Gameful design
In short Designing non-game activities around the rules, goals and measured progress of games.
Definition
Gameful design is the practice of building the structure of a game into something that is not a game, so that people pursue it with the focus they bring to games. It borrows rules, clear goals, measured progress and feedback on performance: levels to complete, streaks to protect, scores to beat. Where playful design invites open exploration, gameful design channels effort toward defined outcomes and makes success visible. The term is closely related to gamification and often describes the same work, with more emphasis on the quality of the experience than on attaching points and badges. It succeeds when the structure gives an activity meaning, and fails when it merely adds pressure.
Not to be confused with
- Playful design
Playful design invites open, self-directed play without goals; gameful design supplies the rules and goals that make effort measurable.
- Gamification
Gamification usually names the technique of adding game elements to a non-game context; gameful design names the aim of a game-like experience and judges the work by that experience rather than by the elements used.
- Serious game
A serious game is a complete game made for a purpose beyond entertainment; gameful design borrows parts of a game's structure without producing a game.
Where the game lives
- rules: used
- goals: used
- feedback: used
- uncertainty: dropped
- choice: used
- play: dropped
Gameful design keeps the rules, goals and feedback that make progress legible. It usually drops the uncertain outcome and the free play that make an actual game feel like one.
used dropped · What the six structures are
Examples
FoursquareFoursquare Labs, 2009
Check-ins earned points, badges and the title of "mayor" of a venue, a goal-and-reward structure laid over ordinary movement around a city.
DuolingoDuolingo, 2012
Lessons are framed as levels, with experience points and daily streaks that turn language practice into measurable progress.
Nike+iPod Sport KitNike and Apple, 2006
A shoe sensor logged runs against distance goals and challenges, an early case of tracked progress applied to exercise.
Where the field disagrees
The words gameful and playful are not used consistently. In everyday writing, and in a good part of the design literature, “playful” covers anything with a light, game-like feel, points and leaderboards included, while “gameful” is often treated as a plain synonym for gamification.
Second Playthrough follows the distinction drawn by Deterding, Dixon, Khaled and Nacke (2011), which builds on Roger Caillois’s two poles of play. Gameful means structured play bound by rules and goals, Caillois’s ludus: competing, progressing, winning. Playful means open, free-form play, Caillois’s paidia: improvising, exploring, fooling around. On this usage a streak counter is gameful and a piano staircase is playful, and a single product can be both at once. When we mean the open side, we say playful design.
In the essays
Gamification is not a game
Gamification usually borrows the visible parts of games—points, badges, streaks—and drops what makes them work: real choice, uncertainty and voluntary play.
Sources
- PaperFrom Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining "Gamification". Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference, ACM, 2011. Proposes gamefulness as the counterpart of playfulness, mapped onto Caillois's ludus and paidia.
- BookReality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Penguin Press, 2011. Reading list
- BookMan, Play and Games. Free Press of Glencoe, 1961. English translation by Meyer Barash of Les jeux et les hommes (1958). Reading list