A number of survey participants see vivid positive/negative potential. “People are generally a game-playing species who have always ‘gamified’ their activities,” said Richard Holeton, author of Cyberspace: Identity, Community, and Knowledge in the Electronic Age. “Making learning more fun by building in game elements can only be a good thing. Manipulating people in the workplace (say, to make them more loyal or productive) or the political sphere, and ‘monetizing’ our every gamified interaction, would be the bad things.”
David Kirschner, research assistant at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, agreed. “Positive aspects of gamification will be used to get people to improve their health, motivate rehabilitation after accidents, think about, simulate, get people motivated, and teach people about solving real-life problems,” he wrote. “Negative outcomes are mainly in advertising. It’s insidious really, using game elements to get people to buy more [things] they don’t need. It’s especially bad when gamification-fueled consumer culture targets kids. Companies that use games in whatever it is that they’re doing really need to be reflective and think about what they’re doing past themselves. Nike or McDonald’s, for example, couldn’t care less about the effects of making buying their products fun. They just want to sell more things to people. Companies should take responsibility for the tremendous power they wield in society. I fear they won’t, but I hope they do. Then of course, you can also say I hope consumers—people experiencing gamification on the ground—are also aware (as best they can be) of the games they are engaging with, what are their purposes, who developed them, why, and so on. We’ve all got to be very critical when fun can mask trouble.”
Microsoft and Harvard Internet researcher danah boyd said behavioral manipulation is positive and negative. “Gamification is the new public relations or the new advertising and marketing,” she responded. “It will seep into many aspects of life without us even acknowledging it. It’ll become a central part of neoliberal ideology without folks even noticing it. Why? Because it’s a modern-day form of manipulation. And like all cognitive manipulation, it can help people and it can hurt people. And we will see both.”
Vicki Suter, director of the California Virtual Campus, noted, “Games are social networks, even single-player games (there are communities of people who play them who interact a lot with each other online—outside the gaming environment). It makes all kinds of sense that as social networking has emerged, so have gaming interfaces to social networking activities (which, when you think about it, pretty much sums up human behavior). I still wonder about children and young adults confusing games with reality. The research about this is mixed. And gaming itself can be a terrible addiction—I’m not sure what the proliferation of gaming interfaces in non-game settings will mean to those with the addiction.”
Paul Jones, clinical associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, added: “I, too, had a Cocoa Marsh Captain Midnight Decoder—but I hated Cocoa Marsh. Gamification in marketing has a long history longer and more enduring than Cocoa Marsh or even Captain Midnight. It’s as inescapable as coupons or bottle top collecting or the lotteries. Gamification is an overblown term for old-school marketing. Yes it works. Yes we use it. No, it’s no game changer (pun intended).”