> A good example is the Odin project study paths, or Khan Academy courses.
One other example that has a few of my friends hooked is Duolingo.
Learning another language was something they'd wanted to do, and had tried to do in the past. They just had trouble sticking to putting the work in.
But Duolingo's particular brand of gamification has got them doing the thing they always wanted to do, but never got round to before, and they now compare streaks of activity of more than a year.
Gamification definitely works better when it's in conjunction with something you already want to do, or feel like you should do. It gives you an excuse to push a little harder to keep on task. It mostly seems to not work at all when it's for something you don't care about.
But that goes against @devjab's experience upthread:
> [gamification] isn’t for good intentions. It’s a tool to make people spend time on something they might not want to spend time on, so why did we ever think it would be a fitting tool for our good intentions?
> [gamification systems] seem to fail to incentivise the development their creators want, unless that development is for people to spend a lot of money on video games.
(Unless Duolingo counts as a video game? But even so, I don't think people spend a lot of (any?) money on it?)
While I agree with most of what was written by devjab, this:
> It’s a tool to make people spend time on something they might not want to spend time on.
I disagree with. It's a tool, its usage can differ wildly between orgs, people. I think it's clear that gamification can be used for good from the examples people have provided. Of course the opposite is also true.
One other example that has a few of my friends hooked is Duolingo.
Learning another language was something they'd wanted to do, and had tried to do in the past. They just had trouble sticking to putting the work in.
But Duolingo's particular brand of gamification has got them doing the thing they always wanted to do, but never got round to before, and they now compare streaks of activity of more than a year.