Gamification

Goddamn, I hate gamification. I'll admit, part of it is because every time somebody tries to shove Jane McGonigal down my throat (which has happened a lot over the past 15 months), I feel pandered to and underestimated as both a person who plays games and as a rational human being who expects people to actually back up their arguments (Malcolm Gladwell: not a credible source, even when you're not misrepresenting him). Mostly, though, the whole thing just takes an ugly view of humanity.

Gamification presupposes that the only thing we care about is our own sense of achievement. It suggests that the best way to get people to do things is to promise them immediate reward and recognition. It basically works to eliminate language of servitude from our lexicon in favor of personal growth.

Personal growth is bullshit -- at least when it occurs in a vacuum. If we abstract away the actual purpose of our efforts, replacing it with an augmented reality veneer that puts ourselves at the center of every action, then we won't actually learn the lessons that make us more Godly. Instead of coming to grips with our own fundamental insignificance, with the incredible value of the people around us and of creation as a whole, we will only grow and grow in our own sense of self-importance.

So, yeah, fuck gamification.

Games, Education, and Exploration

Generally speaking, I don't believe in educational games. That's not to say that I didn't learn a lot of facts from games like Number Muncher or Mario's Time Machine, but games like that are glorified flash cards. I think that we can add an engagement factor and arbitrary context for learning strictly declarative knowledge just fine. What I don't believe in is games that help, by their very nature, in learning procedural knowledge or higher level relationships between concepts.

This wouldn't be an issue if I wasn't currently taking a course that is, theoretically, about making games to serve just this purpose. Twice a week, I get to sit and listen to stories about all of the funding that my professor has earned from various institutions trying to make these sorts of games.

There are two simple reasons that I don't believe in educational games. One is transference. Virtually all games, especially games exploring abstract concepts, employ some sort of metaphor. This means that whatever skills or concepts are being taught, ultimately, are being learned with regards to the metaphor. Knowing what you're supposed to actually learn, then, requires additional interaction with the domain that the lessons are supposed to be applied to. Moreover, it requires an active effort to identify the pieces of the analogy in place. All of this means that it's going to be very hard to make the game itself educational unless it's included as a piece of a larger, directed education plan. Either that, or the game needs to actively mix in these elements, which risks breaking engagement.

Second is that, my professor, at least, seems to lack any sense of distinction between "play" and "playing a game". Play is self-directed and exploratory. It's a matter of expressing and recognizing and responding to patterns that we've observed in an environment where we have complete control. This lets us experiment with ideas and see where the rabbit hole leads us (even if it leads us astray). This is incredibly useful in learning because learning is an exploratory activity. On the other hand, games, by their very nature, are goal based.

The purpose of a game, in the mind of the player, is to complete the game. This can mean gaining mastery of the systems in play, or it can mean butting your head against it until something works and then moving on. In cases where a game requires real world knowledge, people are willing to play lip service to that knowledge without taking it to heart (just like students are willing to put the answer the professor wants on a test or a paper without believing a word of it). In short, all we want to learn from a game is how to beat the game.

Play is educational. Playing a game is not. What we need aren't educational games, but educational toys. Toys can be used in the construction of games to push people towards a specific goal, and games can have their purpose subverted and turned into toys to promote experimentation, but they are very different things.

Creativity

Universally, Christians believe that we, human beings, are created in the image and likeness of God. In its simplest form, our highest calling to reflect that nature as truly and as fully as we are able. I would argue that, first and foremost, this means fulfilling the command to love, but it also has other implications. For one, we know that it is in God's nature, being a triune entity, to exist in community. For another, and most pertinent to what I say here, we know God to be a creative being and to delight in creation, whether that creation occurs by hand or by word. Moreover, our experience of both the physical universe and the inspired Scripture suggests that God creates not only for God's own enjoyment, but because God's creations provide us a window toward understanding who God is.

This, the act of creation, is perhaps the most instinctive manner in which we reflect our status as Image Bearers. It is our natural inclination to find ways to take the ideas that exist in the hazy ether of our minds' eyes and place them firmly in reality. We delight, from our earliest ages, in making things. We stack our blocks into towers and our LEGOs into spaceships. We form sounds and then words and then sentences and finally stories. In doing so, we marvel at our own authority while simultaneously sharing ourselves as directly as possible.

It's unfortunate, then, that as we age, we tend to give up on exercising our own creative talents. We satisfy ourselves with limited means of expression while seeking joy in the creative output of others. We listen to music instead of performing it. We buy our meals prefab or follow the same time-honored recipes instead of inventing our dinners. We consume culture instead of creating it, likely under the unfortunate notion that the value of creating exists more in the quality of the product and less in the act itself. I'm as guilty of this as anybody.

When we don't create, though, we abandon one of the most powerful tools we have for relating to God's creation. Making things exposes us to our own understanding of the world around us and proclaims that understanding to others. Creating gives us an outlet to share why our views are right while, at the same time, calling us to understand our limitations. It asks us to confront our values -- aesthetic, moral, or whatever else -- and to recognize that they are not perfect.

Certainly, there is a place for consuming and critiquing the output of others. Doing so broadens our appreciation for what is possible and helps us connect with other people. But living as so many of us do, simply grazing among the efforts of those bolder than ourselves, is a sad way to be. Go, tell a story, draw a picture, sing a song. Do something as only you can do it, even if that means doing it poorly, and grow from the act.

Jobs and Ritchie

Steve Jobs died just over a week ago and, of course, there was hullabaloo galore. Just this past weekend, Dennis Ritchie passed and plenty of people are just learning of it now. For those who didn't follow that link, Dennis Ritchie was the co-creator of both the C programming language and the Unix operating system/kernel. For those of us who work with software for a living, the impact of his work cannot be understated. Still, I can't help wanting to slap my friends and colleagues who are expressing indignation about the comparative lack of outpouring.

Obviously, the entire technological landscape depends on Ritchie's work. C and its various extensions and offspring have dominated the programming landscape forever, and most of the web lives on servers running Unix-like operating systems (not to mention Mac OSX). But most people don't care about what makes the things they use work. If they did, we'd be a society of engineers and scientists. People care about how well things work, and Jobs was a master of providing technology that simply worked better -- or at least more intuitively -- than anything else out there.

More than that, Jobs was an incredibly public person managing an even more prominent company that virtually everybody has strong feelings about in one direction or the other. As near to the end as he could, he was keeping himself visible and relevant as he promoted the work and products of his company. What has Ritchie done in the last 40 years? I can't find anything other than winning awards for the contributions of C and Unix and sitting on a number of research boards.

So, while it's certainly sad that so few people even knew that Ritchie died, don't bring Steve Jobs into things. Their legacies have nothing in common, and we shouldn't expect remotely the same reaction.