Embarking on A Journey: From Gamification to Game Design

A couple of months ago, I set out to write a literature review on the effectiveness of gamification in instructional settings, and I hoped to find more academic literature on the topic. Honestly, I had a hard time finding anything. To get at what I was looking for, I decided I needed to go a little deeper, and instead look for academic studies focusing on or around the core components or psychological principles behind gamification - because you would never find any physics papers on "Why stones fall to the ground," but there has been a lot written about gravity.

What I found, I must admit, was quite embarrassing. Embarrassing for me.

You see, when I originally became enamored with gamification I thought that it was some revolutionary design method that contained within it a brave new world of ideas for turning education on its head. I was interested in dissecting what game design and marketing techniques had to teach the educational industry, how to build a canon of new "gamification techniques,"and then study approaches to increase learner engagement with these new techniques. I was interested in badges, achievements, levels, and What I found was that gamification is not new, and once reduced to it's component parts it is pretty easy to understand. It is simply the act of applying the core principles for creating engaging experiences in games to instructional settings. I realized that none of those things (badges, etc.) are really what makes up gamification, but just one arbitrary expression of the mechanics that are fundamental to making engaging user experiences.

Understand yet why I am embarrassed?

I was looking for something new, something revolutionary, I thought I had found it in the staples of gamification, and I thought gamification was centrally different from educational games. What I found was that gamification comes out looking more like a rising tendency for designers/educators to apply a specific set of methods that work in games to other educational settings in order to gain and maintain user engagement - probably connected to the rising trend in our society towards video game use in general. I've mentioned in previous posts how I feel about user engagement in the education industry, and I've always known that was the end goal, but I didn't connect the dots between game design and gamification. Up until that moment, I had never once thought that an effective study of gamification is really a study of game design, with the intention of extracting operational principles for use in non-game settings.

I'm sure you're all giving me the facepalm of a lifetime, "D'uhh!" you're saying to yourself. Well, I agree - that's why I'm embarrassed.

But I've found that I'm not the only one that made that particular mistake. If you look at the only one-star rating of The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Instruction on Amazon.com, you'll see that at least one other person who read that book(an excellent read) was disappointed to find "nothing new" in a study of gamification methods, which coincidentally looks at game design and game mechanics and discusses how to apply those core principles to non-game settings.

This discovery has led me to change course in my studies of gamification, and so I've labeled this blog post the beginning of a journey, because in the future I will be researching game design, with the intention of applying those engagement principles in my other instructional designs, rather than continuing my study of gamification.

Even before this realization, I had really come to embrace the idea of gamification according to the definition provided by Kapp: "using game-based mechanics, aesthetics, and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning, and solve problems." which includes applying core mechanics of games to designs up to the point where they can either be classified as games or at least as very game-like. I already believed that building an educational game could be classified as gamification. Now, I've pushed that belief a touch further so that I believe proper gamification is building a game, and that works for instruction because the principles that make games enjoyable, rewarding, and interesting can also make instruction enjoyable, rewarding, and interesting. 

Thus begins my new series of posts, what I learn and what I think others can learn about instructional design from games. I call it my "Game Design Journey."