Gamification is not just about video games anymore, it’s much beyond that. Gamification is the use of game mechanics to help the employees learn and retain knowledge in a very fun and competitive manner. Gamification is not about winning or losing a game, it’s about promoting learning habits that produce greater learning outcomes.
Organizations that are looking to engage their employees and make them active participants in learning are looking to leverage gamification. You can find gamification features in most learning management systems. For instance, tools like Thought Industries have gamification integrated within the tool. With gamification, there is no passive listening to lectures or going through the course material. It demands the employees be active learners.
Although with gamification you can see many benefits, there are a few downsides to it as well. In this article, we will discuss all those pros and cons that gamification has to offer so that you better decide whether or not to opt for it.
Pros:
1)Enhances learner’s engagement:
One of the major benefits of gamification is learners’ engagement. Remember, as children we all used to stay glued for hours together to play games? The same happens with gamification in learning as well. Sitting in long lectures and scrolling through the slides makes it a boring learning experience, especially for the generation that was brought up around digital tools. These digital tools brought down the attention spans drastically.
With games, your learners can compete with each other and make learning fun and engaging. Gamification gives a sense of accomplishment when you finish a series of gamified tasks and earn more points or rewards. With higher engagement in learning, knowledge retention would also increase.
2)Provides feedback instantly:
The other advantage of gamification is feedback, it provides instant feedback be it positive or negative. If you perform well you go forward with the next levels in the game and likewise if you don’t perform well, you cannot move forward to the next levels. With this instant feedback, learners can monitor their progress and move forward. If they perform well, they get more rewards which would motivate them even further to perform better.
3)Features like badges instill motivation:
Motivation is the key to performing well in any task. When you perform well, you get badges and rewards. These badges can look like stickers, virtual ribbons, or prizes. Badges can be seen by all the co-learners which motivates the learners to achieve greater results. All-in-all, badges help the learners to perform well as it creates a sense of accomplishment.
Cons
1)It’s a costly affair:
Creativity is not the only issue in this, designing various stages of game development demands a lot of time and money. All the ideation, design, and development will take lots of time. Sound effects, videos, graphics, music, and animations all will cost you a lot of money.
2)Hits the plateau very quickly:
The games that look exciting and sophisticated might look irrelevant tomorrow. If it looks out of date, your learners wouldn’t use it more. The other downside to games is the reference value. For instance, if any of your learners want to revise a topic, he/she wouldn’t want to repeat the entire game. They would just refer to the content outside the game.
Conclusion:
To wrap up, gamification can be very useful but it has its downside as well. But, if you just want to focus on its benefits and ignore the disadvantages, then it can be very useful to engage your learners. We hope this article helps you to find out various pros and cons of gamification so that you can decide whether to go for it or not.