When Work Becomes Play: Gamification of HR

Abstract

It was not uncommon to believe that Children were just less competent than adults, until Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980) proved that the difference was in the very basic way of thinking. As children we are born with a very basic mental structure. We then construct an understanding of the world around us and through our experiences and the process of maturation, identify the discrepancies. Just like a program we have an idea of the process, also called schema and when faced with the scenario we call upon that particular schema and use it to guide us. As adults our schema are more in number and more complex (Jean Piaget, 1936) Years later, in 2011, when the team at Nottingham Trent University released their study and created the phrase Game Transfer Phenomena or GTP, there were a lot of arguments. Some researchers refused to accept the term saying that the sample size of 42 was too small to generalise and others believed it was an extension of what was first termed as the ‘Tetris effect’, where even after the game was over people claimed to see moving images at the end of their visual field. But the team from Nottingham claim that GTP is much more. They are not hallucinations but can alter behaviour and reactions to scenarios. Like rewriting a program and thus changing the output. Very similar to what Piaget explained through his concept of schema.