If you really want to gamify something, you need to make the core loop be something to explore and master. Buying an airplane ticket or staying at a hotel isn’t something you “master.” Piling up points is not good gamification.

I would have agreed with you a year ago, but upon joining a consulting firm where travel is the norm four days a week, I can vouch that some people have truly “mastered” travel, optimized hotel points and learned how to understand and exploit a corporate system — just think of Clooney in “Up in the Air”. Major airline and hotel chains have created systems with fairly intricate “core loops,” however, unlike a good game, they are not inherently interesting. They are only interesting so far as you can use them to your own benefit (and when you have a peer group that values them).

To make it more concrete, Starwood hotels offer different levels of “status” that can be achieved by nights or stays. The stay requirement is a significantly lower number than the night requirement. Now Starwood’s system is sophisticated enough to catch you checking in and out of the same hotel in the same day, but not sophisticated enough to catch you moving hotels within a city, so travelers will switch hotels every night in order to gain stays toward “platinum status.” To this system you add promotions targeting specific hotels or nights, the Starwood credit card, and you have a fairly sophisticated core loop. At least as sophisticated as an achievement for killing x number of furbolgs.

All of that aside, I think your argument is compelling. The best games have something to teach — whether that is negotiation from “Settlers of Catan” or timing and strategy in Starcraft II. Thanks Raph.

Yukon is right. Learning something is a food pellet. So is mindless excitement. The problem is turning gaming into an intellectual exercise devoid of passions. A lot, probably the majority, aren’t all that stimulated by math puzzles.

Interesting timing to read this. We just had a presentation about a point/reward provider for education, where students earn points that can be reimbursed for virtual or real world items. Kind of like selling magazine subscriptions, earning points, and being able to turn them in for fabulous prizes.

@ Yukon,

Satiation! I’d not thought of that. That explains my thought better than I did.

@ Sebastian,

Arguably, Pachinko would be an example where the novelty of a lot of noise and motion doesn’t wear off terribly fast. The minimal gambling mechanic (or reward structure, depending on which terminology you want to use) appears sufficient to prevent this. Less joy, certainly, but when the sinister goal is to make something compelling…

(Also, yes! Good to see you back, Raph! I’d just been assuming you were taking a holiday break.)

Good to see you back.
And I perfectly agree – I tried to make the argument in the deck garumoo kindly mentioned (http://slidesha.re/gsZ7Sk, slide 29).
However, there is something to be said for the pleasure and novelty of *juicy* feedback, the joy of minimum input->maximum effect, like a baby enjoying hitting a mobile because that simple movement creates a lot of noise and motion. But then again, just like that mobile, the pleasures of novelty wear off quickly, so though it has merit, its far less sustainable than the joy of a deep system to master.

It’s specifically the more Skinnerian aspects that entice the interest of certain groups. How can we use this to sell more airline tickets?

To them, “gamification” would be specifically about what to add to their marketing to get customers to hit the pellet-bar more (and more, what they can cheapest and most easily add; depth is rarely either).

I mean, how long have the “buy 12 lunches/coffees, get one free” style punchcards been around? Achievement: Free Sandwich? You just know right now, someone is in a conference room asking “Okay, so how can we gamify our marketing campaign?”

@Garumoo: That’s a really good presentation! Thanks for the link!

It’s unfortunate that most social games are relying only on positive feedback to drive their experiences. Why is it that even the slightest shred of complexity is a sin in that space?

Thank you for speaking out on this issue. Honestly I tend to ignore most of this “adding points and calling it gamification” stuff entirely – it’s painful to think about. I do hope that it leads more people to think about what a game really is, though.

Any activity is more rewarding and engaging if it provides the actor with Autonomy, Challenge, and Responsiveness (i.e. feedback on the results of actions, and on improvement). Games are among the most rewarding/engaging activities out there because they can provide these three things in spades – people often escape into games because their day-to-day life contains little or none of the above.

All of this “gamification” just seems like people trying to improve Responsiveness/Feedback in order to make activities more rewarding and engaging. This is a fantastic idea, and I’m sure they can learn a lot from games since we’ve developed a number of tools to improve feedback on a player’s progress in developing a skill, among other things. But it’s not “gamification” because it has nothing to do with games.

I expect a lot of activities will have new feedback systems bolted onto them and the resulting improvement will be virtually nil – because there activity affords little or no Autonomy and/or Challenge. Buying an airline ticket being a perfect example.

The fascinating thing to me is that “gamification” of this kind can be applied to any job, including game development. Increasing these three elements in an activity increases the chances of that becoming a “flow” activity… which is desirable in making your game experiences… and I think it’s something that managers should think about in making the experience of game development better as well. I touched on that parallel in a recent blog post.

Glad you’re back to blogging!

Looking forward to reading more posts Raph.

An interesting slideshare presentation which hammers this point too: Pwnd: Gamification and its discontents

Good to see you posting again, Raph.

Also; you’re totally right.