The Power of Game Design and Gamification

Vocabulary terms and concepts regarding the application of game design in education, medicine, and urban planning based on the lecture transcript.

ClassDojo

A platform used in education to track student behavior using cute avatars.

Habitica

A productivity tool that turns a daily task list into an actual role playing quest.

Gabe Ziterman

A game designer who defines a core rule of gamification as: incentivize whatever you want people to do.

Mesolimbic pathway

The specific area in the brain where dopamine is released when a student receives a reward like a point for answering a question.

Barry Fishman

A researcher who argues that traditional percentage based greeting should be replaced with gameful learning structures.

Extrinsic rewards

External incentives used in superficial gamification to control behavior, often described as a form of coercion.

Productive failure

An element of gameful learning where players expect to fail multiple times and can hit restart without receiving a permanent penalty or grade.

Hard fun

A concept in gameful design where learning focuses on building towards mastery through safe experimentation rather than punishment for early mistakes.

Steinkeller and Squire review

A synthesis of game innovations that categorizes the impacts of gaming into different levels, such as first and second order impacts.

First order impacts

The direct benefits experienced by individuals from playing existing commercial video games.

Tetris

A commercial game shown in clinical studies to reduce symptoms of PTSD by engaging visual spatial processing to interrupt traumatic memory formation.

Second order impacts

The application of technologies invented specifically for games to entirely different fields, such as surgery or urban planning.

Laparoscopic hand eye coordination

A surgical skill that doctors improve by playing video games as a warm-up for medical procedures.

Digital twins

Predictive models of real-world spaces, such as the Vancouver Airport, built using video game engines to simulate unpredictable variables.

Game engines

Software built to handle thousands of independent, unpredictable variables, making them ideal for simulating passenger traffic or urban environments.