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

Gamification in Libraries: What works, Part 1: Three examples

Gamifying libraries is something that requires a fine balance of various aspects in order to do well. This post is going to examine what's worked in the 'real world'. By this, I mean events and programs that have been successful in increasing client/user/player engagement in a library system. I'll take a quick look at the events themselves, including what they entailed and their outcomes, and then I'll explain why I think they've been successful. Part 2 will be more of a broken down look at different aspects of gamification that work. I'll be looking at exactly what makes users engage with a game in a library context, and mix in a little bit of game theory as well (known as Ludology).

One of the better known examples of gamification working in a library is Find the Future, a night-long event held at the New York Public Library on May 20th, 2011. The game involved 500 library clients getting into teams of 8 and searching the library for various objects within it's collection, each of which had an element of a story attached to them. There were 100 items in total and social media and technology in the form of mobile phones was used extensively through the course of the game (the game also has its own app which allowed library visitors outside the event itself to play their own version of the game). After the event was completed, a book entitled '100 Ways to Make History' was compiled from the players' efforts. The event was held as part of that libarys' 100th anniversary and gained a large amount of media attention.

Find the Future is an excellent example of gamification working in a library because it made use of many of the aspects of games to a positive outcome for everyone involved. It was heavily collaborative, and large in scope. It made use of the libraries resources in a creative way, resulting in information pull instead of push. It gained the library media attention, exposing the library to new audiences and also simultaneously reinventing itself for a new generation whilst using the resources it already had. It also resulted in an extension of the libraries' resources in the form of a book that was made through collaboration based on already existing resources. It's also a good example of how to layer gaming mechanics into an event and make them an integral part of one, instead of laying them over the top of something that isn't built as a game and trying to make it work. There were no scores in this event - it's possible there was a leaderboard and there would have been some sort of a schedule that it had to run to in order to be completed in time, but what the players were there for was the story they were creating, and the stories behind the objects - not to win against anyone else.

In 2008 the University of Michigan also gamified part of one of their courses involving Information Literacy. The game itself was a web-based board game called Defense of Hidgeon: The Plague Years, and combined the story of how a medieval-era town surviving the Black Plague with both on- and offline research methods for those playing. The ruleset was quite involved and the learning payoffs were staggered to introduce the characters to various tools that they could use to progress in the game, resulting in a high level of engagement. The game also worked well as an experiment in gamification as data was collected on play styles, overall engagement, and payoff in learning outcomes. A number of recommendations were given for gamification itself after the experiment had been completed.

Defense of Hidgeon is another good example of how to integrate game mechanics into a model for education and increase engagement without forcing players to deal with pointless gaming features that don't really count towards the task at hand. This example was more competitive than Find the Future, which is interesting because my initial feeling on gamification was that 'Cooperation meant sustained interest, but competition meant limited engagement'. I can't comment on whether or not Defense of Hidgeon would eventually have caused disengagement with the students who played it (indeed, some didn't engage at all), but it seems that for the time it was played, it provided a valuable learning experience. It's also interesting to note that throughout the course of playing the game, some events that the teachers planned interrupted the flow of the game, causing disengagement with some of the players.  Though this did not sink the game, it was a large issue for the teachers. It seems to me that this is a good example of a 'tacked on' event that isn't properly integrated with the game mechanics/learning outcome symbiosis that I've been talking about.

The final example I'm going to discuss involving gamification of libraries is probably a little bit more 'gaming in libraries' than 'gamification of libraries', but I think it's still worth discussing - International Games Day. This yearly event takes place around the world and is organized by the American Library Association. It involves libraries operating as venues for clients to play games of all kinds, from computer games to board and puzzle games.  The event attracts a lot of attention - despite an election being held at the same time and Hurricane  Sandy disrupting many services in the Northeast of America, over 1000 libraries and 17 000 clients participated there. It also provides community-building between libraries themselves, with international games of Chinese Whispers and inter-library video game tournaments taking place as well.

International gaming day is a valuable concept to look at when discussing gamification of libraries. In addition to being an established resource and community, the fact that it is a library initiative that demonstrates the power of gaming in that setting can't be overlooked. This is gaming done right because it appeals to the masses; it shows how popular the concept is and shows that libraries can function as venues for it. It wouldn't be a big jump for libraries to start to integrate gaming and the traditional holdings together from this sort of event, given its success and huge scope. Though not of the same breed of gamification as Find the Future, International Gaming Day is its own entity, and that makes it a valid consideration for me as I progress from here.

These three examples all have different aspects that allow them to work in a library context. I think they demonstrate the diversity of the medium and the many applications that gaming could have for libraries, and this helps give me an idea of the scope of what I'm talking about here. In my next post, I'm going to think about a couple of the elements of games that allow them to work within a library setting.

First post - Scoping an academically-based plan for gaming and gamification in libraries. Bonus storytime.

I am sitting down to write this in the middle of a crowded library. I have music going through headphones, because for a library, it's fairly noisy; people are chatting away and laughing with each other. The librarians are pottering about, as much stacking books on shelves as they are helping out my fellow students with the printers and self-serve kiosks. There's nary a 'shhhh' to be heard, and you know what?

I like it like this.

The changing technological landscape has become more advanced and pervasive ever since the Gutenberg managed to figure out his printing press. In a lot of ways, libraries have managed to keep up with this, and even lead the way in a lot of things. These organizations have changed over the last few decades into something entirely different to the stuffy old book despositories that they were in times long gone; now they're vibrant community hubs, offering so much more than just a place to get a good book.

I wonder though - could we be doing more?

It hasn't all been trailblazing and mobility for libraries though - quite the contrary. Along with problems with how to redesign metadata to properly organize kinds of multimedia that hadn't even been accessible ten years ago, there's an aging workforce and the 'Google Generation' to contend with. Librarians, once seen as gatekeepers of knowledge, are becoming more facilitators for an educated clientele that is precocious and hungry for more.

The problem then becomes a question of what else we can do to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge between the monolithic entities of libraries and this new breed of learners and information seekers.

There's more to my little story; the music that I've got on is a series of classical pieces set against rainstorms and the sound of water lapping the shore. They're all predetermined lengths, and on top of that, I've got a Pomodoro timer running to keep track of larger sections of time. Every now and again the timer gives me a break, and when that happens I get to take a rest and get a drink, and on a longer break I'll go get a can of coke and reward myself for completing a good block of work. It's a good little game that I like to play with myself in order to get things done, because as an independent person I often find that without that reward motivation, I'm dragging myself through study periods and assignments with the enthusiasm one reserves for visiting the dentist. Making a game out of it has created a desire to get things done that wasn't there before, it hasn't cost anything (beyond the coke), and above every other benefit, it's fun. I am thoroughly enjoying myself right now, and before I created my little game, I wasn't.

Long story short, I think this same thing can work on a larger scope with libraries.

But, it's here that I'm going to put the brakes on this train of thought. The field of gaming, gamification, and the library sector is a vast ecosystem that someone of my limited knowledge and experience can't hope to navigate properly. It'd be very easy to go off on a tangent, or lose my way with all of the pretty lights from the games I love flashing in my eyes constantly. With that in mind, I decided to mind map something of a career trajectory with a few of the issues that I want to address at each step along the way. This is an overall map of how I'm going to get from where I am, to where I want to go - bear with it and don't get too freaked out yet, though, please. This is a thesis/Ph.D/lifelong scope of work, here, but we're only looking at one or two select parts of it for now.

The mindmap:

Please note for the time being, I am ONLY CONCENTRATING ON THE BOXES COLOURED YELLOW. This will constitute the entirety of the project that I am currently undertaking in my university studies. The rest - hopefully - will come later, either on my own time of once I've found gainful employ. As we can see, there's quite a bit there to look at - but for now, the journey of a million miles starts with a single step, and it helps to compartmentalize. I don't even know if the things above are relevant or if they'll get looked at down the track - that map was mainly done as an initial brainstorm for personal reasons. I hope that this helps demonstrate the sort of scope I'm starting with, and where I want to end up.

For the purposes of the project I am undertaking, I intend to post at least weekly over the next couple of months with findings from academic reports, personal reflections, and other tidbits of information that I hope will be useful to turning my interest (passion?) into a well grounded and considered approach to the idea of gaming in libraries.

I hope this works. Timer just went off, time for that coke.

Bodie