Musing on Gamification... Motivation... Usability... Fun

John Cook refers to PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka in GeekWire July 21

Creating a term like gamification does more harm to the business because it actually dilutes down what a game means. And, in his view, a game has one simple goal: to be fun.

On July 24 Peter Friedman suggests 'Maintainable motivation' as a new term for gamification.

The ‘science’ of maintainable motivation extends far beyond games and gamification, because it includes all aspects of persistent engagement, even when the initial intention was ‘single-action’. For instance, a sales message might be a ‘one-off’ opportunity to buy something (for instance, selling your car: ‘perfect condition, one careful owner’) but it might just as easily be sold from a dealership which will want you to only ever buy cars from them for the rest of your life.

My reflections are that
- the term Gamification feels as it is forgeting or denying that much of the knowledge of motivation powers is not deriving from games only but from sciences as pedagogy and psychology. Gamification is all about usability and goals. Previous on this >>

- the goal of gamification is to make something - anything - fun or at least without thresholds for the targetgroup, pretty much the same as a game, pretty much the same as pedagogy.

- the social games don't always have a fun core game (sow and harvest) but the game mechanics make it fun to interact, compare, invite, return, progress and even to pay pushing social or individual triggers.

- there are fun core games that get boring as game mechanics for introduction, virtual economic systems, progress and so on are bad.

- it is sometimes difficult to introduce non gaming or non social media users to the term of gamification, and easier to talk about motivations. But words such as Quests, Missions, Progress and Rewards are not foreign at all.