[cuaderno de] bitácora (ship’s log)
1. (nautical) book in which ship’s crew members record course, speed, maneuvers, and other navigation phenomena.
Thoughts about translation and reinterpretation of culture, in whatever form, shape, color or smell, if necessary.
tuesday, 04.02.2025
I don’t like the concept of gamification as it’s been popularized —mostly coming from people who don’t have any kind of game design related knowledge.
Almost the entire concept of “gamifying” something is centered around the process of dividing that something into tasks, assign those tasks some arbitrary score, and give people a fancy badge once they’re successfull enough —whatever that might mean—. Maybe with some sort of leaderboard too, so people can get competitive with other “players”.
For hell’s sake, games didn’t invent any of those things.
Games —specially video games- took those concepts and structures from a much more established source. In the attempt of making Fun systemic, video games shamelessly copied all that stuff from… (drumroll) Military services!
So… when gamification tries to copy its pilars from an interpreter, instead of the original source —which, I bet, they’re unaware about-, it’s only logic that everything gets lost in translation.
