- Based on class discussions, course materials and your own experience, how is gamification changing the way we live, learn, work and interact with other people? Give examples from your own life. What, in your opinion, are the positives and negatives of using games for other than entertainment purposes?
Gamification is changing the way we learn, work, and interact with others. Gamification is the use of gaming techniques such as rewards and scores to projects that are not games and not for entertainment. By using levels, leaderboards, along with narratives as in games, gamification techniques is engaging audiences better than traditional methods of advertising, training, and maybe even education. Retaining the attention of users, whether customers, students, or employees has become more challenging because of all the distractions new technologies are providing. Proponents of gamification argue that gamification could be used to solve the attention deficit problem.
For many businesses, gamification techniques of levels and rewards are being used to hook and retain customers. These businesses use the point system in the same way levels are used in games. Every dollar a customer spends, she receives a point. And after a certain amount of points, the customer receives a reward. The main aim of the businesses is to entice the customer to feel excited to want the reward because when that happens, the customer is less likely to go to a competitor. The other aim for businesses is to get the customer to spend more, thinking she is getting rewarded. Businesses make sure that customers can see their points (level) on their receipt. Because when customers see they are close to receiving their reward, often buy something extra, even if they don’t need it, for the sole purpose of the reward. These gaming techniques are working, because Customers do get excited to receive their reward and they do spend more. Consumer gamification techniques are used to entice the customer to constantly want to level up by spending more. And this affects us all because we are all consumers.
Gamification techniques are being used in education as well. In education engaging students, stimulating their interests, and retaining their attention is the main aim. Gamification techniques such as immediate feedback are used to help students overcome obstacles in the same way they would when playing a video game: failure is just part of the process that needs to be overcome to move on to the next level. For instance, in online education, lessons are being gamifying so that students are rewarded and punished based on their performance. Lessons are being broken down into sections (levels) just as games are divided. Passing a section is overcoming an obstacle whether through a single try or several tries. And in the classroom, to better engage with students gamification techniques such as by rewards, set goals , and give feedback are being used.This form of learning allows students to truly go at their own pace, unlike the traditional way in which lessons are often too fast or too slow for sections of the student body.
Overall , gamification techniques are being used by just about every industry. And the reason for this is that gamification techniques being able to change human behavior by making activities more enjoyable is incredibly powerful for every sector: education, advertizing, or human resources. Organizations use gamification techniques to train their employees.
the popularity of gamification techniques is due to the fact that they work. Give someone a goal and a reward and they will work harder; the reward does not even have to be equal to the effort. Overall, there are obvious benefits to gamification but there are also obvious negatives. One negative for instance is that gamification techniques are being used to manipulate consumers. Another negative is that in education, there is not enough evidence to prove that gamification is better for engaging with students than traditional method of engaging with students as it’s being propagated.
- How are new technologies and new media affecting the social interactions between people? How are they shaping our relationships with other people and our society in general? How do you see the future of storytelling in our society? Give examples and reasons for your opinions.
New technologies and new media are affecting the social interactions between people. They are shaping our relationships with other people and our society and this is largely due to the way in which they are changing storytelling. The best way people engage and interact with one another is through a story. And since the beginning of social media sites such as bulletin boards, people have been convening online, telling stories.
With new media ,stories can be told in multiple ways, reaching the audience through multiple senses other than just sight and hearing. In new media, narratives can be interactive, allowing the audience to partake in them actively in a way they wouldn’t have been able to do with traditional storytelling. With new media, storytellers are shaping their stories to match the technology. They are using blogs, vlogs, social media sites such as facebook and twitter, google maps, infographics, and video games (consoles or online) to convey rich narratives. In new media storytelling, users have more of a say in the narrative than in traditional forms. In them, users can shape the story’s direction. They can interact with one another to decide the fates of characters and plot sequence. New media allows multiple players to partake in the telling of a narrative such as in multiplayer video games. New media is an incredibly flexible and complex way of telling stories in which creators use different platforms and formats to tell stories using text, visuals, music, and videos to tell stories with flexible plots whose narrative structures are often non-linear, deviating from the traditional, inflexible way stories were are told.
Storytelling is changing to suit the needs of current listeners who are always on their phones instead of watching television, reading books, or listening to the radio. This audience has no patience and in order for their attention to be retained, creators have to be more innovative. And in new media storytelling, the audience and the creators are patterners who co-create. Allowing the users to create as well, storytellers take more of a backseat. Users can decide where to start and where to end a story. In this form of storytelling, the role of the creators is to map out a flexible structure and try to remain as invisible as possible, so it doesn’t seem like they are driving the story. The users must feel like they are driving the plot.
The way we tell stories is changing. Everyone is a storyteller such as citizen journalism. There thousands of posts online of photographs and text, combining and adding text and photographs and videos. And then there emerging technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality promising to change the way we tell stories forever. Our way of telling stories is changing the way in which we engage with one another. And the reason is because we no longer have to be in the same space at the same time to tell stories to one another, we can do so in virtual space. So more and more, we spend less time physically socializing and more in front of our digital screens. We not communicating less, because we are in fact engaging in multi-way conversations using technology that allows use to mesh together text and visuals. And with new media, we are seamlessly stringing together infinite substories in infinite plots to interact with one another.
