Gamification and All-Star Games

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One of the oldest forms of gamification in sports is the all-star game.

All Star Game

Major League Baseball’s All-Star game is the most prestigious, though not the most watched, and dates to 1933. The National Football League began playing all-star games in 1938, although the event didn’t gain blockbuster appeal until the merger between the National and American football leagues and the creation of the Pro Bowl in 1971. Although the Pro Bowl draws more television viewers than any other sports all-star game its future, ironically, is in jeopardy, and I doubt many people will miss it when it’s gone.

But baseball without its All-Star game would be unthinkable. I remember attending the game in Cincinnati in 1970 and it was just as exciting as going to the World Series.

At first glance an all-star game might appear to be a game itself and not the gamification of a game. Isn’t a baseball game a baseball game?

Well, no. It’s outside the system. Even the pre-season exhibition games serve the practical purpose of training the players and letting management select the starting roster. But with the  exception that the winning league gets to be home team for the World Series, there is no practical reason for the All-Star game to exist as far as the integrity of the league goes. Rather the reasons for it are gamification reasons: rewarding the players, engaging the fans, making the sport even more exciting and fun, and of course generating revenue for the owners, the network and the host city.

Even the rules are modified to suit the All-Star game. Pitchers, for instance, can only pitch a maximum of three innings to allow more pitchers to participate. Rule changes in the Pro Bowl have become so pervasive that it’s become a non-violent travesty of a violent sport. Injury concerns aside, all-star games are also better suited to sports that focus on individual action, such as baseball and basketball, rather than a sport like football with its complicated playbook.

The All-Star games for Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association are gamification events that have spawned other gamification events. Gamification upon gamification, by people who probably never heard of the word or watched Gabe Zichermann’s TED talks. Letting fans vote for players, as well as the home-run and slam-dunk contests are all successful examples of increasing fun and fan engagement for events themselves created to increase fun and engagement!

Only 1000 likes?!

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While the professional baseball and basketball all-star games are exciting, well-planned events, conveniently breaking up the season, the Pro Bowl was flawed from the beginning.

Because of injury concerns it has to be played after the Super Bowl, so it is anti-climactic, and the players from the Super Bowl teams aren’t able to participate. While players appreciate the honor of being selected, many don’t want to play, worn down from the brutal season. The league moved the game to Hawaii in 1980 as an incentive that gamification professionals would be proud of. But the top quarterbacks are wealthy enough to buy their own islands. For the 2011-2012 season the league moved the game back to the Mainland, to Miami, the same venue as the Super Bowl, hoping to capitalize on the media and tourist buzz. But the effect instead was to focus attention on injuries, and talk arose of scrapping it.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like the baseball All-Star game, or anyone who does like the Pro Bowl. Yet the Pro Bowl consistently draws higher television ratings, apparently because Americans will watch anything with helmets, except Verdi. This has created an interesting dilemma. What if you are a company, in this case the NFL, with a poorly designed gamification program that is, almost in spite of itself, profitable?

Welcome to the pro bowl!

This is an issue that will become salient as gamification becomes second nature to businesses and organizations. It’s not enough that gamification works. It has to work in the right way. Short-term profit can’t be the only variable. Other measures, such as safety and brand integrity have to be taken into account.

And yes, corporations whose employees play catch in a park or pat each other on the butt before bashing their opponents over possession of an oblong ball do have integrity. They do.

Gamifying Education With Grand Theft Auto

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Grand theft auto

Suggesting Grand Theft Auto as a model for gamifying education sounds like suggesting Satanic rituals to increase church attendance. But the other day I found my five-year-old son playing Grand Theft Auto III on our iPad. The Grand Theft Auto series, from Rockstar Games, is one of the most successful video game franchises in history, and probably the most controversial.

I heard news reports about its anti-heroes, prostitutes and cop-killers long before I played it. But my son, who speaks Spanish, wasn’t seeing the dark side of the game. He was simply driving cars through a detailed, open-world system until he crashed, then running until he found another car to drive. (Actually, he had to eject the drivers, but he didn’t comprehend this as stealing.)

What interested me, however, was that while he was driving a radio station was playing music, DJ banter and sarcastic ads. I realized if he drove around long enough he might learn some English. Maybe not the right kind of English. But what if the radio stations were teaching elementary vocabulary and grammar?

There’s hope in the gamification community, and within the progressive educational community, that gamification might be the magic bullet to rescue our abyssmal K-12 schools here in the U.S. But the record so far of educational gamification has been as disappointing as the New Math. While I do believe gamification will eventually become a natural component of most schools, we may also have to keep changing vehicles until we find one that doesn’t crash.

In fact schools have always relied strongly on one gamification element: grades. And grades are great motivators. The problem is they are also de-motivators. And if grades are such a great predictor of achievement, why are teachers opposed to being tested themselves?

Grand theft auto

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 left pretty much everyone behind except test companies. The imposition of national standardized testing has resulted in short-term cramming rather than long-term learning and, as Steven Levitt discovered in Freakonomics, to cheating by teachers and administrators worried about losing their jobs, or their schools. This is one of the worst examples of gamification in education. Gamification should increase student and teacher engagement and make teaching and learning more fun, rather than be a stressful distraction.

Children are both the easiest and hardest audience to capture. Easiest because their critical faculties are immature. Hardest because they have no patience. They aren’t going to give a video or a book or a class a chance – it has to grab them right away and hold them for the duration.

In terms of gamification children are stubbornly resistant to efforts to manipulate them. Adults will be patient or polite, but if kids don’t like what’s being offered them, they won’t participate, they’ll turn off.

The problem with most educational games is that they are produced by educators, not game designers. Or the game designers are hamstrung by the curriculum. So what you end up with are a few game elements superimposed on a boring course. Children see through this right away.

A better way to gamify education, I think, is to do it backwards. To design or appropriate first-rate games, then gamitize the educational component. In other words, create or license games that grab and hold a student’s attention, like Grand Theft Auto grabbed my son. Then look for ways to layer on the math or English or whatever you want to teach. They won’t even know they’re learning, which is often the best way to teach. Like the luckless pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto, these future students won’t know what hit them.

Top 10 Myths of Gamification

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Adam and Eve Leveling Down

1. Gamification is new.

Tell that to Adam and Eve, who got history’s biggest level down on the Apple Challenge.

2. Gamification is a passing fad.

Why do people always say “passing fad?” Aren’t all fads passing? In any case, if it’s not new it can’t be a fad. What critics are referring to is digital gamification, which is new only because cheap mobile devices with more computing power than the Apollo space program are new. Unless the lights go out, gamification won’t either.

3. Gamification is worthless because it’s superficial.

Hey, you’re not lying on the beach or spending $150 at the salon for the benefit of your internal organs. Unless you’re at a wedding or a funeral, there’s nothing wrong with being superficial.

4. The name’s too ugly to last.

I get paid by the letter, so I love it. And you’re mistaken if you think length or awkwardness spells a word’s doom. Can you say “entrepreneurship?”

5. Gamification is no different from a game. It’s a distinction without a difference.

The Olympic events are games. The medal ceremonies with podiums and flags and national anthems are gamification. [Insert from Keith: Game lets people escape from the real world. Gamification lets people escape IN the real world]

Black pride!

6. Gamification is by nature less important than a real game.

Then why do people cry at medal ceremonies? Why do they mean so much? The scene at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City when American runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fist on the podium as a expression of black pride is remembered to this day, long after the race itself was forgotten.

7. A lot of people won’t buy in.

Everyone already buys in, whether it’s fantasy football leagues or frequent flier programs or church raffles. Critics underestimate the degree to which people everywhere are already innured to gamification.

8. Gamification is a Science

Gamification is an art.

9. Gamification is easy.

Then you do it.

10. Gamification exploits people.

Bad gamification exploits people. Good gamification empowers them.

Battleship – The Game, the Film, the Gamification

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In 1967 Milton Bradley (since bought by Hasbro) introduced the game Battleship. It was a very simple concept based on a old paper and pencil game, but it was easy to learn, quick to play and had the novelty that players only saw half the board. The ships didn’t move and there was only one kind of weapon, but you got to put plastic pegs into holes and pretend you were a lot cleverer than you really were.

Like most successful games it survived new technologies rather than being made obsolete by them. There was an electronic version and a digital version. And now of course there is a 200 million dollar movie.

Battleship

Believe it or not, once there was a time when films looked to people like Dickens and Tennessee Williams for inspiration. Now Hollywood looks to comic books, Disney rides and board games for its source material. I don’t know why they haven’t made Candy Land yet, as it would be 90 minutes of product placement for theatrical concessions. (Not being someone to overestimate the sophistication of popular taste, I decided after writing that last sentence to check that indeed there was not a Candy Land movie, and learned Adam Sandler has signed on to do it.)

But much as I’d like to rant about the film business, I’ll keep to the subject of gamification. The enterprise side of gamification rests on the premise that game elements can increase customer or employee engagement and therefore increase profits in the former case and reduce costs in the latter. But however it’s pitched, the bottom line is the bottom line. Gamification is good for business.

Critics, notably game developers and enthusiasts, see these corporations as aliens, to borrow one of their favorite metaphors, unfamiliar with the pristine craft of game design. They are simply money-hungry entities eager to use whatever methods they can find to exploit the masses. But strangely, in all the blogs and articles and videos I’ve digested on the subject, I haven’t come across a single acknowledgement that movie studios are also huge corporations.

On the contrary, the dramatization of games is viewed by game developers and companies as the God Level. The movie version inherits a core market of Battleship devotees, if there is such a thing, and the game company gets a pile of cash and a two-hour advertisement to sell the game to a new generation.

My question is: How is the dramatization of a game any different from gamification? My answer is, I don’t think there is a difference. The worst kind of gamification is simply awarding points to pointless acts, failing to connect rewards to genuine achievements. But is the bastardization of gaming any different from the scene in Battleship when our heroes search for the enemy on a computer screen deliberately meant to reference the plastic grid of the Milton Bradley game?

What’s the point of that tedious sequence? Or the fact that this is a first encounter story with aliens, when the board game had no aliens? Exploitation of one creative product to make money for another can be done well or poorly. The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, based on a ride that at least has a trace of a narrative, is an example of it being done well. But exploitation in itself shouldn’t be a valid subject of criticism. It’s a feature of the natural world. It’s an unrepentant part of our culture.

At the conclusion of Battleship the movie Lieutenant Hopper receives the Silver Star for saving the world. A medal for a great achievement. Now that’s gamification done right.

Gamification is Old

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Old lady playing wii!

A lot of people in the gaming universe act as if the world began in 1972, when the gods of Atari released Pong. One can read entire threads on the subject of gaming without finding a reference that pre-dates our infant millennium. Even our own timeline at our offices at GameMaki only goes back two years!

But games aren’t created in a Galactic Quadrant vacuum. Developers of virtual worlds borrow their metaphors from the real world. Castles, kings, quests and almost everything else we encounter in video or digital games references reality, or the imagination of people whose creations, such as zombies. vampires and aliens, first inhabited other creative arts, such as drama, poetry and opera. Pong itself was modeled after ping pong. And a Near-Eastern kid named David wielded the slingshot a lot better than your mother ever will on Angry Birds.

Angry Birds!

So I think it’s disingenuous when game developers complain that gamification borrows their precious game elements and mechanics for commercial purposes. Not because it doesn’t borrow them, but because they have no right to complain. After all, I’m sure a lot of these critics enjoyed the toys and books (and games!) that were derived from Star Wars solely to make money.

The relationship between games and gamification is no different from the relationship between many creative and commercial endeavors, such as novelizations of blockbuster films or the reprinting of filmed books. Ken Kesey was appalled when Signet put a picture of Jack Nicholson on the cover of his novel One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest. It was a film element artificially plastered on to literature. But so what? It happens all the time.

So why are so many game developers crying foul? Because they see their craft cheapened by a superficial application of their tools. (Although it’s hard for me to think of anything more superficial than serially stealing cars in a gamified Los Angeles or playing “Love in an Elevator” on a gamified guitar .) Of course gamification often suffers from being superficial, poorly designed or exploitive. But this is true of games, of toys, of sculpture, of fashion – of everything.

But the main problem is that these developers mistakenly believe that because the digital world is new, the metaphors and components in their toolkit are also new. But gamification is not a patch (I won’t say badge!) grafted on to real games, but a creative process consonant with games, as old as games, if not older.

Back then it just wasn’t played out in the digital world. And it wasn’t called “gamification.”

The Greeks called it “pathos.” Suffering, experience.

If there’s a better level-up than the twelve labors of Hercules, I’d like to know.