While they sound the same, they both have game in them, they’re really not the same thing although there’s a lot of overlapping attributes and elements.
So let’s talk about gamification first. Gamification is an umbrella term basically meaning let’s take bits and pieces and parts of games and let’s use them in non game settings. The reason is games have embedded psychological motivators and engagers already in them. For example one of the things that motivates people to play games is the sense of progress. Progress is a driver or a motivator that’s in games and we can take that and use it for gamification .
The other thing is gamification doesn’t always look like a game .
Let me give you an example a social media company wanted people to complete profiles part of the social media product and so what they did is they put a progress bar on to the social media profile and the more people the more information that you filled out the further the progress bar went .
That mean a gamified element the progress bar was used to help drive the activity which was filling. out the social media profile. The company that did this saw a 30% increase in the number of profile completions.
So when you think about gamification an umbrella term for thinking about psychological elements that drive and engage us.
Game based learning it’s different than gamification. Game based learning is basically an entire system designed a helping you achieve, in this case a learning goal. So game based learning is where the activity of playing the game itself teaches the learner what they need to know as they go through the game.
So that’s really kind of an important thing to think about game based learning has a defined beginning, middle and end .And to make game based learning effective, you typically want to have kind of an introduction this is what ‘I want you to focus on when you look at the game’ and when you think about playing the game and then in the middle of the game you want people you know to play the game and then at the end you want this debriefing .
Gamification typically doesn’t have a debriefing but game based learning does because you want to say okay let’s look at this experience and define that from a learning perspective .
The difference is, gamification take bits pieces parts of games but it’s not a game itself and game based learning which is a game itself designed to help meet a learning outcome .So that’s the difference between gamification and game based learning.
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