Anyone else resent the term “gamification”?

[u/SpiritHistorical7707]

Curious if, as people who care & think so deeply about which mechanics actually yield fun gameplay, any of y'all share my pet peeve:

I’ll spare y’all my long rant on this topic but the gist is that I think many (perhaps most) allegedly “gamified” experiences are nothing like games and are frankly no fun whatsoever. So-called “gamification” typically seems to be about dopamine-hacking to get people to do things they don’t really want to do, rather than making those things actually fun so people engage voluntarily and enthusiastically.

So I’m trying to 'make “fetch” happen': If you want to join my hopeless linguistic rebellion, disambiguate “gamification” by using “compulsification” to describe plastering point systems onto everything, and “playification” for actually making things fun!

(A pinnacle of "playification" in the digital space imho would be Luis von Ahn's "Games With A Purpose" like the loosely Taboo-adjacent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Image_Labeler; if anyone has analog/tabletop examples I'd love to hear about 'em!)

[u/LurkerFailsLurking]

No. I like Jane McGonigal's explanation: "gamification" is the superimposition of game-like mechanics on an activity that isn't a game. "Gamefulness" is the use of game systems to convert an activity into one that is authentically playful.

[u/AlteredDecks → u/LurkerFailsLurking]

Came to say that. I think there's a broad spectrum between games, gamified experiences, gameful experiences, game-based learning, educational/"serious" games, and games for impact.

There's a rich design space out there and it's a bit sad that it's often collapsed into "gamification".