Geek Gaming Labs

This book analyses the role of technology in the realm of health. Health apps can promote medicalization and the idea that health is an individual matter, rather than a political and social one.The authors base their arguments around three theoretical frameworks. Quantification: the growing importance in our society of markers, rankings, and scores, which thanks to digital devices is fueled by the ease with which it is now possible to collect data. Gamification: a powerful trend in digital society, using playful features to transform what are seen as dull tasks into competitive and appealing ones. Gamified self-tracking seemingly increases our productivity without oppressing us with apparent self-governance. Finally, Medicalization: a growing social phenomenon of the transformation of a 'normal' condition into something pathological. Several health apps presuppose a conception of the user as an individualized subject divorced from any social determinants of health. The authors investigate the possibility of people sharing their most private states leading to new forms of algorithmic surveillance.Alongside this negative vision of medicalization the authors recover the now-rare concept of positive medicalization, looking at how apps can work as positive self-help devices though promoting a medical framework. A selection of digital programs related to fitness in the workplace are also presented and discussed.

Play predates the development of human culture and our brains are hard-wired to use play as a tool to accelerate learning, strategically explore unfamiliar environments and develop collaborative social connections. Games are human created, formalized structures and processes designed to maximize engagement and get the most out of the "play" impulse. In fact, gaming comes so naturally to us we don't even notice it for what it is. Two examples of large scale gaming structures include our educational and political systems. Going deeper into understanding how gaming structures work, and intentionally applying those mechanics can give us an advantage when designing experiences meant to engage our members in the work of our associations. Although games have been with us since we first learned to scratch marks on small rocks, what is new is the impact the internet and technology is having on games and players alike. What was simple activity in the past, is rapidly turning into a large scale social phenomenon. At some point the term "gamer" will lose it relevancy and we will recognize gamers for what they are - an increasingly sophisticated class of experience consumers. Games are the first mass media of the 21st century and gaming literacy is an essential skill all executives, staff and volunteers need to develop in order to attract, appeal to and invite a new generation of players to play the association game. In this book, we take a simple, practical approach to helping you and your volunteers take these ideas one step farther. By using these 42 rules, you will be able to use simple gaming mechanics to increase member engagement, improve educational outcomes and build community in your industry or profession.

Helping teachers take advantage of game design principles and intrinsic motivators to build more effective courses. The changing student body in American higher education demands a new approach to teaching, one that moves toward inclusive, hyperpersonalized learning environments that have much in common with games and social media. Kevin Bell's Game On! presents dynamic case studies of gamer educators and game-derived techniques to help instructors creatively formulate their own teaching strategies. Breaking gamefully designed classes into their component parts, Bell analyzes what these classes are actually doing and explains why they work. He offers faculty a rubric to assess their own courses for their propensity to engage students, particularly those from low socioeconomic and high-risk populations. Bell explores how game design, pedagogy, and intrinsic motivators can level the playing field to produce rigorous learning environments that are as addictive to all participants as the latest apps and social media systems. He also discusses best practices, lays out the broader context of computer-mediated teaching and learning, and considers the challenges and opportunities that gamification presents. Instructors would do well to consider the key tenets of successful games if they are to engage and graduate the coming generations of learners. Bell's careful analysis of the theories behind gamification, cognitive science, and instructional design will help them to do just that.

This volume discusses the promises and the challenges behind the use of gamification in public governance, both at the national and supranational levels. The first section reviews the landscape of gamification--taking a brief look at its history, providing definitions and examples of its application within the private and public sectors (at the national level), and introducing the readers to a number of problems linked with the use of gamification. The second part shifts the focus from the descriptive to the problematic analysis of gamification in governance. The third section ventures beyond the empirical analysis to address the impact of gamification strategies on participatory democracy in the national and supranational legal spaces.

In this book, Nathan Hulsey explores the links between game design, surveillance, computation, and the emerging technologies that impact our everyday lives at home, at work, and with our family and friends.  The book delves into the role of gamification in motivating us to use software and applications, alter our behaviors, and to collect, display, and contextualize personal data. The author utilizes historical examples of pre-gamified technologies and techniques to explore gamification's growing effect on environments, bodies, and spaces. Reimagining gamification as a surveillance-oriented ideology that eschews traditional disciplinary techniques of control, he argues that gamification uses seduction, in the forms of game mechanics, to encourage people to submit their data in a strategy that utilizes play to promote social, economic and behavioral change. He asks:  What are the consequences of leveraging play as a mode of control?  What are the outcomes using of addictive design to influence our perception of work and play?  As we become more reliant on the digital, will we all become players in an infinite game? If so, who wins?

What if every part of our everyday life was turned into a game? The implications of "gamification."What if our whole life were turned into a game? What sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel is today becoming reality as "gamification." As more and more organizations, practices, products, and services are infused with elements from games and play to make them more engaging, we are witnessing a veritable ludification of culture. Yet while some celebrate gamification as a possible answer to mankind's toughest challenges and others condemn it as a marketing ruse, the question remains- what are the ramifications of this "gameful world"? Can game design energize society and individuals, or will algorithmic incentive systems become our new robot overlords? In this book, more than fifty luminaries from academia and industry examine the key challenges of gamification and the ludification of culture-including Ian Bogost, John M. Carroll, Bernie DeKoven, Bill Gaver, Jane McGonigal, Frank Lantz, Jesse Schell, Kevin Slavin, McKenzie Wark, and Eric Zimmerman. They outline major disciplinary approaches, including rhetorics, economics, psychology, and aesthetics; tackle issues like exploitation or privacy; and survey main application domains such as health, education, design, sustainability, or social media.

Lacking a digital crystal ball, we cannot predict the future of education or the precise instructional role games will have going forward. Yet we can safely say that games will play some role in the future of K-12 and higher education, and members of the games community will have to choose between being passive observers or active, progressive contributors to the complex and often political process of weaving together pedagogy, technology, and culture. This will involve agreeing that games--or, more specifically, game mechanics and the engagement in joyful learning that they engender--are not only critical for shaping online and classroom instruction but also the evolution of schooling as a whole. Likewise, it will involve a hard push beyond questions like "Are video games 'good' or 'bad' for education?" and "Are games 'better' for all students than traditional face-to-face teaching" to unpack how game experiences vary with individual learner goals as an interaction with the parameters of an educational environment. Simply put, we need to form a cohesive, compelling argument in support of the notion that games are entire learning ecologies in and of themselves. This edited volume is designed to anchor collective thinking with respect to the value-added nature of games for learning and the complexities involved in player experience, narrative context, and environmental-player interactions. As could be expected, we are not interested in debates about "gamification," game violence, individual game quality, and other topics that have become standard fare in extant games literature. Instead, we seek to emphasize issues of scalability, the induction of player goal adoption, affordances of game-based instructional environments, relationships between play and transfer, and the value of games as part of an ecopsychological worldview. As long-time contributors in a field that has made a habit of playing it safe--pun intended--we seek to bring the dialogue in a more nuanced and meaningful direction that will reach teachers, researchers, designers, and players alike.

In recent decades, what could be considered a gamification of the world has occurred, as the ties between games and activism, games and war, and games and the city grow ever stronger. In this book, Anne-Marie Schleiner explores a concept she calls 'ludic mutation', a transformative process in which the player, who is expected to engage in the preprogramed interactions of the game and accept its imposed subjective constraints, seizes back some of the power otherwise lost to the game itself. Crucially, this power grab is also relevant beyond the game because players then see the external world as material to be reconfigured, an approach with important ramifications for everything from social activism to contemporary warfare.

Integrate game-based learning for 21st Century skills success!This straightforward, easy-to-follow guide from experts Schaaf and Mohan helps you leverage technology students love best - digital video games. With step-by-step strategies, you'll easily find, evaluate, and integrate gaming into your existing lesson plans or completely redesign your classroom. Teachers learn to use well-designed game elements to: Promote meaningful student buy-in Create student-centered, collaborative learning spaces  Teach and assess 21st Century Fluencies aligned to Common Core State Standards Address multiple intelligences using research-based strategies Includes a detailed implementation outline. Create engaged, adventure-filled learning with this resourceful guide!   

Are you interested in learning more about gaming? Are you trying to determine whether it might be an appropriate training and development solution, but aren't sure where to start? While games have long been an important part of human social development - think learning to take turns in a board game, and strategizing about future moves in chess or checkers - we are only now beginning to understand how games can be a powerful tool in learning. This issue of TD at Work will: define games, gamification, and simulation; and discuss the types of games people play walk you through the process of creating a game by outlining its design and gaming framework describe how to get stakeholders and sponsors to support the gaming solution.