I'm taking an instructional design postgraduate certificate, and the word 'gamification' has been bugging me of late. My tutor recently gave me a more cohesive definition, as the following:

"Gamification applies game mechanics — points, badges, leaderboards, progress bars, and challenges — to non-game educational contexts. The overjustification effect, documented in SDT research, describes the finding that introducing external rewards for an activity a person was already intrinsically motivated to do can reduce subsequent intrinsic motivation. The external reward “overjustifies” the activity and shifts motivation from internal to external regulation."

The reason I hate the term and the definition along with it is that it takes the most surface-level elements of game design, that pre-date games by thousands of years, and applies the game label to them such that we cannot use the word game anymore to point to what games actually afford us:

A set of rules within a temporarily adopted closed system where aesthetics of agency can be modeled through play.

What I mean by aesthetics of agency is the procedure by which a person goes about making choices within the rule set. For example:

Chess is the experience of learning to shape your opponent's incentive structures that make them predictable enough for you to control the range of possible choices towards your advantage.

Poker is the experience of learning to assess probabilities and negotiate with uncertain information; controlling your opponent's perceptions through deception and misdirection.

Papers: Please is the aesthetic experience of learning to balance your own incentives within a bureaucracy with your desire for basic human empathy towards vulnerable people while mitigating risk under time pressure.

Of course, the barrier between the game's own ruleset and the rules of the world around it can change your incentive structure inside the game; you might be paid a large sum of money to deliberately lose during a tournament. And such perverse incentives can also occur during writing learning modules; such as deliberately favoring a solution that locates the deficiency within the employee than within management in order to secure future contracts.

Since Bioshock was released in 2007, the game industry has a term called 'ludonarrative' - which refers to the synergy between the player's abilities, game's mechanics, gameplay loops, art direction, narrative writing and dialogue, and the central themes that the game is trying to explore.

Ludonarrative dissonance occurs when two or more of those things are misaligned; a game ostensibly about peace that places the fun within violent actions is dissonant.

Intrinsic motivation is connected to a player's (or learner's) values, which is also connected to their narrative self-identity. This narrative self-identity is about what experiences they've had, the themes connecting them, and a sense of what path lies before them given their values and competencies.

In a sense, a narrative identity creates a framework through which an autonomous individual is likely to act and conduct themselves in the world, given their attention, perceptions, incentives, cultural contexts, and community. It gives people meaning, and informs a person when they're engaging in agentic behavior incoherent with their values; producing what we call cognitive dissonance as it applies in the real world. It's analogous to the ludonarrative dissonance we talked about earlier.

Therefore, the game, or temporary agentic framework that we ask our particular learner profile to step into, needs to create synergy between their values, their incentives, and the way they learn (convert uncertainty into certainty) through a meaningful framework under which all those dimensions are united.

It is unfortunate that gamification simply refers to chucking a bunch of extrinsic rewards into a learning design module, because those extrinsic rewards mean almost nothing as far as actual game development is concerned.

The 'overjustification' effect has existed long before things like high scores, leaderboards, badges in the form of:

1. Employee of the month
2. War medals
3. How much money is in your 401K as of retirement
4. How many promotions you received at work
5. Receiving a pay rise
6. University tuition for Military service

The malaise most of us feel in today's economy is that it runs on the legibility that extrinsic rewards provide, while giving nothing back to us in the form of a kind of ludonarrative synergy between our narrative self-identity, our personal journeys, how that fits into the corporate mission statement, how the businesses structure their incentives to either comport with their mission statement or hide behind it, and the incentive structures the business themselves are subject to given the regulatory and geopolitical environment.

The thing is, video games are the most profitable entertainment industry on the planet precisely because they have precise models of motivation that schools, universities and (apparently) businesses never had cause to adopt because they've always had access to punitive levers such as:

1. Leave without pay
2. Getting fired
3. Losing Marks against the rubric
4. Suspension from school
5. Poor grades and report cards
6. Losing further educational advancement opportunities

Games can never punish you outside of the game's limited context for not understanding their systems well enough; an employer can revoke your ability to provide for a family if you refuse to toe the line. The over justification effect that we apply to game mechanics in learning tools is the entire incentive structure apparatus through which quarterly profit earnings end up mattering more than the ecological stability of the planet; at least until you can make a profit from providing clean air.

Therefore, games have HAD to build coherent models of psychological principles around autonomy, relatedness and competence, and do extremely well at them, because a disengaged player can simply stop playing. A disengaged employee works to spec or slightly below it, but cannot stop working. An employee doesn't need to find their work meaningful to know that if they don't work, rent doesn't get paid. That's why no school or business has managed to accomplish for intrinsic motivation in a thousand years what game developers did in half a century.

And furthermore, the company's mission statement and the image they curate through their marketing could likely not synergize with the agentic frameworks available to their employees; producing the same kind of dissonance. This is why the overjustification effect exists; the 'why' of the company and the 'why' of the learning module are not supported by the way the employee and the learner exercise agency inside the institution or the learning content.

Multiple choice quizzes are highly scalable and cost-efficient; but do they effectively replicate the agency a person exerts when they need to do active listening with a customer, to empathize with their experience, so the customer leaves with a good experience wanting to return? Would adding an achievement badge meaningfully turn the quiz into a game?

Probably not, right?

So I will try and coin the term Agentification for learning design: Creating a safe simulated environment that approximates the same decision making they will encounter on the job, with the goal of improving performance, that enables your learner to play within interacting systems, and derive emergent principles themselves through experimentation.

This is, after all, how chess teaches how to control people through constraining their optimal choices, how poker teaches people to bluff, how Papers: Please teaches someone through play about the impossible positions frontline bureaucrats are put in.

Bonus points if the agency aligns with their narrative self identity, the function the institution serves civilization, as well as the internal and external mission statement of the institution itself.

If you want to talk about gamification, talk about that.

I saw a few portfolios online. Some featured projects that were around 10 minutes long, while others had short and simple projects lasting only 2–3 minutes. So, what is the ideal duration for a portfolio project?

I assume hiring managers don’t have enough time to go through projects that are over 10 minutes long, but making them too short could also be an issue. I’d appreciate some clarity on this potentially stupid question.

I recently asked when instructional designers investigate an LMS or delivery platform during the design process.

One response stayed with me: In SaaS, content changes so quickly that the topic takes priority over the delivery mechanism.

I understand the pressure behind that approach. When a product changes constantly, teams need to respond quickly.

But I have reached the opposite conclusion.

The faster the content changes, the more important the delivery decision becomes.

If information will change again next week or next month, we should be asking:

• Does this information belong in a course at all?
• What knowledge is durable, and what guidance is likely to change?
• Does someone need to remember this, practice it, or simply find it while working?
• Where is the authoritative source?
• Who owns the update when the product changes?
• Can the delivery format be updated without rebuilding and republishing an entire course?
• Could documentation, in-product guidance, performance support, or another resource serve the learner better?

This is not about allowing an LMS to dictate the learning experience. It is about understanding the environment in which the solution must survive.

After more than 20 years in learning design, I have learned that speed is not only measured by how quickly we publish the first version. It is also measured by how easily the solution can adapt when the work changes.

When we prioritize the topic and treat delivery as an afterthought, we may ship faster today. But we can also create tomorrow’s maintenance problem.

Systems analysis does not have to mean adding weeks to a project. Sometimes it means pausing long enough to decide what should be built, where it should live, and how it will remain useful when the content changes again.

For those designing in rapid-release environments, how do you decide what belongs in structured learning and what should live closer to the workflow?

I (22M) recently graduated a few months ago with a psych degree. I've done plenty of extracurriculars with recruitment, project management, and research– but I fell in love with Instructional Design since it gave structure, but enough creative freedom (I love teaching). I enjoy making things people learn from, so believed that ID was the path for me.

Until the plateau came in.

For context, after graduation, to earn some money and start off my ID career, I did some contract work for a university, and, suffice to say, I thought it was decent: flexible hours, okay management, and I really enjoyed the work there; however, once the design work was over, the work was flat– and so, the pay was too. From then on, I continued to built my projects– through an LMS, Rise, heck, even a full website, and, after that, I got back on the job search.

I started looking into the jobs thinking I was the bomb– fresh graduate with an unmatched level of output and experience.

Yeah. Cocky, I know. I was greatly humbled shortly after.

I found myself at the age-old catch-22. Most jobs rejected me from lack of tenure, or not knowing a program that was easily learnable. It's disheartening. I wanna develop as an ID and I'm truly passionate for the field, but, in the current market, there's no breeding grounds to launch my career.

Since I have a psych degree, I can shift into recruitment or other sectors, but I really don't wanna give ID up. It's been a while since I've felt this way about work– even corporate work. Should I keep pursuing ID in my position, take an adjacent role and try to move into L&D later, or pivot entirely?

Do I quit?