Gamification for Education Reform

Dennis Ramirez; Kurt Squire

Academics have an uneasy relationship gamification. On the one

hand, as Ian Bogost (this volume) points out in “Why

Gamification Is Bullshit,” gamification is basically a

marketing-driven concept designed to commodify the intellectual

and social capital of a popular art form. Gamification sells

services for consultants and provides business managers easy

solutions to the complex issues of confronting a digital,

participatory age. As Bogost suggests, it may be the -

ification that is the most troublesome; suggesting that a

medium and / or art form could be reduced to a simple formula

to be reapplied across contexts if grossly naive, if not

idiotic. To understand the silliness, imagine someone peddling

televisionication or filmification of business.

At the same time, dismissing gamification out of hand is a

mistake. Games exert tremendous social and cultural influence,

including how we orient to media. The rapid spread of online

identities, reputation systems, badges, virtual currencies, and

reward progressions suggests that participant structures

originating (at least to a degree) from games are having broad

impact (see Farmer, this volume). Indeed, if one were to adopt

a descriptive (possibly critical) stance toward late

capitalism, gamification might be a particularly apt

descriptor. Gamification captures how social institutions are

restructuring themselves in a “gamelike” manner, acknowledging

consumer agency (appropriate for an attention economy), and

creating participant structures with explicitly detailed

mechanisms for increased formal participation Rey (this

volume). This perspective of gamification as “the frontier of

social engineering in late capitalism” is one foreseen by game

developers such as Raph Koster, who anticipated this

development and described his work (and in particular that of

the MUD-Dev community) as the experimental petri dish for 21st

century social thought.

Gamification means many different things, to many people.

For the purposes of this chapter, we use the commonly accepted

definition that gamification is the use of game design elements

in non-game contexts (Deterding & Walz this volume). We focus

on four overlapping design features employed in gamification:

Narrative structures, quests and challenges, point systems, and

achievements. Although we do not focus explicitly on designing

games for learning or impact here (our main research and

development activity), the design challenge of gamification and

the design of learning games actually share many features. A

common approach to designing games for learning is to create a

simulation of a phenomenon and then give it “roles and goals”

(Edelson, 2002; Norton, 2005). We might consider overarching

narrative structures and quests roles, while point systems and

achievements are examples of goals. These design features can,

and often are, used to good effect in games for learning or

impact.

However, a second, very important critique to emerge on

existing gamification efforts is how they co-opt individuals’

behavior toward the purpose toward organizations that not only

disregard, but often exploit their interests. Chris Franklin in

the Errant Signal Youtube series offers the following critique

(which is notably directed to an audience of gamers).

The point of gamification is to exploit instinctive

human reactions to basic stimuli in order to get you

to do something you otherwise wouldn’t do. It

utilizes collecting and hording impulses by providing

you a list of badges to complete. It gives you

skinner boxes and experience bars and leveling up

mechanics in order to make you feel more productive.

It creates a positive feedback loop where every

action you take to the benefit of the systems’ owners

grants you more rewards. It then compounds all of

those features with the need for social recognition

or praise by making these badges and levels viewable

to everyone establishing a social hierarchy that

reinforces the behaviors they are looking to promote.

The idea is you take that whole sordid mess of

constructs and superglue them onto an established

system that you want to encourage interaction with.

So users start collecting badges and leveling up in

order to make their EP (experience points) feel

bigger amongst the other players, while the person

who owns the system starts benefiting either through

ad revenue, increased productivity, or whatever.

Franklin’s critique describes gamification as cultural and

economic hegemony, a tool created by the ruling capitalist

elite to ensure that participants feed the capitalist system

(cf. Apple, 1981).

As Franklin acknowledges, gamification structures make

gamers feel more productive, which, as Linderoth (2009; 2010)

argues, can be an illusion. Linderoth argues that many games

balance graduated complexity by increasing the power of player

tools and skills, rather than requiring players to be more

adept in the game space. Many of today’s games, due to a

desire to be more accessible, may be selling players the

illusion of depth, complexity, or learning, rather than

designing experiences in which players learn. Elsewhere, we

have argued for educational games as one domain in which

hardcore mechanics may have particular value (see “In defense

of the hardcore” in Squire, 2010). However, Juul (2012)

distinguishes between traditional and casual gaming audiences,

observing that depth, complexity and learning frequently are

features of so-called casual games, and accessibility need not

inherently be at odds with complexity.

Either way, providing players a feeling of progress is not

inherently bad, and perhaps even is a core psychological need

to be leveraged. People crave feedback, and enjoy opportunities

to visualize progress. When done correctly, the design

techniques that we call gamification (which recall come from

games themselves) can be enormously engaging for their players.

Employing these techniques artfully could (in theory) put

players in much greater control of their learning, and even

provide opportunities for critical reflection on how their

action relates to institutional structures and goals.

We share Franklin’s concern that in most cases,

gamification is little more than a cynical application of

behaviorist and other psychological principles toward driving

consumption. Gamification as it’s typically done -- and we’ll

use its application on Sears’ website as of this writing as a

classic example -- provides nothing for the user other than

superficial award “points”, while providing companies

tremendous value. Critiques of gamification -- particularly

when emanating indigenously from gaming communities -- can be a

powerful form of resistance to the co-optation of gaming

practices by such institutions. Indeed, it is worth remembering

that many game design techniques (particularly those from the

virtual worlds literature) are rooted in academic computing and

grassroots gaming communities such as MUD-DEV (see Bartle,

1996; 2002).

However, as educators, we are always designers of social

systems (more precisely, co-designers along with their

participants). Designing participant and reward structures is

inescapable. All institutions (from schools to businesses) have

formal and informal rules -- or participant structures -- that

shape activity (e.g Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). We can,

if we choose, not have formal rules such as grades or

attendance policies, but such policies themselves are rules.

However, informal rules (often emergent from social

interaction) will always remain. Informal rules also confer

power and status, legitimize and delegitimize activity, and

enable the work of living in groups of people will form. In

short, whether we are researchers, designers, or simply actors,

we are always engaged in the design of social systems.

For decades, educators have tackled redesigning social

institutions using game techniques so a to make them more just,

participatory, and responsive to users’ needs. Many educators’

interest in gamification techniques for learning goes back to

dissatisfaction with how grades and accreditation systems work

in schools. The typical course-based learning structure

deployed in schools holds time constant (we all start and end

at the same time), but then lets achievement vary (Reigeluth,

1996). Why not insist on standards of excellence, and allow

time to completion to vary? Mainstream educators’ frustration

with contemporary assessment has driven them toward badges as

an alternative method for assessing learning, one that could

decouple the function of accreditation from courses, tests, and

schools (Joseph, 2012). In her Presidential keynote address

“The End of Testing,” leading assessment expert Eva Baker

(2007) challenged educators to reconceptualize their practice

from one of “test making” to one of accomplishment

credentialing:

My image of a qualification is validated accomplishment,

obtained inside or outside school. A qualification means

simply that, at various levels of challenge, a student has

attained a certified, trusted accomplishment … Each

qualification is not a new test, but an integrated

experience with performance requirements. It might look

like a course, or a collection, or a musical or sports

performance.

Barry Joseph (2012) describes how mainstream assessment

experts’ interest in qualification credentialing dovetailed

with James Paul Gee’s (2006) work on games and assessment. Gee

argued that games are the future of assessment because they

demonstrate how assessment can be routine, formative, and an

inherent component of learning (see also Collins & Halverson,

2010 for an expansion on this idea).

Thus, as designers and learning scientists who create

learning systems with important consequences for learners, we

treat issues around gamification techniques as largely

empirical questions: “How are they working? Whose interests are

being served and legitimated? Are they engaging and life

enhancing for participants? How might we improve these

structures so as to make them more just or equitable?”

We argue here for a Pragmatic approach to using game design

techniques in non-game settings (to build on the definition

provided by Deterding and colleagues (2011). As Lee and Hammer

(2011) suggest, one can easily argue for gamification

techniques based for cognitive, emotional, and social reasons.

However, like Deterding et al (2011), we believe that so-called

gamification principles aren’t inherently good or bad. Rather,

we can examine the consequences of their use and determine

their value. We recognize that objects embody values and can be

actors in a system (see Latour, 2005). However, we also that

such designs are always manifested in actual social contexts,

and can only be understood in conversation with encompassing

social structures (such as culture). Indeed, there is decades

of basic research exploring how game structures contradict

those of formal and informal learning spaces (cf. Brown & Cole,

1992, DeVane & Squire, 2011; Squire, 2004).

This chapter examines the application of game design

elements in learning systems (which themselves often include

games), describing the work we’re doing to use game design

elements in the social systems that encompass games. It begins

by describing our general project of socio-cultural learning

theory applied to games, in part to contextualize preceding

work. We then discuss how so-called gamification techniques are

applied “in the wild” with entertainment games to promote

learning, and then finally, how they are currently being

designed into our learning systems. The chapter closes with

reflections on using gamification for social change.

Games as Socially and Culturally Situated Systems

For the past decade digital games have garnered the attention

of educators as sites for studying digital literacies, a medium

of expression, and as potential tools for learning (Bogost,

2010; Gee, 2003; 2005; Prensky, 2001; Squire, 2011;

Steinkuehler, Squire & Barab, 2012). Central to one approach,

which has been called the socially situated approach, is to

view games not as only tools or artifacts, but as socio-

cultural systems in which tools are a key part (Deterding,

2011; Shaffer, Squire, Halverson & Gee, 2006). From this

perspective, games are one element of an activity system that

includes people as actors, broader social and institutional

constraints, and other resources (DeVane & Squire, 2012).

Although games and learning as a field is young and the

participatory logic of game-based learning systems contradicts

those of modern schooling (particularly in the United States,

see Collins & Halverson, 2011; Tyack & Cuban, 1997), projects

such as The 5th Dimension, Quest Atlantis, Surge, and Citizen Science have

demonstrated success working in schools.

Social Learning Theory & Games.

Socio-cultural (or socially situated) learning theory, for the

uninitiated, is a loosely connected family of learning theories

(usually rooted in Vygotsky or Dewey), which argue that

cognition is inseparable from social context. Although the

category “socio-cultural learning theory” combines theorists

from multiple traditions, each shares some common commitments.

A key idea driving this work is that most higher learning occurs

through social interaction, and more specifically, that understanding

occurs first on the external plane, before becoming

internalized (Vygotsky, 1978). Parents, for example, often

structure tasks for their children within what Vygotsky called

the Zone of Proximal Development (or ZPD). ZPD is the zone of

activities that a learner cannot do on her own, but can do with

help. A hallmark of learning within the ZPD is that learning is

organized around a mutually valued task. Through working

together in joint enterprise, the adult (or other more expert

person) gradually hands responsibility for that task over to

the learner. Subsequent work expands this idea, and develops

the notion of cognitive apprenticeships, which is a common process of

modeling, coaching, scaffolding, and fading (Brown, Collins, &

Newman, 1991). Essentially, this is the process by which an

adult first models competent expert behavior, then coaches the

learner through just-in-time feedback, next scaffolds the learner

through supports that enable the learner to work more

independently, and then finally fades away so that the learner

can act independently. Designing these patterns into games is a

hallmark of Cole (2006) and Barab’s (2010) work.

Situated Theory for Games.

Educators also value games’ capacity to situate learners in

complex situations. Situated learning theorists (e.g. Brown,

Collins, & Diguid, 1991), argue that our thinking is not just

shaped by, but constituted through our experience of situations,

including objects, interactions, people, and cultural tools

(language, concepts). Classic examples from cognitive science

include the way that we use tools (spreadsheets or word

processors) to organize thoughts (Pea, 1993), and how these

tools transform thinking. To borrow another, simple example from

Vygotsky, consider how the axe transforms our understanding of

trees or the properties of wood. Not only does it change what

we can know about trees; it changes our conceptions wood as we

create a new conceptual category of wood separate from the

trees (the same might be said of man-made objects such as clay

and brick, wheat and grain, sheep and wool or minerals and

ore). In educational games such as Citizen Science (Filament

Games / GLS), the game positions players as youth seeking to

improve a local watershed through using virtual tools (e.g.

secchi disks, chemistry kits), and arguing with virtual

characters over the causes of eutrophication and over potential

solutions (Gaydos & Squire, 2012). The goal of Citizen Science is

to use vicarious experience to transform how players think

about their natural surroundings, including the use of virtual

tools -- all through inhabiting the role of a youth trying to

change the fate of his local surroundings.

Socio-cultural theory for games.

Games are also situated within game-playing communities, which

offers both an intriguing alternative to classroom learning

models, as they suggest different trajectories of

participation. This work builds on a second branch of socio-

cultural research pertaining to games, which focuses on

learning as participation in social practice. Examples can be

found in multiple fields; socio-linguist James Paul Gee (2003),

for example, discusses the scripts that we follow in

conversations, which both structure interaction and constitute

the context in which performance is evaluated. Becoming a

competent student, lawyer, or game player or developer is about

much more than reciting facts, but being one of these roles,

which entails presenting oneself as a member and being accepted

as a member of other people in these social groups (Gee,

2000/2001). Much work in socio-cultural learning theory with

games examines this process of identity formation, including how

students’ identities are constructed in their home lifeworlds,

how new contexts might be designed for new kinds of identities.

Games, from this perspective, are interesting in that they

might provide new models of social organization, ones that

perhaps meet our students’ needs better than schools. We have

argued for online networks such as Apolyton University (Squire

& Gionvanetto, 2008) as one model built around structures of

cognitive apprenticeship and problem solving rather than

routinized content delivery.

Socially and Situated Critiques of Schooling.

Interest in games in schools is often based on long-held socio-

cultural critiques of schools (c.f. Gee, 2005). A classic

critique (see Lave, 1988), is that knowledge in schools is

primary gathered for exchange value (grades, or perhaps

economic rewards later in life), rather than for pleasure, joy,

fulfillment, or action in the world. Schooling severs knowledge

from the contexts in which it was created or in which it is

used, treating knowledge as commodities to be mastered

(Kirschner & Whitson 1996). Knowledge is conferred by an

authority (usually teachers, but increasingly testing companies

paid by the state), which robs students of opportunities to

develop and test ideas through actions in the world (Lemke,

1992). An implication of this view that we always learn new

information by linking it with past experiences, is that

learners with more direct experiences with academic phenomena

have a leg up on those without them. Learners with rich

experiences with adults who use academic languages have a very

real leg-up in schools compared to those students lacking such

interactions. Perhaps most importantly, children raised in

opportunities in which they can interact with adults who

affiliate with the formal enterprise of schooling have

opportunities to develop identities in relation to the

institution of schooling.

Games as Models of Situated Learning.

Work on socio-cultural learning through games is beyond the

scope of this article, and to some extent, now ingrained in the

field of games and learning. Since Gee (2003) laid out an

argument for games as a model of situated learning theory in

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, the basic

notion that game play regularly produces changes in knowledge,

skills, and attitudes has gained greater acceptance. Further,

Gee’s (2003) 36 game design principles (such as learning by

doing, well ordered problems, and learning through a projective

identity), have been used to designed dozens of games for

learning, although until recently, relatively few examples of

good games for learning existed (see National Academies of

Science, 2009 for a good review).

For the purposes of this chapter, two key ideas require

explication. First is Gee’s (2003) notion of projective

identity. Gee argues that anyone who has discussed Pokemon

(Nintendo 1997), or more recently Skylanders (Activision 2011),

with a game-playing six year old will understand that game play

inspires and produces deep knowledge of semiotic systems. Many

youth develop this knowledge, and even report learning to read

complex texts through Pokemon as a pedagogical system (Sefton-

Greene, 2004). Knowledge of Pokemon is mastered in order to do

work in the world, and as a part of becoming a desirable

identity in game (Pokemon Master), which Gee calls a projective

identity, as well as one within a player’s primary game playing

communities. The robust Pokemon ecology enables players to

develop identities as members of Pokemon playing affinity

groups.

This notion of a projective identity is crucial for

gamification in schools. Schools (outside of extracurriculars)

traditionally offer few identities outside of becoming “the

good student,” which involves mostly reporting back to teachers

information that is presented to them. There are few

opportunities for individuation, becoming expert, or

contributing to society in any meaningful way. Through

gamification, we might set up trajectories for students in

which they become different kinds of people (doctors, lawyers,

activists, and so on, Shaffer, Squire, Halverson, & Gee, 2005).

Game structures might enable students to take on these roles,

and guide students’ transition toward becoming new kinds of

people. From this perspective, gamification is rethinking the

roles and assessment mechanisms in schools to make them more

effective and more democratic.

The preceding section describes a theoretical, rather than

commercial basis for investigating the potential of games for

learning. Many educators using games level the same critiques leveled toward

gamification to schools, and are looking to games as an alternative

metaphor for organizing learning. Minimally, rethinking school

through the lenses of games raises new questions about whose

interests are served, and we believe, if designed and executed

well, are a tool toward broader educational reform. Most

critically, they could provide an alternative credentialing

structure that becomes an “end around” for the monopoly in

schools enjoyed by the testing regime.

Gamification for Learning Through Narratives and Quests

Most educators from this perspective are using games as a

leverage point for systemic change in education and ask, “Can

games change how schools operate?” (as opposed to meet the

traditional goals of schooling more effectively). Thus it is

not enough to identify, describe, and reverse engineer design

principles from games and game communities or design learning

environments based on these principles, but most educators are

deeply interested in investigating the impact of these efforts

on broader social institutions (Cole, 2006; Steinkuehler &

Squire, 2004; Martin & Steinkuehler, 2010). Thus, gamification

becomes not simply a tool for organizations to meet old ends

more effectively, but rather, a tool for transforming

institutions like schools.

=======

Insert Quest to Learn School here

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Needless to say this is this is challenging work. Twenty years

of learning sciences research describes how innovations are

usually rejected by the system. Ann Brown (1992) developed the

term “lethal mutation” was developed to describe how most

interventions are changed so that they lack and resemblance to

their original design and instantiate the values of

encompassing organizations. However, projects such as 5th

Dimension and Quest Atlantis demonstrate how such programs can be

effective.

Designing Gamified Learning Systems in Informal Spaces: 5th Dimension.

5th Dimension is one of the longest running, and most well

researched “gamification” type learning systems (Cole, 2006).

The 5th Dimension was created in the 1990s as a mechanism for

exploring Cole’s (1996) theory of cultural psychology. Cole’s

theory, in short, is that culture is at the center of cognition

(particularly the kinds of learning that we care about as

educators, such as habits of mind or problem-solving). Thus a

primary goal of educators is to create learning contexts, or

cultures, with good learning values, such as classrooms based

on inquiry or knowledge construction (e.g. Scardamalia &

Bereiter, 2004). A second (related) goal is to create learning

situations in which youth learn through working along with more

expert peers or adults on mutually-valued tasks (or, in other

words in apprentice-like situations, see Brown, Collins, &

Newman, 1991).

In 5th Dimension “clubs” groups of 5-14 youth work through

a maze of quests, which are assigned to them by a fictional

wizard. These quests are presented on task cards, and

frequently are based on a game such as Carmen San Diego, The

Incredible Machine, or Oregon Trail. All learning is situated within

a narrative experience of helping the wizard, rather than

earning grades or points. Adults (usually college students)

play Wizard’s Assistants, who work as mentors for students and

reinforce the values of the clubs (while gaining professional

development experience). This Vygotskian-inspired role is

crucial for organizing activity, and is the mechanism by which

youth engage in academically valued expertise with mentors.

Over 100 research studies, and a major evaluation report

have been conducted on the 5th Dimension, which has been

enacted in sites across the world (Cole, 2006; Mayer, Blanton,

Duran, & Schustack, 1999; Simmons, Blanton, & Greene, 1999).

Evaluation reports show that, through participation in Fifth

Dimension, students develop academic skills that can be used

across a variety of contexts (Blanton, Moorman, Hayes, Warner,

1997; Mayer, Quilici, Moreno, et al., 1997). In a study of the

project’s implementation in after school centers, Nicolopoulou

and Cole (1993) described how game play as an activity is not

purely a function of the game and the player, but is profoundly

shaped by local cultural contexts. Local Fifth Dimension

cultures were a mixture of the designed Fifth Dimension culture

plus the culture of the overlapping institutions. These

emergent, hybridized cultural conditions of each setting might

be described as a local microculture within the broader

culture. It mediates the activities taking place in the

environment, crucially affecting the kinds of learning outcomes

that result.

These results matter for gamification researchers, because

they suggest that game structures may always struggle to truly transform

encompassing social institutions. Meaning, if designers want to use

gamification techniques only to change the user experience of a

product (e.g. airlines rewards programs), or build a product

around a gamification experience (e.g. Foursquare), they might

anticipate success. If designers want to use gamification

techniques to structure learning interactions, they might even

expect to produce gains. However, transforming the very culture

of an institution, even one as seemingly malleable as a Boys &

Girls Club or drop-in Library program has hitherto proved

difficult. Recalling that for cultural psychologists, the

transformation of culture is the core learning goal, we are reminded

that cultural transformation is a daunting task that tools

themselves can rarely accomplish (Engestrom, 1996).

Designing Gamified Learning Systems for Schools: Quest Atlantis.

Subsequent projects, such as Quest Atlantis, have created a

similar metaverse (that of Atlantis), but built around social

commitments such as respect for diversity or creative

expression. Quest Atlantis is a transmedia learning experience

for late elementary school. Although there are also Quest Atlantis

comics, novels, and other media, in Quest Atlantis, learners

primarily access the world of Atlantis through an online portal

(called OTAK), and use it to communicate with citizens of a

lost civilization. The world of Quest Atlantis (including its

quests), are rendered in real-time 3D (first in Active Worlds,

more recently in Unity). Through quests related to these

commitments, they improve life for these citizens. The quests

range from online to offline behaviors, and are usually

certified by a teacher through an online dashboard. Students’

online profile includes features such as an item inventory,

reputation systems, various currencies and so on. Quest Atlantis

is a fascinating example of gamification, in that although it

contains a number of “in game” quests, the majority of its

quests occur offline. Most Quest Atlantis quests are

traditionally-valued academic practices, but are given meaning

through a narrative of the Atlantians, communicated via quests.

These quests, such as a scrapbooking quest (see sidebar 1) are

academic tasks that many teachers already do, but are given

meaning through the Quest Atlantis narrative (Stuckey, 2008).

The questing structure also serves as a motivational metagame

that repositions traditional academic tasks as a new activity

(Barab, Warren, & Ingram-Goble, 2008). Meaning, Quest Atlantis

tries to take isolated exercises such as scrapbooking and give

them meaning through a connection to a broader narrative of the

Quest Atlantis world. Tuzun (2004) describes how students

participating in Quest Atlantis were motivated by identity,

play, immersion, and social relationships, which for some

students, transformed academic activity from reward-based

activity to activity driven by a desire to become new kinds of

people, to play, or to engage in legitimate social activity.

Through its many interactions, designers Barab, Arici, and

Jackson (2005) find that the Quest Atlantis narrative was its

most engaging feature.

--------Insert Sidebar #1 about here ----------

The communities of Atlantis are not always appreciated, and we

are trying to improve that as much as possible. The Council

has asked all of the children of Atlantis to create a scrapbook

of their community so that the communities can be once again

appreciated. There is one small problem: The children do not

know how to make a community scrapbook. We need your help!

Your first task is to decide how your book should look, and

then develop it. When you finish, bring your book in o your

Quest Atlantis Center and show it to a mentor. Also, write a

summary about how you created your book and why you chose to

include the things you did. You can take a photo of the book

and send it to the Council along with your summary.

Your Goal(s):

■ Choose four or more categories to feature in your book.

■ Create your scrapbook.

■ Write a summary about how you created your book and why

you included the things you did.

■ Bring your book and summary to your Quest Atlantis

center.

■ Upload and submit your work.

-------- End Sidebar ------------

Quest Atlantis demonstrates how a gamified learning context can

lead to learning gains across a variety of contexts, in and out

of schools. Although Quest Atlantis goes across most of the

elementary curriculum, much of the research conducted upon it

is on scientific reasoning. Quest Atlantis (like many virtual

worlds) strives to give players an embodied experience of

complex phenomena such as conducting a scientific

investigation. Studies of Quest Atlantis use in classrooms show

that it can improve students’ scientific inquiry, reasoning,

and argumentation skills, along both traditional and

performance measures (c.f. Hickey, Ingram-Noble, & Jameson,

2009). Barab and colleagues describe this process as

“narratizing the curriculum,” which suggests one useful way for

designers to think about gamifying formal curricular

structures. We often think of “narrative wrappers” as little

more than motivational contexts, but such narrative contexts,

if used well, can attune players to new goals and create a

deeper purpose for activity.

Gamification for Learning Through Achievement Systems

The preceding examples illustrate how gamification structures

can promote learning by organizing activity around problem-

solving or creating narrative contexts for learning. Quest

Atlantis includes some traditional “game elements” (i.e. levels

such as Taiga, in which the content is encoded within systems

or worlds, e.g. Squire, 2006), much of Quest Atlantis focuses on

organizing activity outside of games. As educators seek to

create games for learning or broader impact, opportunities

exist to leverage gamification structures in games, and in

conversation with a broader metagame system to improve

learning. The following section asks, “How might we make more

effective use of those game design elements usually exported by

gamification (achievements, badges) within games for learning?”

This section builds on earlier classifications of achievements

(Blair, 2011), by linking design principles culled from the

learning sciences with effective uses of achievements toward the

design of learning systems. Notably, this section is not a structural

analysis of what achievements are (Hamari & Eranti, 2011), nor

a close examination of participation in gamification

structures, such as Jakobsson’s (2011) excellent analysis of

XBox 360 players (which is, interestingly, a look at gamers

responding to the gamification of game play). We analyze how

current designs in badges, achievement systems, and narrative

structures in games in order to to devise the following design

heuristics for using gamification techniques in for learning

(Reigeluth, 1996).

---------- Insert Sidebar 2 about here ------

One of the most sophisticated attempts at “gamifying” education

is Rochester Institute for Technology’s Just Press Play Project

(https://play.rit.edu/). Just Press Play is a game layer

(achievements, quests, profiles, and collectable media)

designed to provide a game layer complementing the

undergraduate experience in RIT’s School of Interactive Games

and Media. The goal of Just Press Play is to use game

technologies to engage students in a playful way with their

educational environment and experiences in a way that can

support learning while also improving students’ experience of

RIT. Notably, Just Press Play currently occurs completely

outside of the formal course structure, as its designers felt

that it was critical that it be voluntary and outside of the

formal curriculum to be truly playful.

Just Press Play achievements can be attained through

course assignments however, and some leverage course

experiences. For example, the Undying Achievement is gained by

all participating players if 90% of the students in the Game Software

Design class pass the course. Historically, the pass rate had

been around 88%, but after initiating the achievement, the pass

rate bumped to about 92%. Interestingly, Undying worked not

because all of a sudden students started studying; rather, as

Lawley and colleagues (2012) report, this achievement led to

the immediate formation of study groups. Upperclass students

advised new students to form study groups, and they formed much

more quickly than in past years.

Evaluation reports of Just Press Play emphasize that it is

working because its designers use it as a tool for

interrogating the undergraduate experience, designing quests

and achievements that are likely to lead to desirable changes,

and empowering students in this process. Other sample quests,

such as visit every professor to gain their collectable card,

attending a social event off-campus, or visiting the gym were

designed based factors known to contribute to success as

detailed in research, advice from former students, or

occasionally data gained from the University.

This last category -- data that the institution has about

students (such as students who swipe their ID card at breakfast

tend to perform better than those who don’t) is a fascinating

tool for educators to embrace data-driven education. Although

most of this information is propreitary and not available to

researchers (or even outside evaluators), most school

administrators can learn a great deal about the behaviors of

the student body, ranging from correlations between GPA and

dining habits to exercise and drop-out rates. Our behaviors are

nudged in different directions every day by marketers, policy

makers, and others (see Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). Tools such

as achievements and badges, if done well, can make these efforts

transparent, and possibly even give students a voice in

designing achievements.

Reflecting on Just Press Play, questions we wrestle with

as educational designers include: How can content production

and roll-out become a routine, smooth part of educational

design when it’s outside of course structures? How can we use

achievements to facilitate multi-generational communication, so

that students from one generation can share their stories,

advice, and professional networks with current students? How

can we empower students to design, develop, and post

achievements for their peers? How can we make this entire

process (including the data driving these decisions)

transparent to students?

------------- End sidebar 2 ---------------

As a caveat, a primary challenge for game developers is how to

use achievements without undermining motivation (see Hecker,

2010). As Hecker wrly observes, the research on intrinsic

motivation is complicated and at times contradictory, but we do

know that at times, rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation.

It may be that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are largely

emergent phenomenon arising at the intersection of person,

task, and context, and thus there is significant variance in

how people experience such motivation. As design researchers

seeking to transform learning experiences, we argue that

gamification structures can function to promote learning in at

least the following ways (for a similar tact on how badges are

currently being used in education, see Joseph 2012):

● Recording Learning Progress. Achievements serve to indicate

whether or not an action has been completed. By recording

these achievements, however, they become a persistent

history of the user’s involvement with the system. Much

like merit badges awarded to boy scouts, achievements that

reward the completion of a task serves as a record which

is useful for a user to reflect on what they have

accomplished and what they might want to do in the future.

Earning enough points to get to the next level also

provides a sense of having accomplished a goal. Such

achievement systems suggest easy ways that educators might

provide much more detailed learning data than traditional

grades or transcripts. Such a model might also encourage

deviation from current standardized models in which most

students are expected to all accomplish the same tasks in

school, or be measured along the same handful of learning

trajectories (e.g. science, mathematics course sequences).

● Providing feedback on progress: Originally used in Role-Playing

games, experience points are a popular way to provide

feedback on a user’s progress, and provide a mechanism for

communicating with players. Unlike grades, point systems

are built on a growth model for the user, not a deficit,

which is one reason that educators with experience in game

design have gravitated toward experience points in lieu of

grades (Fishman & Aguilar, 2012; Sheldon, 1991). It should

be noted that these experience points are often paired

with some type of level system that implies some sort of

mastery or prowess. In traditional RPGs a player’s attack

may become higher as they level up simulating mastery

through experience, and well executed point system do the

same. For example, social media websites like Reddit or

Digg successfully incorporate this strategy because the

point values imply proficiency such as the ability to find

unique content or contribute to discussion. The same

techniques can be employed for discussion forums, or

contributions via Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

Further, experience points can be weighted so as to both

encourage risk-taking, exploration, or extra practice as

an instructor desires. Many implementations of such

systems in schools decouple these learning tasks from

course timelines, enabling students to learn at their own

pace rather than in lockstep. A key for educators is to

make the values and assumptions behind these systems

transparent, and encourage dialogue about them (something

rarely done in schools now).

● Promoting transparency in assessment: Achievements, with the

exception of secret achievements to promote exploration,

often allow a great deal of transparency when it comes to

how a player completes the achievement. (And in fact, a

subject of discussion at the 2013 Game Developer’s

Conference Achievement Roundtable was how to make even

these achievements more transparent to users, with one

achievement designer declaring, “Secret achievements

sucks” to great applause). We know, from research on

rubrics (see Mabry, 1999), that making assessment criteria

available to students can increase the quality of work,

and learning. Similarly, designing achievements around

such hidden rules can demystify assessment. Indeed, making

informal rules explicit, and making important academic

practices explicit for learners can be a chief

democratizing function of achievements (see sidebar 2).

● Motivating persistence: Not every part of playing a game is

fun. For example, grinding in RPGs has often been cited as

a dull and repetitive process which most people wish they

could fast forward. For this reason, designers use

achievement systems to break up the monotony and encourage

players to push forward. Pokemon addresses this issue by

using the game mechanic of Evolution to reward the player

for their commitment. The game rewards the player with a

more powerful monster and updates their pokedex (their

encyclopedia of Pokemon knowledge) with a new entry,

which, like a badge, serves as a persistent reminder of

the player’s efforts. Thanks to this reward, players are

encouraged to continue the game with the hopes of making

their creature more powerful. Educators have long lamented

that many educational systems (and particularly American

culture) embrace theories of attribution that attribute

achievement to innate talent rather than effort, which

ultimately causes many learners to falsely believe that

they cannot succeed in domains in which they are not

comfortable (Bandura, 1982; Dweck, & Master, 2008; Ryan &

Deci, 2000). Good achievement systems might explicitly

counter these expectations.

● Encouraging Mastery: Achievements that highlight prestige or

skill are useful when motivating a player to not only

continue playing a game, but to master the underlying

mechanic. In the original Metroid (Nintendo 1986) players

were rewarded with multiple endings depending on how fast

the player was able to complete the game as well as how

much of the planet was explored. Only the most skilled

players were presented with the ending that revealed Samus

to be a female. On a similar note, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

2(Activision 2009) awards emblems to their players for

completing actions that require a great deal of skill

during multiplayer matches. These actions include getting

headshots, saving teammates, and maintaining a high kill

death ratio. The emblem the player unlocks can then be

displayed on the player’s profile indicating mastery to

the community and encouraging others to attempt mastery.

Displays of mastery are core to fandom culture (and an

excellent source of achievements). What constitutes

mastery of a game or system are one of the most time-

honored debates in fan culture, and as educators, we are

mostly still waiting for a game that inspires such

devotion. Similarly, we are waiting for a game so robust

as to produce new practices such as speedruns, which in

Metroid for example, is one way that players distinguish

between expert and competent players.

● Encouraging risk taking. At the GDC 2013 roundtable, Stockton

discussed how many World of Warcraft players have a deep

aversion to PvP and need to be coaxed to even dabble in

battlegrounds. Over time, they have tweaked achievements

to reward smaller and smaller steps toward experimenting

with PvP, so that players can earn achievements for simply

queuing for a battleground. Imagine educators targeting

analogous areas such as mathematics and designing

achievements so as to help students overcome math anxiety,

public speaking, or sharing writing with peers.

● Encouraging exploration of new systems to promote mastery. In Plants Vs.

Zombies (PopCap Games, 2009) achievements, and their

respective badges, can be earned by playing the game in

different ways. For example, one challenge asks a player

to complete a level using nothing but man-eating plants.

While playing the game normally, man-eating plants are not

typically a plant of choice, and may not often be used. In

order to unlock this achievement, players must leave their

comfort zone and learn how to use Chompers effectively.

The key to this structure is presenting the requested

action as a challenge to the player. In education, this

approach could draw attention to a part of the design that

might have been overlooked, or to encourage students to

leave garden paths (simple solutions to complex problems).

Sometimes achievements promoting exploration are presented

once the main objective, or some similar level of

competency, is achieved. This way the exploration of the

space in a new way will not be convoluted with the basics.

● Reframing the game experience to promote reflection. Games such as

Jetpack Joyride (Halfbrick Studios, 2011), a simple side-

scrolling action game, contain simple goals (travel as far

as possible), but then use achievements to communicate

wildly different game goals, which ranging from destroying

scientists to creating “near misses” with lazers.

Similarly, strategy games like Civilization routinely include

achievements for winning through specific strategies, such

as winning through an economic victory or by building only

one city. Notably, this challenge (the One City Challenge)

emanated from game community forums. More radically, games

such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Square Enix, 2011), which

rewards players for beating the game without killing

anyone are radical in that they use achievements to

reconceptualize the enter game. As educators, we often

want our students to reflect on the nature of a game as a

representation (McCall, 2012). We want our students to see

games as designed objects that make conceits and

simplifications in representing complex phenomena.

Achievements can reframe the game experience and help

students reflect on how game rules could be different.

Students authoring achievements can also invite

participation in the system.

● Making knowledge more flexible (trying contrasting cases): Achievement

systems can be used a a way to quickly describe a set of

experiences that a learner has acquired over time. The

value of having a flexible achievement system comes from

the ability to collect different achievements without

having to adhere to collecting all of a predetermined set.

By providing a large set of achievements to choose from,

players can compare and contrast their profiles which

draws attention to, and often celebrates, the differences.

In this way, achievements may be in the same way a resume

is in that it lists your achievements and draws attention

to what sets you apart/what makes up your skillset.

● Encouraging collaboration. Collaborative achievements, such as

Just Press Play’s badge for taking a friend to an off-

campus event, can push players toward having new

experiences, expanding their social networks, and engaging

in discussion and reflection. Foursquare’s badges such as

the BFF badge (10 checkins with a friend) are perhaps the

most dramatic example of how gamification can leads people

to create new experiences for others. RIT’s Just Press

Play suggests how educators might leverage these tools,

and hopefully soon, AR systems such as MITAR (MIT

Augmented Reality) engine or ARIS (Augmented Reality and

Interactive Storytelling) engine will enable user authored

badges as well.

● Achievements can be a road map that models for users what experts are / can

do. Much like a technology tree, achievements can be

designed to lay out various competencies required by

professionals (or any socially desired role). A primary

value of such badges is making tacit forms of expertise

explicit. One might imagine (for example), professors

designing badges for graduate students to communicate the

many “unspoken” parts to succeeding in academics (social

networking, professional presentation skills).

● Badges for certifying ongoing professional development. While formal

educational systems are notoriously difficult to change

(Tyack & Cuban, 1984), professional development is almost

wide open, suggesting opportunities for badges to certify

upkeep of skills. Professional training is required in

fields from medicine to information technology, but even

more mundane domains such as driver’s education could

benefit from such badges. Ebay is one model for doing

this. To maintain a flying star ebayers need to keep a

consistent rating based on user reviews. Because it needs

upkeep, (in this case quality has to remain consistent) it

is considered valuable by the community as an example of

competence. Some argue against this approach feeling that

it’s taxing having to keep up an achievement and

introduces a lot of pressure. For example, maintaining a

diamond rating in starcraft, or keeping your kill death

ratio high in call of duty change the way you approach a

match. While, such “hard core” badges may be problematic

in recreation activities, they may have a real role in

education.

The Potential and Challenge of Gamification as

Alternative Accreditation

For many educators, the larger goal of badges is to create an

alternative system of assessment and accreditation. Students

learn skills in formal and informal spaces unrecognized by

institutions of learning. Wikipedia, for example, relies on its

community to edit articles and make sure that content is

accurate. Because the error rates of wikipedia and encyclopedia

britannica are comparable (Giles, 2005), we might infer that

volunteer editors perform at a level similar to professional

editors. Within wikipedia, users are acknowledged and rewarded

for their contributions to the site with banners that they can

place on their user pages. Unfortunately, there does not

currently exist a way to reward users for this expertise

outside of wikipedia. Even if the user is performing at a

professional level, their work may hold little to no weight

when applying to a university program or interviewing for a job

(Ochsner & Martin, 2013). Ideally, badges should serve as an

indicator of expertise to which the user can defer in these

situations.

We might expect gamification to thrive in quickly changing

domains. Computer science has faced a similar problem of

showing expertise without a formal accreditation process, such

as a university course. New technologies are released

constantly, and proficiency in those technologies quickly

become very marketable skills. However, by the time that a

university actually offers a class in said technology, there is

a good chance that skill is obsolete and a new technology has

replaced it. This results in a time when the skill is in

demand, but there is no way to hire someone with traditional

accreditation. This problem has lead to a different way

institutions teach Computer Science. Rather than teaching a

specific language, computer science is more geared to

programming paradigms urging its students to develop skills

that will allow them to learn new languages rather than just

learning one language well. This doesn’t mean that experts

don’t exist, in the meantime, self taught programmers, who have

been working with the technology during the interim, have

become experts, just that there is a need for an alternative

form of accreditation.

In order to meet this gap, developers, like SUN

microsystems and microsoft have created targeted accreditation

systems that anyone can take in order to display expertise.

Individual programmers have also leveraged services like Github

to serve as portfolios. Github is a collaborative coding space

where programmers publish their code to the general public to

view and modify. As a portfolio, github serves as a

persistent, and illustrative, example of a programmer’s skill

as well as an example of how they work collaboratively. It’s

not hard to see how a system of badges can serve a similar

purpose.

Already we’re seeing online learning forums deploying

badges meant to illustrate expertise. Thanks in part to the

success of Kahn Academy, Code Academy, and similar communities,

it now appears that the question is not “Will Gamification be

used for Accreditation?” but rather, “How?” We can learn from

these initial adopters by reflecting on the challenges they

face implementing such systems in the wild. For example, most

“Attendance” badges can be gamed easily because they’re

assigned automatically, triggered by pre-defined rules. Because

of this, a user can earn a badge by simply playing a video

without actually watching it. If we wish to use these badges as

alternative forms of assessment, we must keep in mind what we

can actually infer about the user given the medium. If we

assign a badge for playing a video, we can assume, but cannot

be certain, that the user watched the video. Similarly, if our

goal is to create meaningful achievements, we must be mindful

of not only the ways badges are earned, but also the ways they

can be exploited. Badges that require more from the users are

not immune to exploits either. An example of this can be found

in Kahn Academy’s black hole badge.

The black hole badge was meant to be a reward for

persistence and proficiency requiring the user to spend a great

deal of time on the site completing exercises. Because of it’s

rarity and exclusiveness, a lot of value was placed on

obtaining a black hole badge. However, the difficulty

associated with getting such a badge resulted in the creation

of walkthroughs illustrating ways to game/exploit the system in

order to get the badge efficiently. One such exploit is getting

nine questions in a row right and then missing the last one on

purpose in order to maximize the number of points recieved (see

https://code.google.com/p/khanacademy/issues/detail?id=3083) .

Originally meant to encourage users who were not quite experts,

this point increase instead encouraged students to incorrectly

answer questions they might have gotten correct. If the measure

of proficiency assumes that users who gets all questions

correctly perform better than those who do not, this level of

exploit would undermine that assessment. The badge functioned

perfectly as an external motivator, but unfortunately, at least

in some cases, it lead to the reverse engineering of the system

in order to earn the badge efficiently without having to

actually “Learn” or complete the task in the way it was

intended.

Just because a system can exploited, doesn’t mean it lacks

merit, but just that it may need revision. Games are often

exploited by players wishing to “Min-Max” the system. Min-

Maxing is the process of minimizing undesired experiences or

traits, while maximizing desired outcomes. Min-Maxing is

expected, and it is usually in the interest of the developer to

patch, or fix, the problem if it is detrimental to the desired

experience. Similarly, a well executed attempt at gamification

will continue to refine their approach taking into account how

a user interacts with the game.

In addition to circumventing the system, Jenkins (2012)

cautions that badges, and similar achievements, can also

potentially disrupt organic, existing communities because they

assign value to what the designers feel is important, rather

than what fan communities value. While this is very important

to consider, incorporating player and designer values is not

impossible. Taking examples such as Civilization’s One City

Challenge, the successful incorporation of achievement systems

is an asynchronous conversation between players and designers.

Designers observe players’ activity, see what they value and

how they play games (see also speedruns or headshots), and then

acknowledge these practices in future games. Games are, after

all, both genres of media and modes of interaction, and we

carry over practices from one media experience to the next.

Indeed, one of the most rewarding game experiences as a player

is when a novel action or strategy is tried (such as jumping

off of a cliff in World of Warcraft), and suddenly an achievement

pops up recognizing your accomplishment and creating this kind

of secret conversation between the player and designer. Rather

than being a static artifact, the incorporation of

achievements, especially those that promote mastery or

exploration, creates a dynamic system that continues to

challenge the user.

Another key question confronting educators is whether to

create multiple badge systems (such as a badge system for every

museum or informal learning space), or whether to create a

national network of badges. Using a national network has many

advantages, issuers/educators don’t have to consider whether

they have the infrastructure necessary to keep track of and

host the achievements, and users have the convenience of having

a central repository that catalogs their achievements across a

variety of contexts. In contrast, having multiple systems means

that a user’s achievements are scattered all around the

internet. While those badges may accurately reflect a user’s

expertise, they run the risk of becoming obscure or esoteric

simply because they are harder to share. Unfortunately, an

award has little value if no one knows why it was important in

the first place. Being unable to share your awards efficiently

makes the risk that these achievements will be overlooked more

likely. Open systems aggregate these achievements highlighting

what users have done without having to pull together resources.

Mozilla’s Open Badges project seeks to create an open

standard for badges which enables institutions to host their

own badges, while also being connected to a larger

organization. Mozilla’s open Application Programming Interface

(API) is a free, “open technical standard any organization can

use to create, issue and verify digital badges” (Mozilla,

2013). A museum could, for example, create a badge for

completing a game design workshop which would be displayed

alongside achievements designed by NASA, Microsoft, and Disney

(see http://www.openbadges.org/community/). Implementing Open

Badges is quite simple; the educator’s system identifies where

the player will be / what the player has to do in order to get

the award, and the system (game) informs the hosting

accreditation system that the user has met the requirements.

The relevant badge is then issued and a notification is sent

via email. This badge can then be displayed on a page, unique

to the user, or shared over social networks such as Facebook or

twitter.

Educators hope that through Mozilla’s Open Badge

Initiative, schools, museums, and other formal and informal

learning groups might contribute toward this open repository.

Particular badges may become respected, so that educators

understand that completing a game design workshop or creating a

game that achieves a certain rating is valuable. Perhaps, even

educational institutions will begin using them as credentials,

rather than grades, GPAs, or test scores.

Conclusions

When designing gamified learning environments, it’s important

to see it as an ongoing process. Just as good games require

that their game mechanics match up with the experience you seek

to convey, game mechanics must be used to contribute toward the

values and culture that one hopes to foster. We argue for a

participatory approach in which all constituents can

participate in defining badges, achievements, or structures,

but how to design such a system is not straightforward. In

short, the execution matters.

Gamification is never inherently “done”, but is an ongoing

process, the quality of which depends on how it is enacted. We

must study empirically the value of such systems in context,

and for different user groups. Traditional constructs such as

“achievement motivation” are problematic because they are

rarely contextualized. Motivation is an emergent property

defined by person task and context, and thus must be constantly

studied. Games themselves -- which have been used as a reward

-- are a fascinating problemitizer of intrinsic motivation, as

they sometimes are motivating, and sometimes are not, and even

within them, frequently employ intrinsic and extrinsic

properties.

Gamification structures will flourish in upcoming years as

a response to the open-ended nature of information. As

educational systems wrestle with the reality that “knowledge is

free on the Internet”, and that an increasing amount of

learning occurs outside of classrooms, new accreditation

mechanisms are clearly needed. We face very real challenges in

education. We face very real questions around equity and

assessment. Institutions such as testing companies -- or even

Universities -- have business models that profit on the status

quo, which may or may not be in the best interests of ordinary

citizens. We think gamification techniques are a critical set

of design tools in an educators’ toolbox to address these

issues. Whether or not gamification is a good thing is missing

the question; good and bad examples of gamification exist.

Issues around individual vs. institutional values and

accreditation vs. performance are not new. Our hope is that

educators might take advantage of this moment of disruption

(and invention of gamification) and work toward more democratic

learning organizations.

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