The previous two blogs looked at dystopian depictions of gamification on the small screen via Charlie Brooker’s TV series Black Mirror and the likely even smaller screen via the short film Sight (available online). It’s now time to turn to an example that brought gamified processes and practices to the big screen: Henry Joost and Ariel…
Gamified Dystopias II – Black Mirror
There’s something remarkable in the moment when the last frame of a film fades to black, the credits begin to roll, and the audience sits dead silent in the stillness; when there’s no immediate movement for the door as everyone remains in their seats, half-stunned and half-pondering the world they’ve just visited. Not many films…
Gamified Dystopias I – Sight
Gamification is not always an easy sell – and this is the case even when you’re not trying to sell something. There are genuine and reasonable concerns to be had around gamification in certain contexts, particularly when the thing being gamified is consumer behaviour. Yet rational critiques are not always the staple of a society…
Looking Forward – Episode 10 Follow-up
Our last episode for Level 1 looked back on what we’ve learnt from our gamified explorations so far, so it seems fitting that this follow-up blog peers forward into the future a little. As I mentioned in last week’s post, we’re planning to ‘level up’ in more ways than one for our next series of…
Level Complete – Episode 10
A blog about something that has come to an end may seem a strange way to start off the New Year, but we’d rather consider this ending for Our Gamified World a beginning. This week we round out our Level 1 episodes by looking back on our experiences making the show in 2016. We reflect on…
Gamifying the Holocaust? – Episode 9 Follow-up
An interesting issue that came out of our reflection on SuperBetter in Episode 9 was that of gamification and taboo. The subject of mental health is one that must be approached sensitively, but it is far from the only one. There are some areas of human experience that should undeniably be taken seriously and any…
Mental Health and Gamification – Episode 9
The stats relating to mental health are astounding. The most telling estimate of many provided by The Department of Health is that around one in five Australians experience some form of mental illness annually. As a result, everybody has witnessed the effects that anxiety disorders, depressive episodes, or psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia have on…
Gamification in the Workplace – Episode 8 Follow-up
I think @SummerTeachin will be pleased. Work meeting on how to encourage engagement at an upcoming event. I pipe up: let's try gamification! — AJ Macpherson (@aj_mac_pherson) December 15, 2016 Within minutes of the above tweet to my teaching account being posted, a conversation ensued that had given me extra motivation to focus this blog…
Friendly Competition – Episode 8
Sibling rivalry is a thing. While this blog’s feature image might not suggest it, my relationship with my younger brother Luke involved various forms of competition. I remember one time when playing table tennis, Luke was so adamant that the score didn’t matter that he conjured the quotable saying, ‘When I lose I win!’ Even…
Blurring the Boundaries – Episode 7 Follow-up
Gamification isn’t gaming. This will already be a mundane statement for anyone who has a working understanding of gamified practices and processes, but the distinction is worth raising here in light of our latest episode on Rocksmith. While games and gamification are different, we’ve found that in some situations there is a need for nuance….
Eat Your Vegetables – Episode 7
Learning well is eating all your vegetables. This represents a common, implicit, and completely flawed belief of a large number of people who continue to think of learning as anything but a game. The ongoing reluctance on the part of many working in the broad area of ‘education’ to consider the relationship between learning and…
Beyond Checklists – Episode 6 Follow-up
Habitica is in essence a checklist. That’s not the greatest marketing pitch for the app, but in large part that’s what it is. As our guest Sarah de Vries highlighted in Episode 6, Habitica proved for her to be a far more fun and interactive endeavour than simply striking off checkboxes alongside her daily goals….
Building Habits; Killing Dragons – Episode 6
‘What did you get up to on the weekend?’ ‘Dragged myself into work. You?’ ‘Killed a dragon.’ We highlighted way back in Episode 1 that the crisis (or crises) of engagement in education, politics, and so many other industry contexts is pervasive. In an attention and time poor society, people don’t need to hunt for…
Gamify with AI – Episode 5 Follow-up
The chatbots have landed!! Would you bother talking to someone when you can just converse with your phone? Since we filmed Episode 5 on the gamification of language-learning, the massively popular app Duolingo has released its new chatbot feature. Powered by artificial intelligence, this feature provides a range of ‘virtual language tutors’ for users to…
Language-Learning via Gamification – Episode 5
Language-learning is never an easy thing – for the students attempting to learn and for the teachers attempting to teach. It wasn’t so long ago that textbooks were the sole resource available (in some instances, they might still be). Perhaps if a class was lucky, the teacher may have had in their possession a CD…
Gamification and Punishment – Episode 4 Follow-up
‘Your father said GET OUTSIDE!!’ The concept of ‘play’ is most often associated with enjoyment, while the notion of ‘being punished’ is frequent associated with this only in the context of play being disallowed or in some way no longer possible. Yet encountering obstacles – and stumbling at various points – is not only a…
Gamifying Health and Fitness – Episode 4
So, it’s taken six weeks but we’ve finally introduced ourselves! The opening episodes focused on ‘our gamified world’ in a very specific sense – that is, the ways in which Danielle and Adam have applied gamification in their own work. From this point forward, that world will be expanded and you’ll see that our take…
From Planning to Implementation – Episode 3 Follow-up
The gamification of the unit #ALC203 makes it a lot more interesting,interactive and encouraging for students of learn! — Shivangi Sharma (@shivi2016) May 5, 2016 Episode 3 of Our Gamified World is probably an ‘outlier’ in some ways given that it’s possibly the one and only time we’ll chat about an example of gamification that doesn’t…
Structuring Engagement via Gamification – Episode 3
Ever wanted to be a hero? And did you picture yourself being one on YouTube? Maybe – many people do – but probably not in the same way that you now can be… Not all gamification is well received. YouTube’s recent decision to gamify the ways in which people interact with user generated content has…
Road Trip! Taking OGW to the World – Episode 2 Follow-up
If you build it, will they come? We’ve been thinking a lot about content creation and engagement this week. This is part and parcel of our day-to-day jobs of course, but we also had the good fortune (and not only to leave Melbourne’s miserable skies) to travel to Sydney on 21 September to present at…
Gamifying Food Regulation for Students – Episode 2
Introducing each other by interviewing each other. This may sound like a somewhat unconventional strategy for co-hosts to start a new web series off with, but reflecting one of those unforgettable lines from the 1960s: ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time.’ Of course, we’ve done the usual thing by providing some brief…
Everything is (Not Always) Awesome – Episode 1 Follow-up
We love the subject of gamification, but that doesn’t mean everything is awesome, no matter what the cute lego people say! We started filming Our Gamified World some months ago, and decided to hold off on launching the series until we had enough episodes in the bank to comfortably release future ones on a consistent…
What is Gamification?
– Episode 1
You don’t have to play games to play around… Okay, so that’s not exactly how this blog was supposed to start out, but it does help in some small way to make the key distinction this post is concerned with. In a world where games are fast becoming a pervasive pastime for people of all…