Gaming and the liberal arts

"People who might not be completely familiar with the game world look at fancy graphics and polished gameplay and say 'this is cutting edge,' " he continued. "But from what I've seen, it's still quite basic. Very much a checkers mentality -- red against black, good against evil. I'm interested in having good and evil within the same character, and for you to experience both. I think that's true to life, and I think you can design a game around that, too."

the claim that we've never explored using game-like mechanics for non-entertainment purposes keeps us from using knowledge we actually have: gamification's rhetoric claims that this is a new, unexplored space in which we're just learning things for the first time. But in fact we already know a lot of things about how gamification works and doesn't work, and have done a lot of thinking about the relationships between things like extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, and gameplay, and pretending that we don't know any of that isn't a good way to make progress. I mostly ignored gamification for a while, considering it a brief marketing trend. But if it's here to stay, perhaps we ought to retroactively broaden it, and include things like "socialist competition" as an experiment in gamification worth learning lessons from

gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway

The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about—a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter.

I realize that using games earnestly would mean changing the very operation of most businesses. For those whose goal is to clock out at 5pm having matched the strategy and performance of your competitors, I understand that mediocrity's lips are seductive because they are willing.