Academic Achievement: ClassDojo and the Oregon Trail
Camine presents a criticism of the modern educational employment of gaming and how "digital technology" makes for a happy classroom and happier faculty lounge:
The drive to obtain game achievements is a hard one for me to resist. When I looked over my list of games I mean to revisit, two of them were there because I want to collect all the achievements in them. A third was there because I still haven't beaten it on its highest difficulty. When I can recruit lots of characters, I'll grab them all even if I don't care about most of them. I want to kill all the bosses, collect all the equipment, unlock all the costumes and view all the cutscenes. Sometimes this is hazardous! I often lose sleep and win headaches (how's THAT for a terrible prize?) while trying to beat games on extreme difficulty levels, or while trying to finish a video game's token optional twitchy mini-game.
