Glenn Omura, an associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University, said game elements can create valuable connections. “Digital technology is facilitating a traditional process by speeding the cycling of contacts and information and in a more targeted way.”
John Jackson, a leader in Police Futurists International and officer with the Houston Police Department, agreed. “Gamification will become ubiquitous,” he said. “It provides a means to gain feedback in distributed communities of interest. It is present in forums where contributors acquire reputation in the form of points awarded for the quantity and quality of contributions. Gamification will become a means of reducing management in favor of self-organization.”
Charles Perrottet, a partner at the Futures Strategy Group, responded, “Gaming is really just a form of interaction. As more and more ‘intelligence’ is injected into a ‘gamed’ response, it gains more and more ability to impact whatever it is applied to. Games have always opened learning possibilities. With the sophistication that can be inserted into interactive responses, game-like approaches will be applied across an increasingly wide sphere of human endeavors.”
Alexandra Samuel, director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University of Art + Design said game-style approaches are being leveraged to benefit positive participation in online communities. “The permeation of game mechanics into everyday life and work will be a byproduct of social media,” she explained. “Already, game-like elements have become routine parts of our online interactions: collecting points and badges, competing on leader boards, answering quizzes. While these kinds of tactics often feel a bit tedious or predictable, they are in widespread use because they help solve one of the key dilemmas in social media and online communities: how to generate participation. As that participatory medium takes over more and more of our working life and culture—both directly, by seeing us spend more or our time on social websites and using social web apps at work, and indirectly, by seeing participatory norms embodied into our offline interactions—we will come to rely on game-like techniques for generating participation in virtually any group interaction, and many of our private interactions.”
Matthew Allen, professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University, Australia, said: “Gaming—a specifically understood form of play—is one of the most dramatic developments in contemporary culture, stretching back into the 1950s at least. Games are part and parcel of consumer-oriented leisure society, with its overwhelming desire for ‘entertainment.’ Games are a codified form of the inherent playfulness of humanity—it makes us human to play, and we learn to be human through play. Thus gamification naturally fits with the human condition.”
Marjory S. Blumenthal, associate provost at Georgetown University, reasoned: “Games will continue to have impacts and motivate novel applications. They may be at least as important in research and in decision-support—they will provide accessible forms of modeling and simulation of new or potential situations. But the way the scenario is worded suggests a risk of faddism; games are likely to go only so far.”
Jeniece Lusk, assistant research director with a PhD in applied sociology at an Atlanta, Georgia, information technology company, described her recent experience with a simulation: “I did a major surgery last week on my Nintendo DS! Seriously, I would love to see this type of virtual simulation expand beyond the military and drivers’ ed! I anticipate a greater adoption of these products if we adopt the ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em attitude’ and put this technology to good use.”