Work is no Game

If only it were. A small group of us gathered round the headmaster as he began explaining the ‘smiley system’ that the infants school had implemented: “when the children do something good, such as opening a door or behaving well in class they get a smiley. We keep track of these and when they get a certain number they are allowed to choose something from the reward basket. We used to have a system of awards at the end of each year, but we felt this was a bit demoralising for students who were doing small things – but positive things – every day.”

Sound familiar?

World of Warcraft works like this. Every behaviour earns a variety of possible rewards – from experience points to virtual coin to honor points. There is a variable reinforcement schedule built in as well – random item drops – which help give the game its addictive nature. The trick then is to convert these rewards into something meaningful – what good are smileys after all? The big story is the rise of virtual meaning (to coin a phrase): it turns out that in a uniquely human fashion people identify with their avatars. Unless you are a Korean gold farmer the things you are playing for don’t equate to real money, instead they equate to virtual items (such as clothing or items), virtual status (such as levels), or virtual abilities (such as invisibility). Which people want.

Sure, there are social dimensions to the game but as this blog points out the true motivation is something baser, be it greed or power. Interestingly many games which have no social dimension (such as the excellent Dragon Age 2, or Fallout) still utilise the same mechanisms to great effect. The thoroughly modern craving for upgrades is greatly amplified in the virtual realm.

So the thing to note is that ‘gamification’ can mean a variety of very different things: to some people it implies making something (such as learning) ‘fun’ – through an exploratory dimension for example (some games do this). For others it means the introduction of mechanisms which provide token reinforcement. This latter class of games may well not feel like fun: if you understand the expression ‘grinding for XP’ then you know what I mean.

So what are the implications for learning?

I can think of a couple that generally tend to go unnoticed:

1)    Do we want ‘token learning’? Think back to the ‘smiley’ system implemented at some schools. Does anything trouble you about this? What if it results in children who only exhibit positive behaviours in the expectation of a reward? What happens if those rewards are taken away? If we indulge in ‘gamification’ in the way that most commentators describe, the result may be to rob learning of intrinsic value – paradoxically, to make it a chore. I can easily picture a system in which people complete quizzes to score points; I’m not confident that resulting learning will be more than tokenistic.

2)     Work is not a game. Maybe it should be, but right now it isn’t. This point is consistently missed by advocates of gaming mechanisms. Work differs from games at a fundamental level. Firstly your activity does not relate in any simple way to rewards (unless you work in a contact centre, perhaps). If you were to try to translate work into a game it would be a very odd sort of game. Most of the rules would not be clear. You would not move anywhere. You would guess at the correct responses to thousands of cryptic messages without ever quite knowing how you were doing. You would only ever know if you had done something very wrong. And that might turn out to be something someone else had done. Your reward would be static and monthly – or come at the end of a year, and be subject to economic conditions outside your control. One of your key attributes would be patience.

The reason that this latter point is significant is that at some point, gameification of learning would entail a translation into non-token rewards: financial, status etc. And organisations don’t work that way: if they were going to start rewarding people for the things they do or promote people for their accomplishments, then learning would probably not be where they start. Plenty of organisations have a noble aspiration to be more meritocratic – and I wholeheartedly support this; but along with the aspiration comes the tacit recognition that we are a long way from this today. To put it bluntly why would we start rewarding people for learning, when we don’t yet reward people for completing tasks or solving problems?

You might object that I am describing a narrow sense of ‘gameification’ – but what are the alternatives? Making learning fun is not exclusive to gameification. Teachers and educationalists have been doing this for years; if you’re not already thinking about how to make your learning engaging and enjoyable then you have some catching up to do. And there are lots of ways to do this. That said, ‘good’ learning doesn’t have to be fun: we all hear a great deal about learning from mistakes, and failure is rarely experienced as fun.

But I don’t think it’s all bad: I haven’t touched on ‘mastery’ as a game mechanism, and this holds out hope. Games, simulations or scenarios which allow for mastery via repetition can work well: the challenge then becomes transferability – the extent to which mastery of the game leads to mastery of something meaningful for the business. Typing games such as word invaders seem to do this well.

I do think that gameification has a bright future. Probably not in learning, though. Rather, just as performance consulting looks to provide solutions to performance problems, so gameification (used here to refer to token reward schemes) will be a tool to be used in combination with learning interventions to effect performance gains. Gameification (in the guise of immediate feedback and reward) is the complement to performance support. Starting with more junior roles, the organisation of the future will recognise and reward effective behaviours and track and remedy ineffective ones - as they happen. And gameification will more often than not remove the need for learning: take, for example the Honda Jazz, where a virtual plant flourishes on your dashboard when you drive economically. No 30 min e-learning course about sustainable living required.