Gamification in Education: an Interview with Javier Velásquez

• Gamification has evolved into a design discipline, integrating insights from multiple fields to create cohesive systems for behavior change.
• There is a close relationship between gamification and the behavioral sciences, with gamification using the engaging nature of games to activate deeper cognitive processes.
• Effective gamification relies on timely and meaningful feedback, guiding users in making better choices and learning through iterative cycles.
• Gamification systems should encourage failure as a learning tool, helping users develop skills and strategies in complex environments.
• Gamification is most effective in situations requiring complex thought and should be applied carefully to avoid creating distractions from primary objectives.

Juan Roa
Thank you so much, Javier, for accepting our invitation to discuss gamification. 

Javier Velásquez

No problem, I am glad to be here.

Juan Roa
Back in 2015, I took a Coursera course on gamification. Since then, I know the field has changed a lot. So, to you, what is gamification today and what should it be?

Javier Velásquez
Gamification has evolved, yes, it's true. Now it's rooted in a clearer foundation than it was back in 2015. I've been promoting understanding gamification as a design discipline, not only a research field. In that sense, it's something that must be understood in its scope, not as just one method. 

If we go back to 2015, we had a lot of methods like Hexad, Octalysis, and even mine, BEM, but these are frameworks and toolboxes. Now, gamification is understood as a discipline that takes a lot from other research fields and brings them together to find a cohesive system of rules to try to understand human behavior and promote change. 

Gamification has particular views on how to change human behavior. It is related to behavioral sciences, but also to fields like semiotics, for example. It borrows from a lot of places, of course, with game design at the center. 

So gamification is like an experimental field that has a lot of value because most of its knowledge has been documented. Now, we have a lot of theoretical background and we see how synergies between gamification and game design and other disciplines start emerging.

What can change?

I think gamification will start merging with other disciplines. For example, understanding gamification as a subgroup of info-engineering and behavioral sciences. It will be more complex to find the boundaries. I think the main views of gamification will just start to permeate other fields and start creating more impact—even if it's not called “gamification” everywhere.

Juan Roa
Behavioral sciences is also a field that has evolved a lot in the past decade or so from behavioral economics, which is more centered around this specific idea of how people deviate from the homo economicus, that idea of “rational” decision-making and resource optimization. Now, behavioral sciences also encompass sociology and neuroscience and have blended with human-centered design and design thinking.

What do you think is the relationship between behavioral sciences and gamification and how do these disciplines overlap?

Javier Velásquez
It's a close relationship. When I started studying gamification I was reading Jesse Schell to learn about game design, I was taking Kevin Wehrbach's course on gamification, and Dan Ariely's course on Coursera on behavioral economics.

They are these laboratory experiments where you have closed systems, where you can isolate variables, and make people do weird things, make them make decisions and play so you can gather data, understand how we make choices, and what drives our behaviors.
Gamification is a sub-discipline of behavioral sciences in a way, right? I tend to say that gamification and behavioral sciences are different, but it's not about behavioral science as a whole, it's more about the behavioral design frameworks. 

Gamification works really well under the umbrella of the behavioral sciences. But, not every gamification designer thinks the way I do, right? It’s not a clear roadmap. In my way of seeing things, many behavioral scientists or behavioral design frameworks work around modifying behavior, trying to use the path of least resistance. 

For example, the idea of a nudge: I want you to change how you make decisions by changing the way you see information in your environment—in a way where you are not even conscious of it sometimes, right? So, it's the path of least resistance. I want to make sure that you will change your behavior without entering into the resistance mode of homeostasis. Much of the design process or the scientific research around behavioral science was around that—let’s understand how people make choices so I can take that information and start to design choices, right? To design informational spaces that will allow us to nudge the decision-making process toward one field. And I know it has been hard, many of these experiments don't work as expected because the real world is more complex than any laboratory, of course, but that has been the approach of most behavioral designers.

In gamification, we can take another approach. This is my approach and not all gamification designers do it. The more traditional behavioral gamification designers don't, but what gamification brings to the table that is really impressive, is the kind of behaviors you can create. 

Games can activate more efficiently the task-positive network of the brain that requires more motivation, which people don't want to activate as much because it requires more conscious thought and more energy. Games tend to be better designed to activate those systems required for more complex behaviors, strategies, and problems in real life. 

This process can be activated using emotions in the right way, understanding fear, flow theory, and other concepts that are not just about changing the external environment or showing information to reduce the player’s cognitive load. 

Gamification is about making choices interesting for you and giving you the proper feedback, so you can reflect around those choices and make better choices in the future. You optimize your way of playing through repetition, quick training, and other techniques that are not the main issue for most behavioral designers. I think that would be the difference between behavioral science and gamification, but still, there is a lot of overlap. We're talking about different languages, but the objective is the same. 

Juan Roa

Now that you talked about learning, since we’re talking to the recipient of Gamicon's Award for Best Overall Use of Gamification in Adult Learning, I didn't want to miss the opportunity to ask you about that. What are some best practices you can share with our readers interested in applying gamification in adult learning projects and initiatives? Could you please describe how you’ve used one of those in one of your past projects?  

Javier Velásquez
There are several levels to gamification. 

The first tier is the most applicable if you don't know a lot about gamification and it can be really powerful (without having to know all the theories and all the motivational frameworks behind it). The first tier, for someone who is reading about gamification for the first time, is understanding the role of feedback and the design process. 

In education, the word “feedback” has been misused. Some people use a reductionist definition of feedback:  for example, the grade, the ticks and crosses, and all these systems designed to show you the way, to mold you as a trainee. Game designers understand feedback in a more complex way. 

In 2012, we talked about the idea of “immediate feedback”. Now, game designers work with loops that are not about immediate feedback. For instance: I will give you feedback tomorrow, just come to the game tomorrow so you can get your feedback. It's about understanding we want timely feedback, which means that feedback has a place and must come at the right moment. 

Game designers create feedback loops using discretionary signals that you can understand. You can differentiate one signal from another easily because games give each behavior its own sound and visual cues. There is a language built around feedback; rules that help a learner understand what's happening while they're acting.

If I'm building an essay I will receive feedback after I give the essay to my reader, and that's too late. If I were to put this into the world of games, I would receive feedback while I'm typing the essay. Something like—imagine an AI giving you feedback while you're typing, not that the AI owill type the essay for you, but the AI will tell you: “Okay keep this in mind”. Whereas in the game, I can create, for example, scoring systems to help you understand what your proficiencies are. 

Imagine I'm writing an article for a web page and I have a progress bar with a skill that says how engaging is my essay while I'm writing it. Another bar shows how trendy it can be, or how well written, or how it can affect younger audiences more. If you have a system providing you that feedback, you can think whether you should change your strategy right away. That is how games teach: you're getting feedback that helps you make choices and after you make those choices, you get new feedback. The central idea behind feedback is that the system is learning from itself. Everything I do in the system creates a response that changes the way I will behave in the future.

For game designers, the first layer of design would be to try to understand how games provide feedback to their players. Not only understanding points, it's not only about the numbers, it's about understanding the sound cues and the emotional values of the information that I'm giving you. For example, if I make an unsuccessful transaction and the sound, the movement, and everything that comes are built around the moment I need to understand that my transaction was unsuccessful, it’s perfectly designed. You don't see this kind of well-needed design outside of games right now. You can see it because of gamification, but you wouldn't see it 10 years ago. 

Juan Roa
A lot of our readers come to the TDL website to read about behavioral science and biases. Maybe some of them have never heard of gamification before. I was wondering if maybe you could give us some tips or advice for people who are interested in applying gamification in their behavioral science projects. When should they consider gamification? It's not a silver bullet and neither is behavioral science, so when would you suggest gamification as a solution versus considering another approach? 

Javier Velásquez

Other behavioral science approaches shine when you don’t want people to be in a constant learning loop. Gamification works well when there are progression systems that can be designed into learning cycles. So, if you only need to mold people's behaviors around the special cues they have so they can make better choices without a lot of thought, gamification can actually create noise. Because, right at the moment that you place points or badges or anything else into your system, you create secondary objectives immediately.

Some people will say, "I want all those badges," and they will do a lot of things for those badges, but maybe that will distract them from what you actually want them to do. So, it's very important to understand that in game design, no feedback system has a universal value. Its value depends on designing the whole system in a way that creates choice. That's the point—it creates choice. That’s why it is meaningful. 

All these systems are great to tackle with gamification because you need to build the skills to understand how to filter your attention. For example, games can really help you learn how to better navigate these complex systems by using feedback elements that will allow you to understand where you made a wrong turn, right?

I need to understand that failure can reduce uncertainty over time. Because if it doesn't reduce uncertainty over time, it will not help you learn, and that failure will haunt you for life, right? So, you need to create failing states that can help you out in the learning process. But for that, you need to be able to fail.

If I’m creating a game where you can’t fail, it might include gamification elements, but won’t be a full-fledged gamification project, right? In those cases, I might need to focus more on teaching from system 1 rather than system 2. Gamification is suited for complex learning with progression curves, skills, and challenges, and where narrative plays a role, offering emotional cues. It works when the designer controls the feedback systems—these elements create a great gamification experience. Otherwise, it can just add noise.

You don’t want to add noise to a system that needs to be simplified into a straightforward approach, not bogged down by game rules. Rules are inherently complex—learning a game can be a challenge in itself, like when you need to create a tutorial. That’s often the most frustrating part of gamification design: you have a great game that could nudge behaviors, but people don’t understand how to play it. The rules aren’t familiar or intuitive, which creates a cognitive burden.

You need to grasp all this: creating a cognitive burden only makes sense if the effort and results are worth it. Games excel at engaging people in learning, which is a big plus for gamification, so that’s when I’d use this approach.

Juan Roa
No surprise that gamification is so big in education and capacity building.

Javier Velásquez
Exactly, that’s why it’s such a big niche—education requires people to think and engage with complex ideas. But when concepts are too complex, like literature analysis, it’s harder to design effective games compared to something like solving math problems. You need to understand the problem, the type of game that can help, and whether the effort to create and play these systems is worthwhile.

The goal is to change how people see the world and make choices, altering their heuristics. For example, there’s a gamification project that aims to “vaccinate” people against fake news by playing against biases. Even when you understand a bias, you can’t always remove it, but education and gamification can mitigate some biases. Games provide quick feedback to train your brain to avoid pitfalls and poor decisions, especially when thinking too fast. It’s fascinating—like using games to vaccinate against fake news.

Juan Roa
Yeah, that’s fascinating! Well, thank you so much, Javier, for your time. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, but unfortunately, we’ve run out of time.

Javier Velásquez
Thanks for the invite. I’m thrilled to be here, and I hope your readers see gamification as another way to expand their toolbox. It’s all about finding new perspectives to refine their own—that would be great.