Gamification can be bullshit.
Some people may get triggered by the word “bullshit” as something negative or offensive. However, in this context, Bogost (2011) emphasized that bullshit has nothing to do with truth. Both lie and truth can be bullshit because it is rather used to conceal, impress, or coerce.
As said by Hamari (2019), gamification has been one of the popular advancements in this era (such as in business, marketing, and organization). Specific in education, gamification can also be merely an advancement word and even bullshit if it’s not carefully designed. For instance, chocolate-covered broccoli games.
Some of us may have seen many educational games that need the players to simply answer questions to be able to play the game although the questions are not really connected to the story of the game. For example, let’s say in a game we need to solve math questions in order to get into a shelter. The questions are not anything that connects entering a shelter with math problem-solving skills because they could be simply replaced with chemistry questions, biology, history, or others. In this case, the questions/problems are the broccoli, the things we want students to do, and the gameplay is the chocolate, the thing that we think will get them to do it.
The problem with this methodology is it actually gives ideas to students that math or chemistry or biology or history isn’t any fun. And in order to make those fun, we have to give extra rewards.
Summarizing a webinar by Prof Eric Klopfer from MIT, the other problem with this is that even though it might get students to temporarily enjoy doing math (or other subjects) problems because they’re having some fun with that, it doesn’t really promote the enjoyment of math. It makes math or chemistry or biology fun, but it does not show that they are fun. And that’s an important distinction.
It should start with “why do people enjoy math or chemistry or biology, what do they really enjoy about them?” Maybe math is about problem-solving, biology is about puzzles. So it’s actually about finding what mathematicians love about it, biologists love about biology, chemists love about chemistry, and how do we actually amplify that and put that in the games. Otherwise, adding game elements just to make fun without thoughtful design can make gamification sound bullshit.
Moreover, a literature review conducted by Hamari (2014) showed that, although gamification work, there were considerable caveats and limitations in the studies reviewed such as the lack of control group and other methodological aspects which lead to the validity of the results.
P.S. Gamification in education is highly possible to be as bullshit as in marketing if the games are not perfectly designed with considering its essential aspects. Gamification may be rhetorical (in a sense of business) because it’s used repeatedly to make an idea sounds superficial and thus, accepted. It is the same as the overuse of the word “industry revolution 4.0 or big data” in governance and business to make some policy sounds trustworthy and reassuring.
References
Bogost, I. (2014). Why Gamification is bullshit. In The gameful world: Approaches, issues, applications (pp. 65–79). MIT Press.
Deterding, S. (2011, May 7–11). Situated motivational affordances of game elements: A conceptual model. http://gamification-research.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/09-Deterding.pdf
Hamari, J. (2019). Gamification. In G. Ritzer & C. Rojek (Ed.), The blackwell encyclopedia of sociology (pp. 1–3). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Hamari, J., Koivisto, J., & Sarsa, H. (2014). Does Gamification Work? — A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification. In proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, USA, January 6–9, 2014.
