If you found your way here, there’s a good chance you loved Classcraft — and then lost it. When it was discontinued, a lot of teachers were suddenly without the thing that made their room hum. I’ve talked with enough teachers in that spot to know it stings. You didn’t just lose a piece of software; you lost a way of teaching that was working.

But here’s the first thing worth untangling, because it changes what you should go looking for: Classcraft was really two different tools wearing one costume.

There was the classroom-management layer most people picture — the RPG behavior system, where students had HP and powers and earned or lost points for how they acted. And then, in its final years, Classcraft leaned into Quests — actual self-paced learning pathways, where the game was the learning, not a reward stapled onto it.

I’ll be straight with you up front: what my team and I built is fundamentally different from the behavior-management side of Classcraft. It lives much closer to those Quests. So before you evaluate any replacement, the real question is which Classcraft you’re trying to replace.

So let me talk to you teacher-to-teacher for a minute about what to look for — assuming, like a lot of us, it’s the learning part you miss most.

1. Engagement that comes from the learning — not bolted onto it

The trap with a lot of “gamified” tools is that the game and the learning are two separate things: do the worksheet, get the points, maybe lose some HP if you talk out of turn. Students see through that fast. The engagement that actually lasts comes from three things researchers have been clear about for decades — autonomy (real choices), competence (visible progress you can feel), and relatedness (doing it alongside other people). That’s self-determination theory, and it’s the difference between a class that’s bribed and a class that’s bought in.

The Quests were the closest Classcraft got to that — a path a student actually moved through and owned. When you evaluate a replacement, ask whether it’s built around that, or whether it’s mostly a nicer way to track behavior. Points for sitting still is not what you want back.

2. Flexibility — from a normal course to a full RPG

Some teachers want a full-blown role-playing world with a story arc and a map. Others just want a clean course with a few smart choices built in and a little momentum. Both are legitimate. The tool shouldn’t force you into fantasy dragons if that’s not your subject — and it shouldn’t stop you from going all-in if it is. Look for something that can be your version of engaged learning, that lets you start small and add as you get comfortable.

3. You stay in control of your world

One of the quiet reasons Classcraft worked was ownership — it felt like your class. A good replacement lets you rename things to fit your world (call the points whatever you want, call the map a journey or a galaxy or a syllabus), change how it looks, and decide what’s on and what’s off. If you can’t make it yours, students won’t feel it’s theirs either.

4. Built by people who’ve actually stood in front of a class

Tools built purely by product teams tend to optimize for what demos well, not for what survives a Tuesday afternoon with 34 teenagers. It’s worth asking who made the thing — and whether they’ve ever had to keep a room of real students engaged for 180 days straight.

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So — where does Gameful fit in? I’ll be honest, because I’m biased: I built it. And you might already be thinking, “wait, doesn’t Gameful have health bars and loot too?” It does — fully customizable. The difference was never the mechanics; it’s what they’re anchored to. In Gameful, the bars move primarily with task completion and real effort — the learning. You can flex them toward things that matter in your room, like showing up on time — but that’s your call, not the built-in point of the system. And it isn’t dressed up in flashy cartoon avatars and behavior theatrics; it’s understated by default and yours to shape, anywhere from a clean, focused course to a fully immersive world. What it’s really built around is the experience of learning: quests students move through, with meaningful choice and visible progress. If the part of Classcraft you miss is the Quests and the feeling of a world worth showing up to, that’s the exact ground Gameful stands on.

The most honest way to judge it isn’t my pitch — it’s seeing what real teachers have built. You can browse actual maps in the Codex, or start poking around on the Learn page. Set one up, and if it’s not for you, no harm done.

And if it turns out a behavior-management tool is really what your classroom needs — for a lot of teachers, especially in the younger grades, it genuinely is — go find a great one. That’s real teaching too, and I mean that. But if what you’ve been missing is the learning side — the quests, the choice, a room students actually want to walk into — then, well: here we are.

— Mick McMurray, founder of Gameful (still teaching)

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)

My co-founder Mike has never forgotten his kindergarten report card. He was five; it was 1960. The teacher sent home an envelope, and inside were the marks — not letters yet, just an S or a U, satisfactory or unsatisfactory, for the small business of being a child.

I bring worthwhile things to class. U. (His mom started letting him take things to school.)
Something about nap time. U. (“Just try harder.”)
I sing songs in tune. U.

That third one crushed him. He was five, and a grown-up had made it official: he sang wrong. From that day on, he only pretended to sing — in class, in church, at birthday parties. Pretend to sing. Pretend to fit in. He’ll tell you, sixty-some years later, that he’s never forgotten what that third U did to that little kid.

Here’s the part that matters: that memory was sitting right there when Mike, a teacher himself by then, sat down to design how his students would be assessed. He built something deliberately unlike the thing that had marked him. He’ll say it plainly — the third U was “vital in the long run,” because it’s the reason his rubric doesn’t do to kids what that report card did to him.

I came at the same idea from the opposite direction — later, and louder.

I’d taught photography for most of my career up to that point when I got handed a course I’d never taught: Digital Art. I did everything right on paper — units, a grading policy, the works. First grading period, two-thirds of my third-year art students were failing. Not because they couldn’t do art — because my gradebook was measuring the wrong things, and it was crushing them the way Mike’s U crushed him.

So I did the only thing that made sense once I admitted the problem was mine: I gave everyone an A and deleted the gradebook. Then I asked them what they actually wanted to make. They made music videos, animated films, photo essays. By spring their portfolios were the best work I’d ever gotten from a class — good enough that twenty-eight of them signed up for the AP Studio Art portfolio exam, in a course that wasn’t even AP. All twenty-eight passed.

I didn’t lower the bar by removing grades. I got out of the way of students clearing it.

There’s a name for this now — ungrading — and a growing number of teachers trying it. It isn’t “no standards” or “everyone gets a trophy,” which is the first thing people assume. It’s the recognition that traditional grades quietly work against the very thing they’re supposed to measure. A letter collapses a hundred kinds of progress into one symbol, and once that symbol is the point, students optimize for the symbol: they play it safe, they stop taking the risks learning requires, and — like a five-year-old who decides never to sing again — they learn to protect themselves from the mark instead of chasing the work.

The learning scientist Barry Fishman makes this case better than I can: school is a badly designed game, and grades are a big part of why. It’s the same instinct behind why I distrust bolt-on gamification — decorating a broken system with points and badges doesn’t fix it. Ungrading doesn’t throw out assessment; it moves it back where it belongs: into the work itself. Progress you can see. Feedback in the moment. Real evidence — a portfolio, a project, a thing you made — instead of a number that tells you almost nothing.

That’s the assessment philosophy Gameful is built on, and it’s no accident both of us landed there through a grade that hurt. Gameful doesn’t hand you a gradebook that ranks kids against each other. It gives students a visible sense of where they are and what’s next — progress and mastery they can feel — and it makes their real work the evidence. You can still generate grades if your school requires them; most of us have to. But the daily experience your students live in isn’t “what’s my grade?” It’s “how do I get better at this, and what do I want to make next?”

If you’ve been curious about ungrading but wary of the leap — how do you even run a class without the gradebook doing the driving? — that’s a lot of what Gameful is for: the structure to hold up a class built on mastery and choice instead of the threat of a bad mark. You can see how teachers have set that up in the Codex, or start on the Learn page. And if you want more of Mike’s stories and the thinking underneath Gameful, that all lives over on Meanderings.

Mike still won’t touch a karaoke machine. Sixty-some years later, one unsatisfactory mark still has that much say over one grown man. That’s the quiet power of a grade — and the reason both of us spent our careers building something gentler, and honestly more truthful. If a single U can convince a kid he can’t sing, imagine what a classroom built the other way could convince him he can do.

— Mick McMurray, founder of Gameful (still teaching)