European Iversity courses, including Game Design...

Soul_Rider

Hey all,

I have just discovered Iversity, which is a online university type thingy-majiggy, offering courses in a few different subjects. I have signed up for a course in Gamification Design, starts in March, and I thought i'd post the link here for others who may be interested. They have a small choice of courses, but most of them seem to have already been run, this is the only current course I found that was of interest to me.

Gamification Design:
https://iversity.org/c/50?r=5cf23

AurOn2

Do we have to be anywhere in particular to participate?
I mean there was a local meetups, kind of difficult if you live in the ass of the world.

Soul_Rider

No, it's part of their MOOC Massively Online open Courses. It's a fairly new thing started last year, I guess in the wake of the MIT online and Harvard online courses which have been so successful.

Soylent_green

Gamification sucks on every conceivable level. It's shallow representation of a game; taking superficial game features and mistaking them for the actual game mechanics, like scores, points, stats, experience bars and achievements; completely ignoring the actual game mechanics.

Gaming is about many thing; mastery, flow, self-determination and community being some of the big ones.

Gamification is about one thing only: Tricking and cajoling people into doing things they don't want to do or which it is not in their interest to do with various skinner box type techniques. To the extent it works, that's a bad thing.

Soul_Rider

@Soylent_green - Gamification is a way of making education interesting and fun. Some of the things I plan on making will be education devices that are fun, rather than straight forward 'games', therefore gamification is important to me, to make the things I would like to portray more accessible.

It is a shame you can only see gamification as something that COD tags onto a shooter, but that's your choice.

Soylent_green

Soul_Rider wrote: »

@Soylent_green - Gamification is a way of making education interesting and fun.

On the contrary. It's the most effective poison against fun and learning. Education is an inherently fun activity, if it's something you want to learn. If you want to make an inherently fun activity as blowing people´s heads off with a shotgun in a game a boring and tedious, all you have to do is give an achievement for blowing 100 heads off and keep reminding the player of it every few kills and it ceases to be inherently fun and just becomes a tedious obstacle.

When you incentivice higher performance with a monetary reward, you just get lower performance and lower worker satisfaction. This has been tested to death. Gamification is even worse; you're not even offering an actual reward, just downsides. Piece work is only effective for the most simplistic and mechanical tasks; if even rudamentary thinking skills are involved, offering an external reward reduces performance by sucking the fun out of the activity. That's gamification in a nutshell.

Autonomy, mastery, flow. That's what makes work-like activities fun and not tedious.

Soul_Rider wrote: »

It is a shame you can only see gamification as something that COD tags onto a shooter, but that's your choice.

I've been on the recieving end of gamification in the work place. I resigned.