Stage 1 roundup: Summary, reflections, and future direction for Libranarchy.com

In this blog post, I'm going to reflect on my learning experience for this part of the blog and identify a couple of the features of said experience, with a view to giving a better idea of the scope of what I've done so far. I'll identify some of my own strengths and weaknesses (albeit from a much more subjective point of view than the SWOT analysis that I carried out before), and give a bit of explanation of where I'm going to go with this blog from here. The university-based part of this project is over, for which I've received an excellent mark.

To being with, here’s a screencast of the presentation that I did. It basically gives an overview of what I covered in the course of the blog. (14 minutes)

This was a fairly hard project for me to maintain - not really because of the format, but because of the other pressures that I had in my studies and the fact that it was much more academically grounded than I am used to. I like blogging, but I'm not a huge fan of referencing and research (which seems kind of silly seeing as I'm studying, and I'm studying to become a librarian). I found the academic grounding pretty eye opening, however, and I feel a lot more confident in progressing with my studies now that I've done a bit of actual research into the area I plan to pursue. The effort has definitely paid off and I am looking forward to pursuing the idea of gaming as a learning tool.

In terms of the research I did, I realize it's not completely infallible, but it is still fairly robust. I may not have been critical enough during my investigation, but there are two reasons for this - first, I just didn't have the time to undertake a multi-faceted account of the concept. I had a full study load and - to be blunt about it - a bunch of other life stuff to look after. It just wasn't practical to take a devils' advocate approach and look at the downsides of gaming, though I think the Negative aspects of the SWOT analysis made an excellent attempt.

The second reason I didn't take a more critical view of gaming in libraries is to do with my own personal viewpoint and the purpose of the blog. I am a gamer, more than I am an academic or librarian. It interests me and I can see a lot of benefits for the concept in a library environment. I also think that there's enough hard data to justify the medium as a legitimate tool - I'm not so concerned with that as I am implementing it in a setting where it can be of use. To me, the debate is done - let's work out how it can best be used. This was a huge challenge in the blog - at times, it felt like I was a bit of a bull at a gate, wanting to progress straight to the design aspect of a/the game and skipping all of the background. The blog is driving towards practical implementation and that design aspect, not a drawn out scholarly debate about the pros and cons of gaming.

I hope that so far, this blog has provided a decent starting point for those looking into gaming, from what amounts to essentially a library patrons' perspective (seeing as I neither work in a library nor have a particularly strong academic interest in the subject). It may even serve as a jumping-off point for further research, if someone else wants to take that up. I'd like to publicly thank my Supervisor, Ann Gillespie and Helen Partridge, the Coordinator for the course that I began this blog for. Their guidance allowed me to produce pretty much every entry here thus far and I am appreciative of their time and effort, especially considering that my chosen subject matter was a bit outside everyones experience.

Just to cap off the main learnings that I've gained from this stage of my research -

o   Gaming and gamification are valuable and useful tools that can have a huge payoff when done right

o   Story is one of the most important, hard to get right, and valuable elements of gaming

o   As informal learning spaces, games resist quantification but are qualitatively rich

o   Most of the problems involving the implementation of gaming  stem from biased or dated perceptions of the idea of play

           

These are the major points that I feel bear mentioning at this stage, in the interest of rounding out and summarizing this part of the blog. In terms of future direction, I intend to take more of a design/implementation path here. I want to design games that are of use for purposes other than entertainment (or even as well as being entertaining), but I don't want to gamify things - I'm totally on board with 'gamification' being a bit of a marketing gimmick, and bastardising the medium into a tepid version of itself. This blog will hopefully become my vehicle to chronicle my explorations into creating working game systems and texts, including my reflections on the process. There will be more referenced posts on the subject, mainly involving the theoretical side of gaming and the narratological aspects that I've found to be so important to developing fully functioning games.

Thankyou for reading and I hope that this has rounded out the academic justification for gaming having a place in the library, which I've been exploring up to this point. I'm looking forward to getting into the fun stuff from here on out. Cheers!

SWOT analysis chart and advocacy of gamification of libraries – the beginning of the end (of the beginning)!

This post will begin the development of my argument for advocating gaming and gamification in the library. I have spent the last few posts dissecting the concept and relating it both to the current wider information landscape and the organization of the library itself, and now that I’ve examined all of this, I think it’s time to reflect on the process overall. I’ll begin with a chart that sums up the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) that I’ve investigated:

 

Strengths and Opportunities

Taken together, the positive aspects of gamification in libraries represents an excellent tool that fits in well with the form and function of the library. It can be adapted in many ways to fit with the already existing resources of the organization, as well as employed at service points to increase engagement with the systems in the library themselves. Gaming itself also lends itself to be well integrated into the model of ‘library as community hub’ as it is a heavily interactive concept that allows spectatorship and has a low barrier to client participation once initial considerations are dealt with.

The overall benefit to the organization here is increased immersion in all aspects of the service, a service that offers excellent return on investment when applied properly, and a creative outlet for both staff and clients. Given the massive popularity of gaming and gamification in almost all aspects of world culture, the implementation of them almost seems a no-brainer, as far as benefits go to an institution whose main deliverable is information.

Weaknesses and Threats

As with many negative aspects of any project, the ones present here often spring from outside concerns exacerbating inherent flaws in the concept itself. Here, the immersive and subtly educational aspects of gamification are mainly at in the line of fire, which is interesting because they are also some of it’s greatest strengths. Though the idea of a flawed concept may sound like a very bad thing to bring into an advocacy statement, it should be said that no concept is completely foolproof; anything, applied in the wrong way, will result in a failure. The problem in regards lies in the earlier mentioned immersion and lack of overt educational value – it’s all too easy to get these things wrong in the implementation phase and not realize until it’s too late and the player decides that the game isn’t worth it; they’re over it and have to be coaxed back, with heightened expectations and blunted enjoyment. It’s not until the outcome is revealed that the effectiveness of the means can be judged, if that makes sense.

Talking about the dangers of gamification as a simple case of misunderstanding  might seem like a bit of a copout, but this reveals a bit more of the nature of gaming to those uninitiated – the medium relies on complex machinery behind the scenes to achieve what seems to be a fairly cosmetic and formulaic outcome. A seemingly complicated game might be governed by a few simple rules; a beautifully intuitive game might have an absolutely mind wrecking algorithm behind it, or rely on unquantifiable nuances to present an equally unquantifiable story. This goes back to immersion and respecting the player, as well as the nature of the game being informal and fun – true gamefulness comes not only from an understanding of concepts but an adaptability to the changing situation of the player. In turn, that adaptability is another thing that libraries are having to come to terms with, not only in relation to themselves in the new knowledge economy, but within themselves at the vanguard of that changing economy. The old paradigm is falling away, driven off by technology, and the new one is coming. Games are now more accessible than ever, and it’s because of this that I make my case that libraries should be getting on board with it.

Reflection

The idea that stories and games don’t exist in a vacuum can’t be ignored, and neither can the idea that libraries collect the information that those media are dependent on in vast amounts. The organizations themselves are in the enviable position of having access to thousands, if not millions of texts, and the collective resources to capitalize on them to present hungry audiences with an engaging, interesting, and fun way to consume them.  Given the sheer scope of the gaming industry alone, it’d be remiss of our information repositories to dismiss the concept as not worthy. It’d be tantamount to dismissing compact discs or any form of new media that came out after books.

I say let’s feed the audiences what they want, in a considered and sustainable way. It can only benefit everyone.

Opportunities and threats to the concept of gamification in libraries

In this post, I’m going to discuss some of the favourable conditions within the library environment at large that allow it to utilize gamification well, and some of the threats that the same environment has to the concept. This is in the interest of conducting a slightly modified SWOT analysis on the topic, using my earlier posts on ‘What works’ and ‘What doesn’t work’ as ‘Strength’ and ‘Weakness’ explorations respectively, and this post as an ‘Opportunities’ and ‘Threats’ exploration. With regard to this, the overall analysis takes place from the viewpoint of gaming (I kind of wish I could change this to be from the libraries’ standpoint, but this is how things have come together). Gamings’ internal strengths and weaknesses have already been expounded upon, and now I’m going to look into the external environment it will be implemented in (being the library) to see how the two would play together. I will be compiling an actual SWOT visual chart in the very near future to demonstrate this convoluted paragraph more easily, but for now I am preferring to wallow in my own verbosity.

Opportunities

There are a couple of major opportunities that gamification can find in the environment of the library. They have largely been discussed before, but for a more environmental discussion, I felt it prudent to go over them again here.

Similarity of Purpose and Form

As far as gaming is concerned, the library environment presents a large amount of opportunities for implementation. Gaming relies on information to build its’ systems upon, and people to play them; as a vital link between information and people, the library is uniquely suited to be a resource here. In this, the library not only provides opportunities to create games that stand on their own, but the systems inherent in the library also lend themselves to gamification, as they are user-centric and another point of interface between a form of narrative (the users journey with the library) and a set of rules (the regulations and system itself).

Built-In Audience

Libraries are, more often than not, well established organizations with diverse and often large user bases. Their place as an advisory organization places them well as an inclusive organization that often functions as much as a community hub as well as an entity in their own right, and this all equates to an audience for any project, gamed-based or not, that the library decides to proceed with. To take the example of the State Library of Queensland - according to its Annual Statistical Report (p.4 Table 2.), the library hosts over nine million patrons each month, has a junior membership ratio of 14% (out of just short of 10 million total), and counts 44% of the ‘total population’ as members. Granted, this particular example is one of the largest libraries in Australia, and other libraries often won’t have that sort of patronage, but this shows that libraries are nevertheless popular destinations. One of the main boons for a gamification based project in a library is that it’s likely to have an early adopter or two at the very least amongst its audience.

Presence and Diversity of Information

Of special note is something that I’ve already explored in my post on considerations for libraries – that being the idea of the library as a storehouse of narrative and stories, that can be used as inspiration and textual grounding for games of the users and staffs’ creation. Subjects are categorized and ostensibly fully annotated with metadata to facilitate searching – why not use gaming as a tool for making those subjects desirable to sift through as part of a larger story, legitimizing the effort put into metadata construction and aiding in the spread of knowledge? Gamification is a concept that can take in vast amounts of information and combine it in ways that make CUPs pursue and consume it. The sheer amount of information present in the library environment is a prime opportunity for gamification. Some of the information within the library might concern gamification itself. Could you gamify learning about gamification? It’s entirely possible.

Threats

In addition to the few and large opportunities that the library environment represents, however, there are also a number of threats to the concept of gaming that implementers should be mindful of. Though none are crippling to a project completely, they could be if not considered and accounted for during planning. They fall into two categories, and befit the nature of gaming as an established but expanding medium. The first of these is:

The Frivolity Problem

This is the main observation that I’ve gained from most of my readings on the subject, and has been something of a bugbear for me as I pursue this concept. The problem seems to lie in the changing landscape of information dissemination to a more participatory culture in which librarians are no longer the gatekeepers of esteemed storehouses of knowledge. They are now caretakers in a vast ecology of information, where patrons can come and go as they please, and take what they need to enrich their own private ecologies. Part of this change has been interactivity – where once, libraries imparted the knowledge as needed, now they need to do as much gathering as they do imparting, and patrons can submit their own input to the collective. As an interactive medium, gaming is something that libraries are still grappling with – beyond just functioning as a storehouse for gaming texts (including games themselves), the concept is flowing through the organization of the library itself, changing them, and after often centuries-long establishment of a certain order, it can be problematic.

Frivolity itself is also a large part of the problem here – play is often seen as pointless, and even only grudgingly given any time as a necessity. The idea that learning could take place within the process of play is a relatively new one, and one that seems to run counter to the serious nature of many libraries. Even when the concept is taken up, the stratified, metadata-saturated nature of the environment means that the frivolous part of gaming (the unquantifiable story elements) are stripped out and the ‘serious’ part is kept and run with. This helps to give the libraries a feeling of control over the concept, something that they’re used to from their ‘esteemed storehouses of knowledge’ period. Unfortunately, as we’ve explored in previous posts here, taking simple extrinsic motivation and applying it in the hope it works (i.e. increases engagement) is a recipe that only works over the short term, and may be one that fails outright as a technologically literate user base sees their gross manipulation for what it is. Basically, as a threat to the concept of gaming from the environment of the library, the attitude that games are frivolous and pointless will cause gamification efforts to not be taken seriously and fail before they’ve even started. It’s even conceivable that a cycle of failure could be set up as the concept is deemed to be a failure because of examples where the it wasn’t given its’ due. This might be all well and good if the concept turned out to be paper thin and actually pointless, but then I venture to ask – how is the gaming industry turning a multi-billion dollar profit?

Taking gaming seriously is something that has to happen in order for it to survive in a library environment. We now come to the second problem that the environment presents, however –

The Panacea Problem

In the same way that the newness of gaming presents a new paradigm for libraries to struggle with over the next few years, it also presents the concern that it will be seen as a cureall by organizations wanting something new to attract patrons and justify their existence. Gamification is something of a buzzword – it’s even at the point where I’m slightly cringing at using it as often as I do. It’s new and popular and it carries with it connotations of something fun and exciting, and something that ‘the kids’ will enjoy. Indeed, the term ‘Gamification’ seems to have found its’ widest use amongst those who have an idea of what gaming is, but don’t do it themselves. Put shortly, it is seen in these circles as a gimmick that will bring in numbers and provide a boost, or glaze over a broken system to give it the appearance of working because of an appeal to popularity. It’s this sort of ignorance of deeper issues that cause some implementations to jump the gun and execute poorly, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong place. This in turn can cause the project to fail, just as surely as if the same ignorance caused the organizations to fall to the earlier described frivolity problem.

There are likely to be other environmental aspects that fall into these two categories with regards to gamification, but what is covered here denotes some of the major ones. As I’ve said, I am operating under a tight schedule and my window of access is quite small – I neither work in a library nor in the field of game development (for the time being). I think for my next post, I will collate the matters I’ve discussed here and in other posts into a graphical representation of a SWOT analysis, with a commentary on the situation overall. From there I will round out the ‘academic grounding’ phase of this blog, and with it my university-based project for the term. Thanks for reading!

References:

ANNUAL STATISTICAL SURVEY - NSLA.public_library_stats_2011-12_0.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.nsla.org.au/sites/www.nsla.org.au/files/publications/NSLA.public_library_stats_2011-12_0.pdf

Gamification in Libraries: What doesn't work

In my last post, I talked about some of the aspects that work to make gamification of libraries a success. As a flipside to this, I'm going to spend this post talking about some things that will kill your project. I'm not going to bother going over any examples that haven't worked - there are enough out there and I just don't have time to run over them. I think you'll find that most of these aspects are pretty easy to pick out anyway.

In the interest of determining what 'doesn't work' I've taken as a standpoint that these things don't contribute to influencing or motivating players in any way. In some cases they actively denigrate players' experiences.

Not respecting the players

As far as cardinal sins of gamification go, this is on par with the 'immersion' point for holy virtues (if you'll let me torture an analogy). This even goes beyond an aspect of gamification in libraries - in any endeavour you're creating a product or service for customers, treating them as an entity worthy of respect on their own terms and not merely a means to an end is crucial. So why does it bear mentioning here? Two reasons - first, it's another one of those so-simple-you-forget-it things, and second, libraries and gaming are - at least at time of writing - a bit like oil and water. There seems to be a deep suspicion of why libraries should be accomodating to this new medium. Christy Sich (2006) relates this current state of affairs to when music compact discs first came out; there was outcry over whether or not libraries should carry those, and now they almost seem reluctant to properly engage with games. Given the popularity of games of all types and the potential they have for all facets of modern life, this doesn’t seem forward-thinking or respectful of library clients/players. Even the literature that strongly supports the educational and cultural worth of games – such as Futurelabs’ Computer games, schools, and young people (Williamson, 2009) and Steven Johnsons’ Everything Bad is Good for You (2006) seem to justify their standpoint with an overload of data to give organizations who might want to consider games a hard sell. It seems that given the massive popularity of the genre outside of the library sector, as an information repository we should be clamoring at the chance to make the best possible use of the concept as we can. The extremely slow uptake and excessive debate around the subject all bespeaks a negligence here, at least to me. It’s essentially, ‘It might be good enough for consumers out there, but gamification isn’t for us. We’re a serious organization’. And that is why this bears mentioning here. If it’s good enough for them ‘out there’, it should be good enough for us ‘in here’.

If the players/clients aren’t respected on their own terms, as autonomous people who might in fact know what is best for them in at least some cases, then we don’t open ourselves to the full potential of the concept – which is why we end up with things like:

Tacked on Content

Slightly removed from the most core reason that gamification fails at certain times described above, this seems to be the next big one. As Andrzej Marczewski (2013)describes in the first of a few reasons why gamification can fail:

‘If you stick a thin layer of gamification on a broken system, it will have no long term effect’.

This explains pretty succinctly the issue that I’m describing here – gamification won’t fix something that is already broken or boring. It needs to be layered into a successful system to provide a deeper engagement and enhance motivation. At best, the system that’s applied will seem like a gimmick, and at worst it will just be insulting to clients/players – it certainly won’t make a bad system usable. I think this goes back to repecting the player – they won’t be dazzled with pretty lights. Aleks Krotoski (2010) describes this as the ‘Dancing Clown Problem’.

Gamifying everything/timing it badly

In keeping with the idea that intrinsic motivation and immersion is key to making a successful gamification project, the idea of subtlety really came through too. Shoving game mechanics into players' faces doesn't work, as numerous failed schemes have shown. Echoing the same line of thought I wrote about in my last post, I’ll bring up Seth Priebatsch and his TED talk (2010) again. Seth briefly discusses how credit card schemes and corporate affiliation programs make use of game mechanics but don't offer any element of fun or engagement in undertaking them. It’s all too easy, owing to the immersive and popular nature of gaming, to view it as the panacea that I talked about in my last post. Appropriateness and timing are needed to preserve the impact that such a diverse concept can have for audiences. From a design point of view, Christy Sich also comments:

'If developers take the focus off learning objectives... we can simply adopt the Marshall McLuhan adage and trust that the medium is the message'.

           

This also has relevance to the idea of not gamifying everything, because it helps keep things in perspective. Focussing on the narrative and getting smaller amounts of gamification done right whilst also getting rid of the inherent distrust that august old organizations like libraries have for the perceived frivolity of games and gamification (ie. trusting that the medium will be the message) goes a long way to making attempts at gamification work, it seems.

Organization-centred design

Basically put, when a concept that depends on user uptake is designed to directly benefit the organization over those users, it has a very short use-by date. This problem often seems to befall those organizations who like the idea of gamification, but lack the respect, knowledge and and/or resources to implement the concept well, and view it as an easy way to cash in on the latest pop culture craze. Indeed, there are parts of the game development community who view the very concept of gamification as a gimmick cooked up by the corporate sector for that very purpose. One of the more vocal proponents of this point of view has been Ian Bogost, whose post ‘Gamification is Bullshit’ (2011) outlined fairly explicitly how the concept could be seen as a marketing tool that bastardizes the true nature of gaming. This bears thinking about here because it draws into pretty stark relief how easy it would be to create something organization- as opposed to user centred. Considering my previous assertions that users are wise to knowing when they’re being overtly manipulated for gain and that gaming (upon which gamification is based on, if it’s different at all) is an intrinsically motivated concept, the idea of placing the organizations’ benefit above those of the users renders all of this null. It’s easy to see how this could sink a gamification project. Bogost (2013) has even gone as far as to suggest the term ‘exploitationware’ in place of gamification, with the benefits of (amongst others) ‘disassociating the practice from games’.

Taking the wrong thing and running with it

This final point is along the same lines as the ‘Have Fun!’ point that I made in the last post – this is more of my own observation here, and it sort of ties everything I’ve said over the last two posts together. I get the feeling, after all of this reading, that we took the boring part of gaming – that is, the rules – and attempted to crèche that into our library systems. The problem here is that our library systems aren’t broken – they’re just in a state of flux. We run the risk of libraries falling into the trap of cheapening the gaming experience by doing a bad job of gamifying themselves, whilst at the same time missing not only using the interesting bit of gaming, but also failing to utilize one of the libraries’ chief resources. Those two things are one and the same, it seems – the stories of gaming and that the library acts as a repository of. More than scoreboards and leaderboards used the foster bursts of activity and engagement, we need to harness the deep meanings present in narrative to provide a service and education to our users. That might seem a bit lofty, but after these last two posts, that’s what it seems works best.

In my next post, I’m going to look at a few of the considerations that libraries should take into account when they decide to gamify an aspect of their organization. Thanks for reading.

References:

Gamasutra - Persuasive Games: Exploitationware. (n.d.). Retrieved September 20, 2013, from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134735/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?print=1

Gamasutra: Andrzej Marczewski’s Blog - Why does Gamification Fail? A few reasons... (n.d.). Retrieved September 20, 2013, from http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AndrzejMarczewski/20130819/198562/Why_does_Gamification_Fail_A_few_reasons.php

Games_and_Learning_educators_report.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://archive.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/project_reports/becta/Games_and_Learning_educators_report.pdf

Gamification is Bullshit. (n.d.). Ian Bogost. Retrieved September 20, 2013, from http://www.bogost.com/blog/gamification_is_bullshit.shtml

Johnson, S. (2006). Everything bad is good for you. Penguin.

Krotoski, A. (2010). Serious fun with computer games. Nature, 466(7307), 695–695. doi:10.1038/466695a

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

Gamification in Libraries: What works, Part 2: Aspects of Gamification that let it work

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