Points, Rewards, and Prizes in Games
Games provide players with instant reward in the form of points. Sometimes those points are directly related to the activity. In football video game Madden NFL 12 when a player scores a touchdown, the team earns six points. In the social networking game Mafia Wars points are earned by completing jobs or winning fights which are both activities directly related to the narrative of game which is running a criminal empire. In other games like Super Mario Brothers, you can earn points by collecting coins which is not essential to the goal of the game which is make it to the castle and rescue Princess Toadstool from Bowser.
In addition to points, many games have extra abilities or prizes that can be earned for accomplishing certain tasks within the game. In the video game Call of Duty, rewards can be translated into an upgrade of weapons or the ability to have special tactics available. For example a kill streak (killing eleven opponents without being killed yourself) enables you to “call in the dogs” which provides dogs who sniff out enemies.
There are two views on rewards and badges, one is to make them as easy to get as possible early in a game so that players are hooked and want to continue playing. The other school of thought is to avoid easy badges that are not related to activities that are rewarding in and of themselves. For example, in Call of Duty have a kill streak of eleven is a good accomplishment in and of itself. The subsequent ability to “call in the dogs” is nice but not the main motivator for trying to get an eleven kill streak. It is generally better to link activities within the game to reward than to have random rewards.
Unfortunately, e-learning courses and classroom instruction do not offer easily traceable progress reports like leaderboards, badges or rewards. Wouldn’t it be great to have a corporate leaderboard so employees could know how well they were doing? Or have badges employees wear to know how accomplished they are? The gamification of work provides added incentive to employees through carefully crafted rewards structures.
Posted in: Games
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Do you really think we need more external motivation in our schools? Does that just make a greater divide between the top and the bottom? We need to be asking ourselves how will we implement these things not to have a league table but to engage learners with learning and mapping what they have achieved rather than a motivator for learning.
In games, weaker players still achieve things and work through levels but do so at their own pace. I fear if we take gamification to literally and add exactly the same principles to the class room we will end up turning lots of people off learning.
I wonder if our time would better spent focusing on understanding why players want to keep attempting levels they’ve failed in games but won’t re-learn something they’ve not understood in class. Is it to get the badge or to succeed at the challenge?
If we can work out how to create tasks that offer enough challengeto be interesting but not too hard the turn students off, and that get more difficult as the game progresses then maybe we won’t need league tables in our classrooms and can use badges to map what they can do or have achieved so they can reflect on how they have progressed.
I believe if we can answer that,
Good point but I think that the revolution in form of Mozilla Open Badges will come soon.