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
