Gamification of Trainings, Serious Games and eLearning, and all the rest.

  • What is gamification?
  • And in our context, what is gamification of training?
  • And what gamification of training isn’t.
  • What are serious games?
  • How are they different from casual games – they don’t sport mustaches, of course; but why then they are called serious games?

Some of my interactions with the industry made me think that these questions still seek some clear-cut answers. I’ve been “seriously” into training design, eLearning development, casual and serious gaming for a sum total of 18 years now – and I began gamifying the ID courses and trainings that I conducted, way back in 2007. The online courses on Instructional Design that we ran had serious games embedded all through, the entire course experience was gamified too. Why? Because we brought into them our experience of running a casual games portal – and extended the principles of gaming to learning.

Of course, gamification and game-based learning cannot be the matter of a single post. It would demand a series of well-designed posts – perhaps even a mini-book. This post is merely a peek into the series that I intent to start publishing in early May.

Let us figure it all out.