Game Studies: Gamification & the blockchain (Chapter 1: Introduction to Gamification)

So let me start with my draftpaper regarding gamification and the blockchain. Maybe you ask yourself "wtf ^^ is a draftpaper". My aim is that I split my thoughts into ~ 30 to 40 small chapters. Each chapter can be discussed by the community. After I am finished  with all postings I will do my best to put the results into a scientific-framework and conduct further quantitative and qualitative studies. and this will lead to a whitepaper/paper/or even book. everyone who helps will get credits or direct quotes in the final results. 

At first I need to do a introduction to gamification and present parts of my last 14 yrs into the field. Everything I write down should  not seen as final result or as the academic-chorus. At some point my own opinion differs from classic gamification literature. 

Let me start with the history of gamification

Gamification is something very very very old! Above you see a picture that I recently took at the Kings College Chapel at University of Cambridge. This shows Badges that Pilgrims were able to achieve back in the 16th century. Badges, achieve? Does this sound common to you?

I like to continue with a quote from 244 AD. From Plotin: 

„Spielend fürs erste, ehe wir uns an den Ernst machen, möchten wir behaupten: nach der Theoria verlangen alle Dinge. Ist damit unsere gegenwärtige Abhandlung selber nur ein Spiel? Alles spielt ja nur aus Trieb nach der Schau, der Ernst des Mannes und das Spiel des Knaben“ 

I only have the German translation available, it is written down in the "Enneaden III" - maybe translated as Enneades 3? I am sorry for that but as my research was mainly in German I have to improvise at some points here ;). 

However, let me do a translation of this and reform it a bit into more modern language:

Playing before we start to go for the serious events, that is what we like to say. Is our existence on earth maybe just a game? Everyone plays chased because of the need for admiration - the seriousness of the grown up man and the playing around from the boy.

(Well they did not gender the language in 244 AD ... so it is of course man and woman and boy and girl)

So for me it was really a big thing reading the Ennades and discovering that what was in 2012 (the time I read it) brandmarked as hypertrend (Gamification as a term) was nothing new. In fact it did not start with Juul,Caillois, Huizinga, Wittgenstein or Schiller. You can go back until 244 after Christ was born to get one of the best defintions of gamification ever made. 

Game Studies

As next part of Chapter 1: Introduction I have to go at least a little bit into classic Game Studies Literature. 

We have the famous authors mentioned above. Schiller with his "ludic drive" - with that he defined the range between Egoism and total sacrifice for the needs of the society. 

We have of course Huizinga, who defined the "homo ludens" (the playing men) and the famous approach of the "magic circle"

And we have Caillois, he defined the categories of play and provides a nearly perfect definition of what game / play means. E.g. dividing it into 

• Agon (competition)
• Alea (chance)
• Mimicry (mascerade)
• Ilinx  (altering perception)

and the pendular movement between ludus and paida. Rules and full freedom of play. 

You find good articles about those authors and the very basic of their theories on wikipedia (and in their books) so I don`t need to tell you more about that here, but I needed to get you in touch with the very basics. 

The last decade as game studies became more popular at universities the discussion about games and society grew constantly. And as my text here is about gamification and not classic game studies let me give you here the four points all researchers and philosophers agree on: 

• goal
• rules
• feedback
• and voluntariness

as key elements of play/games. However Voluntariness has to be written in Italic nowadays when it comes to gamification. (I speak about that in an extra posting, which I might call key criteria of success or similar)

I like to continue for today  with some quotes that I absolutely love: 

"playing a game is defined as a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles"

That one is from Berhard Suits, 1978. And it is by far the best sentence I read about defining games - and defining the reason why people who like to play games can out this into their CV. There is so much subtext in this one sentence regarding skillsets of ambitious players. Just take 30 seconds for yourself here and think about it. 

For the introduction I have three more quotes, with one we are going to play around a little bit.

"To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances."

this one is from  Mihály Csíkszentmiháli  the founder of the flow theory. Mihály is speaking about that we have to kind of gamify-ourselfs. So we have to find what makes us happy as an individual. E.g. I love comments here on steemit and the first virtual friendships that seem to pop up. The upvotes and maybe future author rewards are a nice side effect. Gamification can not be "the big hammer" and we will talk about Exploitationware (Osterweil) or Ludefaction (Kirkpatrick) also in one of the next postings.

 „The opposite of play isn‘t work, It‘s depression“  

This one is from Brian Sutton-Smith. And I love it so much. The only thing you absolutely can not put (or shall not put) into a gamification framework is to help people suffering from depression. However you can of course build a serious game or alternate game about depression. But not for the person with depression, for the people that surround him/her to learn how he/she feels. Doris Rusch did a great approach here with the game prototyp Elude (MIT Game Lab 2010)

And the last quote for today is from Jane Mc Gonical:

 „Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good hard work“   

With that I like to play around and "slide" to our core subject Gamification: 

"Self definied goals that we try to reach voluntary or challenging work that we get from others and can be accepted by our choice are the most motivating activities"

This quote from myself - as I said inspired by Jane Mc Gonical - is maybe describing in one sentence what the power of gamification can be at the end of the day. 

However creating a good and working gamification framework is extremely difficult. But that of course is part of future postings and a chapter/chapters on its own. 

So I like to finish the first posting of the draftpaper ;) with the very classic quote what gamification means. In the next entry we will talk about who plays and cluster gamification into three categories. 

  “The application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity…” 

but to this we have to add: 

 "… which should lead to a (positive) change of the behavior even without the game mechanics."

and this last part is the difficulty regarding the framework mentioned before. 

So dear steemit community. Pls Comment, Discuss, tell me what you like to hear more, or sooner ;). Read you soon :).

And as I said if you miss the blockchain here, don t worry - this is coming, but I should not come to this part too fast.