Title:	ICT AND JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY: GAMIFICATION FOR SKILLED ANIMALS
Author(s):	Per Fors
ISBN:	978-989-8533-54-8
Editors:	Piet Kommers and Guo Chao Peng
Year:	2016
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	ICT, gamification, skilled animal, Imamichi, Eco-Ethica, ICT and behaviour
Type:	Reflection Paper
First Page:	263
Last Page:	266
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	In this reflection paper, I have drawn on the Imamichian notion of the skilled animal in order to better understand gamification, the use of game elements in non-game context (Imamichi 2009, Deterding et al 2011). I distinguish between meaningful and meaningless gamification. While meaningless gamification, often used for marketing purposes, does not require long-term behavioural change, meaningful gamification aims to intrinsically motivate the user to carry out real-life activities related to for example fitness, sustainability and education (Nicholson 2015, Fors and Lennerfors forthcoming, Fors and Laaksoharju forthcoming). The skilled animal, according to Imamichi (2009), is a human being in the technology-mediated environment of modern societies that do not understand or question the inner workings of technological artefacts. By using this theoretical backdrop to gamification, it can be concluded that meaningful gamification is inherently different from meaningless gamification in a number of aspects, which in turn has practical implications for the development of gamified applications. First of all, I suggest that in order to develop gamification for meaningless purposes, the user of the gamified application will not have to move beyond the skilled animal approach to technology as the only purpose of these applications is to teach the skilled animal a few more tricks. However, in order to develop gamification for meaningful purposes, the application must be designed to let the user surpass the skilled animal phase in order to find intrinsic motivation for the gamified task.
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