Dr. Who, gamification pioneer

It has been years – almost decades, I’m embarrassed to say – since I regularly watched the show, but I’ll admit that the moment I came across the Google doodle this past weekend, I was immediately sucked back into the world of Dr. Who.

In celebration of the British series’ 50^th anniversary, Google’s homepage featured an interactive game in which visitors could choose from among the many different incarnations of the title character and battle the pepper pot-shaped alien creatures known as the Daleks, among other things. Yet even though this “Whodle,” as it was apparently called internally, was the most technically complex stunt the search engine has ever produced, it has nothing on the actual Dr. Who TV show in terms of what it could teach Canadians researchers about successful gamification.

I’m geeky enough to have not only watched most of the archival episodes on TV Ontario up until its major reboot a few years ago, but to have read several books about its origins and intended audience. Dr. Who may now be a cult favourite among the Fan Expo set, but in the 1960s it was designed primarily as a children’s series. Not only that, but it was a children’s series with a distinctly educational undercurrent. If you don’t know the premise, the pilot featured a pair of schoolteachers who find themselves in the company of a mysterious old man and his granddaughter who use a cleverly disguised time machine to travel back and forth through history and the future. A lot of those early episodes were squarely in the past: characters learned first-hand about life in ancient Rome, for example, and even in the 1980s, when the emphasis seemed to be on visiting far-flung planets, there were stops in contemporary Paris to learn about the Mona Lisa.

Some might argue that Dr. Who “sold out” early on and just became another sci-fi soap opera, but most people who have spent any time with it would disagree. Even in its most futuristic episodes, it has demonstrated the power of science fiction to help us better understand historical developments. And although there are many TV shows that have tried to teach history through storytelling, I would argue that a big part of Dr. Who’s power has been its ability to turn television into an ongoing guessing game. Even after dozens of years, we only know a few things about who the character of The Doctor really is – that he is an alien from the planet Gallifrey, that he has two hearts, and so on – and the invisible question mark at the end of the series’ name has kept untold numbers of viewers desperate to keep watching, and playing along as they rediscover history and contemplate what the future might look like.

How many attempts at gamified learning can claim this kind of engagement, this loyalty, based on a powerful narrative premise that can be adapted seemingly endlessly? Who needs points and leaderboards when you can follow (and root for) a character more intriguing than anything created for an Xbox or a Nintendo console? So many gamification initiatives seem like they would have a life span far shorter than Dr. Who’s 50 years. That’s because the best, most escapist fantasies tap into a human desire for storytelling that, executed properly, becomes truly timeless.