The value of gamification

By Laura Farr

Jane McGonigal predicates that there is a value to gamification – utilizing games to better society. With close to 160,000,000,000 hours spent on online gaming in the last year (15,000,000,000 hours on World of Warcraft alone) she argues that these games can be used to further positive engagement in society. Although these games may seem to disengage the user from reality, they actually set up a sub-section of society that can create better individuals, teams, and societies.

The challenge lies in creating what she calls “the epic win” scenario. In a game, several players have to work together to reach an end goal by utilizing the tools at hand for the best possible outcome – winning, finishing the mission, saving the princess, etc. Achievement of a successful outcome creates an elation that brings the team members closer together, or the “Epic Win”.

Can we create the “Epic Win” in real life, or is this phenomenon something that is only relatable to online play culture?

Games have long been used as an educational tool to teach social systems, communication, politics, ecology, health, history, relationships, marketing, business, language skills, economics, geography, and mathematics. Games have been used to help make decisions on marriage, career exploration, hiring decisions, or deciding admission into college. Some have event wondered aloud if gaming would eventually replace the lecture as the main method of teaching.

“The ‘MTV generation’ of students these days can not just learn – they must be entertained while they learn. If they are not entertained, then you’ve lost them” says John F. Affisco of Hofstra University. He does admit, however, that, “perhaps it is not so much that students need to be entertained as much as it is that their culture has conditioned them to interact in a certain way with information. Students are not necessarily lazier than their predecessors; they have been raised in a completely different environment that seems to call for a new way of learning… Simulation and gaming offers our best chance of reaching these students.”

Gamification has a vocal detractor in Heather Chaplin, Associate Professor of Journalism at The New School in New York. She decries McGonigal’s enthusiasm saying that (McGonigal) “Is not advocating any kind of real change… but rather a change in perception. She wants to add a game-like layer to the world to simulate these feelings of satisfaction, which indeed people want.”

Yet, earlier this fall there was an announcement from FoldIt, a discovery game supported by the University of Wisconsin that allows players to contribute to biochemistry by “folding and designing proteins”. The big news was that gamers had helped solve the structure of an enzyme found in an HIV-related virus in less than three weeks, while scientists had been stumped by this structure for more than a decade.

Given the fact that the average child spends more than 10,000 hours engaged in online gaming before the age of 21, gamification could produce more “blissfully productive and super-powered hopeful individuals that are capable of changing the world” (McGonigal) as a by-product of the millions of gamers globally that are already willing to collaborate with each other to reach the “epic-win” scenario. This could very well result in an epic win-win for society as we know it. As McGonigal muses, “It’s as easy to save the world in real life as it is online; you just need to convince people to play bigger and better games.”

LAURA FARR is a civically engaged, community-minded downtown resident.

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