Around this time last year I described a plan of mine to encourage uptake of staff completion of a compulsory fire safety eLearning package by publishing a leaderboard of the results. Well that project is now underway, so I wanted to reflect on how it was going, and in what ways this might be described as gamification.
Sandwiched somewhere in the middle of our staff intranet (staffcentral) homepage is the leaderboard.
This is updated (manually - by me) weekly. Staff can also click through to see the full leaderboard for all depts in the university (as well as the blurb explaining this is indeed a legal requirement).
So does it work?
Well yes. The package launched in April/May via email notifications, and around 50 people in targeted departments completed it, and then a few weeks later, activity stopped. In September we launched the leaderboard with no promotion at all - no emails - and 6 weeks on we're seeing around 175 completed, from across all departments, and rising.
Turns out there were some technical issues with the package, and before the leaderboard, people who had tried and got stuck, gave up. Now that their performance is slightly more public they are prepared to make slightly more effort. From a support perspective this is a headache, but they are all coming out of the woodwork. They want to know that their score has definitely been recorded. I'm even getting complaints that the weekly update is not often enough.
And is this gamification?
Well no, other than adding a scoreboard, this isn't a game and doesn't try to be. But that doesn't make it less valuable. A better description is pointsification (as coined on the Hide and Seek blog) - a simple way of measuring and assigning scores.
I like this term, because it's also the driving force behind my Never Ending Uni Quiz project and seems equally effective there. It's also a really simple way for anyone to add an additional motivating factor to anything with a measurable 'score'.
And what about the Embarrassment?
A moment of doubt. If they're only completing it because they are embarrassed their department has such a low score, can I really talk about games and playfulness? I'm not adding fun, I'm adding guilt, and that wasn't my intention.
2 comments:
Good honest post there Katie - the whole gamification issue is missing the crucial point you make here - that a 'game element' (leaderboard) does not a game make. *but* they do often make effective or engaging activities (whether through guilt or addiction or, indeed, actual fun): and it's fun which, for me at least, is the deciding factor. If it has an element of fun, it starts to turn into a game. You're developing a scale here though, from activity to game: the above (no fun, all guilt ;) is at the activity end; but your NeverEnding Quiz certainly seemed to have some fun elements (the group scores/duel element for example), so is further along the scale where fun starts to come in. All very interesting...
This is one of my main issues with the term "gamification" - this stuff is not fun. Some people may find it fun to see numbers go up and progress bars fill, but it's not really intrinsically fun. There is nothing wrong with that though - not all motivating factors in games are fun. Gamification, the way it is being implemented now, is not about fun, it's about motivation. It's about using elements from games to motivate.
Also I just think "gamification" is a silly word.
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