Strategies for Meaningful Gamification: Concepts behind Transformative Play and Participatory Museums

Meaningful gamification is the use of game design elements to help users find meaning in a nongame context. Rather than focus on external rewards and a scoring system, meaningful gamification focuses on play to engage participants in a ludic learning space. In this article, concepts of transformative play and learning are combined with principles behind science museums and participatory exhibit design to create strategies for those looking to add meaningful gamification to real world settings. Acknowledgement: Thank you to Jon-Paul Dyson for inspiring me to think more deeply about the optional nature of play and how it can work with gamification. Introduction to Meaningful Gamification Gamification is "the use of game design elements in non-game contexts" (Deterding et al, 2011, p.1) and is a recently coined term for a concept that has been around for some time. Most of the current applications of gamification are based on providing external rewards for some activity; for example, points for being a loyal customer, levels and leaderboards to encourage prograss and competition, badges for visiting certain types of locations, and achievements for reaching fitness goals. Gamification systems that focus on Badges, Levels and Leaderboards, Achievements, and Points will be referred to in this paper as BLAP gamification. For some situations, BLAP gamification is an appropriate choice. External rewards are easy ways to entice customers to engage with a product, and as long as the external reward systems are never taken away, they can be effective (Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011). External rewards damage internal motivation, but if the non-game context is a task for which there is no internal motivation, BLAP gamification can increase engagement when other tools may not work. If the non-game context is a skill with real-life benefits such as learning to tie a shoe or learning to use a new piece of software, then BLAP gamification can be effective. While using external rewards may be effective, Kohn (1999) presents countless examples of how incentives reduce performance. Society has become accustomed to relying upon rewards like grades, gold stars, and money to motivate people. Kohn argues that rewards and punishments are two sides of the same coin, and that while rewards are easy tools for motivation, helping someone to make their own decisions about their actions without an external controlling behavior will lead to better results (1999). Therefore, even though reward-based BLAP gamification may be an appropriate choice, those looking to use rewards should consider that better performance can be reached through non-reward methods.