Sverre Spoelstra
Universitetslektor
“You just Earned 10 Points!” : Gaming and Grinding in Academia
Författare
Summary, in English
This short paper explores the gamification of an online academic conference. At the conference, digital gamification was meant to stimulate increased levels of participation among attendees. Instead, it resulted in a series of unintended consequences. Precisely because it was all too easy to score points and ascend the virtual leaderboard by means of machine-like grinding, the “Conference Challenge” posed a moral dilemma for its players: each participant had to determine for themselves where the border lay between playing the game and gaming the system. We use this case to raise questions about the ethics of game-playing in an academic context. In particular, we suggest that the Conference Challenge is a distorted reflection of what’s already happening in the broader “publication game” in the university.
Avdelning/ar
- Organisation
Publiceringsår
2023
Språk
Engelska
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
Organization
Dokumenttyp
Artikel i tidskrift
Förlag
SAGE Publications
Ämne
- Business Administration
Nyckelord
- Academic conference
- game-playing
- gamification
- publishing ethics
Status
Epub
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 1350-5084