I really enjoyed this course and ended up buying the book also. The combination of lecture, interviews, reading and activities was a great way to understand gaming fundamentals.
Enjoy your $95 pay-wall at the end (*before* the end, I mean) of the section 1 quiz. The material so far was hardly insightful, and they want learners to pay for $95 of value they can't even see after only getting through mayyyybe $3 worth of value. The first two sections re-hash the same points over and over "What is gamification? What is gamification not? for 30+ minutes and then section 2: "What is gamification? What is gamification not?" The course was, from the looks of it, filmed in 2008 and not update one bit since then, and therefore has a ton of outdated information, statistics, etc. They're always talking about things being "new and emerging" when, by now, they're from a prior decade. Gag me with a spoon. Why would I or anyone else pay $95 just to see the rest of this course when the first section or two of it is utterly incompetent except for referencing a few factoids about the concept of a game from ancient philosophers which anyone could Google to grasp the same concept of. Definitely insulted that this course is asking twice the price of game design courses and music production courses I've taken on Coursera for not even a third of the quality of content. I'd pay $25 tops for this course if the rest of it is anything like the pre-paywall portion of it. And that's the problem: how could I know? I can't see beyond the first quiz. I'll just have to assume it's all trash and move in and lament the time I wasted being led to a surprise pay-wall. Coursera, this has severely tarnished my impression of your platform. Do not let this course continue to exist in the ways I've described here any longer.