Gamification and Credentialing

I enjoy games. The ones I find most interesting tend to be longer and more complex. A strong theme and narrative arc are attractive features. I have enjoyed many hours moving counters on a board, rolling dice, playing cards, back when I had more time, and I could find others with the time and inclination. Avalon Hill games such as Civilization, Age of Renaissance and History of the World, lie dormant in their boxes. Previously, I reviewed Mark Carnes’ book Minds on Fire about using Reacting to the Past simulations in mainly college-level history courses. When done well, an immersive game can be highly engaging and foster, not just learning, but the enlarging of one’s world-view.

Gamification in education, therefore, seems like a good thing at first glance – but I suppose the devil is in the details. The advance in computer games creating immersive worlds is nothing short of astounding. I stopped playing computer games in the early ‘90s essentially with Sid Meier’s Civilization. (Doing most of your work on a computer made me look for other forms of recreation, leading to a renaissance in boardgaming for me.) Games, especially the more open-ended ones, can be a seedbed of creativity and inventiveness. We humans also seem to be drawn to solving puzzles, be it Sudoku, Crosswords, or finding secret artifacts in a dungeon-maze in any number of computer games.

Credentialing, especially in the form of digital badges, is a current hot topic in higher education – with new emerging companies getting into the assessment game. When big money is involved, and the federal government shows interest, you can bet on a rush for the new digital “gold”. I had not thought about the connection between gamification and credentialing until stumbling across this article by Jeff Watson on media commons. It’s from 2013 before the gold rush, so it’s a little unnerving to read his warnings from three years ago, and compare them to what is happening today. The title of his post is “Gamification: Don’t say it, don’t do it, just stop.”

The heart of the problem is control. Instead of fostering creativity, Watson paints it as becoming more regimented. “A game is about the unexpected. Gamification is about the expected, the known, the badgeable, and the quantifiable… It’s about checking in and being tracked… It’s a surveillance and discipline system…” with the goal to “create compliant employees, students, consumers, or citizens”. This is the antithesis of the liberal arts – to give our students the “skills” (what the “arts” actually means) to live freely and fully (what the “liberal” means).

A good game is not a free-for-all. It has some constraints, which in fact act as aids (by some measures) to sparking creativity and inventiveness. Watson praises game design, but has harsh words for gamification: “This is not a recipe for creating the kinds of creative problem-solvers our civilization needs. This is a recipe for creating rule-followers who are more concerned with optimizing their badge collections than with truly exploring and engaging with the world in which they live.”

Instead of trying to truly buck the system (which may be too difficult), education has lurched from one credentialing system to another. Most recently, the disillusionment with grade inflation and rising GPAs becoming “seemingly meaningless”, there was a call for the portfolio instead of letter grades. But in an era of massification, the “system” requires some sort of standardization – in the name of justice and fairness, but perhaps hiding the fact that this is simply the requirement of an advancing technological system that counts in bits and bytes. Digital badging is the quick way for your portfolio to be quickly searchable and accessible, supposedly opening you up to new opportunities and linking you into a wider network, but also sinisterly keeping track of you. Welcome to the Brave New World of conformity masquerading as disruption.