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Education is a very crucial and serious domain in life, and it comes in vastly different forms and packages too. For most people, education is a river that brings them from childhood to adulthood, while people of academia adopt research, progress and education as their life’s mission. Under this lens, yes, education can be very serious and can’t be joked about. Even practical people, such as investors, like Ray Dalio, point out the importance of education for the economy. But while the goals and essence of education are serious, in the sense that they are vital for ethics, collaboration and development, the means used in education do not have to be serious. Education can often be playful and this is how the concept of gamification stuck to it.

Simply put, gamification is the introduction of game elements to a process to make it more engaging and interesting. Gamification can be both digital and analogue. It became more popular as a concept, though, due to the traction of behavioral economics, the growing videogames market and digitalization due to Covid-19, when educators were forced to seek more engaging distance learning strategies. As you can tell, two of the three reasons mentioned are digital, making gamification easier to be associated purely with videogames. While this is not bad thing in itself, it is detrimental when most people misunderstand the depth of videogames, since they are primarily exposed to casual, mobile games. The worst thing about most mobile games is the fact that they are re-skins of the same simple mechanics used - and this is relevant to how deep educators are willing to get in gamifying their lessons.

Many publicly available opinions about gamification also come from psychologists and Learning & Development professionals who have caught the trend on LinkedIn. In their case, they usually promote gamification for organizational learning and employee engagement. However, again, due to limited exposure to immersive gaming experiences, their opinions paint a distorted image of gamification. They talk as professionals – not as gamers.

One of the main consequences is the use of standardized software that is known and regarded as best practices. One such example is Kahoot! This software essentially turns quizzes into a competition, where each participant can choose an option and gain points depending on how fast they can answer correctly. This, of course, is highly effective for certain aspects of your teaching. But it’s not nearly enough to claim that a professor properly uses gamification techniques and neither can they do this as the core of their lessons.

Unintentional learning is extremely powerful

So, what do most people miss when they have not been gamers for their whole life? I think most can be summed up with the phrase “unintentional learning.” When a gamer plays a videogame, they don’t play to learn. They play to play. Sometimes, though, you must learn to play, which you don’t realize since the focus is on “play”. My first attempt at “learning something” to “play” was when I started playing Pokemon Emerald - which is basically how I started learning English. In Pokemon you command your pocket monster to perform a certain action against your opponent. When you command your Pokemon to bite and you see an animation of fangs closing, you can easily understand what bite means. Soon, I was developing a basic English vocabulary and with simple google searches, here and there, I had a better understanding of the plot in the game too. This is an example of how interest in the object of the game can motivate you to invest more in understanding it to progress the game and enjoy it even more. I was not playing Pokemon to particularly learn English. But I wanted to understand what is going on in Pokemon and that motivated me much more than thinking about my future job prospects at the age of eight.

Videogames can also spark interest in curiosity when they display a real-world element in a cool fashion. The best example I can think of is the Assassin’s Creed franchise. In Assassin’s Creed you play as (surprise) an Assassin protecting what they stand for, in various historical settings. The game informs about plenty of historical elements and references in the game, while blending in real historical figures, such as Machiavelli, George Washington, Napoleon and Winston Churcill. It is effective to motivate somebody to learn history, as it requires some imagination to make it interesting and memorable. In other words, it is an immersive experience that mixes fictional and non-fictional elements that make the player go and check if something actually happened that way in real history. And each time they now read a book, they imagine the graphics, cutscenes and environments they were seeing for more than 15 hours of gameplay. No historic simulator is capable of keeping your attention for this much time, no matter how many puzzles or quizzes are squeezed inside. It is no coincidence that Assassin’s Creed games with the discovery mode in ancient Egypt, Greece and medieval Scandinavia are used in certain educational curricula. However, for custom-made solutions, educators simply do not have the budget and more importantly the awareness, knowledge or willingness to construct such thorough, immersive experiences.

Finally, let’s look at a category of videogames that try to gamify learning coding languages. While they seem cool, the best they can teach is logic rather than the programming language itself. This happens because coding, in real life, depends on many more variables than most daily users are even aware of. This is why perhaps it is best to study textbooks and apply concepts you learn to create your own little projects. All that while playing Zachtronics games. Zachtronics is a very special developer with games like EXAPUNKS and TIS-100 where you even study a pdf manual to learn a fictional code language in order to progress the game. It doesn’t teach you Javascript, Python or C++. It doesn’t even teach coding design patterns per se – though it helps. The most important thing they teach is the attitude you should have towards coding. As you are trying to achieve the objectives in the game, you are forced through trial and error, which is much easier to accept emotionally in a game compared to studying. This is how one realizes that this applies in a real-life coding also. We are not expected to code 10 lines ahead right off the bat - we should be thankful to have written one line at a time and be ready to change it if needed. Accept the defeat without the psychological toll.

What can we do optimally as educators?

In all the cases above, the learning experience was invisible - in the sense that I was not thinking about learning – I was simply enjoying or were enjoying being challenged. Hence, this should be the primary criterion when incorporating gamification in a process. Unintentional learning is effective due to the absence of the overjustification effect. When somebody is already motivated to play for their own joy, they will not be as motivated to play if they are constantly reminded on top that they will learn something. The same applies vice versa if somebody is intrinsically motivated to learn.  Having multiple sources of motivation is worse than one good source of motivation.

The games were also purely complementary to my studies. They sparked curiosity and that spark evolved into a flame elsewhere – where I could find all the further material in books, webpages and documentaries. The bottom line, however, is that the modern educator must be in the shoes of the learner constantly, looking at what is interesting to them without dismissing it as silly. Perhaps the modern educator must play more in their free time. Perhaps even play together with the students for the sake of playing, having a good time and bonding more with them.