I hope you enjoyed the movie site.
But more importantly, I hope it got you thinking.
I hope it made you ask some questions about the nature of this process
of gamification, and stimulated you to envision where it might go.
In the very first unit of the class, I showed you a clip from Jesse Schell's DICE
speech, which was also a vision of the
future, in his case more optimistic, although somewhat sarcastic.
And both of them, I think, give you a picture of both the potential of
gamification and potentially really positive things that
it can do for business and for people.
But they also get you to think about the dark side.
And it's important to keep both in mind, but the
reason to do this is definitely not to scare you.
The reason to do it is to make you ask a set
of questions and to realize that as someone who now knows about
gamification, and who may be involved either directly or indirectly in deciding
how it gets implemented in different places, you can make some choices.
You can choose whether the gamification that you're doing is empowering.
It helps people.
It encourages them.
It helps them find real meaning, and makes their
jobs or their lives, or their customer experiences better.
Or it can be manipulative.
It can be something that takes advantage of
people, and can be counterproductive, or even dangerous.
You can also decide whether the
gamification that you're involved in is shallow,
just slapping badges and points and so forth on a process without really
thinking through the opportunities, or if it's deep and sophisticated, using all the
different techniques and the different learnings that
I've shared with you in this class.
You may remember, about halfway through I gave
you a chart showing two other different choices
that you have in gamfication: the more behavioral
approach versus the more cognitive or game-based approach.
These are not necessarily good and bad but they are also
a set of options that you have when doing any gamified system.
So all of these are forks in the road.
And I don't want to tell you exactly what to do, but I do want to
communicate to you and to leave you with the fact that the choice is up to you.
The future of gamification will be made by
all of you who've taken this course and people
who've taken other courses like it, and people
who've been involved in gamification projects on the ground.
Because gamification hasn't been around all that long
and there aren't that many people who have the
level of knowledge and expertise that you now have
from what we've done over the past six weeks.