Tag Archives: gamification

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Another Post on Gamification!

  November 3, 2014 , ,

Hey All! I’ve been working like crazy on comprehensive exams this week and thought I would share some of the latest dialogue on Gamification I’ve researched and written. I think it’s a highly relevant topic to a lot of contemporary research that has any public leaning–like our reconstruction of Decatur St project we’re still investigating and researching. Enjoy! How Gamification has Transformed Web-Based Interaction: Black Hat vs. White Hat The terms white hat and black hat originate from the hacker community. White hat hacking refers to those who break cyber security barriers for non-malicious reasons; testing internal security for vulnerabilities(Knight 2009)(Douglas 2010: 503), and sometimes extended into civil activism like leaking documents into the press. Black hat hacking refers to the violation of computer security systems for maliciousness or personal gain(Moore 2005: 258). The dichotomy is in the intention behind one’s action. The terms were applied by Yu-Kai Chou (2014) in his theories of gamification to mirror the intention behind its application. White hat elements of design promote engagement by letting the user express creativity, feel success through mastering the gamified application, and promote a higher sense of meaning—it fosters positive emotions. Black hat elements are those that demand user action from unpredictability of rules, fear of loss, or from the need for things given arbitrary value. The motivations to engage are still evident with black hat elements, but the end user experience elicits negative emotions. Although Chou draws this distinction of good and bad motivating game design elements—black hat … Continue reading

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Gamification Part 2: How can it be used to promote education?

  September 22, 2014

Hey Everyone! This week has flown by! We’re definitely making some headway at CURVE with one of our interactive environment projects–which I plan on posting more details about in my post next week. It’s pretty exciting and involves a tremendous amount of data that’s available–like maps showing the widths of sidewalks, streets, and building facades–as well as some interior measurements on the old Eighty-One Theatre. It’s grave lies beneath our very own Classroom South. For this week I just wanted to wax poetic on some potential applications on gamification in education and how to use it to promote projects. It’s definitely easier to talk about gamification in the context of video games–the whole point to a video game is creating a gamified experience, and anything else is there to support that function–whether it’s sound, visuals, narrative, or novel controls. Jonathan Blow is an independent video game developer who started with a game, Braid, that was wildly successful for an independent release. His immediate critical and public acclaim allowed him to start speaking publicly about the video game industry and its inherent problems–some ethical. Here’s a video below–I welcome you to watch the entire presentation, but he only begins discussing the process of gamification starting around 50:00. The point Blow makes about modern game design–especially for social games, like Farmville–is that people are being ‘tricked’ into playing simplistic games. The term ‘tricked’ has a negative connotation, but it’s applicable. In the case of gamifying a process of data mining that people … Continue reading