by Adam Alter
In one mission, “Dr. Smallz,” sixth or seventh graders learn about the human body. Dr. Smallz has shrunk himself to save an ailing patient, but alas, he has amnesia. The mission lasts thirteen weeks, and across its seven quests, students are charged with several goals: to help Dr. Smallz work out where he is in the patient’s body, remind him what each body organ and system does, help him solve the medical mystery of the patient’s illness, and, based on what they’ve learned about the body’s anatomy, help him find a way out of the patient’s body. By the end of the mission, students have learned the same scientific information that other schools teach, but for them the process is a game. In one task, for example, students build a cell from puzzle pieces. As they research information on each structure within the cell, they earn a piece, and so move closer to completing the task. In another, they learn about the immune system by playing a board game called Virus Attack. The game, designed by the Institute of Play, asks them to kill a virus by generating white blood cells, antibodies, and T-cells. Students earn rewards and track their progress just as they might do if they were playing a game outside the classroom.
A seventh-grade unit teaches students about the American Revolution. Their mission is to mediate a disagreement among several ghosts at the Natural History Museum. Each ghost represents a different Revolutionary character: a loyalist, a patriot, a landowner, a merchant, and a slave. They disagree about what happened during the Revolution, and the students must collect as much information as possible to prevent the bickering ghosts from destroying the museum’s entire collection. The students learn about the American Revolution, but they also learn that the truth is complex; that different parties may view the same event differently, and how to resolve those conflicts.
Q2L’s approach seems to be working. The school’s math team placed first in the New York City Math Olympiad three years in a row, and its students score roughly 50 percent higher than the average school on New York City’s standardized exams. By one metric, students grow intellectually between eighth and tenth grade as much as the average college student grows across all four years of college. Students and their teachers are also engaged: average student attendance sits at an impressive 94 percent, and the school has retained 90 percent of its teachers.
Gamified education sounds like an approach that might appeal most to children, but it works among young adults, too. In 2011, Rochester School of Technology’s School of Interactive Games and Media introduced a program called Just Press Play. The program motivates students by introducing voluntary quests. Each professor introduces these quests, and students have the option to pursue them or to ignore them. Many of the quests are designed for the entire cohort, rather than just for one or two students. For example, the “Undying” quest promises to give all students a reward if 90 percent of the first-year class passes its notoriously difficult introductory course. Historically the pass rate was lower than 90 percent, but the program was so appealing that several juniors and seniors showed up at the freshman computer lab to coach the freshmen through their course. Juniors and seniors weren’t eligible to benefit from the quest, but they were so impressed that they were moved to participate. Freshmen graduated at an unprecedented rate that year, and the juniors and seniors offered to help the next year as well. That’s the hallmark of a game that works: people are motivated intrinsically, even when they aren’t capable of earning extrinsic rewards. My favorite quest is promoted by Professor Andy Phelps himself, one of the program’s founders. Phelps’ quest is called “A Walk into Mordor,” named for a dark and dangerous region in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. “Find my office in the depths of Mordor, when the Black Gate is open,” Phelps says. “Get the card. Feel free to strike up a conversation . . .” Students don’t even realize they’re learning when they meet the professor—as far as they’re concerned, they’re just completing another quest.
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From Andy Phelps’ quest to Q2L’s missions, gamification is designed to raise productivity where people would prefer to be lazy. In many contexts, laziness is the human default. Social psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor describe humans as cognitive misers to suggest that we avoid thinking the way a miser avoids spending. Indeed, people prefer to think only as much as necessary to reach a just-acceptable conclusion. Miserliness makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because thinking is costly. It stops an animal from acting, which leaves it vulnerable to predators and less prepared to seize limited opportunities. That’s why we rely so heavily on mental shortcuts, stereotypes, and rules of thumb, which allow us to make sense of a complex world as quickly as possible.
This laziness explains why work is dressed like a game. Salaries (points) rise with seniority (levels), which brings promotions and new titles (badges). The difference between most workplaces and genuine games is that people don’t go to work because they’re intrinsically motivated by the game; instead, the game is how the employer doles out the extrinsic rewards of money, prestige, and praise. As Nick Pelling explained when he coined the term, you’ll know you’re looking at gamification when the fun of playing the game becomes the reward. In some contexts, gamification can be dangerous. Exercise addicts tend to focus on the game of working out every day, or racking up a certain number of steps or miles. They forget that exercise is primarily designed to make them healthier, developing stress-related injuries instead in the quest for arbitrary fitness goals.
Beyond personal fitness devices, some companies gamify the workplace to motivate their employees. In 2000, four tech entrepreneurs formed a remote call center called LiveOps. LiveOps enlists more than twenty thousand everyday Americans to make telemarketing phone calls, and, more recently, to run the social media platforms of large organizations from Pizza Hut to Electronic Arts. The company vets agents before admitting them to its staff, and once accepted they can work as much or as little as they like in blocks of thirty minutes. All agents need are a landline phone, a computer, a high-speed Internet connection, and a corded headset. Some companies that use LiveOps pay by the minute—for example, twenty-five cents per minute spent on the phone—while others pay per call or per sale. LiveOps appeals to people without a fixed schedule—people who are employed part-time, at home with children, or between steady jobs.
The company’s flexibility is a strength, but call center workers without a fixed schedule tend to suffer dips in motivation. To combat those dips, LiveOps introduced a gamified dashboard. Each worker’s dashboard contains a progress bar with the percentage of calls that produce sales, trophies and badges for reaching certain sales milestones, and individual challenges tackled and accomplished. A leaderboard broadcasts the top salespeople across the company. According to LiveOps, these game elements improved service ratings by 10 percent, and lowered customer wait times by 15 percent. Sales conversion rates rose, and workers reported feeling more positive about working for the company.
Other organizations have grown by introducing gamified rewards. After Rodney Smith, Jr., noticed a ninety-three-year-old woman struggling to mow her lawn in Huntsville, Alabama, he created an organization known as Raising Men Lawn Care. Raising Men employs young men, many from underprivileged backgrounds, to mow lawns free of charge. (The organization is funded by well-wishers on its GoFundMe page.) The boys are motivated to do the right thing, but they’re also motivated by a badge system that borrows from martial arts. As the company’s Facebook page explains, the color-ranking system is “similar to how they do it in martial arts . . . the kids will start the program with a white shirt. Then when they do 10 lawns, they will get an orange shirt, when they do 20 lawns they will get a green shirt, 30 they will get a blue shirt, 40 a red shirt and 50 + lawns will get them a black shirt.” Raising Men’s success has spawned new chapters across the country, a growing online following, and tens of thousands of dollars in funding.
Gamification doesn’t help much when an experience is already fun; it does its best work when the experience i
s boring. On-the-job training is perhaps the most notoriously boring part of work. At the same time, training is critically important, because poorly trained workers are less productive and less safe. A number of companies are starting to train their employees with games. The Hilton Garden Inn, for example, hired the Virtual Heroes game design studio to develop a virtual training hotel. The game puts team members in a three-dimensional, virtual Hilton Garden Inn hotel, where they serve guests within a timed deadline. Their responses are graded for speed and appropriateness, which translate into Satisfaction and Loyalty Tracking (SALT) scores. The hotels assess employees with SALT scores in the real world, so the virtual game environment is an excellent simulation. Since Hilton’s success, Virtual Heroes has taken on a raft of large corporate clients, including the U.S. Army, the Discovery Channel, the Department of Homeland Security, BP, and Genentech.
These games aren’t just fun; they’re also engaging, and they improve job performance and retention. Traci Sitzmann, a management professor at the University of Colorado, studies the role of games in on-the-job training. In one sweeping study, she examined the results from sixty-five studies that compared game-based and offline training. Across nearly seven thousand trainees, she found that game-based training was far more effective than offline training: trainees who used video games had a 9 percent higher retention rate, remembered 11 percent more facts, and rated 14 percent higher on skill-based knowledge tests. Trainees also felt 20 percent more confident and capable after playing the games, since they relied on active, hands-on experience rather than passive instruction.
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The same properties that make training engaging and palatable can also be harnessed for medical benefits. In 1996, a team of researchers at the University of Washington, in Seattle, received a government grant to study the effects of virtual reality gaming on pain tolerance. Burn victims are forced to endure awful pain on a daily basis, when their wounds are cleaned and their dressing replaced. In one study, 86 percent of all burn patients described their pain levels as “excruciating,” and this was after they were given morphine to treat the pain.
Some of the lab’s patients responded well to hypnosis, so the researchers designed a virtual-reality game called SnowWorld. A distraction like SnowWorld is critical because much of a patient’s pain comes from anticipation. As the researchers explain on their website:
Our logic for why virtual reality will reduce pain is as follows. Pain perception has a strong psychological component. The same incoming pain signal can be interpreted as painful or not, depending on what the patient is thinking. Pain requires conscious attention. The essence of VR is the illusion users have of going inside the computer-generated environment. Being drawn into another world drains a lot of attentional resources, leaving less attention available to process pain signals. Conscious attention is like a spotlight. Usually it is focused on the pain and wound care. We are luring that spotlight into the virtual world. Rather than having pain as the focus of their attention, for many patients in VR, the wound care becomes more of an annoyance, distracting them from their primary goal of exploring the virtual world.
SnowWorld is a first-person virtual reality adventure game. Players throw snowballs at penguins, mastodons, and snowmen while listening to upbeat songs by Paul Simon. The experience is immersive, and some burn patients describe playing the game as “fun”—a long way from the “excruciating” label they gave to the process of having their burns dressed before playing the game. When the researchers scanned patients’ brains, they found that pain regions were less active when the patients were playing SnowWorld than when they relied on morphine alone. The same process works for other painful experiences, too—the researchers have shown that it reduces dental pain, pain suffered by children as well as adults, and the psychiatric trauma of survivors of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001.
Though Tetris, which I first discussed in chapter 7, is wickedly addictive, it also shares some of SnowWorld’s therapeutic properties. Many people who witness death, injury, or a threat to others suffer ongoing trauma. The scenes they’re exposed to play on a loop, over and over, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Therapists have tools to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but those tools aren’t very effective immediately after the traumatic event. For a few weeks, the standard therapeutic approach doesn’t do much good, so survivors are generally forced to wait for treatment. This struck a team of psychiatrists at the University of Oxford as strange: why wait for the memories to crystallize before beginning treatment?
In 2009, the team, led by Emily Holmes, tested a novel PTSD intervention. They asked a group of adults to watch a twelve-minute video featuring “eleven clips of traumatic content including graphic real scenes of human surgery, fatal road traffic accidents and drowning.” This was their trauma simulation, and the participants who completed their study were indeed traumatized. Before the intervention they reported feeling calm and relaxed; afterward they were disturbed and jittery. Holmes and her team forced the adults to wait for thirty minutes—a simulation of the half hour wait a person might experience before being admitted to an emergency room. Then, half the participants played Tetris for ten minutes, while the other half sat quietly.
The adults went home for a week, and recorded their thoughts in a daily diary. Once a day they recounted the scenes from the video that replayed in their minds. Some saw cars colliding, and others remembered horrific scenes of human surgery. But the flashbacks affected some people more than others. Those who had sat quietly after watching the harrowing video experienced an average of six flashbacks during the week; those who had played Tetris experienced an average of fewer than three. Tetris, with its colors and music and rotating blocks, prevented the initial traumatic memories from solidifying. The game soaked up the mental attention that might have otherwise moved those horrific memories to long-term memory, and so they were stored imperfectly or not at all. At the end of the week, the adults returned to the lab, and those who had been lucky enough to play Tetris reported fewer psychiatric symptoms. The game had functioned as a “cognitive vaccine,” the researchers explained. Although the video had traumatized them in the short-term, Tetris had prevented it from traumatizing them in the long-term.
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Gamification is widely celebrated, but it also has detractors. In 2013, a large team of researchers published a paper on games in Nature, one of the world’s premier science journals. The paper praised a game called NeuroRacer, which required players to steer a car while pushing buttons in response to on-screen prompts. This form of multitasking, the authors argued, was deeply therapeutic for older adults. Instead of declining, their mental functioning would remain sharp if they played NeuroRacer for an hour, three times a week. That isn’t much to ask in exchange for staving off mental decline. The authors asked almost two hundred adults to play the game for a month, and then measured their mental performance for six months. Compared to older adults who didn’t play at all, or who played a simpler version of the game, those who played the multitasking version did better on a wide battery of cognitive tests.
Several brain-training software companies emerged in the wake of this research. They earned billions of dollars in revenue promoting the idea that multitasking games would improve broader mental functioning. But the evidence was scattered. Some researchers replicated the Nature findings, but others argued that brain-training only improved performance on trivial games; it couldn’t actually improve people’s lives in the long run, years and decades beyond the scope of the original experiment. In 2014, seventy-five scientists signed a statement concluding “there is no compelling scientific evidence to date” that brain games can prevent cognitive decline. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) seemed to agree. In January 2016, the FTC fined Lumos Labs, one of the largest and most successful brain-training companies, $2 million. According to the FTC, Lumos had engaged in “deceptive advertising” of its software. It was po
ssible that Lumos’ games warded off cognitive decline, but the evidence was scant, and Lumos had overclaimed.
Even if gamification works, some critics believe it should be abandoned. Ian Bogost, a game designer at Georgia Tech, spearheads this movement. In 2011, he delivered a talk at a gamification symposium at Wharton. He titled his talk “Gamification Is Bullshit.” Bogost suggested that gamification “was invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to domesticate it.” Bogost criticized gamification because it undermined the “gamer’s” well-being. At best, it was indifferent to his well-being, pushing an agenda that he had little choice but to pursue. Such is the power of game design: a well-designed game fuels behavioral addiction.
Bogost demonstrated the power of gamification with a social media game called Cow Clicker. He designed Cow Clicker to mimic similar games, like FarmVille, which had dominated Facebook for many months. The game’s objective was simple: click your cow during critical periods and you’ll earn virtual currency known as mooney. Cow Clicker was supposed to satirize gamification, but it was a smash hit. Tens of thousands of users downloaded the game, and instead of playing once or twice, they played for days on end. At one point, a computer science professor sat atop the leaderboard with a hundred thousand mooney. Bogost updated the game with new features, adding awards for reaching certain milestones (such as the Golden Cowbell for one hundred thousand clicks), and introducing an oil-coated cow to commemorate the BP oil spill. He claimed that Cow Clicker’s success was a surprise, but really it embodied many of the traits that made other games addictive: Werbach and Hunter’s points, badges, and levels.