Feminine gamification viewpoint: Pink brain, blue brain
In this blog theme I often discuss the differences between male and female motivations, because in gamification we are often asked to change behaviour and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise how men and women react is different. Science and neuroscience is divided and research studies can come up with conflicting views. Lisa Eliot did further research in the differences and similarities of the brain, she found she couldn’t explain differences based on the hardware, yet behaviours were still different, which she is assigning to experience.
I found her talk very refreshing and like the fact she also looked at refuting some the common beliefs about the differences. Have a look for yourself at Lisa Elliot talking about Pink brain, blue brain.
She realised in her book research that hormones and synaptic connections are probably more key in driving difference between the sexes. When we are born the differences are very slight, but then thanks to societal conditioning it changes over time. She assigns most of the differences to nurturing certain behaviours, which happens as we grow up through positive and negative reinforcement in our environment.
She gave the example of spatial awareness, where there is a slight difference at birth with boys having a little more ability, but the types of games we play as children such as lego, building and design type games, Tetris etc can diminish this difference.
In terms of gamification design, I would recommend to be mindful of the differences, because a lot of them are learned behaviours because of society, we also have an opportunity to debunk some of the common expected behaviour patterns and develop new ones. Again as with everything in our design, the ethical perspective is important.
How do you handle differences in behaviour in your gamification design?
