Is Gamification a Good Motivator?

CowboyRobot writes "Growing up, many of our teachers used gamification techniques such as a gold star sticker on a test (essentially a badge) or a public display of which students had completed a set of readings (leaderboard). These were intended to motivate students to strive to do better. Now, these techniques are increasingly common in the workplace where the parallel with computer games is more intentional. A report by Gartner predicts that 'by 2015, 50% of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes.' One example would be assigning badges for submitting work on time, another would be having a leaderboard in an office to show who completed a training module first. The idea of using game mechanics in work or study environments is not new, but its ubiquity is. Educators can discuss how effective gamification is in classrooms, but how useful is it as a motivator in the workplace?"

Comments

Re:What Is Being Measured?

[Anonymous Coward]

With respect to programming, Tom DeMarco has written at some length about the hazards of software metrics, eg. in "Controlling Software Projects". Whatever it is you measure, you'll get more of it -- but that won't necessarily be the same thing as the sublime Quality you were hoping for.

If you "gamify" (ugly word) a system, it will be gamed.

Re:Money is not really a motivator

[jimbolauski]

Gold stickers, cash, pats on the back all do very little to motivate a worker, what it comes down to is the workers pride in what they do. Everything else is in the noise when compared to a person's own work ethic. No amount of external reward will ever be enough to motivate a lazy person to work hard, a manager's job is to enable his employees to do their job. We hired a group of folks recently because the company they were working for insisted that the control system that they were developing use windows because every computer had to have windows. The manager took his group and the contract over to us because he wasn't going to deal with converting 5 years of custom software that worked perfectly fine on Linux over to windows.