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Describing the current state of gamification, Chamorro-Premuzic, Winsborough, Sherman, and Hogan (2016) provide a troubling contradiction: They offer examples of a broad spectrum of gamification interventions, but they then summarize the entirety of gamification as "the digital equivalent of situational judgment tests." This mischaracterization grossly oversimplifies a rapidly growing area of research and practice both within and outside of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology. We agree that situational judgment tests (SJTs) can be considered a type of gamified assessment, and gamification provides a toolkit to make SJTs even more gameful. However, the term gamification refers to a much broader and potentially more impactful set of tools than just SJTs, which are incremental, versatile, and especially valuable to practitioners in an era moving toward business-to-consumer (B2C) assessment models. In this commentary, we contend that gamification is commonly misunderstood and misapplied by I-O psychologists, and our goals are to remedy such misconceptions and to provide a research agenda designed to improve both the science and the practice surrounding gamification of human resource processes.
Gamification is a complex concept, which likely leads to its misunderstanding among many I-O psychologists. Outside of I-O, gamification is often misused as an umbrella term encompassing anything game related in a nongame context (Walz & Deterding, 2015). This impression includes a range of products including educational video games (i.e., serious games), customer loyalty programs awarding points for purchases, and interactive website designs. In contrast, gamification researchers generally define gamification as the use of game elements in nongame contexts (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011). Gamification and games are two tools used under the broader heading of gameful design (Walz & Deterding, 2015), itself an application of game thinking (Armstrong, Landers, & Collmus, 2015). In the more familiar context of the predictor versus method debate (Arthur & Villado, 2008), gamification is a meta-method; it includes a family of techniques inspired by research in game design used to improve the effectiveness of existing methods. Meta-methods like gamification are much broader in application domain than assessment or even I-O psychology--they are general-purpose toolkits.
Within a testing context, gamified (or game-like) assessments can be further defined by the differences between them and assessment games (Popp, 2014). An assessment game can be presented as a stand-alone experience, and assessments...