Gamification is using videogame mechanics into something different than a videogame. Why making a gamificated philophical system like this one? Because videogame mechanics are effective, because it’s the way the new generations thinks, because videogames are cooler than reality and because I’m a Game Designer and my main way of thinking is using Game Mechanics everywhere. Moreover, I’m using an evolved concept I pompously call Gamification 3.0. Maybe these ideas have been already used or maybe not. I’m a terrible researcher.
As an example of my bad research skills, I was already developing this system before I even knew gamification actually exists. So, I started learning about it, and realized that what everybody was doing sucked, despite being so trendy.
Gamification 1.0: Mechanics
What I call Gamification 1.0 is the use mechanics are not only quite simple, but also not very effective. Mainly the obsession with PBL: Points, Badges y Leaderboards. Points are not fun by their own, only the result of gameplay. Taking out from it have no sense. It’s like having 50 points for killing a monster, and 100 por chopping his head off. The fun stuff is beheading monsters, not accumulate points. Points are only a reinforcement, but reinforce something that is not fun is pointless.
The same could be said about badges and leaderboards. You can make the overall experience more structured and easy to understand for somebody with a videogame background, but it’s not more fun. And why using videogame stuff if you are not focused on fun?
In my own system I have seen more effective some other mechanics, like LevelUp, Unlocking or Scale. But they are just that, mechanics/dynamics/aesthetics. But we need to upgrade the idea in order to make it more useful.
Gamification 2.0: Complete Game
Gamification 2.0 goes beyond using game mechanics in other stuff: Designing projects as they were videogames. In detail:
- Everything should work together and influence in the whole picture.
- Extremely interactive. This depends on the design, but the player should be able to do much more than just vote or buy. This interaction and the interface should resemble a videogame.
- Objectives and winning conditions have to be very clear, and depend directly on player actions.
- And, of course, the outcome must be fun.
Process:
- Establish the objective and winning conditions. What you want to achieve with the project.
- Make a brainstorming with all the possible aids to obtain that objective.
- Traduce those helps into mechanics, trying that these mechanics include as many of these aids as possible, and make them connected with the rest of the system. The more connected, the better the gamification will work.
- Design the final result, structuring all the mechanics into a single design, like in a videogame.
This is the way I designed, in the first years of Gaminds, a musical band: Game Gods.
This aproach is close to Jane McNonigal’s own gamification evolution, that she called Gameful Design.
Gamificación 3.0: Total Game
As I was developing the system, I noticed that the Gamification concept could raise a level, using the Scale mechanics.
The tactic scale is a soldier, a mechanic. The operational one is a batallion, many mechanics acting as a whole. And the strategic scale is war itself, deciding which war to fight on and what you want to achieve. It’s the reason to use all those mechanics.
An example. In the first scale, we could have a mechanic to count the sales of a record in order to unlock an extra video when a thresold is reached. In the second one, we have several mechanics structured to help artists to fund their projects, like Kickstarter. But the final result does not make the world better in anyway more than producing the record, something that can be done anyway with more traditional methods. In level 3, everything points to higher ideals that give them meaning, like helping mankind in the case of Gaminds.
In Gaminds, Gamification 3.0 applies to each single Gaminds, which points to the Epic Objectives. The ones not linked yet are called PreGaminds.
In this way, everyone can make their own Gaminds, if they can point to those Objectives. Or using the principles of Gamification 3.0 for a different system with different big-scale objectives.
We can summarize it this way:
Gamification 1.0: What everybody uses.
Gamification 2.0: Gameful Design.
Gamification 3.0: Gaminds.
Anyway, the term Gamification is a bit spoiled nowadays. Maybe it doesn’t need to level up. Maybe what I propose is not gamification at all. I don’t know, and I don’t care very much.