You need to be careful with gamification.
I stopped wearing my fitness tracker a while back. Turns out, after a while the endless data, challenges, prompts and apps began to sap the intrinsic enjoyment of running. I began to feel like the device was controlling me.
Gamification can kill the 'why'.
In my previous post I talked about the importance of the 'why' - the way that it links our activity to a deeper narrative; our personal story. In an ideal world, your work is meaningful - you are passionate about what you do, proud of your work.
Gamification provides an artificial 'why' - activity which was meaningless becomes significant by virtue of a system of tokens and reinforcements that links it to things that do mean something to you: like money, or prizes, or status. This is rats & levers - this is operant conditioning.
So I think you can see the problem: you can bring about big changes in performance through the scientific implementation of gamification (behaviour modification) approaches. But it may kill the 'why'.
So if there is no chance that what you are asking people to do will ever have any real significance for them - then use gamification. But if you actually want people to care about their work, it's probably not the way to go.
I've always been skeptical of gamification efforts (tactics?) and the "why" you speak of certainly reinforces the issues I've had. To me gamification is the easy way out. Its a bandaid at best, one that doesn't stick long enough anyway. The real problem is work that lacks meaning, purpose... a difference. Organizations do need to look at what they are asking people to do and people need to do their research to really understand what is being asked of them before taking it on.
ReplyDeleteHi Mark. I agree. It's not just a hunch - the 'overjustification effect' is well-researched (https://explorable.com/overjustification-effect) and describes the way in which these kinds of systems actually damage intrinsic motivation. I get that not all activity is going to be meaningful to the people doing it - so there is a role for gamification - but it does disturb me to hear that people have 'gamified' learning; that's a great way to kill your learning culture!
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