The best lesson I ever got about motivation came from a year I was failing at my job.

For most of my career up to that point, I taught photography. Loved it — knew it in my bones. Then I got handed the capstone of our art pathway: Digital Art. Not because I’d asked for it, but because another school ran their program that way, with a separate digital art teacher, and someone decided ours should match. So I spent a summer teaching myself Illustrator. I planned the units. I wrote the grading policy. I did all the teacher stuff, the way you’re supposed to.

First grading period, two-thirds of the class was failing.

These weren’t unmotivated kids. They were third-year students in our art pathway — the ones who’d chosen art, stuck with it, and were good at it. And most of them were underwater in my class. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to accept the obvious: the problem wasn’t the students. The problem was me, and the course I’d built.

Here’s what I did about it. I already knew self-determination theory — the research that says motivation grows out of three things: real choice, a sense of getting good at something, and a community you belong to. I just hadn’t built any of it into my class. So I blew it up. I gave everyone an A. I deleted the gradebook. And then I asked my students a question I probably should have led with: what do you actually want to make?

They told me. They made music videos. Animated short films. Photo essays. We stopped being a class doing assignments and became a community of artists making real things and helping each other get better. By spring, their portfolios were genuinely good — better than anything my old syllabus would have produced. Good enough that I told them to sign up for the AP Studio Art exam, the portfolio one. It wasn’t an AP course. Twenty-eight of them signed up anyway. All twenty-eight passed.

I’ve spent a long time since then trying to understand what happened that year — and, honestly, how to make it repeatable. The first time, I basically lucked into it by panicking and getting out of the way.

That’s the backdrop for how I feel about the word “gamification.”

When my eventual co-founder, Mike, started building what would become Gameful in his own classroom, I was skeptical. From a distance it looked like a token economy — points, rewards, the machinery of “do this, earn that.” And that was exactly the thing I’d just spent a year unlearning. I didn’t want to bribe students. I’d just seen what happens when the reward for learning is the learning itself, and I wasn’t about to trade it for a shinier gradebook.

And that’s the real difference between two things that constantly get lumped together.

Gamification is what most people picture, and what I was afraid of: taking the same old task and bolting game-flavored rewards onto it. Points for turning in the worksheet. A badge for the quiz. A leaderboard so the compliant kids can compete. It’s decoration on top of a system you haven’t actually changed. It can juice behavior for a week or two — and then students figure out it’s just grades wearing a costume.

Gameful learning — a term the learning scientist Barry Fishman has spent years developing — is a different animal. It doesn’t decorate the task; it redesigns it. The goal isn’t to reward learning from the outside; it’s to build the learning so the motivation is already inside it: genuine choice in how you get there, a clear sense of getting better, goals worth chasing, and a room full of people doing it together. That’s not points-for-compliance. That’s the Digital Art class, on purpose.

Put simply: gamification asks, “what can we reward students for?” Gameful learning asks, “how do we design this so students want to do it in the first place?” Those are not the same question.

What eventually changed my mind about Mike’s project was realizing it lived on the second side of that line. Gameful wasn’t a token economy. It was a way to give structure to what had happened by accident in my art room — a course with real flexibility and choice, clear goals everyone can see, room to meet students where they are and let the strong ones soar, and a community where every kid is seen and supported. Yes, there are points and progress bars. But they mark real movement through real learning — they’re a map of where you are, not a bribe for showing up. That distinction is the whole ballgame.

I won’t pretend Gameful is the only way to build a class like that. My Digital Art students didn’t have software; they had a teacher who finally got out of their way. But most of us can’t rebuild a course from scratch by instinct every year — and that’s what Gameful is really for: giving structure to the thing that actually works, so you don’t have to luck into it the way I did.

If you’ve ever felt the difference between a class that’s bribed and a class that’s bought in, you already understand the point of all this. If you want to see what it looks like in practice, wander through real maps teachers have built in the Codex, or start on the Learn page.

Two-thirds of my class failing was the worst grading period of my career. It also taught me the most. I’ve been trying to bottle it ever since.

— Mick McMurray, founder of Gameful (still teaching)