Why Games Are Better (100% more Why)
Email thisIn my haste to write about this topic, I think I made a mistake. Last time I talked about some of my issues with the U.S. education system, and I intended to follow that post up with a How we gamify education for the better post. Well, that plan hasn’t totally changed, but here’s the issue I woke up to: gamification of education is fantastic and all, but besides the actual methods of doing it, not enough has been talked about how we actually make it happen. I’m going to save my precious How post title for that discussion next time.
So. Today I’m going to deliver 100% more Why gamification would be better, by examining education through the gaming lens, before we get down to the real work of bringing our gaming fantasy into reality.
Better is key here; there is no point if we just end up making something different that could be equally horrible. Without further adieu, let’s talk about the flip side of the Why coin, the game side, and avoid this situation:
What does it mean to gamify education? In the strictest sense, it is applying game mechanics to a method of educating. It’s about empowering students to do better, and making learning, well, fun! Or at the very least, a hell of a lot more rewarding.
I said in my last post that our current system is already sort of gamified, just done really stupidly. It’s a grind fest with no save points for failure, rewards that are few and far between, and only one primary playable skill set to choose from for success: academic test taking. It takes a year to “level up”, and “badges/achievements” or grades you receive can be just as harrowing as they rewarding, while also being permanent.
There is also a danger in making education a total fail proof candy land of gametastic victory. School is supposed to teach students tough real world lessons right? Like how to deal with failure, how to work for the intrinsic reward of simple accomplishment, but can schools really take credit for teaching those lessons? We learn those lessons because school is rigid in how it defines success, and often unforgiving or indifferent to the student’s struggle, not because school sets out to make us well rounded people. I’d wager that most students don’t go to school every day thinking “I’ll work hard today because it will make me feel good!”, I’d go so far as to say the intrinsic rewards that are supposed to come from just working hard are rarely found in the daily grind of standard schooling as it is now. Games can teach these lessons better.
Let’s break it down, gamer style.
Ze Grind of Doom
“The Grind” is the concept of doing a LOT of repetitive work that has little to no meaning to get somewhere or something. In school, that somewhere-something is graduating high school and maybe getting into college. It doesn’t foster the idea that the student is there to learn, it fosters the idea that the student is playing the game to escape the game. Students get there by doing specific quests, or classes as real people call them. If they succeed the quest, they move on to the next one, always moving towards escape. Play style can have some variability in which classes the student takes, but all the “important” classes use final exams as the big quantifier for success. When the players reach the boss exam, they are forced back into a single play style; memorizing facts, regardless of personal strengths or alternative skills.
What’s more, the rewards system in the game of school is backwards. Extra Credits talks about the idea that our grading system works by starting kids off with the concept of having a 100% A+ in any given class, and all subsequent tasks only have the potential to take points, rather than reward them. If a student does poorly on a test, there is rarely a “try again” button, no space for redemption. The message is “Move on, this task is done, just keep moving towards the exit.” The point of education is for students to learn. Let me say that again.
The point of education is for students to learn.
the point is not to keep grinding towards release, regardless of what was actually learned at all. If a student wants to try again, why on earth shouldn’t they?!
Why Games Are Better
The goal of gamifying education isn’t to just throw points at the system and call it a game. At least, that’s not how I think we gamify it successfully. What we really want is to get students interested in learning. Take the class system found in most MMORPGs; it’s less different from education’s class system than you might think. In games, players choose classes based on what they want to be good at as well as what interest them most; class choice is personal (which is how the educational class system should work). Wan’t to run around with lightning on your fingers and no pants under your robes? Wizard it is! More into solving problems by punching them in the face? Warrior is for you! Do what keeps you playing! It is, after all, your game.
It’s actually this mindset extended into education that first got me blogging, via Extreme Biology. My former teacher, Ms. Baker (I get to call her Stacy now!), had students write blog posts on any life science topic they wanted to as part of our grade, to give students freedom to pursue what interests them. It worked; I remember all the topics I wrote about in freshman year, because I got to choose. No, it wasn’t really gamified, and it only existed in her biology class, but small things can have big meaning. The concept of choice, how the student or player plays the game, is where intrinsic rewards are fostered. Want kids to learn, just cuz? Give them freedom. Power to the player is power to the student.
In WoW, millions of players even make extra effort to play the “metagame”, the game outside the game, by researching how to play best on sites like WoWWiki (the second largest wiki in the world to Wikipedia) or Wow Insider. Players do this because they have a strong sense of personalized engagement with their characters, they put in extra work the game doesn’t explicitly say is necessary. In education terms, that’s like getting kids to do extra homework and research without telling them to.
As for failure, games are the epitome of failure done right. Jane McGonigal talks about the resilience to try again that is imbued into the gamer mindset. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve failed horribly in pvp with Jacob only to keep trying and trying and trying again. Failure shouldn’t be about sucking it up and moving on, it should be about sucking it up, figuring out what went wrong, and trying again. Learn something, damnit! The only thing I want students thinking is that true failure, hopeless useless meaningless failure, is not an option.
tl-dr
Game design is all about creating an experience that is both engaging and rewarding, oh and fun. If we approach education with a game design mindset, the flaws become apparent, as do the solutions.
Ding! You’ve leveled up! Please see your local librarian for training.
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The idea of using game mechanics and their underlying psychology within the realm of education is an interesting one. The article touches on both some good and bad aspects of attempting such an approach to learning.
For me the biggest problem is one of risk. Failure in a game ultimately has no consequences worse than having wasted some leisure time. This is not a suitable equivalent for failure in a job, or a relationship or with keeping up your mortgage payments.
It may not be the best way to introduce students to the reality of failure and mistakes.
Also rather than equating grinding with education, it may be more appropriate to compare it to adult working life. The prevailing stats in the UK show that 70% or more of the working population hate their jobs and are doing it out of necessity. In a game if you find the grind too tedious you quit. The current economic climate does not make that such a viable choice with regard to your career.
However, I do agree with the meta game comparison. When someone is enthusiastic about something, they often will go the extra mile. Perhaps that is possible the best thing that gamifying education can bring to the table.
Thanks for commenting! Great thoughtful stuff too. I definitely want to focus on that concept of meta game in education as the core goal of gamification in education. The point of the awards and badges and other specific methods of gamification in education is to get rid of student apathy, and the best outcome of that endeavor is for students to actually want to keep learning on their own, keep absorbing and engaging new information in an information age.
So I deffinitely agree that there are dangers in hard failure proofing education against hard cold reality. The danger is very real, as you noted with unemployment and the responsibilities of every day living. If you haven’t, I really recommend looking up Jane McGonigal, I actually got to hear her talk today at the Games For Change conference and I really recommend her book “reality is broken”, where she addresses the idea that games are far more compelling than reality, and how we need to make reality more compelling consequently, and more, well, fun. I’m gonna roll with that idea here.
Students who fail in school often don’t just turn around and start succeeding, the system doesn’t really foster that attitude, so often the hard lesson in failing school carries into a student’s “real” life, and they don’t learn how to actually overcome failure at all. Not all the time, but failure does promote further failure, and success promotes further success.
Now, bear with me here, this is a big naive jump, but eventually, there is potential for games to change the way we live our lives, to change reality into a more rewarding ( both intrinsically and extrinsivly) adventure. Our attitudes about pursuit of success in life are started and fostered in school, and if games can teach people to keep trying even after really hard failure or challenge ( today Jane talked about using a game, and her game skills to overcome brain damage ) than that’s an excellent perspective and attitude to have both in the hard real world we have now, and even better in the future when games might begin to change how the reality of life works.
There’s a lot of idealism in all this, which I want to tackle a bit in the next post, but we have to aim for something ideal to at least get something better. Questioning is key though, being wary of idealism, is the most important thing if the goal is to change something as huge as education ( like the pic above implies ) but we want to fix problems, not just teach kids how to live with them, and the trick is figuring out the balance moving forward.
At its base, this is a grading kind of issue, what constitutes a student to actually fail a class in a gamified system and such, and Im still working on that lol, so I hope you come back next time to critique my ideas there!
Love your site btw, thanks for having Diane an Jacob!
Also, sorry for the wall of text comment! This is what Jacob is for, monitoring my brain barf, and he doesn’t get to in the comments lol.
::withholds rage at run on sentences and lack of editing from Erik::
I agree that bringing some game into the system would be beneficial. I also think that although the intention is that students should go to school to learn how to pass their exams (which is a flawed approach in itself) that isn’t ultimately why the kids keep going back. They go back because the law requires them to go back, and when the law doesn’t (once they are out of mandatory education) they go back because they don’t want to fail their exams and fall behind.
In a game system this wouldn’t be the case. The student would take the exam when they felt ready – whether that is earlier or later than their peers. In a game, you don’t tackle the boss at a specified time regardless of whether you’ve properly prepared, you take him on when you’re ready, with a group of adventurers who are of a similar level and are similarly prepared. The result of failure wouldn’t be to fall behind your peers, it would just be to continue learning until you feel ready to take on the challenge.
Exams would then stop being a daunting test which looms at the end of the year, and creeps closer and closer with every passing day, but instead becomes a chance to prove your prowess and strike another quest off your list. That way bright students wouldn’t feel held back, and slower ones wouldn’t feel unduly pressured.
Of course this is with the imaginary endless money pot, and the ability to instantly change the examination culture which exists. But a man can dream!
I love that everyone who approaches this subject (at least everyone Iv’e talked to) always says something about the ridiculous idealism we all see in it, that means we’re being careful, and that means (I hope) that we’re approaching this very necessary change correctly with ample skepticism. Which is really really great!
The whole testing method is dumb, I agree, especially the big standardized ones. Approaching it with the game lens is here is brilliant. Unfortunately, standardized tests are somewhat cemented into the system, and the only way I think we’re going to uproot them is if we begin making a parallel method of evaluation, since we can’t just up and trash the whole darn thing.
That parallel method is gonna need significant changes though to allow the type of individualized education we want out of it. Things to consider are how class times/days are split, the law (might be a big factor for significant gamification in education), and how that time is used for each student, as well as what the role of pressure is and failure to defeat the boss. And more, much more! But this is the kind of critical thinking that education needs, game design is, after all, basically critical engagement thinking; how to make something that makes people do something.
Hi Eric,
I am quite skeptical of gamification, as the constructive concept put forward by Jane McGonigal,
In my opinion the formal education system, as you describe it, is already gamified. In fact in your post.you describe it in game terms, yourself.
It is a closed system framed by a fixed and relatively simple set of rules. Its content is mediated though a set of formalised activities, each with a specialised subset of rules. Its criteria for success are internally defined, as are its motivations to succeed, as simple numerical measures of performance, which are not qualitatively related to the content they describe, but rather to the formalised activities the game uses. It relies on both informal and formal social cohesion among players for the interactions required to perform its activities. By that description, It is in effect an MMO as they presently stand (GW2 included).
Gamificating a task is recasting it in the formal structure (i.e. having rules, scoring, outcome) of a game, to motivate participants in a way which is inherent to the process of playing games, rather than the task itself. When you write that education should allow students to “play the game the way they like”, you are in effect saying the game should be less formalised and rules-/ scoring-based, which is the opposite of gamification.
The “grinding” in the educational system you mention, is in effect gamification. You are motivated to do your math exercises by the prospect of getting a better grade (or not failing), by the prospect of doing better at the exam, in order to “unlock the next class and so on. In effect, the motivation for performing the task is separated from the act of performing the task itself.
Ideally, I think, students should be taught in such a way that they understand why the skills they are taught are useful (why someone thought them up in the first place), and reaslise that by mastering them, they have access to the same benefits.
Mikkel
@Mikkel I.
That should be “Erik” not “Eric”. 0 points in the spelling bee, I guess.
I like the last part of what you said especially, though I don’t want to hide my intentions in education gamification; I do very much think our current system needs to be, well, completely reconfigured. In slow, incremental steps. The end result of k-12 education should be teaching life long skills that can apply to as a wide a field of use as possible, and less oriented to the fact and method drilling we do now. Students need to understand over-arching themes and ideas, and have the freedom to explore those ideas by applying the 21 century skills I’ve mentioned.
As for Gamification, I’m actually planing on doing a post soon to recognize the line between “gamification” which can be applied to almost anything ever since games reflect reality, and “Smart gamification”. Scott N, another writer here, might beat me to this punch line in his posts, but the idea is this: Smart gamification takes a look at ALL aspects of good game design when applying game elements to the real world, the purpose is, to paraphrase Scott Rigby whose also a big guy in the gamification sphere, to hold attention in a deeper way, not making games.
There are good games, and there are god-awful “my eyes are bleeding” games, I place education in the latter group, and I believe that if the gamification movement is smart and careful, gamified education could get the education game into the former group. Each game has different criteria, like you noted that education should focus on the task itself, I would just add the smartly gamifying education doesn’t mean it won’t, it just makes it more.. fun
Hell, maybe we should call it “Engagification”, that’s all we’re trying to do really! It just so happens that the ideas in game design, none excluded, are really really good at that.