Gamification involves combining the mechanics of video games with education and speeds up the learning process, at the same time improving the recall of learned information.

But is learning this way actually effective?

Every one of us possesses certain skills we develop over the years by training, exercising and educating ourselves. Although the skills in question may be crucial, learning them can get tiresome. Some things just have to be experienced. People relied on personal experience as a source of knowledge since the dawn of civilization. Lecture rooms and tutorials pushed us away from acquiring hands-on experience motivated by the nature of our needs at the time. Gamification provides a new way of learning things through experience, playing games and having fun.

Motivating people to learn something new in the first place is an incredibly hard task. Average training courses – the opposite of gamification – sometimes accomplish very little apart from causing participants to lose interest in going through company training. But gamification done wrong will fail as well. A trainer may try to introduce game-inspired incentives such as badges for completing training courses, but will obtaining a badge actually cause people to learn more effectively? Psychologists have established that an external stimulus disconnected from the task at hand (e.g. simply obtaining a new badge) may actually lead to decreasing the person’s interest in further participation!

Whether or not the training will be effective depends on a combination of three factors:

OF CONTENT MUST REFLECT REAL LIFE SCENARIOS, JOB EXPERIENCE, ACTUAL TASKS AND SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLES OF OVERCOMING PROBLEMS

OF CONTENT MUST PROVIDE FEEDBACK TO THE USER

OF CONTENT IS ALLOWED TO CONTAIN PURE THEORY