Next week, Tuesday, October 26th, I’m honored to be giving a Google Tech Talk at 2pm in Mountain View on “Our Fun Future”. If you’re a Google employee, I’m sure I’ll see you there. The talk will most likely be broadcast and available for viewing afterwards – we’ll alert you when it’s live. Unfortunately the event is not open to the public, but if you want to get more involved in gamification, consider coming to the Gamification Workshops in New York and San Francisco on November 12th & 15th.
Dear Gabe, I saw you’re excellent talk at youtube. I have a question pertaining to the use of gamification in HR. David Pink presented his study at TED on using a reward-based motivation scheme to solve a lateral-thinking puzzle, where the performance of people given an extrinsic reward was worse than those with no extrinsic reward. Do you agree with this study, and if so, do you believe there are areas such as this where gamification should not be applied?
Lukasz:
It’s an interesting question, to be honest. There is a major problem with all these studies (and Pink’s conclusions) from my perspective:
These studies evaluate cash rewards on performance. I’m generally not a fan of cash rewards as motivators, as you might have guessed. I use an acronym SAPS (Status, Access, Power, Stuff) to describe motivators that seem to work well for long-term engagement. So we’re on the same page that cash isn’t a very good motivator and can be a demotivator.
It’s a tautology to parallelize that to all extrinsic rewards. I’d love to see the studies redone with World of Warcraft players and frequent fliers with rewards in the context of their “systems”.
And no, I think game-based rewards in HR can be super compelling, actually!
-Gabe