Gabe Zichermann at last year's GSummit
Posted: Thu May 29, 2025 5:26 am
Their message is: points and badges alone will not get you there, you need decent game design to make gamification a success. This position of Gartner clearly reflects the changing relationship between game designers and the “gamification industry”. As I wrote earlier , these two groups started the year on a war footing. But it seems that a truce has been reached and that even the territory is slowly being divided between them.
For example, a year ago no one would have thought it possible that game designer Jesse Schell – who so vividly showed us the dangers of gamification in his legendary Gamepocalypse lecture two years ago – would be speaking at GSummit , Gabe Zichermann 's conference , in April of next year. Not so long ago, Zichermann was vilified by the game design community and called 'Gamification's Dark Lord' by Schell's colleague Ian Bogost . It seems that both camps have accepted that they exist.
The gamification camp (led by Zichermann) takes a pragmatic stance and says: we can learn from game designers, but their approach is not a panacea. In the eyes of Zichermann and his ilk, gamification is just as much about loyalty programs and behavioral economics . They pick the interesting elements from those disciplines and package them with the label gamification. The observation that game design and gamification are different disciplines has apparently taken the edge off the debate.
On the other side of the divide, it seems that the game design community has remained stuck in a list to data lamentation about gamification, without proposing a clear alternative for organizations that do want to do something with games. Game designers do not sufficiently take up their role in this new development. It is therefore not easy to build a bridge between organizations with their goals and challenges on the one hand and game designers with their fresh ideas and systems thinking on the other. In the Netherlands, good work is being done to build these bridges by the Applied Game Design group at the HKU and the Serious Gaming group at Het Buitenhuis. 2013 will have to show whether a productive collaboration can take place between the people who understand organizations and those who understand how to design a good game. We certainly have enough of the latter category in the Netherlands .
For example, a year ago no one would have thought it possible that game designer Jesse Schell – who so vividly showed us the dangers of gamification in his legendary Gamepocalypse lecture two years ago – would be speaking at GSummit , Gabe Zichermann 's conference , in April of next year. Not so long ago, Zichermann was vilified by the game design community and called 'Gamification's Dark Lord' by Schell's colleague Ian Bogost . It seems that both camps have accepted that they exist.
The gamification camp (led by Zichermann) takes a pragmatic stance and says: we can learn from game designers, but their approach is not a panacea. In the eyes of Zichermann and his ilk, gamification is just as much about loyalty programs and behavioral economics . They pick the interesting elements from those disciplines and package them with the label gamification. The observation that game design and gamification are different disciplines has apparently taken the edge off the debate.
On the other side of the divide, it seems that the game design community has remained stuck in a list to data lamentation about gamification, without proposing a clear alternative for organizations that do want to do something with games. Game designers do not sufficiently take up their role in this new development. It is therefore not easy to build a bridge between organizations with their goals and challenges on the one hand and game designers with their fresh ideas and systems thinking on the other. In the Netherlands, good work is being done to build these bridges by the Applied Game Design group at the HKU and the Serious Gaming group at Het Buitenhuis. 2013 will have to show whether a productive collaboration can take place between the people who understand organizations and those who understand how to design a good game. We certainly have enough of the latter category in the Netherlands .