Gamify Your PhD on Wellcome Trust Blog

I’ve been going into a bit more detail of the creation of the Gamify Your PhD project on the Wellcome Trust blog.

We wanted to explore the ‘rules’ of game design and yet not turn it into a huge rambling lecture. We also wanted to give examples of how science could be ‘gamified’ without these examples being too prescriptive so that people may think that is the only way to do it. What we settled on was the creation of a periodic table of gaming elements – a format for organising key components familiar to scientists! We broadly broke the elements down into two main types; ‘mechanics’ and ‘motivators’. ‘Mechanics’ were elements that described how users would interact with a game, such as reaction time (as used in the Wellcome Collection game Axon) and ‘Motivations’ were why the user might choose to interact, such as achievements (as used in the Wellcome Trust game Filth Fair). We also left lots of blocks in the table deliberately ‘undiscovered’ so as to suggest that there were more ways to create games that had yet to be discovered…