Reading through Play As You Learn: Gamification as a Technique for Motivating Learners (2013) by Ian Glover gives an overview of the current state of gamification, with particular relevance to  education. Glover first states the three basic parts of most games:

• Goal-focused activity
• Reward mechanics
• Progress tracking

Glover then notes some current uses of gamification including popular social network FourSquare.

Eventually gets to the good stuff, and touches on some criticism of gamification. These included the detriment of providing extrinsic rewards for learners who are intrinsically motivated, the addictive behaviours often associated with certain personality types (notes from Zichermann, 2011), the competitiveness of leaderboards (Williams, 2012), and the types of engagement when gamification is removed (Thoma, Millen, and DiMicco, 2012).

Glover’s main points include the following

• Careful consideration needs to be taken before the application of gamification to learning
• Providing extrinsic motivation for intrinsically motivated learners is detrimental
• Gamification in earning should therefore be optional
• Popular Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and LMSs (Learning Management Systems) provide an ideal opportunity, with tracking data already available
• Rewards need to be desirable to all learner to motivate behavior
• Gamifiation can be applied to non-electronic contexts

 

My references

Glover, Ian (2013) Play as you learn: gamification as a technique for motivating learners. In: HERRINGTON, Jan, COUROS, Alec and IRVINE, Valerie, (eds.) Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2013. Chesapeake, VA, AACE , 1999-2008. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/7172/

 

Glover’s References
Thom, J., Millen, D., & DiMicco, J. (2012). Removing gamification from an enterprise SNS. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ’12), 1067-1070. Accessed: 27/11/2012 -http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2145204.2145362.

Williams, J. (2012). The Gamification Brain Trust: Intrinsically Motivating People to Change Behavior (part 2). Gamesbeat, Panel discussion, Wallace, M. [chair], Accessed: 26/11/2012 – http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/22/the-gamification-brain-trustintrinsically-motivating-people-to-change-behavior-part-2/#h8geQcI5BUyR5Ihv.99

Zichermann, G. (2011). Gamification has issues, but they aren’t the ones everyone focuses on. [Editorial] O’Reilly Radar. Accessed: 26/11/2012 – http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/gamification-criticism-overjustification-ownership-addiction.html