Gaminification and the programmed learning that went along with it failed. Especially the 2010s version, which still lingers, although the surrounding excitement has died off.
I enjoy games. I enjoy learning. I have loved educational games since I was a child; I still like them. So it was natural that I embraced gaminification as a technique to improve learning. My enthusiasm for gaminification was shared by the wider tech world in the 2010s, so it was exciting to see what smart people with funding and modern technology could accomplish.
Today we see the fruits of those efforts: we collectively failed. Gaminification promised us a new era of engaged students and work being motivated by game mechanics. Instead, it ushered us into an era of addiction and user resentment.
Gamification is using game mechanics techniques to encourage greater engagement from students or software users. This usually transalates into getting points, earning badges, pursuing quests, and tournament ladders. The idea is simple and full of optimism. People enjoy games. What if we used games to engage students into learning? What if we use games to help us stick to our exercise routines? Or diets? Our work?
Not exactly gamification, but usually closely connected to it, is programmed learning. These are courses or books whose curricula are carefully crafted, meant to be interactive and with minimal instructor support. Programmed learning was historically associated with behavioral pyschology, and uses behavioral ideas and techniques in their materials.
Gamification and programmed learning are not new ideas. In the US, Sputnik ushered an era of education funding and research that saw an increase of educational toys, behavioral learning via modules, and the beginning of computer-driven educational technology. The funding waned after the US reached the moon. This milestone convinced US leadership that the U.S. was better at engineering that the Soviet Union, after all, and began cutting funding. Another reason for the decline in funding was connected with how the techiques didn't have the revolutionary results that were expected. Still, these educational toys and books lingered over the decades, which is how I got to see the remanents of these games, kits, and books.
Overall, there were mixed results. Some were wildly successful, such as the Oregon Trail game. Most programs had mixed results, enough that education gave up on most of the products and techniques that were taught. No Child Left Behind, with its stress on standarized tests, pretty much killed most of these programs, only kept alive by the most ardent supporters of the techniques among teachers and families.
Not that these techniques were actually bad. Many of them are good, and used with support of teachers and parents, can be successful. The typing games from the 80s and 90s were pretty enjoyable, and were good at teaching touch typing. WFF N Proof was a fun game of propositional logic. In the programmed learning camp, Bobby Fisher Teachers Chess and Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelmann are great examples of modularized learning, where the lessons are carefully crafted, and the student has instant feedback on whether they made a mistake or not.
But we must stress that even the successful programs and games are a great tools that supplement learning. They were not revolutionary. They didn't speed up learning. To a large extent, even the two successful books on modularize learning that I mentioned still require a lot of human intervention. Teachers are needed to adapt the material to the actual needs of the student, clarifying concepts that the student has problems learning.
If we had a sensible culture where people actually do a literature review to see what succeeded and what failed, the explosion of gamification in the 2010s wouldn't have happened. Or, if it was meant to happen, it should have been in a more sober, measured manner, presented as an interesting twist to programmed learning. Fortunately for us, US culture fails to foster humillity or a collective memory, so instead we got unbounded excitement on how adding gaming mechanics would change learning forever. Why aim for gradual progress, building on the shoulders of giants when we could nurse our narcisisim, thinking that we thought of an idea before anyone else?
Perhaps the most successful and emblematic gamified app is Duolingo. You get chains, badges, points, quests, and a manipulative, nagging mascot that negs you into practicing a foreign languge. You can practice for only a few minutes a day, but its addictive gaming mechanisms are set up so that you will get engrossed into the game, and as a consequence, learn more German than you meant to.
Since Duolingo did so well to capture our cultural imagination, we started adding gaminification mechanisms into rival language learning apps. They were also assed to habit-forming apps. With Habitica, you create a D&D character which ayou level up by the power or washing your clothes and taking the garbage out. It was unclear to me what you did with this powerful character, other than see how your guild collective failed to wash the dishes this week. I also saw these mechanisms appear in developer programming apps like Codewars. Kahn Academy also had some elaborate badge and XP systems.
These apps have been around for 15 years now. Did we see a revolution in education? Have we eradicated learning inequality? Are people learning languages, how to code, getting their stuff done more than before?
No. We are instead living through an era that the education advances of the 20th century are sliding back. People read less, write less, have shorter attention spans, and feel confused and anxious by the constant distractions of modern life. Many of these distractions brought by a cute green owl, reminding us that it is time to do our French lesson.
These are the reasons why gamification failed. They use game mechanics to attempt to manipulate us; to induce addiction in us. It tries to mask compulsive work as a game, and we know the difference between a game and work.
Learning is hard. It is uncomfortable. We feel ignorant and clumsy. We feel confused. In a world that emands us to be tough, learning makes us vulnerable. We cannot make it fun. We cannot make it a game. It can be engaging, but it will still be work. Rather than trying to cheat this reality, we should embrace it. We admire people who do hard things already in our culture. Marathon runners deservingly are admiredbecause running a marathon is hard. We present learning the same way to students. It may be hard, but you are admirable for doing it because it is hard. You won't need to do it alone because we are here to help you.
We lost a lot of time with the Gamification era. Money and effort that could have been spent on researching how we can better help students with learning disabilities were wasted turning your project management system into a bad RPG leaderboard.
We need to move away from tech ed. It can always support, but never replace teachers who have the liberty to focus on students. This is what history shows that works.