We've spent a decade gamifying engagement in education, work, and health. Empty points are short-term dopamine hits.

Maybe we should gamify our reputations.

The Disengagement Crisis

Since the pandemic, the data has shown a disturbing trend in our society.

We're disengaged.

According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a crisis in student engagement with the university communities, describing students as losing "their sense of purpose for attending. (1)"

This trend is not limited to our universities. Whether it's quiet quitting, or mass layoffs, the trust and satisfaction of work are plummeting. Our youth is spending more time on social media than ever before, but feeling more lonely and disconnected. You can find concern over the disengaged in infinite numbers of human resource blogs, educator conferences, and the Twitter feeds of business strategy gurus (2). Disengagement is a five-alarm problem for almost every organization.

However, there is one vertical that doesn't seem to be having this problem.

Gamifying Engagement

You've heard this before, but let's review it. Gaming is exploding. More and more people are spending more and more time each week playing games (3).

Over a decade ago, we saw an independent gaming revolution. Powered by Valve's Steam distribution, and Apple's app store, game design went mainstream. Everyone was playing Angry Birds, and Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken was a best seller (4).

An avalanche of start-ups used game design principles to incentivize engagement with health, education, and work. Multinational corporations integrated "engagement gamification" into their strategy. Every supermarket rewarded us with points and badges. Education companies of all sorts participated in this movement.

It worked! ... Or did it?

You tell me. Every year I read research papers that show that games can be used to increase engagement in education (5). So, where is it? I'm beginning to wonder if it's the engagement that's the problem.

A pedagogy might be in direct opposition to what successful game design might be. Teachers are giving students educational games to play at school. There is more engagement, but the evidence shows that when they get home, they fire up the console and play "real" games.

Alternatively, I have seen a handful of professionally produced games used as tools to teach. Valve released a version of Portal, for students to use in the classroom. Everyone's favorite voxel builder branded and grew their Minecraft Education to 7000 classrooms across the United States (6). And Epic Games, using Fortnite's sandbox-like qualities, have launched several initiatives to support coding camps and game jams of all sorts (7).

Games are fun, and I have no doubt engagement increases. However, the long-term efficacy in education is inconclusive (8). Education and Entertainment are like oil and water because they are still the division of work and play. They have never been able to mix into a singular product.

To make them mix, we need to change the composition of each of them.

I suspect we have misunderstood what it takes to engage someone. The critical element missing from the conversation is that the games with the most engagement are not necessarily fun, but jam-packed with consequences. When your character dies, it matters. Empty points are short-term dopamine hits.

We need to incentivize people to level up the best version of themselves.

Gamifying Your Reputation

You are reading my third essay written for the Bankless Academy Writers Cohort (9). I didn't pay money to participate or get paid to write this. I volunteered to do this agony they call "writing." My motivation to write out my ideas is largely self-directed, but the sprint structure has given me railings to hold on to.

Like meeting your buddy at the gym, participating in a cohort provides collective support. It's made up of other like-minded writers, who are given weekly milestones. However, what I find increasingly interesting, is that we have a cryptographically secure wallet tied to our participation.

Yes, the blockchain is rife with scams, speculation, and overhyped marketing cycles. It is also seen in the rise of tokenized communities driven by a mission. There are non-web3 cohorts that are essentially online classes, but the potential of web3 combined with this cohort mentality could be different.

The success of these communities, like everything else, depends on engaged participants. These communities don't just have gamification programs, they incentivize using crypto. We created the concept of a wallet when crypto was all about coins, but a wallet is only an address that specifies the location of a transaction encoded on an immutable ledger.

In theory, participants can be rewarded by protocols.

For example, proof of active participation (POAP) is an indication that your wallet was there. Other protocols could be developed for hitting milestones on the deliverables. With collective tokenization, participants could be rewarded with ownership or status (10). If I put all of my writing activities from this cohort on the Ethereum blockchain, it's tied to the wallet address I used, forever.

Most gamification approaches have short-term effectiveness. Perhaps motivation may increase if we tied those same principles to a permanent resume of activity. I can showboat on Linkedin, but nothing is backing up my accomplishments. The blockchain, however, is no joke. When something is on the chain, it's there for good. Points are nice, but we care about our long-term reputation.

Isn't that why we engage with universities? We want that degree to mean something. Isn't that why we put that extra time into work? We care about being the best. Motivated correctly, we work because we want the attribution for what we did.

For all the arguments that crypto is complicated to use, some speculate we will have a billion wallet addresses by 2030 (11). The participation of a billion people, organizations, schools, and businesses, all with trackable engagement is coming very soon.

If learning and work-related transactions become a metric for engagement, we might be able to adopt the principles of gamification that worked in the short term, to become a driving force for the economy in the permanently engaged one.

Nye Warburton is an animation technologist and educator. This post was written in participation with the Bankless Academy Writers Cohort. Everything in this article was written and drawn with human labor. (February 2023)

Visit online @ https://nyewarburton.com

Links and Attribution

1. “their sense of purpose for attending” - The Chronicle for Higher Education:

   https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-stunning-level-of-student-disconnection

2. “The Disengagement Crisis” - Fortune Magazine:

   https://fortune.com/2022/12/23/disengagement-crisis-quiet-quitting-tacit-termination-eric-sydell/

3. “Gaming is exploding” -

   https://financesonline.com/number-of-gamers-worldwide/

4. “Reality is Broken" by Jane McGonigal -

   https://www.pdfdrive.com/reality-is-broken-why-games-make-us-better-and-how-they-can-change-the-world-e197940653.html

5. “Games can be used to increase engagement - study” -

   https://slejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40561-019-0098-x

6. “Minecraft Education in 7000 classrooms” -

   https://www.fastcompany.com/90666530/fortnite-minecraft-education

7. “Fortnite for Education” -

   https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/learn-how-to-teach-with-fortnite-creative-in-your-classroom

8. “Gaming in Education is Inconclusive” -

   https://maestrolearning.com/blogs/what-happened-to-the-gamification-revolution/

9. The Bankless Academy Writing Cohort -

   https://writers.banklessacademy.com/

10. "The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust" by Kevin Warbach -

    https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Architecture-Trust-Information-Policy/dp/0262038935

11. “Some speculate we are on track for a billion wallets by 2030.” -

    https://beincrypto.com/digital-wallet-use-track-reach-65-global-population-2030-ark-invest/