“ Gamification is at its heart a kind of measurement, and in a social context measurement can be somewhat vampiric – it can drain some vitality from what it’s measuring thanks to things like cumulative advantage. Do you need to introduce that into your research system or your community? It’s up to you, but hierarchy and play evolve naturally in successful communities without needing codifying necessarily. Something that you see a lot in natural communities and not so much in research ones is the community creating its own games – polls, ‘tournaments’, balloon-debate type things – there’s lots to learn from that.
— This is me! Talking about games over at Research Magazine’s site. Wanted to highlight these points - the parasitic nature of measurement in the social space, and the way communities create their own games - because I don’t see them mentioned much in this conversation.
