Gamification for Education Reform

The Gamification of Society, 2021

The applications of gamification and the contexts in which game elements can be successfully incorporated have grown significantly over the years. They now include the fields of health, education, work, the media and many others. However, the human and social sciences still neglect the analysis and critique of gamification. Research conducted in this area tends to focus on game objects and not gamification’s logic as its ideological dimension. Considering that the game, as a model and a reference, laden with social value, deserves to be questioned beyond its objects, The Gamification of Society gathers together texts, observations and criticisms that question the influence that games and their “mechanics” have on wider society. The empirical research presented in this book (examining designers’ practices, early childhood, political action, the quantified self, etc.) also probes several different national contexts – those of Norway, Belgium, the United States and France, among others.

2015

The growing popularity of gamification techniques in marketing, user engagement and workforce management makes it important to broaden our understanding of this issue. I argue that instead of simply adding a fun factor to boring activities, gamification creates a new, highly controllable social system. By using game metaphors and mechanics, a designer can influence the behaviour of a subject, but also make him or her easier to supervise and more prone to being used as part of big data. She can initiate competition between some players and silence other potential conflicts. This social system creation resembles the establishment of markets as spheres of economic activity, researched by economic sociologists. Nonetheless, gamification forms a system particularly suited to the designer's interests, granting her full control over institutions and rules, which makes consideration of underlying power inequalities especially crucial. One of the most popular introductions to the 'eld, Gamication by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps by Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham (2012), de'nes gami'cation as "the process of game-thinking and game mechanics to engage users and solve problems" (pp. XIV)-generally in non-game contexts, such as marketing, workforce management, education, health and so on. But while this description, supported by a couple of established case studies of famous applications, would usually allow the user to distinguish between gami'cation and "regular" game or other social practices, deeper consideration leads to a number of important questions. For example, is gami'cation a recent phenomenon, originating around the time of the emergence of the term in 2000, and boosted by the particularly game-loving Generation Y (Bunchball, 2012), or has it been around since antiquity, always present as a playful element of education and upbringing: rhetorical debates,

Gamification. Critical Approaches, 2015

The growing popularity of gamification techniques in marketing, user engagement and workforce management makes it important to broaden our understanding of this issue. I argue that instead of simply adding a fun factor to boring activities, gamification creates a new, highly controllable social system. By using game metaphors and mechanics, a designer can influence the behaviour of a subject, but also make him or her easier to supervise and more prone to being used as part of big data. She can initiate competition between some players and silence other potential conflicts. This social system creation resembles the establishment of markets as spheres of economic activity, researched by economic sociologists. Nonetheless, gamification forms a system particularly suited to the designer’s interests, granting her full control over institutions and rules, which makes consideration of underlying power inequalities especially crucial.

A dissertation presented to Ryerson University and York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the program of Communication and Culture, 2017

In recent years gamification has emerged as a design trend in customer relationship management, marketing, education and governance. It promotes the use of game design principles in the organization of every day environments, tasks and interactions. As an offspring of advanced communication technologies, gamification relies on the unhindered use of networked devices that transforms every experience into a user experience. Borrowing on the ubiquitous popularity of video games, the premise of gamification is the technologically enabled relationship between virtual causes and real-life effects, and its promise - a mutually beneficial coordination of corporate and personal interest. This dissertation outlines the socio-political implications of the concept of gamification through a critical examination of its content and intended meanings. The unpacking of gamification as an aspiration and a worldview reveals that as soon as we take for granted the equality of the sign and the signified, we also accept that life experiences do not exceed the signs we use to describe them. Therefore, to play life as a game, as gamifiers urge, is to live life by design. The definition I coin considers gamification from the perspective of political consequences, rather than practical application and mechanics. I work towards this definition by focusing on the rhetoric of gamification as an expressed intention that constructs motives and renegotiates beliefs. Hence, the theoretical model I apply draws on the work of two major theorists. American rhetorician and philosopher Kenneth Burke offers a theoretical apparatus for the study of the form and rhetorical devices of addressed messages. French semiotician and social theorist, Jean Baudrillard, informs the deconstruction of the claims gamification makes. The treatment of language as intention and action that is necessarily subjective and interested, offers a liminal stand-point from where the vision of a gamified world can be seen as an ideology which normalises itself by rhetorical means. Thus, I propose that the concept of gamification, whether applied in practice or not, is a political act. It constructs an ideology that seeks to reconcile the myth of the sacrosanct freedom of the Western individual with the constant imposition of corporate and government demands for compliance, accountability and efficiency.

Gamification as the process of turning extra-ludic activities into play can be seen in two different ways: following Bataille (1975), we would hope that play could be a flight line from the servitude of the capital-labour relationship. Following and Benjamin (1939), however, we might discover that the escape from the drudgery of the worker leads to an equally alienating drudgery of the player. I argue that gamification might be seen as a form of ideology and therefore a mechanism of the dominant class to set agenda and to legitimize actions taken by this very class or group. Ever since the notion of gamification was introduced widely (Reilhac 2010; , scholars have suggested that work might be seen as a sort of leisure activity. This article analyses the controversial dialectics of play and labour and the ubiquitous notion of gamification as ideology.

The Sociological Review, 2017

‘Gamification’ is understood as the application of game systems - competition, rewards, quantifying player/user behaviour - into non-game domains, such as productivity and fitness. This is meant to motivate the user towards certain tasks. Such practice is deeply problematic for it represents the capture of ‘play’ in the pursuit of neoliberal rationalisation and the managerial optimisation of working life and labour. However, applying games and play to social life is also central to the Situationist International, as a form of resistance against the regularity and standardisation of everyday behaviour. We explore both meetings of games and work, and the antithetical political and cultural agendas they come with. We argue that ‘situations’ represent a truer gamification than ‘gamification’, for they transform non-games into games, rather than transferring game elements out of playful contexts and into managerial ones. Since the original ‘gamification’ term is now lost, we develop two alternatives for distinguishing between these two practices of introducing game elements into socioeconomic life: ‘gamification-from-above’ (motivational neoliberal optimising and rationalising) and ‘gamification-from-below’ (playful Situationist anti-work practice). We conclude with a renewed call for the latter, which is an ideal form of resistance against gamification-from-above and its capture of play in pursuit of work.

European Journal of Contemporary Education

What-gamification‖ means and what it doesn't has been addressed and described by many researchers from a variety of different perspectives in the past. Similarities and differences of the methods between-gamification‖ and-games‖ (as well as-gamification‖ and-game based learning‖) have also been look upon up until now. However,-gamification‖ and-game‖ terms, are still being mentioned as substitutes for one another sometimes in many research articles. Although a mixture of methods are being used nowadays in the whole learning process (e.g. flipped learning together with gamification, mobile learning and infographics etc.), naming the-whole‖ learning methodology being used in an educational project/research only as-gamification‖ (or only as a game/GBL)-is yet another common issue that may lead us to misunderstand the gamification concept. These situations may be regarded as problematic issues in understanding the concept of gamification correctly. The number of educators and researchers keeps increasing in the world which are researching and trying to benefit from gamification applications in a variety of disciplines. Some of these disciplines (such as chemistry, health etc.) seems to be more benefitting and being more successful than others in their project states. Evaluating the level of success in various dimensions of learning may also differ from one to another largely in case of mixed learning methods being used in the research. Thus, in cases of using gamification method as well with others in a mixed manner of methods, the low level of success achieved may have been affected by a number of reasons. These reasons and conclusions have oriented the author to establish a research on articles and web resources on-gamificaiton‖ and its differentiations from-games‖ and-game-based learning‖ concepts. The intension is to better understand-gamification‖, try contribute in drawing a clearer view of-gamification‖ for educators and researchers who are in the beginning stages of gamification/gamifying applications topic, or are planning to make use of them in the near future. With this perspective, a literature review was done, summerizing and

2013

Gamification is the main trend in modern media, business processes and public communications. The consulting company Gartner, the world leader in the study of the market of information technologies, for example, confirms this fact by its "Hype cycle-2012" graphic of representation the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. Why exactly this technology has become the focus of the players in the digital age of communication? Is it fortuity or regularity? Is gamification only a marketing instrument to ipulate consumer behaviour, as it seems to its opponents? Maybe gamification is one of responses to the modern socio-cultural needs, according to its apologists? What are the prospects for further development of this phenomenon? These are the questions we tried to answer by means of system analysis. We considered gamification in the context of the general concept of "game", on the one hand. On the other hand, we entered gamification into the motivation system of main communication processes participants, to which gaming technology and mechanics were applied.

Wyższa Szkoła Społeczno Gospodarcza w Przeworsku, 2019

Technical advancement of the modern world, popularity of social networks is significantly changing the direction in education. Both the future of the education and of society in general depends nowadays on understanding by all participants of educational process of the direction of a strategic development of education. Along with the leading scientists and experts in the field of informational technologies, many modern teachers, philosophers, theologians and journalists, discussing a complex of problems of gamification in education, note that process of application and intensive development of informational technologies in the educational sphere has the hidden ambivalent character. The goal of gamification, which is an educational approach to motivate students to learn by using video game design and game elements in learning environments, is to maximize enjoyment and engagement through capturing the interest of learners and inspiring them to continue learning.