1. The Ease of Transferring Gaming's Fine-Tuned Motivational Mechanics
As has already been established, technology has changed the cognitive pace of a generation who now view them as natural tools. The most crucial aspect of this paradigm shift is a fundamental alteration in an educational concept called contiguity. Contiguity is a behaviourist concept- everybody knows of behaviourism in some form, and probably at its most simple level; conditioning. For those who dont know, the school of behaviourism espouses that it is possible to condition certain behaviours through the use of rewards. For the sake of this article, well start off with the use of the operant conditioning chamber, also known as the Skinner box. The idea of operant conditioning was that you could make somebody more amenable to certain actions by giving them immediate consequences to their behaviour, or to give them their proper name, re-enforcers. Case in point, the Skinner box. A rat in a box pushes a button, and gets a food pellet. As a result, the rat becomes more amenable to pushing that button. To put this in formulaic terms, it looks something like this:
Antecedent (the box) --> Behaviour (the button push) --> Consequence (the food pellet) Contiguity is the point between the behaviour and the consequence, the action and the re-enforcer. It is vitally important in motivational terms; its length establishes how effective a re-enforcer is going to be. For example, if we commit an action and dont get a reward until two weeks later, its devalued as a result- you wont necessarily associate the reward with an event that happened a fortnight ago. But if the result is as immediate as possible, youre onto a whole different story. The twitch-speed of todays technology has arguably changed the parameters of contiguity; where once students wouldve gladly waited a week to get an essay grade back, todays learners are born into an environment of digital immediacy, and find it harder to be motivated by an alien environment working at a much slower pace. Thanks to their time spent in front of screens playing videogames or even just browsing the internet, they are much more active in their interactions- the passive role of a pupil in a classroom, with its relative paucity of any kind of all-encompassing re-enforcer (grades are often few and far between, and actual feedback is only available if the teacher chooses to acknowledge you) alienate them in a similar manner to giving the rat a pellet three weeks after it pressed the button. Its simply not enough. Oddly enough, contiguity is where computer games specialise. A game will consistently offer you rewards for even the most unremarkable thing. Nothing embodies this more than Call of Dutys multiplayer; falling 10 feet? Have some XP! Blow up some cars? Have some XP! The game rewards you for anything and everything. But this isnt lazy game design. In fact, its quite the opposite. As Microsoft games researcher and expert on motivation John Hopson once told
Gamasutra; The short answer (for motivation) is to make sure that there is always a reason for the player to be playing. Video game reward schemes offer the perfect counterpoint to the educational system entirely due to their acknowledgement that their proposed consumer needs constant encouragement. This isnt a slight on our generation, its just simply a by-product of our technological lives. We possess a capacity for contiguity that is much smaller than previous generations, and videogames acknowledge this trait. But its actually a bit cleverer than that. Games actively go out of their way to seize upon the contiguity stage of your processing, and make it their own private property. After all, this is where the profit margins lie. Games designers can actively stagger the contiguity phase, creating a situation where you are not going for one big reward/re-enforcer, but multiple smaller ones, capable of motivating like the big one by resembling it. Again, Call of Duty provides a perfect example; whilst you have the main levelling up system, a big part of that comes from the smaller levels contributing to this larger number- how many people youve killed with a certain rifle, how many overall games youve won, etc. These smaller accomplishments feed into a much larger one, becoming identified with that much larger reward. As a result, you keep on playing, knowing that your big accomplishment (levelling up) is just another small task away. This motivational mechanic is whats known as a variable ratio reward; the computer-game idea that we can create a consistent motivating effect through the use of smaller, more easily attainable accomplishments. What is so crucial about these mechanics is that its tenets can be just as easily applied in education. Whilst we need only look at the behemoth that is Call of Duty to comprehend the effectiveness of this stratagem on a gaming level, we can see a similar effect in Lee Sheldons study of the Mark Tree High School in Arkansas. In 2009, Sheldon took a struggling class and replaced their archaic grading system a point system akin to World of Warcrafts levelling up process. The result of adopting smaller points, rather than overarching grades, led to a 36% increase in the passing rate and a 26% increase in students averaging a B or better. All of this was put down to marked increases in motivation- by taking away the slow-contiguity system, and replacing it with the more immediate points, pupils were instantly more engaged. Sheldon effectively proved that railing against the education system was no longer similar to shouting into the wind. Whilst many people were at their wits end trying to motivate an increasingly apathetic generation of schoolchildren, Sheldon, and others like him, have arguably proved that a solution exists. We can have an education system in which this new-minded generation can actively participate in a similar manner to the one instilled in them by videogames. The comparative ease of implementation, learnt from computer game motivational methodology, shows that whilst gaming can certainly be distracting, it can be motivating in the exact same way. Much as it can find a way to make sure the player is always playing, it can also make sure that the learner is still learning. And whilst all the other problems featured in this article are still relevant, its nice to end on this optimistic note. Agree or disagree? Want follow-up literature? Feel free to comment.