The shadow of gamification

Why do people think gamifying something is a bad idea

There have been articles on the dark side of gamification, or why it’s a bad idea and then listing the various well-known examples that highlight that it is in fact true. I have an issue with these articles as they are often the definition of bias confirmation. Stating something is bad and then only giving bad examples is bad practice. These types of articles have in essence become the shadow that hangs over gamification and all the good that it can and/or could do.

Though don’t make the mistake in thinking that the examples of bad gamification are not unwarranted. Many do show the issues with terrible implementation. But they should be taken as cautionary tales where we can learn from. Failure is an opportunity for learning not for judgment and exclusion.

To give you an idea of when gamification goes bad, we’ll go with the ever-popular example of Disney and their hospitality department at Disneyland. We even use this example in our book as a pitfall of gamification. In this usage of gamification, Disney chose to use leader boards, points, and visual stimulation to promote and increase the productivity of cleaning the linen from the rooms at Disneyland.

Employees at Disneyland were suddenly given new targets of productivity that they needed to achieve to keep their jobs essentially. They were scored against their colleagues to see who was the most efficient, and the machines themselves would tell them through a traffic light system whether they were efficient enough or not. Green good, red bad.

As you can imagine the productivity increased, to the point where on-site safety and good practice went out the window. Accidents increased and the quality of work delivered decreased. The ‘electronic whip’ as it were, was just that. It failed and has subsequently become one of the most famous examples of bad and simplistic gamification usage.

A somewhat less extreme example of bad gamification, to highlight that some are just badly thought through, rather than horrible experiences, is Lyft’s usage of a badge system. Again a simplistic usage of gamification in just adding a meaningless and random badge and achievement system. Users of Lyft could earn special badges if they…