Points Are Not a Game

A few days ago I posted a short note on X: gamification, game-based learning and serious games are three different things. It got more reads than any other post of mine there. So here is the long version: where each idea came from, and a quick way to tell them apart.

The short version: points can change behaviour, but they do not automatically create a game or produce learning. What matters is what the learner has to do, what the system rewards, and whether that practice transfers.

1. Gamification: game parts on a non-game

Gamification is older than video games. The word is new; the reward systems are not.

• 1896: S&H Green Stamps. Shops gave stamps with every purchase; customers filled books and swapped them for goods. Collect, progress, reward. Scout badges and airline miles (AAdvantage, 1981) run on the same loop.
• 2002: Nick Pelling coins the term while designing game-like interfaces for ATMs and vending machines.
• ~2010: Foursquare hands out points, badges and “mayorships”. Every product suddenly wants streaks.
• 2011: Deterding et al. define it as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”. Key word: elements.
• 2011: Ian Bogost writes “Gamification is bullshit” and proposes a harsher name: exploitationware.
• 2012: Gartner predicts 80% of then-current gamified apps will miss their business goals by 2014, mostly through poor design.

Gamification can make progress visible and bring people back. It cannot repair a weak learning task. A vocabulary app with a daily streak and a badge for 50 words is still “match the word to its definition”. A dull activity with a badge is still a dull activity.

Think of it as seasoning: you sprinkle points and badges on whatever is already there.

2. Game-based learning: the skill is how you win

Here the learner makes meaningful progress by using the target knowledge or skill.

• 1824: the Prussian army adopts Kriegsspiel. Officers practise command on a map, with an umpire.
• 1967: Feurzeig, Papert and Solomon create Logo. Its turtle, added a few years later, needs 90-degree turns to draw a square. Geometry becomes a tool.
• 1971: three student teachers in Minnesota build The Oregon Trail for a history class. Generations also learned the word “dysentery”.
• Today: DragonBox Algebra. Get the box alone on one side. That is solving for x.

The key test is simple: do you need the target skill to win?

Warning sign: “Answer a quiz question, earn a turn.” If the learning task and the game task never touch, it is a quiz with a game attached — chocolate-covered broccoli. Useful for motivation or repetition, perhaps. But the skill is decoration, not the engine.

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In strong game-based learning, the skill is how the game moves.

3. Serious games: whole games with a job

Serious games are complete games designed mainly for something beyond entertainment: training, research, health, public awareness or discovery.

• 1904: Lizzie Magie patents The Landlord’s Game to illustrate Henry George’s economics. Two rule sets: the monopolist wins, or everyone gains. In 1935 it is sold as Monopoly, with the monopolist rules. The lesson flips.
• 1929: Edwin Link builds the Link Trainer, the “Blue Box”, one of the first flight simulators. In World War II more than 500,000 US pilots trained on it.
• 1970: Clark Abt’s book Serious Games names the category.
• 2011: Foldit players help solve the structure of a retroviral protease that had resisted scientists for more than a decade. It takes them about three weeks.

“Serious” does not mean boring. It means the game has a job.

Players learn what the rules reward

The Landlord’s Game carries the most important warning for every teacher and designer. If an app rewards speed, learners practise speed. If it rewards daily logins, they protect a streak. If it rewards careful evidence, trade-offs or collaboration, those are the behaviours it builds. The scoring system is never neutral.

How they overlap

A serious game can be a form of game-based learning (Kriegsspiel is both). Gamification can sit on top of either. Only gamification stays outside the game.

The 10-second test

1. Take away the points, badges and streaks. No game left? → Gamification.
2. Do you need the skill to win? → Game-based learning.
3. A whole game whose main job isn’t fun? → Serious game.

(2 and 3 can both be yes.)

Why it matters

“Do games work?” is the wrong question. Ask instead:

• Which of the three is it?
• What behaviour or skill does it actually reward?
• What outcome are we measuring: engagement, retention, transfer, or something else?
• Compared with what?

More clicks and longer sessions are not automatically evidence of learning. Engagement matters. But remembering something later, applying it in a new situation and understanding why it works are different outcomes.

I’m a teacher and I build learning games myself, so I test these ideas on my own work too. If you want to talk about what works and what flops, come to r/GamifiedEdTech, a small community for educators, researchers, builders and parents. Start with the “Start here” post.

Which game taught you something school did not — and what exactly did its rules make you practise?

Originally published at https://arinaesp.substack.com on September 30, 2026.