Forrester Analysts: Where Are Serious Games and Gamification Heading?

Tom Grant endorses Serious Games and alerts about potential backlash if organizations push Gamification too hard

Via: ComputerWorldUK - App Dev & Program Management

 by Forrester Analyst Tom Grant

Serious Games? Definitely. Gamification? Too Early To Say!, recently posted by Forrester analyst Tom Grant, with at least 30 retweets and object of an on-going discussion at LinkedIn Serious Games Group, is a must-read article.

According to the author, the blog post is about the difference between Serious Games and Gameification. “I'm hearing occasional confusion between the two, which is unfortunate given the much longer track record of success for Serious Games”, he says.

Tom Grant takes a stand for “Serious Games virtues”, but alerts about the risks of pushing Gameification too hard and getting a backlash.

Coincidentally, or not, most of the constraints to Gameification Tom Grant points out in his article, sound quite familiar to me – they are very similar in nature to Serious Games constraints in their infancy. Here is a sample:

• Not everyone loves games
• People already feel intrinsic motivation about their work, and games might just get in the way
• Add a game layer on top of some activity and you push all the right buttons of a generation of people who have grown up with video games
• While this technique may work some of the time, we hardly have all the data we need to jump to any bold conclusions

Please find the full article at Serious games? Definitely. Gamification? Too Early To Say