I just read Ian Bogost’s entertaining blog entry titled “Gamification is Bullshit.” I recommend reading it–it’s well written and funny. It got me thinking, though.
To some people, to paraphrase Sturgeon’s Revelation, 90% of everything is bullshit. It’s easy to take a look at the lack of substance behind some of the superficial boosters of Gamification or Web 2.0 before it, and to call the whole thing hype and bullshit.
Easy, and not terribly useful. It’s much easier to find fault with things than it is to make new things for other people to find fault with.
Web 2.0 has its roots in something of real value–interactivity–which improves the user experience of people using the internet. Gamification, done right, has a lot of promise for improving user experience as well. It can help build community, and help people get more out of their use of on-line resources.
But both of those have had legions of people pointing out the obvious–that the majority of the hype around them is unfounded. And mostly, the people making noise about them are not necessarily the ones who started the wave of interest in them in the first place.
In Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian,” someone asks “But what have the Romans ever done for us anyway?” and then later they ask “But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Calling anything bullshit is making a statement rather than asking a question. It’s an attempt to take the whole issue off the table. If people accept the premise of the statement, you’ll never find out about the good parts that the question would possibly have revealed.
I’m an optimist. I don’t think 90% of everything is bullshit. I think 90% of everything is bath water. There’s probably a baby in there somewhere, or nobody would have got interested in it in the first place.
Oh dear, that poor baby, buried in manure tea:-)
Aside from the smart aleck remark, though, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I can’t remember when it was that I realized that cynicism really is often a mask for ignorance; what we used to call sophomoric nonsense. When I was in college I thought it made me look sophisticated to call things BS; now I know it just rules me out as a thoughtful person.