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As the semester got rolling, I realized that I’d made a new course preparation into a potentially life-consuming task.

The site reflected my commitment to designing the class assignments around collaborative mission-based tasks that would increase in difficulty level each week and reward multiple paths of completion. Each week I tried to think beyond discussion topics and create playful mechanics–the real challenge of harnessing gameplay, which no site can provide on its own–and some weeks it was hard to escape giving assignments that would never feel playful.

many of the students appreciated the greater sense of collaboration

Ian Bogost escalated his anti-gamification campaign with a Gamasutra article that explicitly mentioned how the rhetoric of gamification is drawing attention from educators to a trend that threatens “to replace real incentives with fictional ones,” among many other sins. The piece even inspired Darius Kazemi to build a Chrome extension that replaces “gamification” with “exploitationware.”