It is always nice to get some credit about something you have done. And there is no such thing as too many badges, or is there?
Gamification seems to have become the “ultimate tool” for rewarding people lately. In earlier blog posts we have seen how it encourages people to do their chores, lose weight, learn stuff and even make them more motivated to do their jobs and so on. It can also be used at motivating people to volunteer in weeding out mistakes from librarys e-archives.
This recent Times -article about gamification that rewards it’s readers by giving them badges based on their actions on the article’s site.
Although the idea is pretty good and the article quite fun to read, it has received some critique since all those badges can actually be collected though one would even not bother to read the article at all. What is the relevance of getting rewards if you get them by just doing nothing? I was actually doing other things simultaneously so it took me quite a while to read the whole article. Still earned a badge for being such a “ zen-master” (=concentrating so well to the article = spending much time with it), though, which felt a bit funny and foul.
Irrelevant rewarding is one of those things that makes gamification sometimes feel like an unnecessary, added layer, and is one thing that makes people see the whole gamification-thing in a bad light.
Sometimes irrelevancy and the element of surprise can be good if it makes the players smile as Andrzej Marczewski puts it at Social Media today, but most of the times people want to be rewarded about something that they actually have done.
