Badges, points, and leaderboards: Is Gamification good or bad?
The short answer is: YES.
Part of the problem is that some people who are jumping on the gamification bandwagon don’t actually know much about games.
Like a great many other fads, gamification is viewed by some as a panacea – a simple fix that can be slapped over a broken system to give the appearance of having done something.
Children are not fooled by edu-games when they turn out to be the same old worksheets wrapped in a game (see my Decorative Media Principle), and your employees will not be fooled by a veneer of gamification.
Badges, points, and leaderboards are no different from “Employee of the Month”, if they are not representative of something real and worthwhile – worthwhile in the eyes of the ‘players’. In the end, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of them. It especially doesn’t matter what management says about them, if they are not tied to something real.
Is money real enough? Well, it’s certainly something tied to the real world, but while it is a common belief (especially in America) that monetary rewards motivate employees, there is plenty of evidence that if you have a reasonable salary, monetary rewards are not especially motivating. Rewards that DO motivate should involve these things (purpose, autonomy, opportunities to demonstrate mastery).
Also, leaderboards, like Employee of the Month awards ultimatly serve to pit co-workers against each other in competition. While everyone may want to be named (EoM), one can only win if everyone else loses, and that’s not good if you want people to really be a team.
Gamification can be useful framework, but your organizational structure has to actually match those aspects of gaming that make good games work. Much of the truly useful aspects of gamification aren’t actually new – individualized learning, clear and measurable objectives, choice, the ability to keep at something until you get it right,…. these are all worthwhile elements of games that can be used effectively in many other contexts. What gamification gives us is a sexy new veneer for a collection of useful approaches to organization, teamwork, and learning.
