The future of gamification
The last few years has seen a deluge of off the shelf gamification tools, platforms and features infiltrate L&D. Almost everywhere you look there is a progress bar, leaderboard, or virtual badge up for grabs. Some websites even award you a badge for visiting them.
However, as predicted by quite a few veteran game designers, the gamification trend (of points, badges and leaderboards other wise known as PBL’s) is starting to wane. We’re all starting to suffer from gamification fatigue if you will.
“There’s widespread failure of gamification. And there’s growing awareness that the sprinkling of game mechanics on top of an existing product is limited and often backfires” Amy Jo Kim
Why is gamfication starting to lose some of its shine? It's all down to results and rightly so. If you operate in the world of L&D you have to measure the impact of your approach, and unfortunately gamification promised the world, but has failed to maintain long term impacts.
You can’t argue with the case studies which show huge increases in engagement when a gamification platform is introduced, its new and novel after all. What you see after that initial spike is a sharp drop off.
That is down to a couple of things, but fundamentally gamification in its most basic form is a misunderstanding of why game mechanics are so motivating.
PBLs (points, badges and leaderboards) are the easiest, most fundamental elements of games like candy crush, even world of warcraft merged with loyalty rewards systems from the world of marketing and the most basic gamification platforms just leave them as they are in fixed systems. The trick that was missed? Those games developers and many like them, spend a lot of money tweaking their systems based on user behaviour. The balance between how challenging it is to gain those points and therefore climb the ‘leaderboard’ is constantly being modified behind the scenes to maintain the most engagement.
For gamification to work, it needs to;
Grow up and leave behind its basic applications
Be treated as a serious change program and not just a quick fix layer on top of fixed systems
Be adaptable and assessed regularly
Be integrated
The fundamental reasons behind why gamification solutions are popular still exists - it's all about employee motivation and engagement.
Gamification in the sense of PBL’s is not enough. It ignores the other critical components required to produce long term behaviour change. For behaviour change to occur we need knowledge and ability and the reason why we need to change, the ‘what's in it for me’.
You may have heard the terms ‘games based learning’ or ‘serious games’ crop up a little more often in recent months. It’s not an evolution of gamification, as these terms and approaches have been around longer, games based learning comes from the point of view of how game mechanics and learning objectives can be seamlessly blended together to create the desired impact.
And that’s the big difference. Gamification is often a layer applied to content or systems. Games based learning is a blend of content, motivation, and the reason why.
It may seem like pointless semantics - it’s all games thinking at the end of the day so who cares what it’s called? But it's crucial to move away from this easy fix mentality that's linked to gamification. Yes, we have basic drivers, we like to collect, we like to interact and climb the leaderboard but we are also complex creatures who require meaning and emotional connection.
I’m a big believer in a more playful approach to learning and there has been a lot of talk about the death of gamification but it’s by no means in its final death throes. Rather it’s growing up. We’ve been through the ‘gogo’ phase and we’re now seeing a maturing of the market.
The future of gamification as I see it will merge more towards games based learning, with well thought through designs, blending content and game play. We’ll still see the PBL’s around as the development cycles catch up and features come onto the market, but I personally believe these standard features (PBLs) will appear less and less in L&D in favour of more immersive experiences that use a wider range of game mechanics to create long lasting engagement and true behaviour change.