A few quick thoughts

There will be more blog posts coming on various topics I've mentioned before (or tweeted about), I promise. In fact, it's quite possible I finally got past my bloggers block today by doing a little work on one of my slow moving posts. In the mean time though here are a few more thoughts on gamification.

• When I say that you've gotta have a simulation, I mean specifically that all games function through the creation of a rule system that dictates possible player actions. Note that I'm not reducing play to rules here, just stating that games require rules (we'll come back to play). These systems of rules are distinct from the rules that we apply in other aspects of our lives. In particular, they are more narrowly defined. In this sense, the rule sets that we develop to play games are massively simplified models of the various logical systems that we create to make sense of other aspects of human experience, and make our way through the world.

• Nothing I wrote in that last section was really new, and there are other people out there who have way more expertise on the history behind these theories. However, I feel like this whole gamification conversation forces us to go back to basics, and I don't see enough of a push out there back to first principles, so I'm taking a rough stab at it.

• While we're on the subject of simulations (or at least were two points ago), it's a bit of a double entendre when it comes to digital games. Not only does all that rule stuff apply, but it applies at the level of code as well. Actually, maybe it's not so much a double entendre as it is at least doubly relevant . . . . hmm, I'm not going to try to unpack that particular issue over the course of a handful of bullet points about gamification, but the point is that if people are trying to talk about making things more video game like, then that whole simulation piece becomes even more critical.

• The word play is a tremendous pain in the ass. It is, nonetheless, extremely important when talking about games and what makes something game like. I'll come back to this again, but I just wanted to emphasize what a bugbear that word is in doing intellectual work on games.

• People are using gamification with reckless abandon. I have heard or seen it used to describe educational and social impact game development. It has been deployed in describing making classrooms more game like. It has been used to describe the work Jane McGonigal does. I have seen it used to refer to the game design behind Zynga's various Villes. I have even seen it used to describe someone playing a game on their laptop while sitting in a session about something else at a conference (although that may have been ironic). I find this gamification bleed effect truly problematic.

• Personally, I feel as though we'd all be better off limiting the application of the term gamification to the family of things closely related to what Ian Bogost has labeled as explotationware.

• I don't personally believe that all gamification efforts actually involve exploitationware, and conversely I'm pretty sure that most exploitationware is not actually making anything more game-like. However, the term gamification has definitely stuck in reference to exploitationware, and was probably generated by folks who were out to design exactly that. As a result, we basically have to include certain types of exploitationware in talking about gamification.

• Frequent flyer systems and other reward systems are not gamification. They're simply not. Not only do they seriously pre-date the term, but they also have another name: loyalty systems. Can these systems be gamed? Of course, almost any system can be gamed. That does not make implementation of a system gamification. Please people, stop talking about frequent flyer programs as an example of gamificaiton. It's just embarrassing. It's like talking about your grandmother's coupon collection as gamification.

• To come back briefly to the "play" thing, it's always worth remembering that the light hearted associations we have to the words play and games are kind of incidental when it comes to the various emotional states involved with playing games. Here-in lies one of the key sticking points in the seductive nature of gamification as a rhetorical device (as Ian pointed to). There's a lot more to unpack here, and like the first bullet point, there are folks out there with way better command of the theory than I have at this point.

• Just because a system has users does not mean that it has players. This is maybe the most important point, and it rests on some elements that I haven't fully articulated in this argument yet. However, I need to put my laundry in the dryer, and there are already nine other marginally connected bullets in this blog post. The bottom line in my book: If your users are not players, you have not made the experience more like a game.