“Gamification is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts.” (Deterding et al 2011)
“[S]erious games describes the use of complete games for non-entertainment purposes.” (ibid.)
Deterding, S., Khaled, R., Nacke, L. E., & Dixon, D. (2011).
Gamification: Toward a Definition. Paper presented at the CHI 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Gamification is about designing computer systems that do at least one of the following:
- create engagement
- reinforce motivation
- change behavior
- persuade
I've attached the slides from a presentation of gamification I did for the Design group at UiO on the 29th of September 2016.
Relevant master thesis projects at UiO:
- Gamification:
“Designing Semantic Enrichment for non-expert users in a News Outlet website”
“OAsearch: A crowdsourced search engine for scholarly OA publications, gamified to enhance user motivation”
“App for Sharing E-Charging points.” - Serious games:
“The Design of Educational Games: ENKI”
“Scientific hangman”
Examples, gamification:
- Duolingo.com is a language learning environment developed at CMU by a team lead by Luis von Ahn. It is now a Google project. Setting up a course for a new language is crowdsourced to a team (there is some selection process in place). When you gain some level of knowledge (seems to be "knowing 50 % of the words", whatever that means) of a language, you are invited to translate documents that are uploaded for translation. This feature seems less well integrated with the site than the rest. This TED talk explains the concept and business model. To keep students motivated, a careful track of progress is made, leveles are awarded, and students are rewarded with "Lingots" for completing assignments. "Lingots" can be used to purchase more advanced game features.
- StackExchange.com: On the surface, this is an "Question & Answer"-site where users ask questions about all sorts of things (segmented by sub-site), from Theoretical Computer Science to Philosophy. For several subjects, it is the best source on the web for precise knowledge about a given subject (outperforming WikiPedia for instance). And if you look under the hood, you'll see that one of its main motivators is gamification.
- HeadSpace.com: Gamification of mindfulness and meditation.
Examples, serious games:
- GetKahoot.com: This Game-based blended learning & classroom response platform that is used at NTNU. It allows anyone to create a quiz or a survey, and deploy it for real-time classroom use and to be shared by others. The game-play and production values are great, but seems to be lacking in the QA area - some of the quizes have "trick" answers that simply confuse students. Chief architect is Alf Inge Wang.
- Enki: A platform game for K12 education (levels 5-7) in mathematics.
- DragonBox: A serious game to teach algebra.
If you know other examples of gamification or serious games done well, please let me know!
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