One of the big problems with the instructional software design that has bought into “gamification” is it’s reliance on video game design theory from the entertainment industry. This is the LAST place you want to base your design on, yet this is almost exclusively where they focus.
Most video games aren’t developing a real skill. Ex. You kill a goblin and you get “experience points.” These experience points help you buy a stronger sword and killing goblins is easier and it feels good (a sense of power enters the player in a Nietzschean type, as he described it in The Antichrist). Before the game becomes too boring because it’s too easy, you get a slightly harder enemy and the loop continues.
The focus would be in games that develop real skill (sports, chess, military wargames) IF a game platform is to be used. Another problem is that the designers seek to understand software design or video game theory (some don’t even know how to code), and then breach the gap with that SEEMS like learning. The goal should be to understand HOW the brain learns, then maybe breach the gap with a came IF possible. Sometimes it’s not going to be possible.
The idea of deliberate practice (where the ten thousand hour rule towards expertise came from) is not the play of games, but the training the athlete does to improve in the game. It’s the endless repetitions of a swing a golf-player will do in order to improve technique. It’s the practice of dribling the ball a basketball player does, not playing the game per say. The actual goal of many of the designers is to take the user trying to learn away from this boring tasks (exactly what they would need to improve a skill) and towards the entertainment of a game (that doesn’t develop deliberate practice and won’t create the compound effect of skills you see in world class champions throughout the years).
The other problem is that games open up the mind to a form of learning called implicit learning (where you learn without realizing you’re learning. Ex: developing a new accent after moving to a new geographical area without realizing it). Implicit learning shuts down the declarative memory areas of the brain (explicit knowledge, which is what many of these educational game software aim for) making games a bad choice (not necessarily however, there are ways it can be properly designed. Ex: teacher has whole class work on an answer and then randomly assign a student to give the answer instead of picking a student and then offering the question. In this first method the whole class is engaged in learning, while in the second only one student is while the rest is passively observing).
One of the problems with implicit learning with video games is that the video games are the worst environment for this type of learning. Implicit learning is the subconscious mind picking up on information and patterns we will never be consciously aware of. The video game is an artificial environment that is much more simple than the real world, and doesn’t work in the same way. This whole focus on virtual reality and video games as a substitute for the real world is a huge mistake. The brain picking up patterns in the artificial virtual reality may even jeopardize the student. It might be useful at the very early stages of learning something new, but it will never replace engagement in the real world.
Finally, learning in a video game doesn’t translate to real world skills. Studies have been done with chess players on this (which I’ve spoken elsewhere). The learning in a video game creates memory patterns called “memory chunks” that help you improve in the game, but don’t have any real world application outside the game. Similar studies have been done with companies such as Lumosity. Some studies on Lumosity have claimed that there may be improvements in the games the company offers, but no real-world improvements outside those games are found. Now, this is not to say there hasn’t been any benefits found from playing video games, but these seem to have a point of diminishing return (casual gamers seem to be the ones that benefit the most) or are studies done on the elderly who would have otherwise been doing a passive activity such as watching television. Point being: Just because they’re learning in an instructional video game it doesn’t mean that this learning is going to have real world benefits (someone can be watching Netflix all day and be learning from the frivolous TV shows, but hardly anyone would call this an education), but this doesn’t mean that educational games couldn’t be useful in CERTAIN contexts.