Is all gamification bad? If you read this piece, How gamification took over the world published in MIT Technology Review, you might come to the conclusion that it is. I thought the strongest criticism of it came from the game designer, Margaret Robertson. She…

 argued that gamification should really be called “pointsification,” writing: “What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience. Points and badges have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards.”

I think that’s true. If the whole game is just getting more and more points and levels, after awhile the game gets dull and easy to abandon.

So what should a game be, if it’s not just about keeping score? The article goes on to say:

“A game is about play and disruption and creativity and ambiguity and surprise,” wrote the late Jeff Watson, a game designer, writer, and educator who taught at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Gamification is about the opposite—the known, the badgeable, the quantifiable.

Ideally that might be the case, but there is a range of game play, and some great games may only have a modicum of creativity and ambiguity and surprise and can still be loads of enjoyment.

Indeed, that’s the thing about games and indeed gamification. Some games can be engaging and great fun. And some games suck. The same can be said for gamification: some of it is fun, and some — alot — isn’t.

This is especially true for gamification that is imposed on us. We all can recall childhood friends who would say “let’s play a game” and the game turned out to be something that would be good for them and not for you. It was no fun then, and it’s no fun later in life where you are working for a company and your employer wants you to play a game in order to get you to behave in a certain way for their benefit.

If imposed games are bad, so are endless games. Games that never come to an end or that are practically impossible to win also suck. Yet for game makers, it is tempting to engineer the game so that you never leave it (and them). I was reminded of people I know who played Duolingo and who found once they got to a certain level, they were just floating there. Now it was no longer a game to them, but merely an activity. Now some activities can be fun, but it’s no longer a game.

Gaming is a structured form of play, and like any type of play, it should be fun and it should come to an end. Too often with gamification, neither of those things are true. That, to me, is the true problem with the practice of turning non-game activities into games.

(Image is linked from the article in MIT Review)