• Carla Casilli, who is the project lead for Mozilla’s Web Literacies and Webmaker Badges, has a great blog, which focuses at length on badge system design.
• Antin & Churchill’s (2011) paper on the psychological functions of badges in social media. They describe five psychological motivations for using badges: 1) setting goals; 2) providing an overview of the possibilities of the system; 3) encapsulation of reputation; 4) status symbols and personal affirmation; 5) group identity.

An academic colleague surprised me last week by saying “badges are a terrible idea, they’re for children, my students would think they were back in primary school.” Now this is a colleague who I had seen the evening before taking part in a ‘who can make the best napkin hat’ competition, so I know she’s certainly not averse to games and playfulness. She’s got a point: badges – like game-based learning – won’t appeal to everyone and may demotivate many students, but that’s not a reason to disregard them wholesale, more a call to thoughtfully consider how to use them to best effect.

For a gamification project I’m working on, drawing on research on games and motivation (as well as a fair amount of game playing), I’ve created some principles of badge system design for learning. These are really a first attempt, and I’d really appreciate any comments, feedback, suggestions, and additions.

1. Simplicity. Don’t try to encapsulate too much information in a single badge. A 2×2 (type and level) matrix is sufficiently complex. Each badge can then have a clear, uncluttered visual identity.
2. Variety. Provide a large number of badge types, so that different learners on the same course can develop completely different badge sets but can still identify as part of a group. This allows for exploration and identification of possibilities.
3. Exponential progression. As learners move through levels, badges should become increasingly difficult to achieve. Early badges should be gained quickly to give learners a feeling of mastery, later ones should take longer and be more complex.
4. Fairness and clarity. Is is crucial that badges are perceived to be fair, so that the criteria for achieving one is clear and transparent (not necessarily before it is achieved).
5. Surprise. The unexpected can be a massive motivator, so create badges that are not known in advance (but are still fair and clear why they were awarded in retrospect).
6. Achievability. Each subsequent badge should build on previous ones to be seen as achievable, yet still challenging.
7. Collections. Humans like to arrange things into sets and complete collections, so grouping badge sets into collections can add another motivational layer (but with associated complexity).
8. Humour. Not all badges have to be serious (my colleague might disagree with me on this one).

As with any game-based element, I believe that badges can be used to motivate some of the people some of the time, if used thoughtfully and purposefully. My concern is that when they’re used ‘because we have the technology’ that they may end up actually pissing students off rather than motivating them. I’m going to finish with a quote from Werbach (2012) who reminds us: “don’t mindlessly attach extrinsic motivators to activities that can be motivated using intrinsic regulators.”

Werbach, K. (2012). For the win: how game thinking can revolutionise your business. Philidelphia, PA: Wharton Digital Press.

One thing that struck me is the lack of online tools for game-building. Given the practicalities of gaining access and installing software on most institutional computers, this is a real barrier to game-building in the classroom.

1. LARP (live action role play) does not (necessarily) involve sweaty teenagers, with multi-sided dice, pretending to be goblins. Actually, it sounds a lot more active and fun than that, focusing on play and moving beyond reality to experience new things. If you can get beyond the stigma behind the words ‘role playing’ (at least in the UK) this has amazing potential for learning (see my previous post for some great references).
2. Being an online student is hard. Really hard. Just over a year ago I enrolled in Edinburgh Napier’s fully online Blended and Online Education course (one of the longest running and well-thought of courses in the area), mainly because I was asking the rest of the course team to do it so I thought it was only fair. Also, I’ve got years of experience in the area, so it’s going to be a breeze, right? Sadly no, it’s been a bit of a slog, because they seem to expect me to do things, and read things, and think about things, and complete assignments, and make stuff, and discuss stuff, and so on. Brilliant experience though, and it’s fully recommend it to anyone interested in teaching online, even if only to experience the loneliness of the long distance student.
3. FOTE (Future Of Technology in Education) is the conference to be seen at. I spoke at it last year, and it really has an amazing buzz, with people interacting on and off-line, tweeting throughout. The immediate feedback from a talk is amazing, as well as the ability to discuss a talk while it’s going on.
4. Other people are great. Yes, it probably shouldn’t have taken me forty years to come to this conclusion, but collaborating in groups such as the ALT Games and Learning SIG, the Games and Learning for Older Adults partnership project (we talk more than we blog) and with colleagues at conferences such as ECGBL has really made my year. In general, game-based learning people seem to be really fun and creative, but then with a common passion for play perhaps that isn’t surprising.
5. It’s surprisingly easy to create location-based games. I recently discovered the magic of ARIS, a free online tool, for building virtual treasure hunts, adventures, or data collection activities (sadly limited to iOS). We recently ran a session with a group of undergrad geography teachers, and I’ve never seen a group of students move so quick, or so much enthusiasm for running round a soggy campus. Definitely my ‘one to play with’ for 2013.

I was invited to oppose the doctoral thesis of J. Tuomas Harviainen, which was based around an hermeneutic analysis of live action role play (LARP) from an information systems perspective. I was also pleased to meet Markus Montola, who successfully defended his doctoral thesis a few weeks before, in the area of role-play and pervasive gaming (Markus is also an author of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design, which – to my shame – has sat, unread, on my bookshelf for the last year).

It’s good to see some really sound and robust research and analysis in a neglected area of gaming, and both of these theses are well worth a read. I think that Finland is definitely somewhere to watch for interesting further developments in this area.

For me this is essentially interactive educational multimedia. Fiona Trapani argues that it fits the definition of a game: “goal, clear rules, feedback and voluntary” but these factors are not unique to games. There are ‘game’ elements present: the use of ‘missions’, scores, leaderboards, achievements. There’s even a basic narrative (‘twins are brought into the emergency room…’) that doesn’t seem to go anywhere or influence the core interaction in any way. You could remove all of these ‘game’ elements and you’d still have a nicely designed, easy-to-use, piece of interactive media for learning.

So is this a game, or simply the gamification of  interactive educational media? I would have said the latter, for certain, but for Katie Piatt‘s comment that it is “playful”. I agree to some extent: you can take blood from the head instead of an arm, you can give the wrong blood type and make the patient scream, but the scope for exploration and play is very limited. Is this playfulness enough to make it a game? I’m not convinced.

The title of the talk was What is the Future of Digital Games and Learning? (although perhaps should have been more correctly titled: What is the Future of Games and Learning in HE?) and I’m not going to go into it in depth here (the slides and video are available online). It was one of those talks where you have to come up with the title long before you think of the content. However, I wanted to share what I think will be the three big trends in games and learning in HE in the neat future, just to get an idea whether people agree, disagree or think I’ve missed anything blindingly obvious. All comments welcome!

1. Low cost gaming. The sector can’t afford high-end games costing tens – or even hundreds- of thousands of pounds. There are now lots of free (or inexpensive) game development tools available (GameMaker, Informor Adventure Game Studio, for example) that don’t require vast amounts of technical knowledge or expertise. The proliferation of casual games also supports the use of low-budget games for learning, and games don’t even have to be digital as I think we’ll see a resurgence in traditional and mixed-media games. This is exciting as it puts the power to create educational games back in the hands of teachers.
2. Gamification, that is, using game elements in non-game situations. There is masses of hype around this at the moment – particularly based around the PBL (points, badges, leaderboards) model – but I think it will peak then die-away and more sophisticated models will emerge that integrate ideas of curiosity and mystery, goal-setting, visible progression and rewards based on actions, set collection (as well as PB and L) but support deeper learning and more critical engagement.
3. Student- centred gaming, where the boundary between game ‘player’ and game ‘builder’ becomes more and more blurred. There are already examples of  using game-building to teach technical or employability skills, experienced players mentoring new players in online role playing games, ARG players creating their own mythologies and narratives around the game, and the development of game-support communities.

As an aside, Katie Piatt, ran a brilliant potato-themed conference game. Her reflections can be found on her blog.

We are seeking submissions from a range of viewpoints and theoretical bases, using a variety of research methods and approaches, as well as articles that provide a practical perspective grounded in research.  We hope that this symposium will offer a holistic and critical analysis of engagement – as well as related ideas such as motivation, commitment, immersion and flow – and an evaluation of its relevance and value in the sphere of educational game and simulation design, implementation and debriefing.

We encourage a variety of different types of articles related to engagement, simulation/gaming and learning, including topics such as:

• engagement theory from different disciplinary perspectives
• the relationship between engagement, games and learning
• factors influencing levels of engagement with games and simulations
• case studies evidencing engagement in games and simulations
• ways in which to evaluate and measure engagement
• engagement in reflection and debriefing with games and simulations

The full call for articles can be downloaded here (pdf).

However, I’ve been very impressed with the course so far, and I’m trying to understand why. The content is pretty much what I expected, good overview, America-centric, rather positivist in its assumptions (everyone born after 1971 sees games as the normal way to learn – really?); but, to be fair we’re only two weeks in so I’m going to save that critique for a later post.

What has really impressed me is the delivery. I’m someone who has always said: ‘video lectures are a waste of time, no one’s going to watch them, why be talked at when you can read in your own time’ and yet, in this instance, I’ve avidly watched all of them. Some more than once. This turnaround has so amazed me that I’ve had to give it some thought – what makes these lectures so watchable and engaging (for me, anyway)? There are a few things possible things that spring to mind: the chunking into short (10 minute or so) segments; the fact you get a tick when you’ve watched a segment; the nature of the content (mainly informational) lending itself to exposition; the combination of talking head and presentation.

Sadly, I think these are all minor contributory factors. I think the reason that I’m engaging with these videos, when I’ve be turned off by so may others, is that they are presented by an American. There, I said it. I don’t know if it’s the accent, the confidence, the production value, or just this individual lecturer, but there’s something much more compelling – and professional – than anything I’ve seen produced over here. Maybe it’s just novelty value. Perhaps I watch far too many US sitcoms.