Gamification and diversity among students.

Recently the gamification has aroused a lot of activity on weblogs and twitter. Especially when the word appears to be misunderstood in publications. Raph Koster argued, correctly, against someone who misinterpreted the idea in Koster's book 'A Theory of Fun'.

Today, thanks to Twitter, I stumbled upon 2 interesting presentations about gamification: The first is a presentation by Sebastion Deterding from the 2010 Playful event in London.

Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents

View more presentations from Sebastian Deterding.

The second presentation gives an interesting overview of gamification and its meaning. Especially the fact that the gameplay should be adjusted to the motives of players/students/customers. This is exactly what I argued in the last chapter of my PhD thesis: contemporary youths have gained a diversity in interactive media experiences, skills and preferences. Educators should therefore address each student in their own manner. To make things easier I looked at 2 kinds of motives for students, following Ito (2008): students are either interest-driven participants or friendship-driven participants. This means that people develop patterns of interactive media use because they want to know about certain subjects or because they want to connect to others.
Amy Kim in her presentation presents a whole list of social aspects to be taken into account when gamifying content or processes.

Gamification Workshop 2010

View more presentations from Amy Kim.