Game Theory, Games and Gamification - Get it right.

If I didn't know better, I'd be sure stupidity had gone viral. Let's get this straight, in a world in which Google exists, there simply is no excuse for confusing concepts, and yet concepts like game theory, game design and gamification are constantly used without any sense of what they mean. To put this right, I'm going to define these terms and then call creatives, strategists and sales people who brandish, bugger up and reuse bastardized versions of them, idiots.

Game Theory is defined as follows:

In mathematics, game theory models strategic situations, or games, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others (Myerson, 1991). It is used in the social sciences (most notably in economics, management, operations research, political science, and social psychology) as well as in other formal sciences (logic, computer science, and statistics) and biology (particularly evolutionary biology and ecology).

A game consists of a set of players, a set of moves (or strategies) available to those players, and a specification of payoffs for each combination of strategies.

Please take note, this is not a term with which to describe a game you've just created on behalf of your client. Game Theory denotes the strategies employed by game participants and speaks more to their strategic actions than it does about the creation of games. It presumes the very existence of a game, and does not dictate the rules thereof. To use it to describe a game you've created is simply put, wrong.

In a real world boardroom context, if a marketeer suggests he / she has applied game theory to his / her campaign concept, a good litmus for just how out of their depths they are would be to propose a challenge; "as a Game Theory expert, could you enlighten us on the strategies at play in the Prisoners Dilemma".

Gamification

Gamification is by day a term most often utilized in boardrooms across the world to suggest the application of game design thinking to a marketing challenge. By night, this term is a dirty whore earning tricks by getting near the lips of marketers who don't understand the aforementioned Game Theory.

Game Design or Game Designer

The last term, the least popular of the two, Game Design is what in fact marketers are doing when creating games. It is the creation of the rules of play, the roles of players, and the payoff for playing the game. A game designer, cannot predict game play strategies but he / she can dictate the rewards and penalties for game play and therefore reduces the number of strategies or moves a game player can make use of.

I can only hope, now that I've Googled the terms for you, that there shan't be any more confusion in boardrooms, nor shall there be any excuses when your client asks you to unpack a term like Game Theory.