Can we forget about gamification once and for all?

If I got a dollar every time I hear about gamification in a client meeting, I would be rich. Very rich. And the funny thing is, I don’t really work on consumer apps. I usually work with big (or potentially big) systems targeted at corporate clients. No matter the target, 80% of initial meetings or plannings include the word that makes me gag: the holy “gamification.”

My usual approach was not to prove that this is a wrong approach, but rather to quietly deliver user flows, wireframes, and designs in a way that I thought was alright. To provide the biggest value for the user and satisfy the client. But I am tired.

And don’t get me wrong. Gamification can work. There are many great uses, education and healthcare being the most prominent. I am here to critique the notion of gamification for the sake of gamification. I am here to critique this weird notion that apps can’t be engaging if there is no gamification. I want to critique the fact that we let clients talk about gamification and comply with their wishes instead of educating them that apps have to be useful to be engaging, and no bells and whistles will change that if the user doesn’t need the product.

What exactly is gamification?

Let’s get back to academics because it is my firm belief that we read too many blogs and success stories and not enough research. Academically, two texts defined gamification:

• Deterding et al. (2011) say that gamification is the use of game design elements in nongame-contexts.
• Huotari & Hamari (2012) define gamification as “a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences to support user’s overall value creation.”

The latest definition by Landers et al. (2018) makes it roll off the tongue more easily by stating that gamification is using game-like elements to make nongame tasks more interesting.

Let’s pause for a second and think about Huotari and Hamari, though: enhancing a service to support overall value creation.

As Landers (2018) wrote in his paper (aptly titled Gamification Misunderstood: How Badly Executed and Rhetorical Gamification Obscures Its Transformative Potential), there are two types of gamification: legitimate and rhetorical. Legitimate gamification has a transformative potential when used skilfully. Rhetorical gamification “is at best novice gameful design and at worst a swindle, an attempt to make something appear “game-like” purely to sell more gamification.”

Landers points to one more important thing: rhetorical, fake gamification comes from a misunderstanding of the term. Sometimes it is just another reincarnation of organizational games, strategy games, serious play, etc.; sometimes it’s an all-encompassing term for engagement.

Surprisingly, given the hype that it received in previous years, gamification didn’t amass significant research outside of education and healthcare. I went through two big meta-analyses of existing research so that you don’t have to, and let me tell you: findings on the effectiveness of gamification are inconclusive at best.

Gamification as a mental shortcut

Oftentimes clients come to us, and they know that people use only a few apps on their phones. They say that their new product has to be engaging, so they want an element of gamification. For that, I blame Medium articles, Harvard Business Review, content marketers, and the likes. I blame consultancies for doing a disservice not only to pure, well-executed gamification but also to clients. Clients are allowed to make this shortcut, but it is our duty to educate them. This is why they hire us.

Talking about the gamification blurs the vision of our clients. I don’t blame them, they want their apps to be used. But it is not the way! It blurs the vision in our discussions because once gamification is mentioned, discussion shifts to finding ways to make sure that users get back. It shifts to famous “hooks” taken straight from Nir Eyal (I hate this book).

To quote Bogost from his text “Why Gamification is Bullshit”:

“Gamification is reassuring. It gives Vice Presidents and Brand Managers comfort: they’re doing everything right, and they can do even better by adding “a games strategy” to their existing products, slathering on “gaminess” like aioli on ciabatta at the consultant’s indulgent sales lunch.

Gamification is easy. It offers simple, repeatable approaches in which benefit, honor, and aesthetics are less important than facility. For the consultants and the startups, that means selling the same bullshit in book, workshop, platform, or API form over and over again, at limited incremental cost.”

The thing is, if gamification worked, we would see much more of it.

Your financial app doesn’t have to be gamified. It has to be useful. Your application for assessing the risk of delayed payments doesn’t have to be gamified. No person who is not an accountant needs to open your accounting app every day. It is enough that it will be useful.

And what clients don’t realize — and they don’t have to, it is our role — gamification comes from times when it was ok to get users addicted to apps. When we wanted to maximize the time spent in consumer apps without looking at consequences. We tried to hook them at all costs and keep them coming back.

I think that it is now clear how exploitative that is. It makes us focus on the wrong things. It makes us focus on bells and whistles instead of improving flows, making it easier to get a job done.

The closest those apps will get to actual gamification is if they create a leaderboard of their employees to push them to work more, for longer and under more pressure. Do you really want to build that, though?

And if we ask a corporation for, I don’t know, a loyalty program to create something resembling gamification? They don’t have it. Creating it or modifying existing programs would take too much time, and it is too complicated. The responsibility to make apps gamified is on designers and consultants then. We have to figure out how to make people collect points that don’t make sense. We apparently have to give them badges for the most rudimentary tasks. Why would I provide a badge for an adult just because he logged into your app? It’s patronizing.

Gamification is a smokescreen

Innovation theatre, that’s what it is. We (us, clients, everyone in tech really) feel this pressure to be innovative, to show that innovation happens. Everything is called innovation, even if it’s pure window dressing on our part. Companies make a simple app or digitize a legacy part of the business and call it innovation even though it’s an industry standard.

It has to be engaging, so it has to be gamified. Clients don’t really care about usefulness. The fact that they don’t use apps that they don’t need somehow doesn’t register.

Whether our products tap into an existing need or create one is a different question. Still, it is not done with gamification. It is not done by addicting users to apps that are supposed to help them work or manage their documents or whatever basic task they have to do.

We end up with a funny way to solve a problem that is not worth solving, set wrong KPIs to measure success, and wonder why it failed.

I know that we have to sell our services and that talking clients out of an idea is tricky. But we have a moral obligation to right the wrongs and to deconstruct the hype.

Let’s educate.

If it’s not possible to change minds, do what you do — design without gamification or add a progress bar somewhere and call it a day. But please, let’s have those discussions. Let’s educate people about design and engagement, and moral obligations that we have towards users and wider humanity because design happens without designers. Design happens everywhere, and any time someone makes product decisions. Those people who you think don’t understand the design, and you can’t stomach the idea of changing their minds, they will make decisions with or without you. Let’s help them make better decisions.

I will try to.

Bibliography:

Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., Nacke, L. (2011). From game design elements to gamefulness: Defining gamification. In Proceedings of the 15th international academic MindTrek conference: Envisioning future media environments (pp. 9–15). New York, NY: Academic MindTrek Conference.

Huotari, K., Hamari, J. (2012). Defining gamification: A service marketing perspective. In Proceedings of the 16th international academic MindTrek conference (pp. 17–22). New York, NY: Academic MindTrek Conference.

Landers, R. N. (2019). Gamification Misunderstood: How Badly Executed and Rhetorical Gamification Obscures Its Transformative Potential. Journal of Management Inquiry, 28(2), 137–140.

Landers, R. N., Auer, E. M., Collmus, A. B., Armstrong, M. B. (2018). Gamification science, its history and future: Definitions and a research agenda. Simulation & Gaming, 49, 315–337.