Gamification, Presence and Awareness (Part 4/4)
As we discussed in our explanation, the process of meditation is based on the principle of balance between attention and relaxation, of being motivated enough but not to the extent of being too tense and too goal focused. This is a much more difficult exploration due to a lack of peer reviewed articles in terms of ‘too much effort and motivation’ obstacles.
What Wuyts (2020) describes as ‘excess to exhaustion’ might point out towards the reason for this lack of research, in a society oriented towards goal achievement and the cult and praise of effort in which play is absent (Nørgård, Toft-Nielsen & Whitton, 2017).
Giving too much effort is nonetheless a major issue when it comes to meditation, and I would like to try gaining some insight to see if meaningful gamification can help overcome this excess of effort or motivation.
Mullins and Sabherwal (2018) focused specifically on the effect of gamification on emotion and particularly show that emotions such as enjoyment and relaxation are at the very core of gamification. Likewise, Kapp (2012) explains that when gamification is intended for intrinsic motivation, the tension that comes with competition, comparison, and external rewards leave the space for what he calls effortless learning. In other words, Kapp encourages the mindset of the learner to be oriented towards open play rather than being task-oriented and goal-oriented.
To explore more this notion of play, I found it useful to look at a pedagogy called Playful Learning and how the elements of this pedagogy could be merged with meaningful gamification. Playful learning is characterized by a pedagogy fostering a state of mind where there is a joy in being engaged in an activity without the need to achieve or succeed at anything (Whitton & Moseley, 2019). This is a crucial element in terms of creating an environment of play: removing the emphasis on the goal, on achieving, succeeding and simply orienting the learners into the enjoyment of the learning and task itself.
An example of an implementation of this approach in terms of gamification for meditation was the MindJourney’s project (Ge & Han, 2021). MindJourney is a game based on biofeedback, Virtual Reality and gamification. In this game, the creators have been mindful of not creating any external rewards and judgement on performance. Learners are in a virtual world full of fog and some exploration needs to take place. When they relax their breathing, the fog diminishes, and they access more information about their exploration. They continue to navigate the virtual world by maintaining an awareness of their breathing. They see the direct correlation between their breathing pattern and what they are experiencing in the game. The results show a positive correlation between the use of these innovative pedagogies and technologies and the development of meditation by being aware of being less goal oriented.
Conclusion
As a conclusion I would like to summarise the findings of this research. Firstly, I explained the context of our learners and discovered that exploring this context with meaningful gamification through the keystone of motivation can offer some documented insight into our inquiry.
Motivation issues in meditation can be of three types. Initial motivation can be easily overcome through gamification. Sustained motivation, however, is best nurtured through meaningful gamification, which gives an emphasis to fostering intrinsic motivation and real-world connections. Excess motivation, which in our context means being too goal driven, can also be overcome through meaningful gamification that takes into account elements of playful learning.
This reasoning however has been done through indirect means as I have found no scholarly nor non-scholarly study on the impact of meaningful gamification towards learning deconstructive meditation. Further research needs to take place in this specialized field. As a conclusion of this inquiry, I will generate my own research based on my findings. The research will collect data from learners through various assessment tasks during the meditation course that I will design. I will display the results in another blog when the research is completed.
Go back to Gamification, Presence and Awareness (Part 3/4)
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