At the beginning of this week I was unaware of the extent of gamification within the library world, but after doing some research and reading a couple of articles I think that gamification definitely has its place within the library community. Gamification is defined as bringing elements of game design into a non-game context to help improve user experience. Ultimately I would like to work in an academic or public library and I can see the benefits of gamification in both settings.
Initially I was having a difficult time trying to relate gaming to a library environment. An article by Bohyun Kim discussed the applications of applying game dynamics to library services. An interesting point was made about creating a game that taps into people’s creativity and diligence. Games traditionally get harder as you progress to various levels. A person needs to utilise their creativity to pass these levels, but also use diligence to keep getting better. This article asserts that this type of interaction does not need to remain solely in the game world and can be transfered into the ‘real’ world, or even library environment.
Some brilliant suggestions are made in the article as to how to incorporate gaming within the library. While I wont state all the suggestions here, I will talk about one suggestion I found particularly interesting. With the rise of social media and libraries adapting their catalogues to incorporate social interaction with users ie. ratings, book reviews, etc. the idea of awarding ‘status points’ for posting something about the library to Facebook, or borrowing out a large number of books. Of course, the awarding of an essentially arbitrary points system is a form of extrinsic motivation which hopefully begin to trigger the intrinsic rewards of interest, peer acknowledgement and motivation, and pride. The idea of using status points is a small and simple way of adding gaming elements into the library setting to hopefully motivate users. Librarygame is a unique tool to help libraries modify their discovery interface and engage users. I'm looking forward to reading about other examples of gamification in libraries, if anyone has any suggestions please let me know!
Some personal apps I have used with elements of gamification are:
Duolingo - A free language learning tool (Manzana means apple in Spanish!)
Zombies Run! - I'm almost at 5k!
Cookie Clicker - I found this on Reddit. I don't understand the point of this game, but it definitely uses extrinsic motivation!
Like you, I was surprised at how gamification has become so accepted, almost mainstream. Some work...some will have a limited nife but it is a subject that is far more interesting than I expected,.
ReplyDeleteThe Morten Bay Regional Council Library uses a rating and review system for its catalogue, but I don't thin it is tied into a point system. While I think it's great for getting people more actively engaged in library content, the system is far from perfect. Most people will give a book either 9 or 10 stars, or 0 or 1 stars; there isn't much in the mid range, which suggests to me that people only use the system if they really loved or hated an item. While I'm not certain if this counts as gamification, it is some interesting user generated content.
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