HU ANQI

Both Ivan and I were tasked with 3 main deliverables, including:

• an article in our topics of interest relating to gamification
• a game in our topics of interest
• a gamification concept document (GCD), a document that explains the rationales behind our games

These projects had the same aim of exposing us to the concept of gamification. Through these projects, we were able to learn how gamification works and how it could be applied to our daily life. We were given the liberty to research on topics of our interest with the guidance of our external mentors. I chose to create a game based on procrastination due to its close relevance to almost everyone's lives. We were also challenged to work on our articles and I decided to work on the implication of gamification in the government system; more specifically, Chinese social credit system, something that I may not be able to learn in school but was given the opportunity to excavate more here.

We are given this task at the start of our attachment. I have brainstormed several topics that I felt were closely connected to our lives, including implementation of gamification in social phobia, music education, scientific research, procrastination. However, Keith, one of the co-founders of the company, suggested to me another unique topic, which is the implication of gamification in Chinese social credit system. Before his suggestion, I never considered linking government, a place that supposed to be serious with gamification. After looking through more articles on the topic, the idea of "governing the people like a game" in the system grabbed my attention the most than other topic. The lack of coordination among different sources in the area also intrigued me to find out more about the truth, so I decided to choose Chinese social credit system as my topic of research for my article.

I did many research and went through several drafts to get to the final. Many skills and knowledge are gained throughout the journey, but one main takeaway I would like to address is that:

Gamification is a powerful tool in terms of changing people's mindsets and their decisions by twisting non-game contexts into games. Many of my friends and families did not realise their behaviours were slowly shaped towards positive by the government until I told them about the rationale behind social credit system. Chinese communist party is taking a radical way to improve the quality of governance. Although there are a lot of problems occuring in the system alongside, the starting point of guiding citizens towards good behaviours and making governance easier was good and I believe we can reach the dream of a trustworthy, transparent, stable society eventually. Overall, the social credit system was mind-blowing when I researched on it, giving me a really unforgettable experience.

Click here to have a look at my article!

Apart from the article on gamification, we were also tasked to make our own games using the Gametize platform. There are different challenges in the platform. For instance, there are flashcards for delivering information, normal challenges for players to write down their thoughts over the questions in the game, quizzes for testing player's understanding of the information given before, prediction challenges to collect people's choices and let the players make guesses. Through the training by our external mentors, we learnt the structure of a game, attracting the attention of our players using various challenges and how to choose the best visual style for our game (For example, icons are usually more attractive to players than normal pictures, but memes may drive the players' attention away from the texts). It was fun brainstorming ideas and humorous contents for my game.

We were also introduced to the gamification concept document during the attachment. Through writing the document, I gained a deeper understanding of gamification concepts and reviewed my game along the way. I realised there were still some more improvements for my game and improved it diligently.

Play the game from here!

• I learnt how to present the online articles so that the readers are more willing to continue reading. At first, I did not think about the formating and just put everything onto wordpress (a platform to edit online article for gametize website). However, after some suggestions given by Kumar and Prapim, I learnt that people generally prefer more images and shorter paragraphing with byte-size information when they read online. A flow chart or infographic is easier to understand than a long paragraph. Formatting is much more important for online articles than the normal essays.
• I also learnt to view the world from the gamification aspect. Instead of taking every task assigned seriously, we can apply gamification in our daily lives. By changing the non-game context of our tasks into game context, we can influence people's behaviours and decisions. The various advantages of games such as fun and addicting elements in the game, rewards and achievements system could be exploited by us to make tideous and repetitive work more attractive to people and thus increase our productivity. Informative game could be also used for educational purpose. For exmple, gamification can be used for customers to increase loyalty
• Another important knowledge we learnt was the concept of gamification. We learnt many rationales behind games such as the 4 player types, namely killers (ranking oriented, less than 1%), socialites (community oriented, around 80%), achievers (achievement oriented, around 10%) and explorers (novelty oriented, 10%). I also learnt about the various categories of known as SAPS, namely Status, access, power and stuff. Stuff as a extrinsic reward is quite superficial but really effective in attracting new players, long-term players are more attracted by intrinsic rewards including access, power and status. More knowledge can be learnt from: https://corp.gametize.com/2017/01/30/gamification-101/ , https://corp.gametize.com/2017/01/29/gamification-102/ , https://corp.gametize.com/2017/01/28/gamification-103/ , https://corp.gametize.com/2018/05/23/challenge-types-201/

• It was interesting looking at different sources saying things very differently when I was researching on Chinese social credit system. Due to the different perspectives of different media and China's firewall, online resources could be very different from each other. Through studying different sources, I applied the skill of assessing of validity of sources I learnt in history 2 and tried to pull out the collaborations and conflicts between sources.
• It was also interesting to know how the game industry looks like, which as a gamer I never thought about this before. I realised content creating is extremely important for games. A novel storyline can really hook a lot of players to play your game. However, tech crew provides the foundation of your game platform. Everyone in the team is a superhero and plays an important role to make the platform better. I like Gametize's idea of teaching other people how to create games instead of helping them to create games. Afterall, it is better to teach a man fishing rather than give him the fish.