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When this online store had just launched, we struggled to explain its purpose to family and investors. This wasn’t necessarily a problem, but it’s interesting to talk about.

Everyone responded positively! They said: “Ah yes, gamification is pretty hot right now. And your store wants to gamify education, right?”

And then we would squirm and try to explain that this is not actually true, without ruining our chances ;)

Gamification is a hot topic. Schools everywhere are falling for products or services that would gamify education. Parents everywhere are asking for it, because they see the results. Their kids come home all enthusiastic because they played a new game at school, or because they got some reward.

A definition

So let’s start with the question: what is it?

Gamification means applying game-like mechanics to otherwise non-game activities.

Literally playing a game is not gamification. It’s just playing a game. You can call it educational games if you want, or serious games.

Gamification is the act of adding things like levels, objectives, badges, rewards, and more to a non-game activity.

This can be as small as rewarding someone with a sticker after doing their homework. Or it can be as big as having an actual leaderboard in the classroom and students being able to score points for all sorts of things.

It can be as tiny as taping a theme/story to a typical textbook. Or it can be as huge as structuring an entire subject as a competition with rewards and feedback loops.

In practice, most schools are indeed gamifying education (as opposed to playing educational games or something similar).

Does it work?

Now comes the second question: is it good? Is it actually improving education?

This requires a more nuanced answer.

Principle 1: Anything that makes kids happier and more excited about school/learning is a good thing.

We don’t believe that it’s “worth it” to make people extremely unhappy or bored just to make their education a bit more efficient. Games and game-like mechanics make people happy. They’re supposed to be fun—they’re designed to be. And being happy, especially as a kid, is a very very good thing.

As such, even if the gamification itself were completely useless, we’d still likely be positive about it.

Principle 2: Learning and Fun are the same thing. Learning and Addiction, Pressure, and Psychological Manipulation are not.

We’ve written countless articles about this fact. All games are educational, because the process of learning is the same process of having fun. For example, one might check out,

The dangers of gamification

But there’s a darker side to this. Our brains can’t really distinguish between “I am engaged/having fun and want to do this” and “I am compelled to do this (by habit or manipulation) but I don’t actually want to”. It’s this error in our psyche that social media and gambling exploit.

It’s most easily exploited with, you guessed it, systems like randomized rewards, made-up pressure, and needless competition. Apps/Games reward you for logging in daily to force you into a habit—before long, you’re stressed about logging in daily, even though you’re not actually having fun or want to do it. Similarly, games contain random elements (such as the infamous “loot boxes”) to make you keep playing, because “randomized rewards” are the way to make someone addicated.

In practice, unfortunately, many gamification efforts add exactly that.

  • They simply add external rewards to random things (you get a sticker, a candy, etcetera). Science has proven that this destroys intrinsic motivation, creativity, and hampers actual learning.
  • They reward kids for showing up every day, or doing the next three homework exercises every day, or something similar. As stated, this is nothing more than fostering habits and addiction, not actually about efficient learning or having fun.
  • They create leaderboards or little competitions that actually have consequences. (As an example that actually happened: a leaderboard where only the top 10 were allowed to go to some special “educational excursion” in the weekend. Might seem harmless at first, but in practice the richest kids just scammed their way to the top, and now you’ve created an unfair class system at microscale within your classroom.)

This is how you should not do it. If you do this, then we’re obliged to say you’re actively hurting your students.

It might not seem that way. You might be happy for a while that students are working a little harder or being more consistent. Students might even report that they like it for a while. But in the long term you will destroy a lot (such as intrinsic motivation and risk-taking creativity) and our brains (especially kids’ brains) can’t accurately self-reflect. (We all know smoking and alcohol are bad for you, but most people who use it are pretty positive about these goods, aren’t they?)

Most importantly, does it even teach anything? Does it improve learning? We can’t find any evidence of that. Games are great learning tools; gamified textbooks don’t seem to be.

That’s why we do not brand our store as “gamifying education”. We might use the term here or there to ensure people find us or get the gist, but even that is are. Because, well, we don’t. We make full-blown games, and puzzles, and escape rooms, and more. We write professional novels that treat kids like intelligent beings and discuss a topic in interesting ways. We have no interest in “gamifying” the traditional school curriculum. Why would we gamify a textbook, when we could just make a really good game teaching that topic instead?

An example of good gamification

We understand, however, that not everyone is in this situation. Making games is hard, so even our curriculum has lots of gaps right now. School directors (and governments) are more open to “gamifying” the existing system than any bigger changes.

We’ve experienced this first-hand many times, as stated in the introduction. Investors, teachers, family and friends, everyone responds positively to “gamifying education”. Sure! Let’s give it a shot! Very innovative! And then … nobody responds positively to “replacing it with actual good games” ;)

So let’s end on a practical and positive note. How do you gamify education?

Principle 3: Gamify by copying and translating the mechanics that make games fun.

A good example would be short feedback loops. Games are fun because you,

  • Regularly get to take an action.
  • Almost immediately see the consequences of it.
  • Which allows you to learn and take a slightly better/different action next time.

A short feedback loop. A cycle that you repeat from start to finish—the core “game loop”.

Now let’s compare that to school.

  • You sit still and read/listen for hours on end.
  • When you get to do something, your only feedback is often a delayed grade.
  • You’re swamped with boring work, feedback is so scarce, and you have so little free will within the system, that you can’t really learn from feedback and experiment with new actions easily.

So, what is a proper way to “gamify” this?

  • Very regularly let your students interact with your presentation/lecture. Answer questions, solve little puzzles/problems, decide what to focus on next.
  • Focus on the practical applicability of topics in the first place. If you think a certain scientific topic is important enough to teach, then you must be able to find a way to directly apply it to the real world. To the daily life of your students, so they understand why you’re teaching this. So they can go home and do something with that information.
  • Only use external “rewards” or “leaderboards” for feedback, not competition or actual consequences. For example, simply give kids “experience points” whenever they finish the next batch of exercises. They can’t use those points, there are no real-life consequences, and they also get the points if they made lots of mistakes. They’re personal experience points.