A discussion of gamification concepts, and our implementation of Just Press Play at RIT. Toggle to speaker notes (instead of comments) for annotations and relevant links.
1. The Great Gamification Debate
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
Rochester Institute of Technology
Director, Lab for Social Computing • Professor of Interactive Games & Media
Internet Librarian 2011 Closing Keynote
3. Ian Bogost – gamifyforthewin.org
“-ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques.
[it] is always easy and repeatable, and it‟s usually bullshit.”
4. "My point is that
the 'fun', the
pleasure of these
elements does
not come from
some extrinsic
reward value of
those
elements, but
chiefly from the
experience of
competence they
Sebastian Deterding
give rise to.”
14. “My point is that
the „fun‟, the
pleasure of these
elements does
not come from
some extrinsic
reward value of
those
elements, but
chiefly from the
experience of
competence they
stian Deterding
give rise to.”
15. What behaviors did we want to
reward and encourage?
What feelings of competence
could we engender?
What did we want our students to
remember and reflect on?
30. “On a side note, despite website difficulties,
people are playing. The buzz is tremendously
positive. Keith Whittington has already had
several lovely interactions as people want his
card. I have given out around 40 already of
Weezes Wobble. People are breaking out in
dance around me. I never want this to stop.”
31.
32. I walked in the next morning and several of the students
(including Somara) were waiting outside the room to hear my
reaction, which was my turning around and yelling
"SOMARA!!!" Definitely a good time :)
The idea for this came from a conversation one of our professors was having with some students in the spring of 2010, in which the students said “we should get achievements for being awesome.” She took that idea to our chair, who took it to Microsoft Research, who said “here’s some seed money—think this through, then come back and tell us more.”
We want to make the implicit map more explicit. What are the mileposts and markers along the way? How do they know they’re on the right track? How can we visualize their progress towards a goal?Narrative emerges…what does the narrative look like? How is lore disclosed?
As they complete activities, they will be collecting virtual artifacts, stocking their inventory with the tools we know they need to be successful.
This is less about pushing them to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do, and more about recognizing what they do, and allowing them to remember and reflect on their accomplishments.
Reflection is a powerful tool This is a service I signed up for a few months ago that tells me what I did a year ago in Foursquare. And these daily reminders are much more powerful than a leaderboard in encouraging me to check in on Foursquare regularly. What did we want to encourage our students to do?
When Andy first pitched this to MSR, he made a point of saying “GREAT DANGER HERE”…and he was right. The reason you don’t see this achievement approach everywhere in education is that it’s really hard to do well!
By adding external tangible rewards, we can actually do damage to our students’ intrinsic motivations. The focus needs to be on “now…that” rewards, rather than “if…then” rewards.
For this to be successful, it has to be voluntary, fun, and engaging. They have to vest in it as creators, not just consumers. This is the key takeaway from Deci & Ryan’s SDT work. We know this because we asked them
http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-copy-and-paste/http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/gamification-by-design-response-to-oreilly/So….what feelings of competence did we want to focus on?
Big questions that guided our content development.
We started with a very simple model for classifying the activities the game, drawn from Richard Bartle’s famous (to game designers and researchers, at least) MUD player types. But we eventually realized this was not the best model, and was
When we started really thinking about the natural tensions at RIT—in particular, for our students, between design and development—we found that the history of RIT yielded some fascinating historical context for that tension.
This was the model that emerged for us—the tension between the athenaeum and the mechanics institute, as well as the tension between individual and collaborative competencies. Bloom’s taxonomy informs the rings, but the important part is not just expansion but BALANCE. The problem with “atheneaeum”, however, is that NOBODY can pronounce (or spell) it. More importantly, we found as we tried to categorize activities it was too difficult to operationalize “athenaeum” and “mechanics”.
What we ended up with was one axis of “exploration” and “mastery”, and another of “individual” and “social”.
Students’ stories will become part of the game narrative/lore; one achievement available to alumni might be a “tell your story” achievement in which they submit their story, along with supporting images/video.
Students lining up on the first day of the game to get their PlayPasskeychains.
Development team, at midnight before launch, eating pie in hopes of gaining Tona Henderson’s collectible card.
Chris Cascioli’s card requires you to give him a picture you’ve made of a boat. The first night of the game, students snuck into the lab he’d be teaching in the next morning, and put this drawing on the whiteboard.
Jill Bray is one of our office staff assistants. She was delighted that students were showing up in her office to recite a nursery rhyme. And the next time these students need to talk to someone in the office, they’ll know exactly where Jill’s office is located!