Games have always been a part of culture and society. They are deeply ingrained in the human nature, yet they seldom receive much of our attention in the academic world. As computer games have matured in recent years, so has the interest of applying their techniques in other environments.
Never before have so many people played games for so many hours. Why is that? Modern games have a unique quality of capturing ones attention and keeping it for long stretches of time. Our goal has been to harness the techniques whereby this is accomplished in games to use in motivating students instead.
By building a prototype and gathering data from users of it we have managed to pinpoint a few critical properties needed to be able to achieve the “gamification” of school. In the process we have also gathered some guidelines for the development of such an application.
This report concludes that, although it might be possible, it is very hard to make this work in reality. One would need to reform the structure of the Swedish school-system in order to successfully implement gamification in such a way as we have tried here.