The Gamification of EAP

Robin Turner
BUSEL / BALEAP Conference, 2012
Abstract
Games have always been a staple of English language teaching, but their use has been concentrated at elementary levels;
in contrast, English for academic purposes is often thought of
as too serious to warrant games in class. At the same time,
gamification has become a buzzword in education, business
and social activism. This paper draws on the practice of gamification not only to show that games have a place in the EAP class,
but more importantly, to demonstrate how we can learn from
games to make learning more playful. In particular I show how
certain characteristics of online games make them addictive
notably clear long- and short-term goals, constant feedback, enhanced self-image, flow, and the balance of collaboration and
competitionand how we can try to introduce these qualities to
EAP courses.

Despite its current popularity, the word gamification was practically unknown before 2010. There is thus some disagreement about
what it means, or indeed whether the word is worth using at all,
but the general view is that it refers to applying the mechanics of
gaming to nongame activities to change peoples behavior (Bunchball, 2010, p. 2). Educationalists often make a distinction between
gamification and game-based learning, with the latter referring
to the use of actual games and the former simply to the use of game
features; however, in this paper I shall use gamification broadly to
include both of these. While hangman, for example, is a game, not a
gamified activity, the insertion of word games into a curriculum can
still be seen as gamification, because a curriculum is not a game.
Whether they use the terms gamification, game-based learning
or serious games, there is considerable interest among educators
in applying the power of games to learning in the hope that we
can harness the spirit of play to enable players to build new cognitive structures and ideas of substance (Klopfer, Osterweil & Salen,
2009).
Games have always been a staple of English language teaching
(ELT), but they are far less common in Englsih for academic purposes (EAP). In an online survey I conducted of 32 colleagues at
1

Bilkent University (an English-medium unviersity in Turkey), 81%

replied Rarely or Never to the question How often do you play
games in class? I had assumed that the reason for this lack of enthusiasm was the notion that higher education is too serious for games:
teachers coming to EAP from general ELT may be fed up of the incessant cheerfulness of the language classroom and welcome the
new-found sobriety of academe, while those with a Freshman Composition background may never have considered the classroom as a
place to play games in the first place. However, if the EAP instructors polled are representative, this may not be the case: instructors
noted mild agreement with the statements Games increase student
motivation and Games are useful for learning vocabulary, and disagreement with the statement Games are waste of time (3.3, 3.7
and 2.0 respectively on a 5-level Likert scale). It is possible that
other factors, such as a crowded curriculum or (mis)perception of
students perceptions may be more important. Whatever the reasons, this neglect of games is a mistake; we would do well to play
games in class, but more importantly, we should consider what we
can learn from games and (cautiously) gamify other elements of the
course in line with innovative practices in current higher education.
A more playful approach to the serious business of academic English is, I will argue, beneficial in terms of engaging students and
enhancing learning.
To investigate the possible advantages and pitfalls of gamifying
an EAP course, I chose, appropriately, a content-based EAP course
entitled The Philosophy and Psychology of Games. Students were
all Turkish-speakers who were taking this as a required course in
their Freshman year (or repeating it); while there are a variety of
content themes available, students are currently placed in courses
arbitrarily, though there is some ability to change courses during
the first few weeks of the semester. This element of selection was
good from a practical point of view but means that we cannot generalise from these students to the general student body; consequently
any data presented below is presented merely to illustrate my points
rather than to prove them, and a much more general survey of student attitudes and behaviour would be necessary to draw strong
conclusions.
Overall, the experience was positive and confirmed what I had
suspected from earlier, less gamified courses. Nevertheless, there
are dangers to gamification, which I will deal with towards the end
of this article. Before discussing in detail the application of games
and gamification in EAP, though, it is necessary to consider games
and play in their own right.

Games and Play

The word game is hard to define, as Wittgenstein (1958, pp. 3134)
famously pointed out. Many definitions have been attempted, but all
either end up including activities that are not regarded as games, or
excluding activities that are. For the purposes of this investigation,
though, the following definition is adequate: a game is a structured
activity designed to facilitate play.1 This does not cover some peripheral members of the game category, such as gladiatorial games
or the games of game theory, but we are not concerned with these
here; it does cover all the things that we would describe as games
in everyday life when not speaking metaphorically, from football to
World of Warcraft.
Play is, if anything, even harder to define than game; Huizinga,
in his classic Homo Ludens (1949), manages to classify almost everything as play. Fortunately, we have an intuitive sense of play that
renders a strict definition unnecessary; for example, we can tell immediately when an animal is playing, as witnessed by thousands of
videos of cute kittens on YouTube. What is useful here, though, is to
identify some features of play that are relevant to learning. Firstly,
play is done for its own sake. This does not mean, as Caillois (2001,
p. 5) claims, that it is necessarily unproductive, an occasion of pure
waste. People may play squash in order to lose weight, but if during
the game they are only thinking about the calories they are burning,
then they will play badly, and in a sense are not really playing at
all. This presents us with the paradox of gamification: we gamify an activity in order to obtain practical results, but to the extent
that we are results-oriented, we risk jeopardising the play element
that makes such results possible. Secondly, play creates its own
meaning. Consider the myriad actions performed with balls during
games: we throw them, kick them or hit them with sticks, propelling
them into, over or through nets, hoops or holes, and none of these
actions has any meaning or value outside the game. Again, Caillois
and Huizinga probably overstate the case when they claim that play
takes place in a kind of magic circle completely removed from mundane life; there is still porosity between the play world and the real
world (Goodwin, 1985, p. 315). Nevertheless, even when the play
world and the mundane world overlap, as in a social game of poker
or a grammar exercise which is also a game, there is continual codeswitching between play-meaning and normal meaning. Finally, play
is actively absorbing. Watching television or reading a book may be
absorbing, but it is largely passive: we may react to the content we
1 This is similar to Maroneys (2001) definition, A game is a form of play with goals
and structure. However, I would argue that while games are designed to promote
play, they are not in themselves a form of play.

are presented with but do not interact with it. (This is why educationalists who speak of interacting with the text are talking nonsense.) It is this characteristic of play that makes it so suitable for
learning. In particular, play at its best produces two types of peak
experience: flow and fiero. The former term was coined by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi (1991) to indicate a state of intense absorption in
a challenging activity, such as climbing a rock face, performing music or, of course, playing a game: play is the flow experience par
excellence (p. 36). The term was immediately taken up by game
designers, as was fiero, originally an Italian word meaning pride
but now taken to mean the sense of elation felt on achieving success
in a game (scoring a goal, solving a puzzle, finishing a level etc.).
Fiero is associated with release of epineprine, norepinephrine and
dopamine (McGonigal, 2011, p. 47), which enhance memory (Saraf,
2009).
The means by which play produces these states have been listed
by Caillois (2001) as agon (rivalry), alea (chance), mimicry (roleplaying) and ilinx (disorientation, as in bungee-jumping or fun-fair
rides). These may be understood as modes of play and are usually
combined; for example, poker combines agon and alea, Dungeons
and Dragons combines alea and mimicry, and so on. Arguably activities which only contain one of these four modes are either not
games or are on the periphery of the games category; we may gamify by exploiting one of these modes, but this does not necessarily
produce a game. To these modes I would add enigma 2 to indicate
the puzzle-solving aspect of play. Again, this is important affectively:
puzzles arouse curiosity and are claimed to stimulate release of betaendorphine, adding to the neurochemical cocktail of play (McGonigal, 2011, p. 47).

Gamifying the Curriculum

There are three ways in which we may gamify our courses: introducing existing games into class; turning an educational activity into a
game; and adopting features of games into our teaching and assessment. The first of these options is familiar from general ELT. Even
game-wary EAP teachers will occasionally use a vocabulary game
like hangman or hot-seat to fill ten minutes at the end of a class.
However, if games are not to be mere time-fillers, they need to be
focussed; thus, I may play hot-seat using words from the course vocabulary list, and have adapted an online hangman program to work
with the Academic Word List.
2 Thanks to William Wringe for suggesting this as the best classical Greek equivalent of puzzle. probably best translates as riddle.

Existing games are suitable for simple cognitive processes like

vocabulary recall (Duong, 2012), but for higher-order skills we may
need to create our own games or game-like activities. The simplest
way to gamify an exercise is to turn it into a team quiz. Putting
students into teams immediately gives us the element of agon ; there
may also be a touch of alea (since who gets which question may
be random) and enigma, if there is more to it than simple recall.
Quizzes not only test knowledge; they can, for example, be used to
practice reading skills like scanning, especially when it is important
for students to retain the information (e.g., I always play a game
like this when introducing the syllabus at the beginning of a course,
and choose for my questions the information I most want students
to remember).
Another example of gamifying an activity is a simple gap-fill exercise I prepared to test vocabulary from a text students had recently
read. Since students are familiar with this type of exercise to the
point of boredom, I wanted to add a game layer. The first element of
this was again the teams, but an extra element was added by providing each team with one suite of a set of playing cards; by giving up
a card, they get one letter of the answer for the equivalent question
(the court cards are wild cards which can give an extra letter for any
question). The scoring system (which took some time to get right)
was:
correct word from the text6 points;
other possible word3 points;
each card remaining at the end1 point.
I also deducted points for misspellings and wrong word forms, and
for speaking Turkish rather than English. This last rule proved to
be particularly effective. I have tried different ways to encourage
students to speak English during group work with varying but usually negligible levels of success; this method was by far the most
effective. It is interesting that in a course where students have a
class speaking grade which is negatively affected by speaking any
language other than English, deducting game points had a greater
effect than deducting real grades. I suspect this is partly to do with
the fact that speaking English is seen as part of the game, rather
than as an onerous duty (in the same way that online game players
will happily perform seemingly tedious, repetitive tasks3 ) and partly
because a game provides immediate feedback, a point I will return
to later.
3 It takes about 500 hours of play to reach the maximum level in World of Warcraft,
and much of this is spent on the comparatively routine activities necessary to level
up (McGonigal, 2011, p. 54).

Moving on to more complex skills, I wished both to handle a difficult academic text (Goodwin, 1985) and introduce students to decimal outlining to prepare them for their term paper. To this end,
I prepared a game using an interactive whiteboard where students
had to drag subheadings to the appropriate place in the outline (to
make it easier, I colour-coded them for level; e.g., third-level headings such as 1.3.2., 2.1.4. or 3.2.3. were all green). Again, this
was a team activity, with most of the time being devoted to reading and discussing the text (which they did in English because of
the aforementioned points penalty). Student reaction to such games
was generally positive. Online polls of students half-way through
the course and after the course had finished showed the following
results.

The games help us to learn.

The games are enjoyable.
I take part actively in the
games.
Games are useful for
learning vocabulary.
Games are useful for
advanced academic skills
(e.g., analysing an
argument).

Midcourse
(n =40)
4.0
4.1
4.3

Agreement
(15)
Postcourse
(n =29)
4.3
4.0
N.A.

N.A.

4.4

N.A.

4.0

Of course these data may be skewed by the points mentioned

earlier that this was a course about games, and that respondents
were self-selected; it would be worth conducting a more rigorous
survey with a range of courses and teachers.
Of course it would take more than a handful of educational games
to make a significant and lasting difference over the course of a students thirteen-year public education (McGonigal, 2011, p. 128) or
even over an EAP course. However, we can also learn from games
and employ game-mechanics outside activities that are clearly recognisable as games, and here we enter the area of gamification proper.
The following are features of successful games that we would do well
to learn from in designing and teaching our curricula. They should
sound familiar, because they are often the same as principles of good
teaching that we already know, but perhaps need reminding of.

Competition and collaboration

We have seen the element of competition in the discussion of agon ;
however, collaboration (team-play) is as or more important in providing motivation; even in pursuits previously thought of as individualistic such as computer games, the social aspect has been found
to be increasingly important in producing flow-type emotional engagement (Kaye & Bryce, 2012). The education system is arguably
competitive enough as it is, but an element of playful competition
is useful for encouraging real collaboration. Lee Sheldon, in his
immediately influential book The Multiplayer Classroom (2011), describes a gamified course where students are put into guilds (to
use a gaming term) who both cooperate with their own members
and compete against other guilds. Similarly, even when not playing an explicit game, I put students in the same teams for normal
group work, and often have teams write their outcomes (notes, concept maps, etc.) on the whiteboard so that other teams can see
them (and often then upload photographs to the course website to
provide a more permanent record and enable students from other
sections to see). Students are thus encouraged to collaborate in
producing something that will then be compared with other groups
efforts, even if it is not explicitly assessed. (I experimented with having groups rate each others products Eurovision-style, but as with
the song contest, it turned out that tactical voting and inter-group
dynamics became too important.)

Clear goals, appropriate challenges

In a game it should be clear why you are performing any action. If
you move a chess piece without knowing why you move it or hit a
tennis ball in a random direction, you are playing badly. In more
free-form play action is still purposeful, even if the action performed
and the goal are the same, as in a game of ring-a-ring-of-roses. Play
is the opposite, not just of drudgery, but of ennui. It is thus obviously
important to stress the contribution of activities to the overall goals
of the courseany good educator does thatbut also perhaps to students values and life-goals. This should be familiar territory for EAP
instructors using a CBI / theme-based approach. (Check to see how
often the word meaningful occurs in a typical text from this field!)
It is also important in games for challenges to be matched to capabilities, since enjoyment comes at a very specific point: whenever
the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to
his or her capabilities (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991, p. 53). With a fixed
curriculum, we cannot hope to match the experience of computer
games, where the levels or quests are almost perfectly tailored to
players abilities; a low-level player may be required to kill ten orcs
7

but not ten dragons. Nevertheless, by again applying principles we

are already familiar with, such as scaffolding, we can try to lessen
the gap. Group work and project work may also increase students
opportunities to find tasks that suit their abilities and preferences.
A well-designed game also varies the difficulty of challenges from
time to time. An online role-playing game may have a player start
a quest by gathering objects or fighting relatively weak opponents
before gearing up to a show-down with a boss character at the
end of the level, which in turn is followed by a period of relatively
unchallenging activity. In more traditional games this variability is
provided by the opponent, who may press you harder at some times
than others. Varying difficulty helps avoid boredom on the one hand
and stress on the other. In a curriculum this is achieved by alternating highly challenging tasks with ones that are easier to accomplish; for example, a writing course should not be assessed solely by
a number of essays of equal length, but should contain longer and
shorter essays, as well as smaller assessed tasks, such as summary
writing or annotated bibliographies.

Continual feedback
As well as having clear, achievable goals, players need to know how
close they are to achieving them. In many games this is simply provided by a score; in strategy games players can compare their forces
and territory with those of their opponent; in the aforementioned
quest to kill ten orcs, killing eight orcs is a sign that you are close to
completing it (and even if you dont know how many orcs are in the
caves, each dead one is a sign that you are doing something right).
It is not surprising, then, that gamification in the business world has
focussed on PBL: points, badges, leaderboards. All of these are
forms of feedback: points tell you how much of something youve
done (and by implication try to make you feel good about it); badges
are signs of definite achievements (the equivalent of levelling up in a
computer game); leaderboards let players compare their achievements to others. Tripadvisor.com, a website where users review
hotels, restaurants and other holiday attractions, is a good example:
members receive badges with titles like reviewer or contributor
after completing specific numbers of reviews, and periodically receive e-mails telling them how many people have read their reviews
and how close they are to their next badge. In academia we try to
do the same thing with grades and written feedback; the problem is
that unlike games, feedback cycles tend to be long (Lee & Hammer,
2011, p. 3). If writing an essay were a computer game, students
could see their grades for language, organisation and so forth going
up or down as they were writing the draft. As it is, they normally

have to wait weeks between submitting an essay draft and receiving comments or grades. Unfortunately in the case of essays it is
near impossible to shorten the feedback cycle, though using LMS
software such as Moodle can at least minimise delivery time and, if
essays are read in order of arrival, allow students who submit earlier
to receive feedback earlier.
As mentioned earlier, though, essays should be alternated with
smaller tasks for which feedback can be given more quickly. Quantitative feedback need not always be related to grades. For example,
I frequently put quizzes on the course website (Moodle); these are
voluntary and the results do not affect students actual grades (although doing the quiz does increase an online participation grade).
The purpose of the score is simply to let students know how they are
doing, and sometimes compare scores with other students, since the
high scores are automatically displayed (obviously publishing the
low scores would be neither motivating nor ethical). Course websites can also borrow a feature from computer games in the form of
a progress bar (Sheldon, 2011, p. 237). I tried this using a Moodle
plugin, and later noted that courses offered on Coursera.org used
the same feature. Although it contains no information students could
not gather elsewhere, it provides an encouraging and immediately
updated visual impression on how much of the course one has covered.

Choice and chance

A good game can be played in different ways, with multiple paths
to success: in chess the goal is checkmate, but the various ways to
arrive at this goal fill volumes. This is also true of the most popular
computer games, such as Civilization, Grand Theft Auto or World of
Warcraft. In contrast, academic courses typically have one path to
success. Students may have, say, three essays, an oral presentation
and a final exam: the only choice comes within an assignment, not
between assignments. Percentages for different assignments are
fixed, so no matter if a students essay is good enough to make it
into a peer-review publication, they can still only get, say, 20% for
it. While there are often good reasons for this kind of assessment, a
little flexibility might be in order, such as a portfolio system where
students pick which assignments they include. I introduced an online participation grade which included forum posts, contributions
to glossaries and quiz attempts, and students were free to do more
of one type of activity and less of another; the system worked rather
like experience points in role-playing games (see Sheldon (2011,
p. 56) for a far more ambitious example of this kind of system).
The opposite of strategic choice is alea, chance. While we do

not want to introduce random elements into anything that will be

graded (the exam system does enough of that anyway), a certain
amount of chance in non-significant events arouses interest. For
example, the teams mentioned earlier for games and group work
were drawn, with much ceremony, out of a hat, while smaller groups
for oral presentations came out of a card game (with the higher
scoring students getting to choose their presentation topics first). I
also made use of Moodles random glossary entry feature, so that
each time students log on they see a different entry, which could of
course be theirs.

Investment in loss
The term investment in loss comes from the tai chi master Cheng
Man-ching (1981, p. 24) and describes, amongst other things, the
attitude of deliberately putting oneself in positions where one will be
beaten so as to improve ones technique. It is also a good description
of how players typically approach computer games: Roughly four
times out of five, gamers dont complete the mission, run out of time,
dont solve the puzzle, lose the fight, fail to improve their score,
crash and burn, or die (McGonigal, 2011, p. 64). That gamers are
happy to fail so often is remarkable, and a stark contrast with the
education system. Games maintain this positive relationship with
failure by making feedback cycles rapid and keeping the stakes low.
The former means players can keep trying until they succeed; the
latter means they risk very little by doing so. In schools, on the
other hand, the stakes of failure are high and the feedback cycles
long. Students have few opportunities to try, and when they do, it
is high stakes. (Lee & Hammer, 2011, p. 3) Another factor is that
playing a game even when you are losing is generally more fun than
academic work; nobody says Oh well, I failed the exam again, but I
sure had fun studying for it!
Nevertheless, we can take small steps to allow students to fail
creatively. In a way, the practice of drafting essays is a form of
creative failure, in that we do not expect a first draft to be as good
as the submitted version, and while we may give a grade to indicate
how well it would have done, we should never give real grades to
drafts; otherwise, they are by definition finished works. We would
also do well to allow one or two grades to be discounted as a kind
of Get out of jail free card or to allow students to select which
assignments they will be graded on as mentioned earlier.

10

Caveats and Conclusions

Despite the meteoric rise of gamification, a growing body of literature is expressing skepticism or outright opposition, most famous
among which is Ian Bogosts (2011) position statement at the Wharton Gamification Symposium, Gamification is Bullshit. Bogost describes gamification as exploitationware and notes Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that
it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and
levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity. It is certainly true that the overwhelming popularity of the
easily-implemented PBL system has led in many cases to superficial
and ineffective gamification which fails to provide the same enjoyment as real games, while at the same time replacing the intrinsic
motivation of the task with the faux motivation of points scoring.
Games may involve scoring points, but play is not about scores;
after all, no one plays a game because it has a good scoring system, yet gamification experts sometimes act as though this were the
case (Van Turnhout, 2012). Applying this critique to education, Paul
Driver (2011) notes:
With most gamified systems and processes the feedback
is provided in the form of a simple, superficial layer of
points, badges and other rewards that are not contextually
integral to the activity itself. In the field of education, this
is compounded by the fact that we have already introduced
such a feedback layer in the form of test scores, grade
averages and certificates, so in essence we are rewarding
the rewards, much in the same way as parents who give
material gifts in return for As.
Education, it could be argued, is already too gamified, and [b]y
making play mandatory, gamification might create rule-based experiences that feel just like school [. . . ] like chocolate-covered broccoli (Lee & Hammer, 2011, p. 4).
This is why the worst thing that could happen with educational
gamification would be for educational managers to take up the idea
and run with it. Any kind of gamification above the individual class
level could be counter-productive, and well-meaning attempts to encourage teachers who neither know or care about game design to
gamify their courses could be disastrous, as would foisting games on
students who are unconvinced of their value; what works in a class
of playful undergraduates may not go down so well with a group of
sober PhD. students, for example. To return to my original definition, a game is a structured activity designed to facilitate play. It
is play that promotes learning, not game mechanics. For this reason, the success of any kind of gamification in education depends
11

on its ability to foster a playful attitude in students, and indeed in

teachers.

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