Perspectives on Gamification, part 3

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

In part one of this series, I wrote about the role that technology and techno-optimism played in pressuring schools to adopt tech in classrooms. Along with the technology came an argument that learning should shift from traditional models to new models that are better suited for the kinds of digital lives we’d be living in the 21st century. At least, that’s how we felt in the early 2000s. I think it’s always important to retread recent education reform history because today’s backlash against education technology, phones in schools, and incorporating social media and video streaming in class is a complete 180° from how the public felt just a decade ago. Anyway, along with the tech came the idea that learning should be about exploration, creativity, imagination, and play. While this was far from a new idea, the general sense was that kids are online exploring, creating, imagining, and playing anyway and schools had to keep up with the times.

In part two of this series, I looked at what actually came out of adopting these digital systems and why it often looks nothing like play or imagination. A large part of this was the influence of very typical design decisions that were being implemented through Silicon Valley. Apps and web services and social media and streaming video adopted psychological techniques pioneered by casinos. The goal was to keep users interacting with their products and one of the (now acknowledged) methods was to use gamification to create addiction. EdTech was no different and various products and learning management systems adopted gamification, not play. While there was (and still is) a lot of rhetoric around making learning more like video games, it’s pretty clear now that the kinds of engagement we get from gamification are dissimilar to those from actual games. What we have deployed in schools today are gamified systems to collect data, surveil children, centralize curriculum, and produce compliance. No child has ever entered a flow state on IXL. Kids, as several media reports have detailed, are checking out and using edtech to entertain themselves and play, just not in the way that supports their academic growth. As anyone who has spent time teaching can tell you, this is what kids do when you give them bullshit work.

But, what if we’re thinking about games and gamification all wrong? We often say that play is children’s work, and we acknowledge the value play has in learning outside of school. Sometimes we even acknowledge its value inside school but often frame it solely in academic terms. When we prioritize academics over everything else, shifting to systems of coercive psychological manipulation can seem like useful means to an end. Schooling, though, has other purposes and that includes our psychological and social development. We often give these short shrift because they’re not academic (we also refer to these kinds of skills as non-cognitive skills) and they’re not always best taught so much as experienced and practiced through play. Games, in this view, are a socio-cultural technology that use rules to structure play toward specific goals through prescribed means. Negotiating and following rules, setting goals, and figuring out how to achieve them within the context of those negotiated rules turn out to be tremendously important capacities for children to develop.

Things Play Does

I cannot recommend highly enough the work of Kevin Stinehart. Kevin is a public school teacher who has made it his mission to bring unstructured play into schools everywhere. He’s written a ton and draws on a deep well of psychological research about adolescent development to remind us of just how important play is for children of all ages. Kevin is also engaged actively with researchers who’ve looked at the impacts of the “Play Club” he founded and continues to run. Kevin just started a series on his new Architecture of Childhood and, again, I think it’s worth checking out.

You’ll notice that Kevin does occasionally tout an improvement in test scores but what he’s really focused on are those non-academic or non-cognitive skills. For example, here’s how he describes play’s effects on children’s development of independence and agency:

Let me add that we’ve stripped agency out of the classroom environment via digital tools that nudge and judge kids in real time for everything from time on task to their eye movements. There’s little choice in the curriculum and there’s little space for authentic engagement or productive struggle when your teacher is an algorithm. Plus, when your teacher is an algorithm, is the tech itself, then you’re never operating in a space away from adults. Omnipresent edtech means omnipresent adult supervision. Even if there’s no adult human in the loop, the adults’ expectations and management of children are baked into the hardware and software. Whatever creative problem solving we want to see goes right out the window when the Chromebooks come out. And, when there’s no room for agency in the schoolwork or the classroom, the kids still find ways to exercise their agency. They watch 13,000 YouTube videos. They game the system to rack up points and rewards but learn nothing about the actual concepts being taught. We’ve designed school that that the only avenue for their natural desire for agency is rejection. There is an alternative!

One thing children do with their agency, by their very nature as little social learning goblins, is make games. These games are critical for their social and psychological development.

Games, their creation by children and their instability in the face of childhood, are such a crucial piece of how kids develop their ability to communicate, to cooperate, to endure failure, and to develop perseverance. There is, however, I think another important component here that Kevin doesn’t mention in his writing. It’s a more philosophical take on games than where Kevin places his focus, but I think it’s going to add to our rehabilitation of the idea of using games in school and for school, not just during play.

Games and the Library of Agency

Let’s start with a long quote here from C. Thi Nguyen’s book, Games: Agency as Art.

Games, in Nguyen’s telling, are both a component of a human’s development and a component of human society that makes us, well, human. At the center of all of this is the idea of agency. Simply put, agency is our ability to act on the world. It might be physical agency, like putting on your shoes — something my older kid still struggles with. But, more often, we’re talking about agency in a social sense, or the ability to get other people to think and behave in some way. This kind of agency occurs in two ways simultaneously. The games designers exercise agency by creating the game, its objectives, and its rules. The players exercise agency somewhat counterintuitively by circumscribing their own agency to adopt the goals and rules of the game designers. They want the designer’s meaningless points and will play by the designer’s rules to get them.

Nguyen leverages the idea of maieutic ends here to explain what he thinks is going on. A maieutic end is an end that leads to other ends with the goal of achieving understanding or clarity. Becoming a doctor doesn’t mean much if you just earn the degree. The goal of that goal is a career in medicine helping people become healthy. Becoming a teacher doesn’t end when you get your classroom. In fact, that’s kind of when you begin your journey of learning to teach. Those are examples from careers, but Nguyen says there are all kind of maieutic ends that we pursue even though the ends themselves may only lead to more questions in a search for understanding. The point is, maieutic ends are still valuable even if they’re not terminal. Games typically only have maieutic ends. We play them for the experience of playing them, of inhabiting different agentive capabilities within various rule-based regimes.

The outcome of games, and what I think is really important for my purposes in writing about gamification, is what Nguyen calls a “library of agency.” Because agency is the aesthetic medium of games, humans build up experiences being both player and designer. We subordinate ourselves, our agency, to the rules and in doing so we can often design games of our own. This means we can also inscribe and share that experience with others which means human societies can grow and change through the imagining and experience of new agencies. The library, then, is an individual one but it’s also social and shared. In developmental terms, we might call the individual library a repertoire of agency while the social library we might call a fund of agency. At least those are the closest corollaries I can think of from the world of education.

You see, Nguyen is a philosopher with a background in philosophical aesthetics and Games: Agency as Art is sometimes stubbornly a philosophical book. He doesn’t stray too far into any particular real-world non-gaming examples and isn’t drawing on outside disciplines such as sociology or psychology too heavily. While reading the book, I kept wanting Nguyen to dive into other conceptualizations of games, such as Wittgenstein’s language games or, perhaps, the status game. I led into Nguyen with Kevin Stinehart because I think Kevin’s work shows us how Nguyen’s ideas apply to kids in the real world and as part of their overall growth and development. So, I’m having to make those connections explicit myself, but I think it works pretty well to explain what’s valuable about games. Nguyen also gives us a helpful framework for explaining what has gone wrong with gamification.

Gamification and Value Capture

Toward the end of the book, Nguyen takes a darker turn and considers some negative ways games can impact people. Here, I feel like he’s actually quite concrete in both examples and application.

This probably sounds familiar to anyone in any industry but definitely go back and read the articles I linked in part two last week because they exemplify both aspects of gamification. The problem here is what Nguyen calls the process of value capture.

Eventually this “undermines my autonomy by diverting my efforts of self-control toward a more game-like target.” Looking back up the post to Stinehart and the importance of developing autonomy, you can see why I think we really need to be clear-eyed about the impacts of gamification on children’s autonomy and, therefore, their healthy growth and development. Right now, we are gamifying in a way that doesn’t just substitute autonomy, it shortcuts kids’ ability to exercise any agency at all. While we look at the metrics and the data and the test scores, we miss all the non-cognitive components of their development. And we will miss them. We already do miss them as a generation of anxious kids, unable to handle many of life’s ups and downs, emerges into an uncaring world.

I learned recently that Nguyen has a new book out this past January, The Score: How to stop playing somebody else’s game. I haven’t read it, but the book appears to be an expansion on his criticism of value capture and gamification. I was please to see, though, that Michael Pershan has read the book and penned a nice post about it. Do go read the whole thing but here are some bits that offer us a nice conclusion to our series on gamification.

He thinks we should “make room in play for schooling” a lovely turn of phrase I will have to remember.

Thanks for reading!