Gaming and the liberal arts

That's what this is about: making things count, commodifying life and passion in the context of a marketplace of education and expertise. However, it is painfully obvious how quickly that gets reversed, how quickly we shift from pursuing something because we are interested in it (and then retrospectively looking for a reward) to pursuing something strictly for the reward.

When we look at all the free, DIY learning that is out there now, it's free precisely because it hasn't been commodified. You can download stuff from MIT's Open Courseware because that kind of learning has no commerical value. If you want to get a badge though, that's going to cost. All the big textbook publishers and educational technology companies will just jump right on badges. All those Sylvan learning type companies will be selling badges. Edutainment video games and such will come with badges and thus be more expensive.  Badges won't make learning cheaper. We'll be spending more money on education than ever, and we won't get any better results because the motives for learning will still be all wrong.

I'm trying to imagine my kids' lives (ages 10 and 12) in badge-world. We already live in what I consider a college-crazy community where parents of 12-year olds wonder whether keeping their kid in travel soccer is the best way to get a college scholarship or if they should switch to golf or oboe or fill-in-the-blank. Imagine a world where every potential after-school activity is commodified as a badge. The first thing parents ask is "which badge is most valuable for getting my kid into college or a good job?" Then it's all about the badges. My kids can just give up on ever having a single moment of joy in their lives. Even if they were going to enjoy something, how can they when they've already committed to this transactional experience instead?

the revelation born out in long term studies is that ultimately it backfires. Over time, people engaged in activities that are structured by and sustained through operant conditioning grow to resent or hate those activities, and their creativity in approach as well as their productivity declines.

Ian Bogost has done an excellent job identifying gamification rhetoric as bullshit, and suggesting many of its products are exploitationware. In light of Kohn’s work we are compelled to add that the logic of gamification is the logic of corrosion

If the goal is to get users to simply DO something, then the logic of gamification may not read as corrosive – just effective

Deus Ex: "I was overwhelmed by a feeling of pointlessness very early on, and I felt so cheated that I actually threw the CD in in the bin."

These arn't not classic games. Guardian sort yourself out and get a real games editor!

I discuss his key idea: that systemic thinking is a liberal art, and I explain a corollary idea, that textbooks suck

if you don’t have a category for an idea, it’s very difficult to receive that idea

the story of the last few hundred years is that we’ve quickly developed important ideas, which society needs to have to improve and perhaps even to continue to exist, and for which there are no pre-existing, genetically created categories. So there’s an idea-receiving capacity gap.

"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."