My interest was initially caught be the brilliant and awesome Jane Mcgonical and her views on using gaming and gamers to save the world, explained in this TED talk which I strongly recommend to everyone!
Now there seems to be wide agreement that gaming does indeed have vast potential as a learning tool and game theory elements are being used to engage and motivate. A good overview article on this could be Why Game Designers Are Better Motivators Than Your Boss.
One of the points that caught my attention was a reference to Dan Pink’s studies on performance and motivation and his 3 fundamentals of motivation; Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose, also termed M.A.P.
Achieving mastery at something that matters is greatly satisfying. The experience of getting better at something initially difficult when faced with, what Jane Mcgonical would call, an epic story of some sort is a great motivation. This leads us to purpose, the epic meaning, the important and enthralling goal. This is typically where good story telling and context comes in.
Drawing on the example of the Super Mario this point is expressed quite well in the above mentioned article: Is your work having you save any “princesses”, or are you smashing your head against bricks for nothing?
That leaves the the importance of autonomy, and this is an interesting and challenging issue in gamification. While I studied, I also worked for an eLearning company. The challenge of enabling sufficient levels of autonomy when creating eLearning is a significant one. The reason why autonomy is important, is that a crucial part of gaming is the freedom of choice. You choose which tasks to solve and to some extend, how to solve them.
As also mentioned in the article above, game designers are well aware that people game for different reasons, are driven by different motivations and enjoy different kinds of gameplay. In my own work with World of Warcraft I also found that my informants had completely different goals, motivations and ways of playing and experiencing the game. They all agreed that the game's ability to accommodate such different styles of gaming was one of its main assets.
So how can we best facilitate this when creating eLearning? Both the story and the autonomy are apparently important in order to create that oh so effective game-feel. But when does it become too complicated when compared to the learning purpose? An employee being subjected to eLearning in order to learn how to use a new piece of software or a new way of handling a specific situation is likely to get mightily annoyed by lengthy cartoon introductions and an initially confusing myriad of learning options. A person at work, who just needs the information to progress might not really need to spend time on being involved in an epic company-storyline.
So how to strike the balance? A wonderful guideline for any kind of online initiative now is to keep it simple, social and scalable. The level of game-elements, that invoke the three M.A.P fundamentals, must be scaled to the learning objective at hand. Creating a learning platform that facilitates autonomous learning without overpowering with too much "noise", where both the sender of the information and the recipient can scale the information to their own needs and preferences, might be the answer. If we provide a maleable and social platform, game elements might emerge on their own, as people help each other along to achieve their learning goals. After all, we all love playing games.
