Gamification Cafe

I recently ran a Knowledge Cafe in London hosted by Westminster Business School on Gamification with Andrzej Marczewski as the speaker. Irene Pardo of Willmington wrote about the Cafe A little KM story… and Claire Valentine of TFPL bogged about it - Gamification – the new way forward in engaging with staff and clients?. You will also find a lot of feedback from the earnings on the Knowledge Cafe Wall for the event if you are interested.

Andrzej Marczewski also spoke on Gamification at KM UK 2014 and an exercise was run to explore how Gamification could be used in a KM environment.

Although Andrzej was an articulate and knowledgeable speaker and removed many of my doubts about gamification I am still not sure that I fully appreciate the concept but these are my thoughts to date:

• Gamification is not about turning something into a game.
  
  
• Gamification is of value (I am no longer quite as sceptical as I was)
  
  
• When ever I design a system of any sort in the future, I will stop to think how gamification might be of benefit in helping to engage people.
  
  
• Key "gamification elements": Think about how to give more timely feedback to people; how to introduce elements of competition and how to give frequent small psychological rewards. (I suspect there are a few more I have missed).
  
  
• Consider carefully the possibility of people gaming the game or other unintended consequences.
  
  
• Be careful not to undermine intrinsic motivation. Like most "rewards" intrinsic motivation can be easily undermined.
  
  
• I have yet to see or been told about an application in the KM field that works and does not have any of the above pitfalls. Hence my scepticism.