On Gamification (Part II)

Back in 2011, I wrote some thoughts on gamification that I thought I’d return to sooner. Fourteen years later, here we are. Back then my view was mixed, leaning negative. Now? Still mixed. Maybe less negative, maybe even tilting toward the positive. I would not call myself a fan of gamification, but I have found myself using it, or at least thinking about my teaching through that lens.

My initial critique was the way gamification was pitched back then: badges and levels designed to get people to spend more time on a website. I used GameSpot as my example. You could rack up a rank, collect titles, earn mysterious "ninja" badges. But what did it add? Spending more time in a forum did not mean better conversations. More time in class does not automatically mean more learning either. Even if you could measure the minutes students spend reading, that is not the same thing as understanding.

What has shifted for me is teaching instructional design. The more I teach it, the more I see that gamification has potential not because it tricks students into working harder, but because it makes the structure of learning visible. Instructional design asks us to provide pathways. Gamification lets me lay those pathways out so students can see them. Asking a question in class, for example, can be a power-up, not because students are chasing coins, but because it signals that curiosity matters.

For me, the real value is less about changing student behavior and more about changing how I frame the experience. Laying out the gamified elements forces me to look at the course as a system, not just a bundle of readings and discussion prompts. It makes the whole course feel more coherent. And as I have said before, students do not have to buy into that layer. They can ignore it and still get what they need. That optionality feels crucial. Too often I see courses where quests or guilds are mandatory, and there is no way to opt out.

The trickiest part is how specific my approach is to my own context. It works best in small classes, ideally online where I have the time to record and maintain the gamified pieces. It does not scale well to lecture halls, and it would be awkward in a traditional in-person course. That makes it nearly impossible to study in any clear empirical way. With fifteen or twenty students, there are too many variables to "prove" whether it works. For me it remains an experiment. If I stripped it away, maybe the class would run just as well.

And yet, even if gamification does not do much for my students, it has made me a better instructional designer. At the very least it has made me more interested in the teaching itself, because I am not just dumping content into a course shell. I am actively designing an experience I want students to enjoy. I did not always have that mentality.

Because I have been thinking about gamified learning as a game-like context, I spend more time rethinking and refining than I probably would otherwise. And it is not all fun and games, no pun intended. What it really does is force me into iterations. Teaching can easily become static. If something works, why change it? But through this frame, I have become more oriented toward constant revision and hopefully improvement.

If nothing else, it works for me. That might be both the benefit and the drawback. It is tailored to the designer, not something you can easily hand off to someone else. But then again, what teaching method really works for everyone?

So maybe that is the takeaway. Gamified or not, no system is universal. What matters is whether it helps you see your own teaching differently. For me, that has been enough. Whether there is ever a Part III, I cannot say. I hope it will not take another fourteen years. But like any good game, it feels like an ongoing investigation.