worse*. And worse still, it’s subtle. You aren’t likely to know it’s happening – but because you’re focused on the reward, you literally can’t see the odd solutions as fast as you would otherwise. I’d actually argue with grades & scores & the current reward structure, education *already* shows this is what’s happening.
I went through high school with a higher-than 4.0 average. What did I learn from that? I learned that if you take the right classes, you can get good grades. If you play it safe, you can get unreasonably high scores. Then in college, that got *smashed to pieces* and my GPA, at least for the first year or two, was terrible, because I hadn’t *learned* – I’d learned to manipulate the system. It wasn’t long after that that I learned *how to learn* – often from trying something new, failing at it, then changing things until I was doing the best I could.
I don’t have a good way to wrap this up, really. The point isn’t so much “all gamification is bad”. It’s that it has some unobvious dramatically negative effects. And before everyone jumps on the GAMIFY EVERYTHING! bandwagon, I hope they’ll take a moment to understand why it’s potentially much less effective and *damaging* than it seems.
Thanks for the post. I really enjoyed the video so thank you for the link. Gamification spoken about so widely is a lot about badgification or pointsification and these are the bandits on the wanted posters in the wildwest of what games can do to influence the world. You’ll find good posts from Margaret Robertson and others on this.
However, this doesn’t mean that game design, which is a subset of user experience design can’t make a positive impact. To me, the real “gamification” is the restructuring of a user’s experience to make the possibility of discovery, engagement and progress more easily realised. A trend in web right now is the concept of “the story” – or how narrative is applied to provide a more compelling (and in fact a more human) structure to things. Gamification, in many ways is about applying the ability to create a narrative around behaviour – to give it a structure. A simple example about this is really just to allow someone to collect a history of things they have done, or plan a list of things to do. To allow them to set goals and to progress against them. The thing they are hoping to achieve must be intrinsically motivating in and of itself (e.g. running a marathon), the “gamification” of that is merely designing an experience of running a marathon that tells a story from the moment it was decided to the moment it was finished. The gamification of this is the subtle use of technology to allow people to track and improve against themselves and to give them more tools to tell great stories of “that time they ran the marathon”.
If you offered someone a badge every time they went running, then it would not motivate them. If you tell them how much progress they have made against their own goals and provide feedback and support on how to get to the next one then you will see an improvement. Give them ways to share and reflect (nostalgia/timelines/pictures/stats) with friends and family it’ll mean more too. (I mean, running for charity is a form of gamification – a totaliser gives incentive and a purpose and gives intrinsic motivation – “it’s for a good cause and I want to be a good person” using an extrinsic structure – “give money for me to do this”).
At it’s heart true gamification is just really good user design, but as with anything, if what you’re designing a nice experience for is hollow or meaningless then it’s always going to taste bad. There won’t be any examples of brilliant gamification because if it’s brilliant you’ll never even notice.
Excellent comment – however, the things you’re talking about gamifying are all essentially rote tasks. Run farther. The charity example, for instance, is the kind of thing that actually comes up in Drive, but the difference comes in *who gets paid*. Because you’re raising money for charity, your friends and family aren’t giving *you* money to run. You’re still intrinsically motivated to do it. But if they paid you per mile, and it went into your pocket, evidence suggests that the extrinsic motivator begins to replace the intrinsic desire to run, and you’ll end up running *less*, because in the absence of that extrinsic motivation (or even if it stays at the same level). That’s a subtle thing, but it happens, and it’s one way that types of gamification can even destroy rote tasks.
I believe that extraordinary user design is absolutely helpful in almost everything – being able to give a user immediately noticeable, and visceral feedback is incredibly important, and it is one of the things that distinguishes (good) games. But again, it comes from what you apply it to – you have to be careful about how you encourage someone to participate, what behaviors you motivate, and how.
Thanks!
Thanks for the reply. I agree with your paragraph on the running, that’s exactly what I was driving at. Dan Ariely’s excellent book “Predicatably Irrational” has some really interesting research on motivators and what people will do with social and economic norms and how they change behaviours. My favourite is the “honour code” and what motivates people to cheat.
Regarding cognitive things, you can look at how the gamification (and what I mean by that is making a game about something) of rock stardom (Guitar Hero) emphasises the experience so anyone can feel good (feedback city!) and provides a deeper challenge of dexterity for those invested in challenge. It doesn’t teach you to learn the guitar. It might *inspire* you to learn the guitar, but that’s not what the game is about. Rock Smith, the attempt to make a game out of learning the guitar? Hasn’t really been received that well. In a lot of ways I see games as being a place to inspire learning (the full exploration of the limits of the game and the betterment of oneself) and as a way to inspire further learning. Most of what I remember about the Romans is because Caesar II made history class more interesting – I hoped it would make me better at the game. Great lenses to place on the design of things and experiences. Fun to talk, write and think about.
There were also good chats about this on Twitter today from @Sorrell and @BetterTheMask and @Rado_g.
Look forward to more in future.
Oh, I totally agree that games can be incredibly inspiring. I *love* Rock Band, and it made me realize that I like to sing, even though I’m relatively terrible at it. Then after playing it for a few months, I realized I had actually become a (slightly) better singer.
And with learning to play the guitar/drums/sing, the thing that Rock Band does incredibly well is that it gives you tons of feedback that you can easily understand, even if you can’t understand the subtleties of how to play the guitar/drums/sing. It can also give you enough points & progress indicators (and actual ability to make progress through a song) that you can then be encouraged to work through the *work* of learning the repetitive tasks of replicating an existing song.
Again, I don’t mean to be repetitive if the point is already clear – where this becomes a *problem* isn’t so much in the process of using a medium to inspire or work through rote tasks. Heck, the inspiration is an indication that you’ve translated some action into an intrinsic reward – that’s the whole nature of inspiration. And then you’re doing gamifying the drudgery that’s needed to make progress.
The problem isn’t gamifying everything – it’s the idea that you can gamify everything. Which probably reads totally wrong because the emphasis on which syllables are a lot clearer in my head than when written.
You can gamify the mechanical process of reproduction (playing a cover). Where gamification is a problem is in, for instance, trying to gamify the writing of a song. The “optimists” who talk about the broad powers of gamification often say you can gamify the creation of *new solutions* to things, and this is where scientific research butts up against the optimism. Gamification/extrinsic rewards focus a person, where creation of something new requires lateral, broad thinking and at times, genuine, deep expertise in understanding.
That’s where the issue is – it’s not in the application of gamification *at all*, it’s that the pitfalls are not necessarily expected or obvious, and in certain applications, it has a substantially detrimental effect.
Great discussion. The only thing I have to say is in response to these sentences: “You can gamify the mechanical process of reproduction (playing a cover). Where gamification is a problem is in, for instance, trying to gamify the writing of a song.”
Yet NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is exactly that for writing novels. The ultimate intrinsic motivator is people’s desire to write, create, and to be a part of a larger community. The gamification of writing comes in the form of “word count sprints”, amazingly complex or beautifully simple charts that track your daily progress, the right to post a “badge” of winning on your site, having a numeric (and not qualitative) end goal to determine winner status, and LuLu letting winners print their books for free.
Yet the result is AMAZING amounts of free-flowing creativity due to this artificial pressure to produce as fast as humanly possible.
This is obviously not an argument against your stance that not everything should be gamified, or that not everything can be gamified without detriment. It just addressed corralling of creative fields as being “above” gamification.
I think the thing that NaNoWriMo does really well is that it gamifies the “work”, not the inspiration. But maybe at this point, it’s just semantics?
ie: if say, the idea was “Participate in NaNoWriMo for 12 points”, it’d be different. You participate in NaNoWriMo because you have the intrinsic desire to do so, then the points & feedback are there to help you get through the worst bits. You’re not providing extrinsic motivators to *solve problems*, you’re providing the extrinsic motivator to simply spend time on it.
In any case, it is certainly one of the best *uses* of gamifying a creative task I’ve ever seen, and a totally *appropriate* use of it.
Huh. I really should have titled this post “Reality Is Broken Is Broken”. Drat!
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