How a Wharton School research paper’s findings on gamification got completely warped

Two weeks ago, when I came across a post called “Gamifying the office? Don’t Bother,” on the Boston Globe’s Ideas blog I started to worry that the backlash against gamification might be justified.

In the post, Kevin Hartnett discusses a recent research paper from a pair of Wharton School professors that more or less debunked the value of gamification in corporate settings. In an experiment at a tech startup, a basketball-themed game seemed to have a middling effect on sales performance and was detrimental for those who weren’t up for playing.

“There’s . . . something especially depressing about being told by your higher-ups to regard something as fun when obviously fun isn’t the point, for anyone involved,” Hartnett wrote. “If we’ve got to trudge through the sludge, we might as well be real about it.”

When I dug a little deeper, however, I discovered there was more to this research than the Boston Globe was letting on. Harnett’s post was not based on the Wharton research paper itself but a much more balanced article on the Knowledge@Wharton website which interviewed the paper’s authors, among several other sources. The professors say that even if their gamification experiment didn’t yield universally good results, they described it as a “first pass” at measuring the impact in the workplace. They also say what most Canadian researchers have also learned: “If you give people choices, and they get the choices they want, that helps increase buy-in,” one of them notes, and that buy-in, of course, is key to making gamification less an act of parental desperation than a tool for real engagement.

The research paper, by the way, is not really that new, having been published last June. Rather than merely go with what was mentioned in the Wharton article, I downloaded and read it through. ‘Mandatory Fun: Gamification and the Impact of Games at Work’ is really good, and contains as many valuable insights about how to pursue gamification successfully as it acknowledges the potential pitfalls. It’s really a study about the need for consent, and thoughtful ways to achieve that consent. Here’s the part that stood out to me:

“We found that the most powerful predictor of consent came from employees who were immersed in non-work worlds where gameplay was common. Those employees who regularly played the type of games used in gamification were much more likely to consent to the use of games in the workplace.”

And later:

“Fun essentially is in the eye of the beholder, and requires either selecting individuals who have a uniform view of what is ‘fun’ (likely a difficult task) or else working hard to implement the initiative in a way that engenders greater consent. One way to do this could be for managers to be very clear about the rules of the game. Another way might be to solicit ideas from employees about what games might be fun and to be clear that the game structure emerged organically from the ideas of co-workers.”

Beyond the reminder that gamification can’t be generic and is not an off-the-shelf solution, the point of all this is that superficial coverage does a disservice to the discussion. Anyone who reads and shares that Boston Globe post may believe they have evidence for the naysayers. A deep read suggests otherwise. In a media culture that increasingly relies on curation, aggregation and traffic-baiting headlines, researchers and business people need to realize that when they hear generalized conclusions about gamification, they may be getting played.
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