Why Everything Shouldn’t Be A Game
Margaret Robinson, of Hide&Seek, the game designers, on why everything shouldn’t be ‘gamified’:
Margaret Robinson, Can’t play, won’t play
Games offer fail conditions as well as win conditions. They are able to deliver the high levels of emotional engagement they’re famed for because they’re also adept at delivering the lows of loss, humiliation and frustration. The world of user experience design from which the concept of gamification has arisen has spent the last twenty years erasing loss, humiliation and frustration from its flows. A world of badges and points only offers upwards escalation, and without the pain of loss and failure, these mean far less. And when this upward escalation is based only on accumulation of points, rather than on expressions of my choices and my skills, then this further strips out the sense of agency and competence, so crucial to the emotional and neurological buzz we get from gaming.
It’s crucial that we stop conflating points and games.
Firstly, because it devalues points. Points are great. So are badges. Everything you’re reading on the pro-gamification posts about how powerful they are as motivators and rewards is spot on. Game designers resort to them – I resort to them – so often because they’re fantastic tools, and as with all tools there is real art and science behind deploying them well. They deserve to be studied, refined and adapted on their own terms, with their own vocabulary.
But secondly, because it misrepresents games. Gamification is an inadvertent con. It tricks people into believing that there’s a simple way to imbue their thing (bank, gym, job, government, genital health outreach program, etc) with the psychological, emotional and social power of a great game. And when their gamified thing doesn’t deliver on that promise, the only rational thing for them to do is to turn round and say ‘Games don’t work! We gamified the dickens out of this thing, and it still didn’t make as much money/reach as many users/generate as much social heat as World of WarCraft/Farmville/Minecraft’. Any game designer looking at their gamified thing would say, ‘Of course it didn’t do what those things did! Those things are all games and your thing isn’t!’ But they won’t be heard, because they won’t be in the room, since – and this is very telling – the gamification process rarely involves any actual game designers.
Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither.
It’s important that we make the distinction between the two undertakings because, amidst all this confusion, we’re losing sight of the question of what would happen if we really did apply the deeper powers of game design to more everyday things – if we really did gamify them – and that question is a fascinating, exciting and troubling one. I really hope we get a chance to explore it properly.
I have been making a supporting argument, badly: puttin badges and points into every social application trivializes what they proxy in social tools, which is reputation. Instant reputation is like instant coffee: at its best, it’s still ersatz and inferior to the real thing.
So, games are fine, just like money and sex. But we don’t put money and sex into every social app either.
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