This blog post looks at gamification, or the use of game mechanics and dynamics to drive game-like engagement in largely non-game contexts. Of particular interest is how gamification is implemented by science, businesses, and social media sites to foster greater engagement
This blog post looks at gamification, or the use of game mechanics and dynamics to drive game-like engagement in largely non-game contexts. Of particular interest is how gamification is implemented by science, businesses, and social media sites to foster greater engagement, participation, and investment within these realms. We will explore examples of how gamification is being implemented to alter behavior and how this can lead to both greater productivity as well as radicalized behavior.
A brief definition of gamification: While the use of the term gamification can be traced back as far as 2008, widespread use of the term clearly begins around 2010.
Gamification is a concept bandied about by businesses, scientists, and social media scholars alike, and the definition used is often strongly influenced by the context in which it is being considered. In fact, the ways in which gamification is defined are nearly as numerous as the ways in which it is implemented. The wiki page dedicated to gamification defines it as “the concept of applying game design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging”. For the sake of clarity and brevity, one might alternatively define gamification as the use of game attributes such as game mechanics, dynamics, storytelling, gaming psychology, and other aspects of games to drive game-like player behavior such as engagement, interaction, addiction, competition, collaboration, and learning in a non-game context such as work, fitness, community and social participation, and scientific investigation. Did I say brevity? I meant verbosity. While that doozy of a sentence is a grammarian’s nightmare, it makes comically clear that gamification is both complex and broadly applicable. Businesses tend to emphasize the use of game mechanics to reap tangible business benefits, such as increased customer loyalty, or greater worker productivity, Scientists and social media scholars on the other hand, tend to emphasize the incorporation of game structures and dynamics to encourage problem solving, or the use of fun and reward to reinforce and influence behavior. Much research is currently going focused on trying to define gamification to make it a rigorous term and to distinguish it from a host of related ideas such as gamefulness, gameful interaction, and gameful design. Gamefulness (a term coined by Jane McGonigal) denotes the general quality of gaming, gameful interaction is interaction which results in gamefulness, and finally gameful design is designing for gamefulness, typically through the incorporation of game elements. Gamification is perhaps most strongly related to the process of gameful design specifically for non-game purposes, and this is the sense in which we will largely be discussing gamification in this blog post. We will specifically focus our attention on the ways in which gamification is used to alter behavior in such diverse fields as science, business, and online social media.
Within the realm of science, great emphasis is placed on the process of problem solving and the mindful pursuit of unambiguous truth. Comparing this to the common association of games with diversion, relaxation, and make-believe, it might not be immediately apparent that games can play a large role in the realm of scientific research. However, the gamification of science is not only becoming increasingly common, but has already been implemented to solve immensely complex scientific problems. In the realms of biology and biochemistry alone large scale crowdsourcing games, often called serious games, such as Phylo, Foldit, and eteRNA, have proven successful in solving problems such as genomic analysis, protein folding, and RNA folding, respectively. This form of gamification focuses on problem solving and relies on three key aspects. First, it takes a complex problem that traditionally requires specialized training and immense amounts of time to solve, and translates it into a simplified and well-defined structural puzzle which relies on only a very small number of simple rules. Secondly, it makes these puzzles accessible to a large number of people. Thirdly, it leverages reward and reputation to create engagement, investment, and participation in scientific gameplay. In short, the primary focus of the gamification of science is to convert a largely non-scientist community from non-scientifically engaged citizens into citizen scientists. For instance, in only three weeks, non-scientists playing Foldit were able to unlock the structure of an AIDS related enzyme in monkeys that had baffled scientists and specialists for nearly a decade, bringing the scientific community closer to a potential cure for HIV and other retroactive viruses.
It is amazing that games such as Foldit can take a problem such as solving for the ideal folded shape of a protein, a problem which induces painful flashbacks of chemistry 101 for most people, and convinces non-scientists to dedicate large amounts of time to solving it. How is gamification being used to convince people that solving biochemistry problems is a game, not a chore?
Looking at the three aspects of gamification within science it is worth noting that the first is not something new to science. Scientific disciplines such as chemistry and have long taken complex problems such as the electronic nature of chemical bonding and constructed simplified models to explain observations. The VSEPR model of chemical bonding for example invoke a few simple rules such as: two electrons form a single bond, bonds move but don’t break, and bonds will try to get as far away from each other as possible, to explain the shape of molecules.
While this model is very simple and was first proposed in the 1940s, it remains foundational to how chemists determine molecu