Can gamification make the world a better place?

Can it help people improve the quality of their lives?

Sure, obviously.

At some level, gamification is a tool for motivation, and

that motivation can be something like getting you to buy some more of

a certain breakfast cereal, or getting you to fill out a market research survey.

But it could also be motivating you to eat healthier.

Motivating you to use less energy and therefore reduce your carbon footprint.

Motivating you to learn about personal finance skills,

which are important to help you escape from poverty.

So gamification certainly can be used for social good.

And in fact, I've already mentioned a number of examples in the course so

far that would go in that category.

But it's still worthwhile to look specifically at

gamification in this area for a couple of reasons.

First of all, there are some different issues.

There are some unique challenges for gamification in the social impact or

social good arena, and some interesting opportunities or techniques that

seem to work more effectively for these kinds of applications.

Secondly, it's valuable to see the range of

applications that are out there in the world today.

Things that organizations are already doing in a wide variety of areas,

using gamification as the motivational tool to encourage people to

take actions that are either good for them or good for the world.

And here under social good, I'm lumping in both of those categories,

things that have some societal benefit above and beyond the benefit for

the organization that's putting together the program or

the place where the person works.

That's one kind of gamification for social good.

And the other one is a set of things that involve helping the person become better,

become happier and more fulfilled, healthier.

That may certainly tie into broader social good, and

it may tie into the business interest of certain companies, but fundamentally

the applications are about making people better, making them more awesome.

So I lump both of those into the category of social good and

talk about how gamification can be applied in those areas.

One preliminary issue, is that independent of applications that

are specifically about social good, there's a lot of positive energy and

emotion and engagement that comes out of games,

and that comes out of being involved in truly gamelike activities.

This is something that Jane McGonigal goes into in detail in her book

Reality Is Broken.

Games produce positive energy, they produce sociability,

they make us more focused and engaged on tasks and so forth.

So there's a lot of potential good in making things more gamelike.

There also are some risk and dangers in certain versions of gamification,

as we've talked about.

But it's worth noting that there's a lot of reason to think that purely

trying to find some fun and find some engagement and find that kind of

problem solving spirit of games in any task has some positive social value.

But specifically, what's different about gamification

in a context where the application is deliberately focused on

some kind of social impact or personal impact?

The first issue is motivation,

and it goes to the element of relatedness under self-determination theory.

As I talked about, relatedness is one of the three components of intrinsic,

internal, self-directed,

inherent motivation under self-determination theory.

And it's the one that has to do with being part of something bigger than yourself.

That might be interacting with friends, or

it might be the activity having some greater meaning or purpose.

When we're talking about social good applications,

that's there almost by definition.

That's what distinguishes these kinds of situations from other ones.

There is something involved that is bigger than the individual there's some,

larger social good or some larger life well-being good involved in the activity.

But it's not always simple to unlock the power of that sense of relatedness.

There's always things that we think we should do, or think would be good for

us, or think would be noble and worthy for us to do, and yet we just don't do them.

So gamification in social good context is really primarily about

activating that sense of relatedness, making it meaningful and real so

that people act on their latent desire to engage in some kinds of activities.

Second one is that there's a caveat there, which is that to the extent gamification

is about rewards, people might question, well, is there something troubling

in saying instead of just motivating you because you think this is good.

You're engaged in this activity because you believe in protecting wildlife, or

you're concerned about climate change, or

you want to learn something that is beneficial to you.

Instead of just doing that for the purely intrinsic reason,

maybe there's a danger that gamification puts a premium on doing it for

the short-term reward, for the points, for the badges, for the achievements.

Or maybe even for some prize type award,

some tangible reward that goes along with them.

And that potentially is problematic because it ties into that crowding out or

over justification effect that we saw in the discussion of intrinsic and

extrinsic motivation.

To the extent that gamification for social good is about game elements and

their rewards replacing, or substituting for, the inherent

relatedness-based intrinsic motivation of the activity, that could be a bad thing.

That could actually lead to less beneficial activity.

For example, as I described in the study of day care centers, where giving people

a penalty, charging them for coming late, actually made them come late even more.

So that's something to keep in mind and to avoid in these contexts.

The next one is that most, but not all, of the examples

that involve gamification for social good have some element of behavior change.

So they are about that third broad category of gamification, which I haven't

talked about as much in the course, that's about getting people over the hump.

Doing something that they already want to do.

Changing the way that they act in a certain area.

As opposed to an organization trying to motivate either its external communities,

i.e., customers, or its internal employees and extended networks.

So therefore, part of this unit will be focusing on behavior change and

habit formation as a distinct kind of practice.

10.1 Gamification for Good

游戏化

与讲师见面