Re:Against Gamification
by wdewind on Thursday March 31, 2011 @10:47PM
(#2394729)
I've always thought McGonigal completely misses the point. She's sort of right and sort of wrong about a lot of things at once:
1) People in general definitely are bored. The industrial revolution led to the death of a lot of artisanship and concentrated a lot of thinking power into the upper class. I'm not sure the answer to that is video games though: that's escapism. Now she uses other values of gaming, but those arguments don't make sense for the "people need to feel epic" facet of her general thesis.
2) She confuses gaming with design. This is my real issue: what's she's ultimately saying is if we use games to help guide people into solving problems we will be better off. The parts of this that are true can be attributed to good design in general: industrial, graphic, yes game and other types too. But gaming is just one small part of this.
1) People in general definitely are bored. The industrial revolution led to the death of a lot of artisanship and concentrated a lot of thinking power into the upper class. I'm not sure the answer to that is video games though: that's escapism. Now she uses other values of gaming, but those arguments don't make sense for the "people need to feel epic" facet of her general thesis.
2) She confuses gaming with design. This is my real issue: what's she's ultimately saying is if we use games to help guide people into solving problems we will be better off. The parts of this that are true can be attributed to good design in general: industrial, graphic, yes game and other types too. But gaming is just one small part of this.