Four experts' discourses[1] on serious games—games which are not designed primarily for entertainment—illustrate the diversity of opinion on the subject, which ranges to extremes. At the far ends of the spectrum, one sees gaming as a (potentially) planet-saving panacea, while another sees gamification as a disgusting marketing sham, and worse. Examination of the discourses reveals valid points from all sides of the argument, and proves that gaming, serious games, and gamification are complicated subjects fraught with nuance.
If the first is the worst, then let us begin with Ian Bogost's "Gamification Is Bullshit," his position statement at the Wharton Gamification Symposium. The title is his thesis, and he calls gamification "marketing bullshit, invented by consultants […] for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway." The diatribe is directed at the corporate world, at Vice Presidents and Brand Managers. Bogost suggests the term "exploitationware" as the "accurate name for gamification's true purpose."
Full of unbounded optimism, Jane McGonigal's lecture from February, 2010, is titled "Gaming Can Make A Better World." The key point around which she builds her argument is that there is a big gulf between gamers' self-images in the real world, where the mantra is "I'm not good at life," as apposed to game-worlds, where McGonical believes "that many of us become the best version of ourselves." Of course, games and life are different. In games, we are perfectly matched for where we are, and there are tons of collaborators who are willing to help on the mission. The problem, says McGonical, is that "we don't feel like that in real life […] we don't get that feedback in real life." Her research and experiments have proven that games can reshape real-world behaviors, by providing four key conditions: urgent optimism, social fabric, blissful productivity and epic meaning.
Other writers are more pragmatic than impassioned. Tadhg Kelly, like Bogost, addresses the "wizards" of the game world, and their handwaving: "In so doing they perpetuate the myth that games are hard and so game design needs some serious expertise." Gamification boils down to three things, he says: validation, completion and prizes. He says to be wary of "ludemes," game designer's jargon for conventions seen across many games, cribbed from one to the next. He also provides guide rules for increasing engagement, for understanding users, and for simplifying the design. Apparently, there is a glut of user experience consultants, and they are selling snake-oil.
Sebastian Deterding's "Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right," a lecture for Google Tech Talks, also gives practical advice, and proposes three "missing ingredients" that make a game fun and "sticky": meaning, mastery, and autonomy. Without meaning, a game is likely not to have much replay value, which, he argues, explains the recent exodus from Foursquare. Regarding mastery, he paraphrases Ralph Koster: "Fun is just another word for learning (under optimal conditions)." Autonomy also seems to be a necessary component of good game design. Too many extrinsic rewards can be demotivating and devaluating of the activity, he says. Play is voluntary.
Each of the experts makes sincere arguments backed both by reason and understanding of the world of game design. If Bogost's bombastic tone is completely sincere—and it seems to be quite sincere—then it shows how deeply invested and caring people can be about the gaming domain. Seeing it perverted for crass corporate ends would be disgusting to them. Though Bogost calls the bullshitters "not stupid," he does not give the same credit to the gamers, who also are probably not altogether stupid, and who probably have the wherewithal to reject any corporate exploitationware served up as a "game."
Kelly succeeds where Bogost fails, by addressing the gamer's psychology. Rule two is that "users aren't naive," except for maybe one in ten-thousand, for whom games are not designed, anyhow. Regarding achievements, Kelly's barometer is the funny-meter: "I always ask whether those achievements are going to be funny. Because achievements are boring unless they are funny." The benefit of gamification needs to be tangible to the user, he says, and seeing that others are using it gives something else to grasp, the sense of "social fabric" that McGonical described.
Going forward in this class, finding the intersection between the practical and ideological is where these materials will be the most useful. Seeing these materials through the eyes of classmates, as well as further exploration of the rhetoric of gaming, serious gaming and game design, is going to be needed in order to develop a firm grasp of these subjects and to excel at serious game design. Fortunately, this assignment has been a big step in the right direction.
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