I was sitting in a class on Monday, listening to a professor give a deeply involved lecture on a complex topic and absorbing absolutely none of it. It was a topic which people have devoted their entire lives to studying and something which I knew was going to be on an upcoming midterm. But a combination of the rainy weather, the warmth of the room and my typically millennial short attention span turned the whole thing into so many sounds— not words and ideas and concepts worth absorbing. I glanced to my right. My neighbor was on a website where a flapping green owl was asking her to translate “The cats drink milk” into Spanish. She typed in the answer and a big green check mark appeared. In the upper-right corner of the screen, a small progress bar began to fill up. 

I quickly became involved in the website. Correct answers earned her points to fill up the bar, and wrong answers led to simplified questions. The class was over before she finished, but I left feeling a bit disappointed that I wouldn’t get to see what happened next. 

It wasn’t until I had left the room that I realized I’d just found it more engaging to watch someone else take a quiz online than to actually participate in a real-life class I was taking. 

Such is the nature of gamification, the new trend of applying the rules of video game design to other fields. Gamification has been used as a marketing strategy for years; over 70 percent of Forbes’ Global 2000 companies in 2013 reported plans to use gamification to increase customer retention. Examples include airline companies with frequent flier rewards, excercise applications such as Nike+—which tracks the user’s exercise record—and My Marriott Hotel—a Facebook game which simulates the experience of running a hotel in the Marriott chain. But gamification applied to education is still relatively recent. Teachers have invented games to teach material to students for who knows how long, and educational games like The Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego have existed for decades. But academically identifying specific game design concepts—things like leveling up, health meters and the like—and deliberately incorporating these concepts into the classroom is still fairly new.

There have been numerous success stories. Lee Sheldon, a professor at Indiana University, started grading his student with an “experience points” system. Laurier University professor Celine Petsche uses tournaments and leaderboards to incentivize being at the top of her Business classes. Western Oklahoma State College is creating badges to reward students for using their tech systems, and they’ve even taken a lesson from Xbox 360 achievements and come up with punny names for them—students who use Dropbox earn the “Drop It Like It’s Hot” badge.

In all of these cases, student engagement and performance have increased dramatically as a result of gamification. It’s not difficult to see why. Games are specifically designed to be engaging and enjoyable and are good at breaking complex concepts into small, bite-size challenges to overcome. Framing education as a competition gives a clearly delineated goal to learning: do X, and you win. And perhaps the feeling of “winning” is the biggest advantage of gamification. It provides positive reinforcement and incentivizes  succeeding rather than punishing failure. In games, you are rewarded with victory. In education, when you pass a tough midterm, your reward is not failing the class. You didn’t succeed necessarily; you just didn’t do poorly. It’s a very different story if success is framed as a win. 

But reducing education down to a system where one can “win” or “lose” ignores an entire critical vector of education, that some would say is the most important part. If one is only given absolute success or absolute failure as the options for completing a task, they are never encouraged to think critically about what they are being told to do. 

Too often, gamified education takes the form of a quiz with a reward system. My lecture neighbor learning Spanish from the green owl on her computer is a perfect example of this. She may be able to take a thousand quizzes testing her grammar and vocabulary, but we haven’t yet written the algorithm that will tell her whether she is writing a Spanish essay that tells an interesting story or makes an interesting point. This is key to truly understanding Spanish, as it is with most any topic. But critical thinking is non-absolute and non-objective. Video game mechanics simply lack the capacity to be non-objective, but someone learning a topic through games will never be tested on skills that cannot be quantified or ranked. Absorbing facts is one layer of education; interpreting fact is quite another. Reducing interpretation down to a simple “correct/incorrect” binary would be a dangerous mistake to go down as the gamification fad becomes more and more implemented in education.

The only major way that gamification has impacted the quizzes that make up the majority of its purview is through progress meters, visual metrics of how close one is to accomplishing a given task. In games, this often takes the form of a “level up” meter and in the real world, it becomes frequent flyer miles, Sheldon’s “experience points” grading system, or the little green “correct answer” meter in the corner of my neighbor’s Spanish quiz. This is also the same concept at the heart of games like Farmville, at one time the most popular game in America, in which players spend hours performing rote, redundant tasks to grow a farm. However, the exploitation of this common mechanic is itself dangerous. It’s called operant conditioning, and it’s the reason that activities like gambling are addictive. If an activity rewards the user on a predictable but irregular schedule, the user is likely to continue long after the activity itself is no longer enjoyable. The reward becomes the only reason the user continues, not the inherent value of the activity. For gamified education, this means that the feeling one receives from passing a quiz may be the only reason one returns to the game. This isn’t an inherently bad thing except that it further reduces likelihood that students will think critically about the content they are presented with. As long as you get your fix, you keep coming back. Additionally, there are some serious ethical implications if the way we plan on fixing our educational system is to use the tactics of a casino. 

Too many articles hail gamification as the “future” of education, the one tool that will singlehandedly save American schools. Gamification is a powerful tool to be sure, but it still cannot replace a good teacher who truly cares about what they are doing. The fact that I was sucked up in someone else’s activity on someone else’s computer speaks to the extreme power of gamification, as well as its extreme danger. But careful and thoughtful implementation of the concept may prove it to be a powerful tool in education.