How to Analyze Gamefully and Anthropologically
Digesting what we learn in a gameful way
Food for thought and body
Learning something new is very much like eating. To get any benefit from eating, you need to process the food.
Just like our bodies and their multiple organs and cells analyze when we give them foods and drinks, our brains need to analyze the information received and decide what to do with it — to act on it, store/archive for later or just in case, or forget all about it.
Fortunately — but in cases of intolerances and allergies also a bit, unfortunately — for us, our bodies analyze the fuel we provide without very much conscious intervention from our side.
We can support them by eating healthy and chewing thoroughly after we have learned from observing the digestion process and listening to the signals from our bodies.
But consciously, we can only make a post-analysis or a long term observation. Our bodies seem to have the minds of their own in terms of digestion and metabolism. We need to wait and see to interpret their reactions.
Two sides to digesting food for thought
When it comes to information and small bits of “food for thought,” our minds act as the tongues, stomachs, and gut for that food.
Thus there are different stages of assimilating the information.
Like anything else in life, learning is paradoxical.
To learn something, it would help if you were both subjective and objective and focused on what interests you or what you committed to learning instead of complaining about having to do so.
Along, with a very personal way, you digest the information received based on what you know, your earlier experiences. That is the subjective side of learning.
But to truly learn something and experience it as new, you need to set your judgments aside and let yourself be surprised by what you learn, even if you heard it before. Thus, it would be best if you were objective too.
How to digest the food for thought
This is all good and well, but how to do it? Nowadays, my spontaneous and immediate answer is: In a gameful way!
OK, that wasn’t very explicit. Here are some words of clarification.
Games have a specific structure to them. They contain many components, which, luckily, can be boiled down to the main four.
“When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.”
— Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
When turning something into games, I like distinguishing the backstory out of the goal component because it gives information about what happened to and in the project until you stepped in as a player. It also offers essential information on the reasons why the project “game” was created. And it gives the details of the role you play in the project game.
Keeping those in mind may increase your motivation to be fully engaged in the project and your joy in attending to it.
Parts to consider while analyzing
Thus, when you look closely at something and analyze it, then I suggest that you consider it for the five main components:
- Backstory,
- Goal,
- Rules,
- Feedback system, and
- Voluntary participation.
Let’s consider each of them in some detail.
1. The backstory
Whatever is in front of you might need a closer look and analysis. Be it a bit of new information, or a challenge in a project, or even a book about which you want to write a review.
That bit of information, the project or the task didn’t appear out of the blue, even if you might feel about them that way.
The things we resent about those tasks or, in general, pull our attention away from the actual reasons that made those tasks enticing for us in the beginning.
Bringing that backstory in a few brief stokes regularly and intentionally to your attention will work in the same way as when you choose a game from your game collection and bring to mind what the game was about. And just like with that game, the awareness about the backstory or your project, task, or activity might increase your appetite for whatever you want or committed to do.
2. The goal(s)
“The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose.”
— Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Most would agree about the importance of goals, whatever we are up to, be it a game of a project, or a text we are supposed to read and learn from. And still, our brains often wonder what’s that good for what we are doing.
Maybe it is that collective agreement that goals are critical, which leads us to shy away from considering them often in the real-life world. Or resent them when we review them.
In games, the goals are not daunting, and instead, we consistently and voluntarily (more on this later) keep them in the focus of our attention.
Here is one of the possible tips of how you can rethink and redefine goals of whatever you do to make them sound fun and enticing:
“I recommend adopting the word ‘quest’ instead [of goals]. A quest instills notions of an epic journey; a journey that will be hard work, but provide you with a sense of accomplishment once completed. A quest will become a defining part of your hero’s story.” — Dr Zac Fitz-Walter in “Prioritise your main quest this year”
Thus, when you analyze something and try to learn from it, and have a difficulty finding out what it is good for, try to figure out what is the quest in it, what is your mission of it?
When reading a text from which you need to learn, try to uncover the quest of the author of the information you receive and your journey as the receiver of it. What are the missions of both of you? What or whom are each of you “saving” or helping with that?
Giving yourself a minute to think of the goals in such a fun way will provide you with a strong torch to illuminate how you can use the bit of information you received. And this is what learning also is about — to find out how what you learn can power you up.
3. Rules
“The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By removing or limiting the obvious ways of getting to the goal, the rules push players to explore previously uncharted possibility spaces. They unleash creativity and foster strategic thinking.”
— Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Everything has specific rules and limitations. Or assumptions. It is only that we look at the rules in real-life projects, tasks, chapters in textbooks as something wrong and unnecessary. In contrast to that, we approach rules in games without judging and with curiosity. One or another might tickle a chuckle out of us, but when we commit to playing a game, we embrace the rules and diligently learn them.
You can analyze what you need to learn and assimilate in such a way, too — by going on a quest to explore its rules.
There are games where you need to figure out the rules as you play them. Jane McGonigal illustrates this by referring to the video game Portal, which she describes as “the single-player action/puzzle game.”
“A game like Portal turns our definition of a game on its head, but doesn’t destroy it. The four core elements of goals, rules, feedback, and voluntary participation remain the same — they just play out in a different order. It used to be that we were spoon-fed the goal and the rules, and we would then seek feedback on our progress. But increasingly, the feedback systems are what we learn first. They guide us toward the goal and help us decode the rules. And that’s as powerful a motivation to play as any: discovering exactly what is possible in this brand-new virtual world.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
That is what often happens in real life, especially when we study something — you learn the rules while “playing.” Learning those seemingly strange “limitations” of what you analyze as if you were discovering rules of a fun game will make the activity exciting. Above that, you will set your possible complaints aside or will utter them with less drama and maybe even with a smile and even drive to discover more.
But apart from discovering already available rules, you can also add your own to the process of learning. For example, you could learn in “sprints” by setting a timer. Or you could learn in a different space or manner than you usually do, like reading your textbook under a table or while standing.
If you modify your learning project in a fun way, then you will start enjoying it, including its stage of assimilation and analysis.
4. Feedback system(s)
“The feedback system tells players how close they are to achieving the goal. It can take the form of points, levels, a score, or a progress bar. Or, in its most basic form, the feedback system can be as simple as the players’ knowledge of an objective outcome: ‘The game is over when …’ Real-time feedback serves as a promise to the players that the goal is definitely achievable, and it provides motivation to keep playing.”
— Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Discovering the feedback systems in what you learn can be as much fun as finding the rules. They might not be as evident as in games, but paying attention to them can be the actual appeal because of fun they bring when considered as a score.
Here are a few examples:
- The number of paragraphs, pages, sections, chapters, etc. of the text you read or the videos you watch.
- The time you used to read that amount of text or watch those videos.
- Exercises at the end of a block of text or after a video unit of an online course and how you scored on them.
- Concluding paragraphs and sections, which you can use as quizzes to test yourself on the information you learned.
- Additional gameful elements, like stars and badges, you record as a reward for levels you reached in your self-learning games. These levels could be, for instance, the completion of (= gathering points for) the bullet points above for a chapter in a textbook you study or the videos in the online course, into which you enrolled.
5. Voluntary participation
“Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.”
— Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
As you see in the definition above, voluntary participation is closely related to the game’s goal, rules, and feedback. The more enticing each and all of them are in a game, the more willing is the player to play the game.
It is the same case when you learn something for the first time and then assimilate and analyze it. Just like in games, the more enticing and visible the goals, the rules, and the feedback systems, the more successful is the whole learning process, including its analysis part.
And the best thing about it is the following:
- You have all the tools to turn self-learning into a game. And when you do that, you are both the designer and the player. Thus, it is only up to you how fun the self-learning process is for you, including the assimilation and analysis part.
Therefore, explore and experiment with all components when you learn and analyze something and observe your willingness to learn, increasing dramatically because of all the fun you experience in the process.
Clarifying the title of this article instead of a conclusion
I’d like to remind you of the title of this article, which might have caused your brows raising when you read it.
Here it is: “How to Analyze Gamefully and Anthropologically.”
I explicitly demonstrated the gameful part, but the anthropological aspect of learning and analyzing might be a little hidden at first sight.
I want to address it here instead — or rather, as in conclusion.
For that, I will use the words I have written in my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games:
I believe that the best game and gamification designers must also be anthropologists. They don’t judge what they see. They learn as much as they can about the players of their games because they are utterly invested in the interests and needs of their players.
After learning about the main game components — backstory, goal, rules, feedback, and voluntary participation — and how they relate to self-learning and especially to the assimilation and the analysis part of it, you’ve got the tools not only to design your own self-learning games but also to observe the dynamics of your learning processes as if you were an anthropologist studying a culture fascinating her or him, with curiously and passion.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this article, then in addition to the ones referred to above, you might also enjoy this one:
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