Survey Question: How does gamification affect learning?
I think it’s time we had a frank talk about what gamification is, and why we should stop doing it — or at least, why we should agree that if we’re not going to stop doing it, we ought to stop calling everything that involves real-world game design by that name. Gamification as formulated by its proponents — let’s thumbnail it as, “the application of points and badges and other representations onto real-world behaviors under the assumption that doing so will ‘incentivize’ or motivate certain actions” — is anti-human. It’s about closing down possibility rather than opening it up. When “successful” (which, to be sure, it often is not), it amounts to a sleazy kind of behavioral control system. Population control is anathema to what games are, or have been, or ever will be.