Ah if it's just semantics that's fine, as long as someone is actually researching that part of it. :-) In my area (which is actually games research), 'gamification' usually means something more specific, although the definition keeps shifting admittedly. But more often the trend of adopting explicitly 'game-mechanic' type elements such as points, level progression, competition, etc. into non-game tasks, which are seen as having a motivational quality (with somewhat mixed research results, obscured by a whole mass of charalatan gamification consultants pushing it). What you describe I'd associate more with concepts like 'microtasks', 'dashboards', and generally UX, which can be pared with gamification but are a separate cluster of ideas.
Best, Mark
Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com writes:
That really depends on how you define 'gamification'. To me, the gamification is not the leaderboards, but exactly the elements you mention - the splitting of the whole into simple microtasks plus giving out those microtasks to users for a large part at random. In fact, I usually play the 'distributed' version of the wikidata game, and as far as I know there is no scoring or leaderboard there at all, but I would still say the whole is gamified.
Andre Engels
On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 1:12 PM, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
Dario Taraborelli dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org writes:
*Gamified interfaces for microcontributions à la Wikidata game*. (per GerardM) there's absolutely no doubt this model is effective at creating a large volume of high-quality edits, and value to the project and communities.
I agree on these interfaces, but at least in my use of them, and that of the other people I know who use them, the 'gamification' part is a red herring and not why we use them: the important part is the interface and its functionality. The confusing point/leaderboard system (which I never check) isn't really a draw, but the tools are actually useful to do things that are tedious otherwise, and at least somewhat enjoyable to use. It's useful that it tries to find e.g. new articles that might match an existing Wikidata topic but are unlinked, and presents side-by-side information that helps quickly eliminate some false positives, with a fast interface where you just press '1', '2', or '3' on the keyboard to move on.
So a different way of looking at this category is: interfaces to make microcontributions non-tedious, and easy to curate in a "dashboard-style" way. Those interfaces might or might not have some gamification layer too, but I don't think that's the important part.
Best, Mark
-- Mark J. Nelson The MetaMakers Institute Falmouth University http://www.kmjn.org
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