¿Cómo llegué a la gamificación?

En la entrada anterior hablé de la tesis que hice sobre gamificación, y bien, aquí les comparto la justificación, que esa la extensión de texto más corta y llamativa de todo el documento (a mi parecer).

Ah, por cierto: la tesis fue hecha en inglés.

 When I was hired as a game designer in 2011, I barely knew anything about creating enjoyable experience outside games. Two years ago, during the development of a game about the history of our country, we came across an unforeseen event: since the game featured a few key events of Mexican independence and we had to make them as credible as possible, I ended up I had to work closely with a historian. During the final stages of development, the study brought in a couple of testers so that they could check the playability and overall sense of enjoyment, however what we got was a report on how much they had learned about the events leading to the independence of Mexico.

 Yes, the game was enjoyable, but the way they experienced history during a few days made up for years of standard education about the same events.

 After the development was cancelled by the client, we tried out a different project: we created a simulator to teach practical administration skills to a group of MBA students. The results were more of the same: the group that used our product showed a steady increment in their grades throughout the experiment in comparison to the rest of the student body.

 Unfortunately, game development is not cheap, and we realized that even if we could replicate the experience of learning through games, it would be prohibitively expensive for most educative institutions. Therefore, and after a couple of years of research, I was presented with the idea of Gamification.

 

 Explained further in the following chapters, gamification’s aim is to bring the fun of games outside the medium of game-development in order to motivate a certain behavior. It began as a marketing strategy but, unlike mainstream game development, it has a low operative cost because it does not require great teams of programmers and designers. It can be implemented just as easily by one person, and it isn’t necessarily technology-reliant.

 These factors make it perfect for fields other than marketing, like education. Many tests were made in other countries with similar if not greater results like the ones my colleagues and I accidentally ran into, causing this technique to quickly become a trend in first world countries.

 Gamification is practically unknown in Mexico outside a few marketing studios and even less educational institutions. Meanwhile, Latin American countries like Chile and Brazil have conducted experiments and proposed changes to education, but none have been approved as of yet.

 The purpose of this research paper is to bring this fascinating tool, its uses and effects, to light, so that future research can be made and, hopefully, applied to our country’s education syllabus in hopes of improving students’ motivation and general enjoyment of their educative experience.

Gamification of teaching programme in foreign language education for adults in Mexico.

Carlos F. Morán Ríos, 2018. 

Para aquellos que no mascan el inglés, lo que hice fue hacer referencia a mi trabajo que, en ese entonces, era como diseñador de videojuegos y experiencias interactivas para una empresa local.

Desafortunadamente la compañía cerró después de una década de trabajos y proyectos, pero fue una experiencia inolvidable. Fue gracias a ésta que tuve mi primer contacto con la gamificación, porque un dependencia de gobierno nos pidió recrear los eventos de la independencia de México a manera de videojuego.

El proyecto, a final de cuentas, no se terminó (ni se pagó), pero la experiencia que nos dejó fue abrumadora, incluso para los testers, quienes aprendieron mucho sobre historia en el proceso de probar el juego.