Customers and developers of educational solutions are not always familiar with the features of gamification, which is why they do not get the desired effect from it. When is gamification necessary and how can it be distinguished from badgeification?
Interest in gamification in education is consistently high. For example, the TalentLMS company surveyed its clients and found that 61% of respondents are trained with its use, while 83% of those who learned through gaming practices noted high motivation for learning. Among those who took training without gamification, only 28% felt motivated. SberUniversity regularly conducts EdTech market research, and year after year gamification is among the most popular educational technologies.
But customers and developers of educational solutions are not always familiar with the peculiarities of its application, and therefore do not get the proper result.
As Vyacheslav Yurchenkov, head of the Center for the Development of Educational Technologies at SberUniversity, notes, in the public mind, this concept is often mistakenly associated with primitive badging. It seems to many that to create a gaming environment, it is enough to give points, give out rewards, invent levels and indicate the position of the player in the ranking. In many cases, such external incentives are really justified – for example, when you need to arouse the user’s primary interest in a fairly monotonous action, say, tell an employee about updates to the software interface.
But external motivation undermines internal motivation and will not be effective in the long run, as more and more powerful external incentives will be required.
Intrinsic motivation leads to more sustainable results because it allows us to do things without external rewards and controls. Intrinsic motivation is closely related to meaning: if we personally consider some action or goal to be meaningful, we do not need any coercion or encouragement from outside.
The game allows you to find new meanings, and then discover them for yourself already in a real environment. If badgeification is meant to sweeten up an activity that seems unpleasant or boring, then full-fledged gamification allows you to find meaning in it yourself.
Rob Alvarez, associate director of online education, author of the Professor Game podcast, IE University:
“Don’t demonize extrinsic motivation. It works great in reasonable doses to get people involved. Then you need to connect the internal.
Gamification, on the other hand, is not about collecting badges, but about increasing motivation to do some work. For example, it will help encourage the student to read the case before class, to increase the priority of this case over many other equally important activities.
In the long run, the goal of motivation is to change habits without coercion. If you force a person to change their behavior, you violate ethical standards, and sooner or later a person naturally begins to resist such an invasion of his personal space. As soon as the listener realizes that they are being manipulated, demotivation occurs.”
Differences between badgeification and gamification
Badgeification is a primitive approach to gamification, the use of the simplest game tools without understanding the meaning of their use. As a rule, in badging there is a focus on elements from the PBL triad – points, badges, leaderboards (points, badges, leaderboards) and rewards (and even punishments).
Miroslava Bronnikova, the founder and development director of the Why42 Gambling Club, is sure that gamification, in turn, involves the meaningful addition of game rules to any context in order to make it more interesting for players. In doing so, three important aspects must be observed:
- Pleasure
Compliance with the game rules makes reality more fun.
- Connection with reality
In a gamified environment, the player performs the same actions that were expected without it.
- Voluntariness
The player can refuse to participate in this system at any time. If you have to force people to play your game, you’ve made a bad game.
Seven levels of gamification
Good gamified systems are usually designed so that a person constantly feels in control of the process, understands that the game is made for him, and does not force him to do something against his will in a manipulative way. It must be remembered that the game is a safe space for experimentation. The worst thing a developer can do is punish players in the real world for their actions in the game.
In ATD Game Thinking: From Content to Actions, Kineo Educational Designer Zsolt Olah offers a small model to help you choose the right level of gamification depending on your educational need and the complexity of your solution. This model demonstrates that the simplest solutions, such as game design, can be done as long as it suits the learning goal.
The elements of the scheme are arranged from left to right as the solution approaches a full-fledged game:
- game design
Purpose: to attract attention. This can be achieved with small, entertaining elements that can be built into the interface.
Example: changing emoji when entering a password (😊 is a secure password, 😟 is a weak password).
- Structured gamification
Purpose: to evoke extrinsic motivation. This can be achieved by embedding incentive elements.
Example: reward listeners for watching videos with points.
- Gamification through action (content)
Purpose: mastering the material. Achieved by adding game elements to the main educational content.
Example: compiling a course map.
- Gamified tasks
Purpose: feedback. It is obtained by using quizzes and other popular game formats for the acquisition and assessment of knowledge.
Example: an offer to take a quiz and reflect on the results.
- Game simulations
Purpose: simulation of practice using a simplified model of a real situation or process.
Example: the ability to go through tasks several times dedicated to working out the most common mistakes.
- Business games with a full game cycle
Purpose: gameplay.
Example: an educational game with a storyline, quests, tasks, character growth, and so on.
- Sandbox: a game without linear restrictions
Purpose: self-expression.
Example: Minecraft EDU is an educational version of Minecraft where players create their own spaces and interact with each other unlimitedly.
The use of gamification always requires a broader context, notes Tatyana Chernigovskaya, professor, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Education, director of the Institute for Cognitive Research, St. Petersburg State University: “In an applied sense, it is really necessary to think about who these homo ludens are “playing people”. If your goal is to teach a person to make dumplings faster than a machine, it might make sense to do it through simple tricks. And you want to teach a person to think, you need a completely different approach.