Call for Participation

Gamification 2013: Gameful Design, Research, and Applications is a new international and interdisciplinary conference with a focus on researchers and professionals in gamification. Gamification uses game design to make a system that primarily supports non-game tasks more fun, engaging, and motivating. We invite a wide variety of research and applications to be submitted for presentation and showcasing at the conference.

The goal of the conference is to demonstrate current high quality research in gamification and encourage discussion of this research as a foundation of the future of gamification. To this end, the conference will feature streams that blend academic research and experimental applications with industry and non-profit examples, results and procedures.

We seek to understand the research necessary for increasingly effective implementation of gamification in business, health, education, and entertainment. We welcome presentations of research projects, gamification successes and failures, unanswered questions about gamification, gamification metrics and processes, methods of gamification commercialization, and more.

IMPORTANT DATES

May 6 – Submission system opens
June 6 – Registration opens
June 21 July 1, 11:59pm (EDT, UTC-4) – (Extended) Deadline for academic full papers (Select “Submit to Gamification 2013 Academic Full Paper Submissions” in PCS)
August 8, 11:59pm (EDT, UTC-4) (Extended) Deadline for posters, demos, short papers, Gamification Student Design Competition (Select “Submit to Gamification 2013 Short Paper, Poster, Demo, or Student Design Competition Submissions” in PCS)
August 8, 11:59pm (EDT, UTC-4) (Extended) Deadline for industry/non-academic presentations (Select “Submit to Gamification 2013 Industry and Non-Academic Submissions” in PCS)
August 1 – Accept/Reject decision of the committee
August 1 – Poster, Demo Submission Deadline
August 30 – Camera-ready submission
October 2-4 – Gamification 2013 Conference in Stratford, ON
Fall 2013 – Submissions of revised and extended full papers to Computers in Human Behaviour Special Issue on Gamification
Spring/Summer 2014 – Publication of Computers in Human Behaviour Special Issue on Gamification

SUBMISSIONS

Gamification 2013 is open for research paper submissions and industry submissions. Please note that we only allow professionals affiliated with a company to submit to the industry track. Researchers should submit to the research track. We are looking for gamification researchers and professionals from but not limited to the following backgrounds:

• Game Design
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Game Studies
• Education
• User Experience and Interaction Design
• Communication Science
• Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Paper Submission Types

We encourage the following research paper submission types:

Full Research Papers (8 pages in ACM SIGCHI format, 20 minute presentation)

Full Research papers published at Gamification 2013 are archival publications (and will be available in the conference proceedings in the ACM DL). Full research papers should describe your original research contributions. Papers must report new research results that represent a contribution to gamification research. They must provide sufficient details and support for the presented results and conclusions. They must cite relevant published research or experience, highlight novel aspects of the submission, and identify the most significant contributions to the gamification community. We evaluate papers based on originality, significance, quality of research, quality of writing, and contribution to conference program diversity. They are a significant research contribution including the areas involved in gamification. All submissions should be formatted according to the ACM SIGCHI word template. The papers must not be longer than 8 pages (including your references). Your papers will be subject to blind peer reviewing and all identifying information about authors needs to be removed from the submitted manuscripts. Citations to your own work must not be anonymous, but should be described in a way that does not reveal you as the author of the cited work. Full research papers must be submitted using the Precision Conference system for Gamification 2013. You may submit a video figure to support your paper.

Works-in-Progress Short Papers (4 pages in ACM SIGCHI format, 10 min short paper talk) or Posters (2 pages in ACM SIGCHI format, poster presentation at the conference)

Posters and Short Papers provide a unique opportunity for breaking results and late in-progress work to be presented to the gamification community. Submissions should be in the form of a 4-page ACM SIGCHI paper. Accepted submissions will be presented as a poster at the conference. Short papers will be peer-reviewed and archived in the proceedings. Poster papers will be juried and archived separately.

Gamification Student Design Competition (2 pages describing the gamified content or service in ACM SIGCHI format)

The Gamification Student Design Competition will provide a unique opportunity for students to showcase their gamification systems and designs. Students will need to submit a link to a short video trailer and explanation of the gamified system on YouTube or Vimeo. A 2-page description of the system and approach in ACM SIGCHI format is also necessary as well as proof of student status. A gamification jury panel will judge the submissions and invite the best submissions for presentation at the conference, where a panel of experts will make the final decision on which gamified system wins the competition.

Demos (2 pages in ACM SIGCHI format, working demo at the conference)

The interactive gamification demo event will showcase the latest gamification tools, techniques, and systems created by academic or industrial research groups. You will be provided with space and time at the conference to showcase your demos to the conference audience.

Industry and Non-Academic Submission Types

If you are a presenter from a company or other non-academic organization, you must submit your full deck of slides and all other presentation materials (videos, etc.). Unlike research papers, these will not be blindly reviewed, so the materials may include, for example, all applicable names, brands, but we strongly discourage evangelistic presentations. A central goal of the conference is to engage academics and non-academics in open discussion of gamification practices and examples, and especially to map current and future practices to current and future research, and to this end we strongly encourage the presentation of examples for the purpose of precisely such discussion. We also actively seek presentations on examples and methods of gamification commercialization.

We encourage the following industry submission types:

Panel (40 minutes)
Panels encourage debate among panelist with often different viewpoints on a particular topic. A panel session combines these viewpoints with the help of a moderator. We prefer you submitting an overview of the topic you would like to touch on and the nomination of a moderator. The panel should not feature more than 5 people on it (including the moderator). All panelists and the moderator must be confirmed before your submission. There is a very limited number of panel slots.

Conference Presentation (20 minutes)
This is a standard industry conference presentation preferably with one speaker only. We would like to see case studies of gamification and best practices from industry here.

Roundtable (40 minutes)
Roundtables are small discussion groups facilitated by several moderators. These are limited to 30-40 attendees in a room. Moderators will need to have a list of topics prepared and help propel the discussion in the group forward. Roundtables are meant to inspire and encourage the exchange of ideas. Audience participation is key, so discussing topics that are likely to evoke different viewpoints is going to be best for this format.

Demos
Posters are cutting edge overviews of white papers and recent exciting industry and research work. Poster presenters will need to be at the conference and present the content of their posters at a designated timeslot.

Workshops (variable)
Please contact us individually if you would like to run an industry workshop for the conference.

Review Process: Full Research Papers

We selected a program committee of experts in human-computer interaction and game research to lead the scientific review process. Once your paper is submitted as a blind manuscript in the correct ACM SIGCHI format, our program committee will assign at least 3 peer reviewers to each submission and ensure to receive high quality reviews back from them. The PC members will then weigh in with their own opinion about the paper and summarize the individual reviews, essentially meta-reviewing the paper and putting forward a suggestion of accept or reject to the conference chairs. The conference chairs will then deliberate in close communication with the committee members about the acceptance of papers. Papers eventually get a recommendation on including certain changes before camera-ready submission and acceptance might be tentative until those changes are included. Once accepted, paper authors are required to present their paper at the conference.

Review process: Industry and Non-Profit Submissions

A team of six representatives from non-academic organizations will review all submissions from companies and non-profits. While the showcasing of successful implementations of gamification is certainly a goal, the committee will also look specifically for presentations that raise questions about gamification, that encourage discussion and critique, or that address research needs.

Surprisingly, the results showed that merely enabling these features did not have any significant effect on use. However, those users who actively followed up on the accumulation of their own badges posted and accepted more trades as well as commented more. Comparing badges was also positively associated with making more trade proposals. The paper discusses in more length possible reasons for these results, such as context of use, nature of the gamified service, intentions of the users and the sporadic nature of use of such services.

The research is published in the journal Electronic Commerce Research and Applications. Here.

and a pre-print of the paper here.

Citation:
Hamari, J. (2013). Transforming Homo Economicus into Homo Ludens: A Field Experiment on Gamification in a Utilitarian Peer-To-Peer Trading Service. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 12. doi: 10.1016/j.elerap.2013.01.004.

Author:
Juho Hamari
Researcher @ Game Research Lab – University of Tampere
http://juhohamari.com
@VirtualEconomy

Abstract:

During recent years, the addition of game mechanics to non-game services has gained a relatively large amount of attention. Popular discussion connects ‘gamification’ to successful marketing and increased profitability through higher customer engagement, however there is a dearth of empirical studies that confirm such expectations. This paper reports the results of a field experiment, gamifying a utilitarian peer-to-peer trading service by implementing the game mechanic of ‘badges’ that users could earn from a variety of tasks. The users (N=3234) were randomly assigned to treatment groups and subjected to different versions of the badge system (a 2×2 design). Results show that the mere implementation of gamification mechanics does not automatically lead to significant increases in use activity in the studied utilitarian service, however those users who actively monitored their own badges and those of others in the study showed an increased user activity.

CHI 2013 Workshop Designing Gamification: Creating Gameful and Playful Experiences

Call for Participation

In recent years, gamification – the use of game design elements in non-game contexts – has seen rapid adoption in domains such as education, work, self-management, health and well-being, sustainability, or civic participation. In parallel, a growing body of research has studied its uses and effects, as well as the evaluation of game user experience in general. Yet little is known about the effective designing of gameful systems. This one-day workshop, co-located with CHI 2013 in Paris, France, therefore convenes HCI, games, and design researchers as well as industry practitioners to take stock of current design practices and approaches to gameful systems, chart challenges, issues, and best practices, and identify key opportunities and questions for future research. You will also get to pop balloons.

Topics of Special Interest

• Postmortems, lessons learned, recurrent challenges and issues encountered in the design of gameful systems
• Design models, principles, methods, tools, and evaluation methods adapted from interaction and game design
• General and domain-specific constraints, opportunities, facilitating and success-critical conditions of gamification

Submission Information

We invite interested participants to submit a 3-4 page position paper in the CHI extended abstract format (word template, LaTeX template) to Sebastian Deterding at chi2013@gamification-research.org. Researchers and practitioners with first-hand experience in designing a gameful system may alternatively submit a slide deck outlining their experience. For further information, see the workshop site gamification-research.org/chi2013. Papers and slide decks will undergo a peer-jury process and 15-20 will be selected, with preference to submissions based on actual experience in designing a gameful system. Submission deadline is January 11, 2013. At least one author of each accepted paper needs to register for the workshop and for one or more days of the conference.

Important Dates

• January 11, 2013: Submission Deadline
• February 8, 2013: Notification of Acceptance
• April 28, 2013: Workshop

I’m really, really excited (and fortunate) to be one of the invited white paper authors. Below you will find the text of my paper, which is currently open for public commentary on the site of the conversation – so share your thoughts!

In his seminal book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes: “Mowing the lawn or waiting in a dentist’s office can become enjoyable provided one restructures the activity by providing goals, rules, and the other elements of enjoyment” found in games. This idea – that gameplay holds valuable principles for making even the most mundane activity more engaging – has a long history in human-computer interaction and education, regularly re-emerging under names like funology, ludic design, playful interaction, serious games, or game-based learning. Its most recent iteration has come to be known as “gamification:” using game design elements in non-game contexts.

One may rightfully question whether “gamification” is anything more than a marketing ruse to sell the next digital snake oil. The current field is certainly littered with shallow interpretations and implementations – essentially incentive and customer loyalty programs repackaged with a superficial “gamy” veneer as software services that disregard decades of research on the limited effectiveness and unintended consequences of such systems. (This is one reason why educators have reacted with such mixed feelings to the current Digital Media and Learning Competition, “Badges for Lifelong Learning.”)

However, cases like the Quest to Learn schools, the Just Press Play project, or the health application Health Month show that “gamification” can also be approached thoughtfully. More importantly, even if “gamification” (or gameful design, to use a term I prefer) will ultimately prove to be a fad, I do believe that it helps to move our current thinking on games for impact forward in two crucial ways – regarding how gameplay facilitates learning and engagement, and regarding the scope of what game-based interventions could and should encompass.

Back to Play

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word “video game”? Likely, it will be a box: Some square screen, some interface tied to a piece of hardware running a piece of software. That is, you are thinking of a game as a designed artifact. There is nothing to say against that; it is a lasting achievement of game research to have demonstrated in detail how the design of games makes and breaks their experience and potential effects, and we are far from understanding these matters fully.

Still, I would argue that this box is what currently most limits our thinking, because it disregards what happens outside of it: the specific way in which people come to frame, experience, and interact with games. Simply put, it ignores that people are usually playing them. For although games certainly uniquely cater to being played, there is no necessary connection of the two. We can do very many things with games – we can build, test, debug, review, analyze and play them, and we can work in them, as gold farming demonstrates. Likewise, there are many things we can play with – our hands, sticks and stones, passing cars on a long highway drive, games, even work assignments.

Is this a trivial point? Well, a small but growing movement in game studies – driven by the likes of Miguel Sicart, T.L. Taylor, Mark Chen, Aaron Chia-Yuan Hung and others – urges us to extend our attention to the many ways games are being played, and to the way both, games and play, interact to create the unique affordances of fun, motivation, learning that we are hoping to make use of.

To be sure, the games and learning community has long been at the forefront of pushing game research “from content to context“, towards the broader “ecology of games“: how participation in the cultures, communities and affinity spaces surrounding games is not only part and parcel of gaming, but also a crucial site of learning. Yet arguably, it has not paid as much attention to the psychology and sociology of what constitutes “playing” as a mode of engagement.

The Troubles of Instrumentalizing Games

For if we start to look more closely into this matter, we immediately notice how the instrumentalization of games for a serious purpose may interfere directly with one essential aspect of play: its voluntariness. Scholars from Johan Huizinga on have stressed voluntariness as a defining feature of play. And this feature is mainly found in the social interactions and interpretations that envelop a game: to what extent others force an individual to do something, and to what extent the individual, in light of such actions of others, comes to define said activity as self-determined or not.

Now a rich literature in psychology has demonstrated that voluntariness – autonomy – is a core part of intrinsic motivation, and that attaching rewards or punishments to an activity may thwart the experience of autonomy, making the activity paradoxically less motivating. Some studies suggest that good video games are engaging precisely because (among other things) they support strong experiences of autonomy: In them, we can choose who to be, what goals to pursue, and how to pursue them. But by the same logic, games should also be engaging because they are played, that is, because they are engaged with voluntarily. In contrast, if a game becomes mandatory and consequential, for instance by being made part of graded homework, it might easily stop being experienced as voluntary, and thus, play. “Gamified“ applications are almost natural experiments in this regard, as they intentionally take game elements into non-playful contexts.

From Games to Playful Contexts

Could it be, then, that the mixed successes of serious games in the past is at least partially also due to the fact that learners often encountered them in such non-playful contexts? Once we grant this possibility (and there is some, though anecdotal, evidence pointing in this direction), we grant that how people encounter games, how they are socially placed and framed, might be as consequential to their impact as how these games are designed.

Therefore, if we want to fully understand and utilize the unique affordances of game play, we need to pay closer attention to play, and how to design the social context of games to support playful engagement. What are the features of play that are conducive to learning and motivation? How do good moderators, teachers, and game masters facilitate a playful atmosphere? Voluntariness and lack of consequence are certainly crucial aspects, but there are many others pointed at in various literatures, like the lack of outer imminent threats, a shared focus and attitude within the co-present group, mutual trust, or lived ethics of fair play and benign mischief, to name a few. Many of them connect to what we already know about the negative impact of stress and fear on learning, but our understanding of these matters is arguably at the beginning.

Beyond Transfer

The second “thinking box” that gameful design pushes us out of is our notion of the object and scope of game-based interventions. The predominant approach in serious games has been to deploy games as interventions within an educational institution or public policy program to convey attitudes, knowledge and skills for later situations. This leads to the familiar question of transfer: How do we ensure that what is learned actually gets applied afterwards? For instance, will a student playing an AIDS prevention game make use of what he experienced in it when he is out for the night? Game-based learning usually tackles this issue by emphasizing situated, participatory, interest-driven learning that involves learners’ interests and life and resembles the context of application as much as possible.

In contrast to this stands a recent line of reasoning in policy and design circles heavily informed by behavioral economics that goes under names like persuasive technology, choice architecture, or design with intent. It argues that traditional measures in health communication, civic engagement, and consumer education have seen only limited success not so much because people don’t learn, or learning doesn’t transfer, but because emotion, habit, cognitive biases and material environments strongly shape and bound our conscious action and decision-making. In other words, we don’t necessarily do better just because we know better. Instead of educating people in the hope that they will later consciously act on what they learned, proponents of persuasive technology and the like argue that we should try to affect decisions and actions directly when and where they are happening, operating on the level of emotions, habits, cognitive biases, and material environments.

From Games to Gameful Contexts

This is exactly what gameful design (or “gamification”) attempts: It implements features of games that are presumably conducive to desired action right where that action occurs. Instead of building a simulation game about personal budgeting to improve financial literacy, say, one creates a personal financial management tool informed by good game design to make it fun and self-explanatory (see Bobber for one example). Thus, gameful design broadens the scope of games for impact from designing games as interventions deployed within certain contexts to designing contexts as interventions, informed by game design.

Again, there are legitimate doubts whether this strategy is ultimately effective and sustainable on its own: Shouldn’t we empower people to reflect on and self-regulate their own conduct, rather than making them ever more dependent on technological environments ‘nudging’ them? There is evidence in the psychological literature that the abundant use of outer measures of control forestalls the development of people’s ability to autonomously self-regulate, for instance.

On the other hand, embodiment and distributed cognition have taught us that thinking, learning and acting always already involve tools – done well, gameful design ‘just’ improves the tools at our disposal (which puts it in neighborhood with transformational objects, ReflectOns, or the Quantified Self movement). As Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson suggest, for us humans to get anything done at all, we always did and always will rely on the “extended will” provided by social and material devices like to-do lists and public commitments. Ideally, good design helps people to develop the skills to self-regulate and enroll the tools their environment provides in the course.

Secondly, even within a narrower focus of facilitating learning, gameful design still opens our eyes to the context of learning as part of our intervention: Are the tools and environments of learning optimally designed – for learning, for motivation, for self-regulation? Why further a particular learning goal with a well-designed game, for instance, only to curb its effectiveness by placing it in a larger structural context of grading, class organization, etc. whose design goes against all the principles of learning and motivation said game embodies?

This broadened approach is currently exemplified by teachers from primary to graduate education who are organizing their classrooms according to principles of game design, following in the footsteps of Lee Sheldon’s “Multiplayer Classroom.” Admittedly, these are often crude beginnings, full of trial and error and slippery slopes into shallow ends. But they also point towards the high mark of what games and game design for impact could become: A marriage of the sciences of learning, motivation, and action with the practice of game design to restructure not just interventions, but tools, environments and institutions in a playful and gameful manner so as to optimally enable the people that live with and in them.

Conclusion

To summarize, I believe that to advance games for learning and change, we need to expand the scope of our attention and ambition beyond deploying games within contexts towards designing the social and material contexts of learning and behavior themselves as our interventions, or at least as a necessary part of them. This strikes me as the logical next step in the exploration and utilization of the ecology of games. Doing so immediately raises important academic and practical questions:

• What characterizes play as a mode of engagement? How does it support motivation, learning and behavior change in and beyond game-based interventions? How to design game-based interventions and their social contexts to optimally afford playfulness?
• How might we redesign tools, institutions and environments themselves in a playful and gameful manner to directly support learning, engagement and desired behavior changes?
• What are the limitations, unintended consequences and side effects of these approaches, and how to best tackle them? Are gaming tropes universally appealing and accessible to all audiences?
• Finally, how can we best equip educators and change agents to transform the tools and environments they are operating with into playful and gameful ones?

Current proponents of “gamification” have sparked the imagination of many about the potential of games, but turned away an equal amount with troublesome ethics and a disregard for the complexities of design and human motivation. Uniting the momentum of the former with the thoroughness and care of the latter is the big opportunity I see for games for impact today.

But that would also be a non-story, of course.

The report is a breakout from the 2012 edition of the bi-annual “Imagining the Internet” survey conducted by Pew Internet and Elon University. The survey invited roughly a thousand hand-selected and self-recruited Internet experts to assess eight “tension pairs” – two diverging scenarios on the state of the Internet in 2020 with regard to one topic –, select the one they more agreed with, and explain their choices in writing.

The result of the “gamification” tension pair: 42% chose “By 2020, gamification … will not be implemented in most everyday digital activities for most people”, 53% chose “there will have been significant advances in the adoption and use of gamification”, and 5% did not responded. The rest of the report highlights excerpts from the written responses, covering various topics and positions.

The full tension pair and instructions for respondents to the survey.

I was playing in my head how pundits and press might spin this non-story into a story (“Majority of experts agree on bright future for gamification, new study finds”), but my trusty google alert showed me that the media were already quicker: “Gamification taking over our lives, study finds”, “According to a new study, gaming is going to be creeping into our lives in a big way in the years to come,” etc. Sigh.

Bickering aside, the Pew report is indeed an interesting and rich data point. If there is any overall “message” to take from it, I’d say it’s the very undecidedness of its result and the diversity and tentative quality of the statements it collects. Put differently, “the jury is still out.”

Apart from that, the main value I found in reading through the highlighted statements in the report (and the full statements collected here and here) is getting an insight into the discourses, frames and conceptual models that Internet users and thinkers are using to make sense of “gamification.” Along those lines, some observations that stood out for me were:

Little gaming expertise

As an artifact of the study design, which attempts to cover broad general Internet trends, the collected expert voices come by-and-large from Internet theory, sociology, and anthropology – danah boyd, Clay Shirky, Amber Case, Paul Jones, Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger, Stowe Boyd, Steve Jones, to name but a few. All names beyond reproach, for sure, but also all people with little explicit expertise in game studies, game design, or the gaming industry. This is not a bad thing per se – it’s a refreshing outside view –, but it should be kept in mind when reading the statements.

Confused terms

Partially as a consequence of such lacking domain expertise, the statements showcase a frequent confusion of gamification, serious games, games in general, and even virtual worlds. Although the study took care to define its understanding of gamification – “the use of game mechanics, feedback loops, and rewards to spur interaction and boost engagement, loyalty, fun and/or learning” – people’s understandings were all over the board, as the report itself notes:

“Survey respondents framed their conception of “gamification” in highly varied ways, ranging—in game-name terms—from massively multiplayer online games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic to World of Warcraft (a “virtual world”) to Farmville (social network-based game) to Angry Birds (popular smartphone app) to Foldit, a game that researchers used to crowdsource a scientific solution to an AIDS question, to training simulations, to the “points” (sometimes only in terms of social currency) one gathers for action in social interactions online, including having the most Twitter or Facebook connections or mentions.”

This is crucial to frame the survey result: When people were speaking for or against a presumed future pervasiveness of gamification, they were more often than not actually thinking of (serious) gaming in general. It is also misfortunate in that it implicitly supports the efforts of some gamification pundits to establish the term “gamification” as a catch-all for anything remotely game-related.

Playbour and the political economy of gamification

I really, really like the fact that PJ Rey and others framed gamification in terms of the more general critical analysis of the political economy of the Internet, especially “free labor” (Terranova), “playbour” (Kücklich), and “weisure” (Conley), and that the authors of the report highlighted this as one main observation. In her review of Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken, Heather Chaplin has made some moves in this direction, as did Trebor Scholz in another context, but we do need more solid criticism of gamification and the web in general in their often exploitive economic relations covered up by an ideology of “fun,” “play” and “self-expression.”

My favorite quote in this regard comes from Brian Harvey:

“This (gamification, SD) is a matter for intervention, not prediction. It should be illegal, with serious penalties (life in prison, for example), to use information ostensibly gathered for one purpose for something else without an explicit, competent, well-informed opt-in by the person who legitimately owns the information—not third parties, such as pharmacies or search engines or ISPs. Someone who puts up a game-like thing in order to coax people into providing free labor, or in order to collect information for any commercial purpose, is committing a profound violation of human rights.”

“Generation G” and the “Grandma loves romance novels” fallacy

Two assumptions running through many statements are “games = young people” and “young people like games = young people like and demand gamification”. To quote: “‘We have an ever-increasing number of individuals (mostly younger than 35 years old) who have grown up with videogames and have been conditioned to pursue online rewards,’ said Marcia Richards Suelzer, senior writer and analyst at Wolters Kluwer, echoing the sentiments of many survey participants.”

Demographics aside – according to the most recent figures of the Entertainment Software Association, the average age of the US gaming population is 37 years –, this reiterates the problematic “Generation G” or “gamer generation” trope. The idea is that growing up with video games was a formative experience for a whole generation of people that powerfully shapes their preferences and expectations towards workplaces and life in general. To my knowledge, this trope was given birth to by authors John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their 2004 Harvard Business Press book Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Changing the Workplace. They drew their conclusions from one survey among US business professionals with often poorly constructed, leading questions, do not report on the statistical (un)significance of their results, consistently jump from correlation to causation, and consistently over-interpret results.

There is no doubt that playing video games has been and continues to be a crucial part of the life experience of millions of people across the globe. It is very likely that this will have some effect on them individually as well as culture as a whole. But to the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet conducted a solid empirical study to explore what these effects might be. So to me, the “gamer generation” sits right next to “digital natives” in a spectrum between unexplored myth and gross overgeneralization.

Furthermore, the notion that “because young people like games, they will like and demand XYZ to be gamified” showcases what I like to call the “Grandma loves romance novels” fallacy – a fallacy that also appears from time to time in the discourse on serious games: “Kids like games but don’t like school books. So let’s replace math books with maths games, and kids will love maths.” The silliness of this non-sequitur becomes fully apparent when we replace kids and games with grandmothers and romance novels: “Grandmothers love romance novels but don’t like school books. So let’s replace maths books with romance novels involving maths, and grandmothers with love maths.” The medium in and of itself does not mean that whatever is conveyed in that medium automagically gains relevance, meaning, and value to a person preferring that medium.

This silliness is even more pronounced when we move from “games” to “gamification”: “Grandmothers will like and demand romantic novelization. Soon, no grandmother is going to visit a dentist who doesn’t dress up like Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy and deliver his diagnosis in florid Jane Austen-style.” Just because you enjoy one thing in one context doesn’t mean you would want superficial properties of that thing indiscriminately slathered onto every other part of your existence.

Competition

Several quotes seem to indicate that games (and/or gamification) are always competitive: “The word ‘gamification’ has emerged in recent years as a way to describe interactive online design that plays on people’s competitive instincts”, “It is not wise to make everything into a competition”, “Gamification has little use in cooperation”, etc.

Now it is true that most standard definitions of games include an element of conflict or strife. To quote but two definitions currently commonly referred to in game studies: “A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.” (Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 2003, p. 96). “A game is a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.” (Jesper Juul, The Game, the Player, the World, 2003)

But both in Salen’s and Zimmermann’s “artifical conflict” and Juul’s “effort,” nothing demands that they derive form the competing force of another player. The wealth of single player games and cooperative games (from Pandemic to FarmVille) betrays the assumption that games are always necessarily competitive. This is not to deny that direct or indirect competition or comparison fuel a large chunk of gameplay. I only wish to emphasize, counter to the assertion made by Stowe Boyd in the report, that there is a big role for game design to facilitate collaborative and cooperative processes.

Neuromania

Both respondents and the report allude to the neurosciences as an empirical basis for the effectiveness of gamification. To quote the second paragraph of the report:

“While some people dismiss gamification as a fad, neuroscientists are discovering more and more about the ways in which humans react to such interactive design elements. They say such elements can cause feel-good chemical reactions, alter human responses to stimuli—increasing reaction times, for instance—and in certain situations can improve learning, participation, and motivation.”

Despite a critical evaluation of this trend, sociologist Simon Gottschalk echoes the same framing in his statement: “The findings yielded by the emerging field of neuroscience provide powerful tools to understand and hence manipulate the human brain … In light of advances in neuromarketing, there is no reason to believe that the most powerful economic entities are not going to use that knowledge (rewards, feedback loops) to spur interaction, boost loyalty (especially brand loyalty), and provide neural pleasures when consumers and customers do what they’re told.”

While it is to be forgiven that an online survey response doesn’t reference sources, I find it problematic that the authors of the report themselves allude to “neuroscientists” without providing sources to back up their portrait. It is problematic because they are implicitly reinforcing a rhetorical maneuver made not only by certain gamification pundits: appealing to neuroscientific studies as a presumed new highest authority when it comes to ‘the truth’ regarding the human condition. Beyond that, to my knowledge – and please, dear reader, correct me in the comments if I’m wrong –, there have been no neuroscientific studies conducted yet on the effectiveness of gamified applications.

Play versus work

The relation of play and work is a big issue that continues to befuddle the academic study of play and games, because it connects directly to an even more fundamental question, namely, in what way games and play are “separate” from the rest of everyday life. (Some of the best recent analysis on this I found in Bonnie Nardi’s excellent anthropology of World of Warcraft.) Terms like “playbour” and “weisure” quoted above already indicate how in society at large and digital (game) culture in specific, the presumed boundary/opposition of play and leisure on the one hand and work on the other have become more and more blurred. Modding, e-sports, or goldfarming are further cases in point for play activities that have become professionalized, instrumental, even waged activity.

In light of this, it is more than anything interesting to see that outside game studies, folk theoretical notions of a play/work dichotomy still prevail, and how these notions look like. As a highlighted quote states: “Playing beats working. So, if the enjoyment and challenge of playing can be embedded in learning, work, and commerce then gamification will take off.”

I think we are still at the very beginning of understanding the fundamental role of play (as a mode of experience and conduct) in contrast to games (as designed artifacts) in supporting the emotional, motivational, and social affordances of gameplay. And I am actually confident that studying “gamification” will help to surface and contour its contribution. So I would just want make two short remarks on what I find missing in this folk theoretical play/work opposition: First, as Csikszentmihalyi already documented in his study of flow-inducing activities in the 1970s onwards, people regularly find the most flow, meaning, fun etc. in their work already. Second, to the extent that gameplay and work are different, “game elements” and “feedback loops” are the least important bit of that difference. As I find time and time again in the interviews I’m currently conducting for my PhD, it is autonomy, voluntariness (or the lack thereof) that makes or breaks the playfulness of a situation.

Some reflection recommended

Overall, the Pew report offers a rich variety of often contradicting voices raising a large number of issues, resulting in a multitude that is hard to reduce to one overarching “sentiment.” That alone makes it a welcome counterpart to the confident and unilaterally optimistic predictions of technology consultancies like Gartner or Deloitte also quoted in the report. The only thing I really missed was some critical reflection on the part of the authors about the discursive effects of the report itself. When an esteemed scientific body like the Pew Research Center puts out a report on “gamification,” and a report titled “Gamification: Experts expect ‘game layers’ to expand in the future, with positive and negative results”, that already legitimizes the topic in a major way. But that is indeed a minor quibble.

Call

“Ludic” here refers to Latin definitions of ludus, referring to fun, play or playfulness.  It might also widened to include the notion of entertaining facilitation, ease or pleasure of use.  Simulations are computer-mediated environments that provide opportunities for users to explore a world, an occupation, a task, etc..  We are making a broad assumption that all electronic games are simulations, but not all simulations are games.

We expect electronic games to be fun.  Games that are not fun are not played, understanding that “fun” is unique to each player.  However, we do not often expect simulations to be fun.  If a pilot or anesthesiologist is learning their vocation through virtual experiences, we seem to care more about their learning than whether they are having fun.  We want better doctors and better pilots first and foremost.

What does it mean, therefore, to have a simulation that could be called ludic?  Does making a more playful, fun, and pleasing to use simulation impact learning, retention, or practice?  Does a ludic simulation receive more critical reviews for not being serious enough?  What does it mean to make a simulation ludic, without turning it into a game?

The purpose of this special issue is to address the ludic nature of simulations.  Authors are invited to submit manuscripts that:

• Present empirical findings on the use of ludic simulations
• Push the theoretical knowledge of ludic simulations
• Conduct meta-analyses of existing research on ludic simulations
• Present innovative interfaces for ludic simulations, including testing/evaluation data

Potential authors are encouraged to contact Dr. Coppock (patrick.coppock@unimore.it) or Dr. Ferdig (rferdig@gmail.com) to ask about the appropriateness of their topic.

Deadline for Submission is  July 15, 2012.

Manuscripts should be submitted in APA format.  They will typically be 5000-8000 words in length.  Full submission guidelines can be found at:  http://www.igi-global.com/journals/guidelines-for-submission.aspx

Mission

The IJGCMS is a peer-reviewed, international journal devoted to the theoretical and empirical understanding of electronic games and computer-mediated simulations. IJGCMS publishes research articles, theoretical critiques, and book reviews related to the development and evaluation of games and computer-mediated simulations. One main goal of this peer-reviewed, international journal is to promote a deep conceptual and empirical understanding of the roles of electronic games and computer-mediated simulations across multiple disciplines. A second goal is to help build a significant bridge between research and practice on electronic gaming and simulations, supporting the work of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

The new Gamification Summit at GDC Online will discuss the debatable and sometimes problematic process of building game-like incentives into non-game applications, to address issues like productivity, health, marketing, and customer engagement. The day long program will include lectures and panels for game developers and other tech creators to exchange ideas, introduce best design practices and learn how to best serve the player to meet your organization’s needs. This summit will bring fresh discussions about the integration points between games and technology and highlight inspired, successful case studies from today’s forward-thinking businesses.

Here are the submission form and further submission details.

Here’s the description from their website: “GAS 2012 explores issues that crosscut the software engineering and the game engineering communities. Advances in game engineering techniques can be adopted by the software engineering community to develop more engaging applications across diverse domains: education; healthcare; fitness; sustainable activities (e.g., recycling awareness); and so on. Successful computer games feature a property that is not always found in traditional software: they are highly engaging and intrinsically motivating. Games enthrall players and result in users willing to spend increasing amounts of time and money playing them. In addition, GAS 2012 provides a forum for advances in software engineering for developing more sustainable (“greener”) software, which can be applied to game applications. For example, approaches that support adapting software to trade-off power consumption and video quality would benefit the game community. Software engineering techniques spanning patterns (requirements, design), middleware, testing techniques, development environments and processes for building sustainable software are of great interest. Last year’s GAS workshop brought together people from various fields and investigated the possibilities of this exciting research area – we aim to continue building these relationships and advancing the state of the art.”

The preliminary program looks likewise promising, with a keynote by Walt Scacchi of UC Irvine and several interesting papers.