Gamification - We're Not Playing Here

In retrospect I'm not sure why, but I kind of expected a bit more from this article at ELearning Industry -- Gamification Benefits in Workplace Training"

The title drew me in. I was hoping that it would offer some lucid and effective arguments to the instinctive (and sometimes subconscious) resistance to gamification in corporate learning system design.

Instead, the article's primary thesis seemed to be, "people play games anyway, so just give in -- and besides, it's fun!"

This really misses the point.

Do You Know or Do You Understand

You've been fooled. We have ALL been fooled.

We were brought up in an education model that prizes knowing things.

If you proved in school that you know a thing, you got a gold star.

If you faced a list of ten things and proved that you knew 9 out of 10, we gave you a score and told you that it was good. We told you that if you knew fewer than 7 of the 10 things, you had failed.

The details, and the levels may vary, but don't get wrapped up in fascination about the margin of variance. The principle is, we taught you that knowing stuff was good and not knowing stuff was bad. We taught you that knowing more things made you better, and knowing fewer things made you less valuable.

We created a relationship to knowledge in our culture that prized knowing things as the gold standard, sometimes at the expense of understanding. Certainly, although we have sufficient means to measure understanding of a knowledge domain, we've failed to use those tools consistently, and we definitely missed the opportunity to place the emphasis there.