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Beyond Gamification. Designing up Maslow’s Pyramid.

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IainB:
How do you even state the criteria of a proof?
-TaoPhoenix (February 02, 2012, 07:26 AM)
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I'm not sure how you would do this for Maslow's theory. At a guess it would require empiric research over several thousand people/cases, using a control group(s) and requiring defined and repeatable results.

Also I understand Maslow's theory to be a *correlation*, not a Boolean either-or-xor or such.
-TaoPhoenix (February 02, 2012, 07:26 AM)
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High correlation proves that there is high correlation. It does not prove a cause/effect relationship. One of the earliest lessons I had in statistics was to gather data about the import of bananas into the UK and the amount of reported crimes in the UK, over a period of years, and then summarise conclusions from the analysis of the data. There was no doubt about it, the rate of growth in the crime rate had a high correlation with the rate of growth in the import of bananas.
So did that mean you could use the projected growth in the import of bananas to predict the crime rate?
Certainly not - but it was initially easy/tempting to think that there might be a cause/effect relationship there...   

IainB:
High correlation proves that there is high correlation. It does not prove a cause/effect relationship.
-IainB (February 02, 2012, 08:49 AM)
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Interestingly, it looks as though this may yet be proven to be an inexact generalisation: Linking correlation to causation with power laws and scale free systems

IainB:
I liked this because it was in line with my confirmation bias, and because the author puts it all so much better than I could:
Gamification is Bullshit: My position statement at the Wharton Gamification Symposium

The post is copied below without the embedded links:
SpoilerIn his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym—albeit a somewhat vulgar one—for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth.

Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit.

Gamification is bullshit.

I'm not being flip or glib or provocative. I'm speaking philosophically.

More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.

Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.

Gamification is reassuring. It gives Vice Presidents and Brand Managers comfort: they're doing everything right, and they can do even better by adding "a games strategy" to their existing products, slathering on "gaminess" like aioli on ciabatta at the consultant's indulgent sales lunch.

Gamification is easy. It offers simple, repeatable approaches in which benefit, honor, and aesthetics are less important than facility. For the consultants and the startups, that means selling the same bullshit in book, workshop, platform, or API form over and over again, at limited incremental cost. It ticks a box. Social media strategy? Check. Games strategy? Check.

The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about—a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter.

This rhetorical power derives from the "-ification" rather than from the "game". -ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. -ification is always easy and repeatable, and it's usually bullshit. Just add points.

Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity. That may be true, but truth doesn't matter for bullshitters. Indeed, the very point of gamification is to make the sale as easy as possible.

I've suggested the term "exploitationware" as a more accurate name for gamification's true purpose, for those of us still interested in truth. Exploitationware captures gamifiers' real intentions: a grifter's game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit trend comes along.

I am not naive and I am not a fool. I realize that gamification is the easy answer for deploying a perversion of games as a mod marketing miracle. I realize that using games earnestly would mean changing the very operation of most businesses. For those whose goal is to clock out at 5pm having matched the strategy and performance of your competitors, I understand that mediocrity's lips are seductive because they are willing. For the rest, those of you who would consider that games can offer something different and greater than an affirmation of existing corporate practices, the business world has another name for you: they call you "leaders."

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TaoPhoenix:
School is horribly Gamified.

There was a related xkcd a few days ago about how certain ex-students were vengeful that they never needed Algebra since they left school. In a way, they are right about non-work conditions. So passing Greek Geometry meant getting a good grade on the "Game" (test) then I've never needed to do a 19 step SAS theory proof since.

The Simpsons have done a couple of nice takes on all this too with Bart. In one early season he flunks the "game" (test) and gets stuck in detention again. Only that episode, he had really tried, and it only raised his flunk from a 32% to a 59%. So he was all "Aw man, now you know why I never bother, if I'm still stuck here."

So a little later he peels off some kind of speech like "Aw man, now I know how Paul Revere felt when he rode down the freedom trail and couldn't get the word to General Washington, so he had to go to the houses to get more minutemen..."

So Mrs. Krabappel took pity on him and gave him something like a 66%, a D. "I passed! For once I passed!"

Paul Keith:
The problem with appealing to Orwell's Politics in the English Language is that Orwell didn't simply rally against jargon but warned specifically against jargon used in the realms of politics. After all, this was the same person who wrote Animal Farm which was unnecessarily more metaphoric and jargon-ish than the Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Over time, it became sort of a "buzz article" to use the article as a sort of appeal to pop culture authority to explain away why simplicity is better but just because it's an article and not a word does not mean the terms "Politics in the English Language" is not often wielded in the same status as the buzz word Gamification.

Thanks however for providing that link. It gave me a better hint as to where you might be coming from. I dare say your problem might not be so much on buzz words as, just like that author, your stereotype example of what gamification implies.

A short example:

Gamification is easy. It offers simple, repeatable approaches in which benefit, honor, and aesthetics are less important than facility. For the consultants and the startups, that means selling the same bullshit in book, workshop, platform, or API form over and over again, at limited incremental cost. It ticks a box. Social media strategy? Check. Games strategy? Check.

Yes, there's a lot of bullshit out there and gamification being propped up in popularity as a buzz word does not make irrelevance the definition it provides. It's like with Maslow's self-actualization. Lots of ways to twist that around but anyone who's gotten any benefits from more Eastern practices like meditation can have a much clearer line as to what the line between self-actualization and non-self actualization is. It doesn't even have to be that complicated.

A doctor who finds his purpose in life for example is different from a doctor who earns his right to be a doctor and doing a thing he likes yet both revelations are linked closer to our personal anthromorphic idea of the world than to any dissimilarity between two near similar events having different meaning to us. That is why in some ways, self actualization is not so much the top of the pyramid chain but a product of all the lower chains adding up to a single chain and creating a paradigm shift in mindset within a singular entity.

Empirically it can be applied to the most mundane of revelations such as one changing his name to the most profound of basic needs such as one finding a person that they would love forever as opposed to loving until they become ugly, loving until they hurt them, etc etc. Of course love itself has often been categorized as insanity especially if you judge it through objective empirical actions.

It's the same way with Gamification's definition because before there was gamification the buzz word, there was gamification the design - but there was simply no unifying term to describe such designs except addictiveness.

See what the author fails to acknowledge is that complexity can grow through simplicity. The Sims for example went from being a game often categorized as a pointless game and ends up becoming a major tool for machinima. Something not many complex games can brag about even though, hypothetically, all games (including the failed but better aimed for movies sim The Movies) can prop up such a motivation.

Another deceptiveness with simplicity is that simple games are unable to contain depth when in actuality the common component of less is more is not really anything new and it has even baffled many game designers before. Like many people couldn't figure out the formula behind FF7's success and replicate it, even Square when in fact a huge part of it's long lasting appeal is it's simpler yet more proven designs compared to other Squaresoft games, even the ones the hardcore FF fans praise like FF6.

Cloud like Luke was your typical mystical hero and was a unique take on the more simple "mute" heroes.

Aeris' death though nothing new at the time was new because it was rare for such a purity designed creature to be killed. Especially a bland one. People rarely kill Mother Theresa's and Superman's and Captain America's in game as a type of plot twist but many more complicated (though still quite simple) characters have gone on to die in far more notable ways.

Even things like Barrett was a good throwback to a simple action hero and Sephiroth was a good pre-Neo from the Matrix concept of how to add depth to bland and simple designs.

In terms of gameplay, before there was the social gaming madness that attracted itself to Facebook games there was the more purer and infinitely more replayable Harvest Moon who embodied everything that gamification is about. A combination of simplicity that resulted in something different.

Even nowadays look at some of the Android games like Star Traders Elite who are way way much simpler than 4x game but through the simple idea of update often, update as much becomes one of the more popular (and deepest) games out there.

We're talking about a simple "flip switch" mechanic (for factions if you have actually played the game though I'm not using any programmer's jargon) that because of great design can end up matching up against some of the deeper aspects of classic 4x games (some whose factions have more ai based tendencies) and even match up to the depth of some modern more complicated designed and higher budget based games.

Yes, on the surface, many who sell gamification get it wrong but the critics are just as wrong if they can't even wrap their heads around the simple idea that the buzz words they are railing against is gamification and not game nor ification.

It may seem sound on the surface to separate the two in a way to unwrap the stereotypical mainstream gamification examples that popularized it as a buzz word in the first place but from a basic lexicon it falls apart. Yes, you have to attempt to mimic some design in tried and true fashion much as the way for increasing usability starts with adding features on top of familiar and comfortable features but to pull off the finished product in such a way that respects the lexicon behind the definition of gamification: you have to be able to make a game that matches the lexicon

The exploitationware? Of course any addictive game can be exploitationware but that is hardly unique to games that fall under gamification. MMORPGs and Sequels are far far far worse and have done more damage and earned more profits than games with concepts fulfilling gamification.

The Sims for example might be exploitationware but the Sims 1 was closer to something falling under gamification because at that point there had been nothing like it and for a long time, a complete collection of Sims 1 expansion far outweighed the content of the Sims 2 and Sims 3 which was the ultimate crime being expoused by critics against exploitationware. Mind you even exploitationware can be seen as an attempt to create a counter buzz word for the current buzz word.

In the end it's all about how much you've been exposed to a certain design. If you only know MMORPGs like WoW then you might not know the difference between it and it's more modern mainstream copies from MMORPGs like Dragonball Online and you'd end up hating and painting all MMORPGs as similar games even though there are many different MMORPG experience just from what server and what community that server has. Even a difference in gaming economy is shocking and that holds even truer for gamification. The idea of social currency starts with currency before the social. Just how the currency works alone is the equivalent of changing the revenue model of a gamified concept and that alone creates too much of a disparity to rail on gamification the concept as a single umbrella concept.

The most often cited ideas for example such as badges and points are in fact some of the more "loose" associations with the concept of gamification. It's just one of the more exposed and popularly stereotyped ideas out there.

By far more subtle things like changing an ugly looking icon to a more animated icon (an element badges borrowed with the combination of things like pop-up msgs) are more in line with gamification than the actual concept of badges.

The same goes for points. Many mistake the idea of points as some sort of unlocking meter or excuse for high score addiction like the popular classic games but in fact in it's true implementation, it's more about creating an artificial economy based on micro addictive options than points. Adding friends for example at a click of a button or following someone on Twitter are by far closer to a gamification concept (friend count/follower count) than the commonly applied "recruit a friend to receive a bonus" that many mainstream gamification type games/services have. It's why social gaming was successful on Facebook not w/o Facebook.

For this same reason, school is not really horribly "gamified". At least not if you're applying the lexicon in any sense. Gamified is not just about combining gaming aspects to non-games/poor games. Schools have lots of mini-concepts like clubs or fraternities or social groups that can be gamified but the reason few people like schools is because it's not "horribly" gamified. Scores are often motivational based on their points as opposed to the meaning of those points except if you pass a social line between smart, ok or dumb. Even many clubs have more of a tournament of life stress than a euphoric "almost MMORPG" like addiction except for those with the talent to compete for the Olympics or be part of a very special school program in a unique school setting that puts far more quality to their programs than your average generic school.

Not to say gamifiying schools is a solution but it's simply not horribly gamified under the lexicon of gamification even as a buzz word. Of course those who wield buzz words would try to get away with selling it as heaven sent but really the current school systems, even the best ones, are rarely horribly gamified. Saying it is is the equivalent of using a horrible boring game/service who have badge accomplishments as an example of gamification.

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