De-Gamification

By Harry van Vliet on 16 February 2012

Although gamification is so 2011, I bet we will be seeing it cropping up here and there in 2012 and beyond. Why? Because it is such a simple and yet powerful concept: we all know our ‘games’ and we all can come up with examples how certain incentives helped us achieve our goals, whether it was money, game points or esteem. So why not incorporate ‘gamification’ into more (social) activities such as health, education, environmental issues and make the world a better place? There’s nothing to loose, is there? Yes there is, gamification can crowd out intrinsic pleasure or moral motives. In other words, there is potential harm in gamification…

There are a lot of nice experiments that offer us insights into people’s behaviour. A famous one is the Israeli day care centre that faced the problem that more and more parents kept coming late to pick up their kids. So they announced a fine for lateness, thinking that parents now have two good reasons to pick up their children on time: it was their obligation and they would pay a fine if they failed so. But the day care centre was in for a surprise: lateness increased. What happened was that coming late shifted from a moral decision (it is not right to do so if agreed upon) to a financial decision, as a payment for a service (for a small fine I can come late without feeling bad about it, I pay them right?). Incentives (or fines) have a way to frame situations in a transactional way, which is competing with social motives.

James Heyman and Dan Ariely did a similar experiment: they asked passers by to help with loading a couch onto a van. Some were offered a modest fee and some were not, in this way people could frame the situation as a financial one (working for a fee) or as social transaction (doing someone a favour). In the first case people would start asking themselves ‘is this worth my time and effort?’. A small fee saw less people helping loading the coach then no fee at all…

More related to the gamification issue is an experiment with nursery school children. In this experiment children were giving special felt-tipped drawing pens. After a playful period in which a psychologist measured the time the children spent drawing with pens, the children were separated in two groups: one group were told they could achieve ‘good player’ awards with their drawings, the other group were told nothing. After a few weeks the drawing pens were again handed out to the children, with no further instruction, promise or any award. Children who had received awards earlier on were less likely to draw with the pens at all, spent less time with it and drew pictures that were judged to be less complex, interesting, and creative.

Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe use these examples in their book Practical Wisdom (2010) to make the following claim: “Incentives like money, prizes, or awards can ‘crowd out’ the pleasure people get from an activity (drawing or solving puzzles). They can crowd out the moral motives that drive an activity (day care or nuclear waste). And they can crowd out the inclination people have to be helpful to others.” (p. 195). Given that people have multiple reasons for doing things (work, leisure, social behaviour) there is always the possibility that a social context of morally good behaviour is suddenly framed as an economical transactional situation. In their book they give numerous examples of how people in their working environment are (forced to) switch frames of references. People that work around this produce inspiring results in the classroom, the courtroom and the hospital. Read their book to see how people struggle with this and institutions are a kind of natural enemy to keep the telos in focus.

In order to interpret this behaviour, Schwartz & Sharpe revitalize Aristotle’s concept of telos. Telos is the purpose or aims of a practice: the telos of teaching is to educate students, the telos of doctoring is to promote health and relieve suffering; the telos of lawyering is to pursue justice. Every profession has such a telos. The point being that it takes hard work to translate the very general aims of a practice into concrete action. This is what they call ‘practical wisdom’ which stresses that there is more than sticks and carrots, fines and achievements. Gamification lives in a world of sticks and carrots; gamification is bad for your telos…

tagged with: telos, gamification, psychology

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