- The first task is to give the avatar their name.
- Then write their back story.
- Or better still, watch the Call to Arms video, join the UCISA Digital Capability Community, find your group, email your Twitter name, introduce yourself to your team members and let the game begin.
This is the second UCISA Spotlight on Digital Capabilities Conference at Austin Court, Birmingham, 25-26 May and we were playing Dig Cap Play Track.
The work which went into setting this up was phenomenal. Kudos to Fiona MacNeill @fmacneill and Farziaa Latiff @farzanalatif for their inspiration, knowledge and technical skills 🙂
Why Gamification? To explore the use of game design metaphors to create more game-like and enjoyable experiences’ (Marczewjki, 2015 p 11)
Each team had to create a digital story outlining the current digital ‘need-to-knows’ for each group’s assigned person: IT Director, Student, Academic or Admin Staff. Points were awarded for engagement with the community, tweeting, exploring the Introspective Room and making a digital nirvana box (see images below) before publishing and disseminating the story online. Scores were collated on a RISE leaderboard with prizes for the winning teams.
TakeAways
I’m the non-gamer in the family. Apart from Treasure Island Dizzy on a Spectrum 48 and brief addiction to Candy Crush, my experience is limited to vicarious exposure to Heavy Rain and Witcher. I’ve never been a great fan of charades or cards and its been a long since I played chess or any other board game. However, in recent months I’ve been watching Joel Mills use Minecraft and was looking forward to seeing Dig Cap Play Track progress.
The minimum requirement was a mobile device and a Twitter account. Oh, and wifi. Poor connections proved to be a challenge and some participants had problems checking in with the i-beacons in the Introspective room, even with notifications enabled on the ucisa app. Of 91 players, 53 used Twitter (58%) while 38 (42%) did not. There were 12 teams but only one had a full contingent of Twitter users. The gaps might have been people opting not to use Twitter or changing their minds about playing and opting out altogether. The the disparity in numbers resulted in uneven opportunities to win points and although Twitter was not compulsory, it felt the scoreboard was more about the tweets than the digital story. Communication between team members was patchy in spite of a number of contact options; the online Community, Twitter, coloured tags on the name badges and visible meet-up points in the refreshment area.
Overall, the quality of any gamification event depends on the motivation of the players. Even accounting for the inevitable differences in personality and enthusiasm, when half of more of the team is absent it makes it difficult and the intermittent wifi added to the problems. But for those who played it was a valuable experience on multiple levels. There was the instant commeradery between team members, opportunities to engage with a variety of different digital tools, the challenge of competing for points and some valuable reflection on how much the internet has impacted on higher education over the past 16 years.
There was so much going on at the conference that sometimes playing the game felt like overload. However, because so many point gaining activities were threaded throughout e.g. the tweeting, the Introspective room, the Nirvana Box etc it did create additional elements of fun. Fiona and Farzana worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make it all happen and it will be interesting to see what the evaluations show from a broader participant response.
Was it worth playing? Definitely yes! Even though my team didn’t complete the digital story, the game stimulated conversations and ideas which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Apart from the intermittent wifi and invisible team players, the only other downside was lack of time to engage fully with the story development. A good conference is a busy conference with things to see and people to talk to and if you’re presenting as well, it isn’t always easy to find spaces for extra curricula activities. Maybe building in time out for the game activities would be worth consideration next time. I hope there will be a next time. I think I could get used to this gamification pursuit!
digital academic 