In my last post, I
covered three examples of gamifying libraries that worked - that is, they
carried out their purpose well without compromising the libraries' reputation
or duty to society. In this post, I'm going to look at a couple of the common
threads that I saw throughout those examples and other journal articles on the
subject, in an effort to answer the question of 'what works in gamification of
libraries'. In the interest of this, some of the wider reading I undertook on
the subject borrowed a bit from the field of education and game design itself.
As education is both an industry that libraries support and a central tenet of
libraries themselves, I thought this to be appropriate. In the interest of what
makes a good game, I thought that looking at what game designers had to say on
the subject might be good too. I'll finish up with a few comments of my own.
So - What works to
successfully gamify a library?
Immersion
The first thing that
really stuck out to me about everything I saw and read was that immersion is
really key in creating a successful gamification experience. The people we
(being, librarians, teachers and whoever else is looking to gamify something)
are marketing to are not naive or silly - they are savvy and literate, and they
will be able to tell when an experience is 'tacked on' to an already existing
concept or entity. This will more than likely not draw them in and might even
repel them, as they take issue with being treated like a commodity. The game
has to be authentic. As Christy Sich ( 2006) comments on the rise and failure of
Edutainment -
'One reason
(edutainment failed) has to do with the generation of younger people and their
use of technology. They are born and bred using games. They are being trained
to be visual learners with a preference for active learning and intolerance for
purely passive learning...'
Here, I equate 'active
learning' with immersion in whatever game system the player is using. It
illustrates that a game existing only to educate and/or gain some other benefit
from the players (ie. money) is doomed to fail, at least after an initial
period of early adopters. This is mainly because there is no immersion there -
there's action, and reward. It seems like it's just too mechanical for the
player/client to get any intrinsic satisfaction from the process. Immersion is
the most core of the aspects of what works in gamification, and some of the
concepts I discuss from here are linked into it.
Bringing a story
Another common thread
that was present throughout all of these examples and much of the literature
that I read was that narrtive was of huge importance in the world of gaming and
gamification. This ties in with immersion, in that it provides the impetus, the
pull in information pull to draw gamers in the number that it has. In Find the
Future, the players worked to discover the stories behind artifacts at the
museum. In Defense of Hidgeon: The Plague Years(2008), players worked to provide a plan of survival
against the Black Plague to the town. Even in the vast scope of International
Games Day, the narrative was made by the people playing the games, in addition
to the narratives they took from the commercially available games they played
at the participating libraries. Aleks Krotoski (2010) tells how 'The playing experience must beimmersive, coherent, and believable'. Bohyun Kim, in her article 'Harnessing the Power of Game dynamics'(2012), gives us a few examples of basic gamification
in a library. What's interesting about these is that they're just rules - but
they describe points along a story that the player makes themselves. In the
suggestion to include 'level-up experience' for library users, we're given the
example of going from 'novice' to 'super researcher', and it's suggested we
think up more appealing terms. This simple suggestion in itself is pregnant
with potential, and though it really is pretty simple, it shows how rules are
really just a means to interface with a deeper narrative that is what players
really want from gamification. Of all of the points that I have looked at, I
think this one is one that bears the most thinking about.
Combination of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation
This leads on from the
last point about bringing a story. Though narrative - an intrinsic motivation -
is a big part of what allows gamification to work, there also has to a
practical reward - an extrinsic
motivation - of some kind. Well balanced rewards plus an immersive story gives
players the short term, regular reward that gratifies them, as well as the
deeper meaning and satisfaction of engaging in something over time. Two things
to note here - first, in the interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation, the rules of the game really come into play. They not only give the
narrative a means of interfacing with 'The Real', but they provide signposts
that make it easier for designers to decide when rewards should be given.
Again, a good (if fairly simplistic) example of this comes at Bohyun Kims'
suggestion that library clients could spend accumulated points on coffee at the
library cafe. The points would be accumulated through the clients' use of
library resources (engaging in their own narrative through knowledge building),
and the extrinsic reward comes in the form of free beverages. If I can break
the academic patina I've got going here (or at least that I hope I’ve got
going), that is so elegant it almost brings a tear to my eye. Though this is a
fairly fine line to walk, it was definitely something that I became aware of as
I moved through my readings.
Know when not to gamify
In the interest of
keeping on the topic of what works, I'll keep this fairly to the point - it's
all too easy to see gamification as a panacea in an organisation, owing to its'
immersive nature and current popularity. Seth Priebatsch expounds briefly in
this during his TED talk (2010), where he comments that systems of game
mechanics overlaid onto corporate benefits 'aren't very much fun' and that
basically 'they suck'. This is a great example of knowing when to appropriately
use game mechanics to the users' benefit, and not the organisations. Three
other thoughts here - first, the ever- present immersion factor and how knowing
when to gamify keeps the subtlety that is needed for full immersion. The second
is that knowing when not to gamify an aspect of the library itself almost seems
to demonstrate a degree of maturity in the organisation, as well as a respect
for their clients/players. Finally, knowing when not to gamify raises the
interesting concept of 'dead' games for me - gamification schemes that neither
excite not influence their players. I haven't heard of too many people who have
been motivated to buy more than they usually would because of flybuys
membership, for example. This topic will more than likely be revisited in my
next post on what doesn't work, so for now, I'll leave this here.
Make it fun!
Finally, in regards to
gamification and what works, this seems to be a pretty common one. It's fairly self
explanatory, but I get the feeling that it gets lost in all of the talk and
hand wringing over how this sort of thing is done successfully. I think that
libraries and other organizations could take a few cues from the (multi billion
dollar, rapidly expanding, soon-to-be-all-pervasive) gaming industry in this
matter. This really seemed one of those 'so obvious you forget about it' things
that I read a lot about but was rarely mentioned explicitly and had to be
consciously written into the list I had to expand on.
Reflection
To put it simply, I
get the feeling that in most gamification attempts to date, we took the wrong
thing to run with. Personally, the vast majority of games I play isn't for a
high score or because of a really great new bunch of rules - it's for the
stories and the thoughts and feelings that come out of the experience of
playing it. I'm not saying that every incidence of gamification has to become
an epic of grand scale, but fetishizing rules and rewards and leaderboards
seems only ever seems to have a short term effect at best. Successful
gamification relies on longer term motivations and giving the players a space
to make their own, with a bit of reward thrown in.
In my next post I'm going to touch more
explicitly on what doesn't work - even though I've probably done a pretty good
job of that here.
References:
Kim, B. (2012). Harnessing the power of
game dynamics Why, how to, and how not to gamify the library experience. College
& Research Libraries News, 73(8), 465–469.
Krotoski,
A. (2010). Serious fun with computer games. Nature, 466(7307),
695–695. doi:10.1038/466695a
Markey,
K., Swanson, F., Jenkins, A., Jennings, B. J., St. Jean, B., Rosenberg, V., …
Frost, R. L. (2008). The Effectiveness of a Web-based Board Game for Teaching
Undergraduate Students Information Literacy Concepts and Skills. D-Lib
Magazine, 14(9/10). doi:10.1045/september2008-markey
Seth
Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world | Video on TED.com. (n.d.). Retrieved from
http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html
Sich,
C. (2006). From game studies to bibliographic gaming: Libraries tap into the
video game culture. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science
and Technology, 32(4). Retrieved from
http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=christy_sich
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