Remember the promise you made to your mom that you would call every so often? What about the other time you promised your boss that would not be late for work again? Or that promise you made to yourself that you will quit smoking?

Many individuals are capable of keeping to their promises, but there are also many others who are unable to do so. The fallacy of making promises is that there is no one else besides the person who is being made the promise to that will hold the individual accountable for his or her actions. As there is a lack of an immediate feedback loop, it leaves the individual complacent in accomplishing their tasks and making good on their end of the promise. A new IOS app, PromiseUP aims to change that by helping people to fulfill their promises.

By serving as a virtual feedback system, PromiseUP helps users keep track on their progress while enabling themselves to be accountable for their actions and promises. At the start, new users are given 1000 UP dollars, the app’s virtual currency to serve as a wager. As users state their promise and when they aim for it to be accomplished,  they would allocate a certain amount of UP dollars. The wager could be bet against themselves, or towards other users, as witness to their attempt. Should they succeed in their task, they win the allocated bet but lose it all if they fail.

As users accumulate UP dollars upon completing their promises, they could then use the virtual currency to redeem tangible prizes at the UP-Shop.  Conversely, if users eventually lost all their starter amount, it is not entirely game over as they could purchase more UP dollars with real money to continue. It has been noted that the purchase of virtual currency through real money served as the basis of the startup’s business model.

The reasons for people failing their promises may vary, but one could argue it is due to the lack of a tangible feedback system. People tend to get discouraged when they are unable  to see progress despite their all-out efforts. Moreover, the lack of a constant reminder of the rewards and benefits they would obtain upon accomplishing their promises further negates their endeavor. Thus, it is not surprising why people abandon their promises all too often and revert back to their old ways instead of focusing on the goals they initial conceived.

That being said, PromiseUP is not the first of its kind as it has close similarities to other goal setting apps such as Klash. Nonetheless, the purpose of the app is straightforward from a gamification perspective, to serve as a personalized feedback system. The growing popularity of goal setting apps should be embraced by many as these apps are the feedback systems people need. They are positive motivators for individuals and ultimately serve to better ourselves.

via TechCrunch

The post PromiseUP, the Gamification App to Help Keep Promises appeared first on Gamification Co.

When we started on this crazy gamification journey in 2010, I could not have predicted how large an impact our community would have in just 3 short years. What began as a shot in the dark (“I think there are some people out there who think that game concepts can improve business and the world”), has mushroomed into a real movement. Collectively, you have worked to design change in marketing, human resources, product development, strategy and business process. You’ve brought the best ideas from games, loyalty programs and behavioral economics to health, finance, education, government, loyalty and travel…just to name a few industries.

And the examples continue to multiply rapidly – as the videos from this year’s GSummit will attest. These case studies form the backbone of our collective intelligence, and our goal will be continue to discover and amplify those over the coming weeks as we roll out some new features.

These new concepts will support our core mission: to help this community come together, grow and change the world. We’ll continue to do this in every way possible — through live GSummits around the world, online, in print, in certification and more. 

I believe that in order to help you be as awesome as possible, we need to also challenge you. This means bringing together people and ideas that are sometimes controversial, often divergent and always thought-provoking. We also want you to challenge yourself and others with big, new ideas that change the way we think about engagement, business and society. Only through this challenge will we continue to innovate and excel.

And that’s my birthday wish: push yourself — and your colleagues — to think differently about how you will rise to the challenge of the Gamification Revolution.

I’ll start with a small gift: free access to my  GSummit 2013 closing keynote (embedded below).
What you can do for me: watch this talk and share it with two people you think need to hear the message it contains.

In that vein, please challenge me on the ideas you hear in the speech. Undoubtedly you’ll disagree with some (or all) of what I have to say — so share your thoughts. I can be reached in the comments below or on Twitter @gzicherm.

Meanwhile, thanks for making my work so fulfilling. Your (continued) success is the best gift a guy like me could ask for.

The post My Gamification Birthday Wish appeared first on Gamification Co.

For people who still watch regular broadcast television, it has become very common to actually watch TV while simultaneously using your laptop, phone, or tablet. Savvy networks like USA/NBC have picked up on this and created gamified mobile companion applications to engage with users as they both watch TV and browse on the net. There are compelling case-studies that outline the efficacy of this concept, coined the second screen, but I have not really seen any other kinds of engagement tactics for viewers. However, I found inspiration for new possible ways from the gamer community, and more specifically, the Dota 2 community.

Dota 2 is classified as a MOBA game (multiplayer online battle arena) and is a competitor to the most popular game in the world, League of Legends (LoL). And just in case you didn’t know, here’s a quick update on the state of gaming: World of Warcraft (WoW) and MMORPGS are not the most popular games in the world as they once were in the early 2000′s; MOBA games rule the gaming world right now.

The company behind Dota 2, Valve, is no slouch when it comes to innovation and the Interactive Compendium they’ve created to support their international Dota 2 championship tournament has a number of interesting ideas that broadcast media can really take advantage of.

1) Offer Crowdfunded Prizes and Crowdsourced Decisions

The Interactive Compendium  is a virtual book that will allow spectators and fans to bet on who will win each round of the tournament, keep a record of their success, and even allow them to vote on an all-star game featuring their favorite players. Each one of these virtual primers will cost $9.99 and $2.50 of each purchase is put towards the prize-pot. What is interesting about the compendium is that it isn’t required to view the tournament in any way. Valve incentivizes these purchases by putting Kickstarter-esque stretch goals that reward buyers for purchasing compendiums.

As of today, the Dota 2 tournament currently features $2.1 million in prizes and has already reached 3/7 stretch goals that have unlocked an XP boost for all buyers, more stages of evolution for their pet (more on this later), and a custom skin for their HUD. If enough players buy compendiums and the prize pot reaches their $3.2 million goal, then players will also unlock special limited edition items, decide who gets to play in the all-star game, and actually choose the next character who Valve releases for the game.

Valve wants Dota 2 viewers to use this compendium to enrich their tournament spectating experience and rewards their purchases by allowing them to influence the actual state of the game and tournament. These concepts may not seem new but Valve’s approach makes them significantly better.

Second screen experiences for TV shows have asked viewers to vote on certain outcomes in the plot of shows and commercials but they’re really only choosing between a number of pre-determined outcomes; compendium owners will be able to vote on a hero that will completely affect how the game will be played from that point on. The All-Star game will also be significantly more meaningful to the viewers because they force higher quality votes for participating players. In American sports, All-star game players are determined by popular votes through public polls but the Dota 2 tournament qualifies all the voters as a result of the cost of the compendium. Voters need to be invested enough into the game to have put $10 in for a vote and this limits any random person with an opinion from affecting/trolling the vote outcomes. In short, Valve is allowing viewers to feed the tournament with their support in exchange for a richer experience that has real impact on the future of the game.

2) Make the Passive Viewing Experience Fun Too

As mentioned earlier, one of the prizes for reaching the stretch goals of the grand prize was more evolutionary stages for the virtual pet that comes with the compendium. What the virtual pet does in the context of the game isn’t that important but what is important to note is that the pet actually grows and evolves in relation to how much you watch games in the tournament.

This video shows how the pet changes from a four-legged creature into a flying creature and there will be many more aesthetic features and stages that comes along with more viewership. The changes are aesthetic and do not impact the game but they exist as a status symbol. While this feature isn’t very engaging by itself, making it a supplementary gift to viewers during big events allows them to have a token and “proof” that there there. The level of evolution in the virtual pet shows exactly how much they participated and offers varying degrees in the quality of the “status trophy” they earned.

Stage 1 Evolution of the International 2013 Smeevil Courier

Conceptually, the pet is similar to a unique achievement one might receive for checking-in to singular events but the pet differs in that it’s used in the game’s mechanics and can be actively seen by players who use them. The compendium also aims to exist as a virtual book that is a recorded anecdotal account of that players experience throughout the tournament. Traditional broadcast media should aim to provide a passively generated history/representation of their user habits to further offer viewers greater ownership and relationship with their viewing.

3) Chatting Live without Hashtags is Superior

Part of the huge growth of MOBA games and their popularity can be attributed to the explosion of popularity in the streaming community. Supported by services like Twitch, it has been discovered within the past 4 years that gamers actually really love watching people play games. 

Twitch is arguably the top streaming platform for people to stream all their gameplay and it contains it with a handy chatroom. I would contend that without any sort of chat integrated into Twitch, it would still be hanging on to the coat-tails of Justin.tv as an unknown service.

An example of a Dota 2 Stream and Chat on Twitch.tv

Second screen experiences (and quite frankly too many social media campaigns in general) ask people to join the conversation through a hashtag. Observing a column as it refreshes for specific hashtags and tweets is a decent way to “join a conversation” but it is nowhere comparable to the immediate feedback and energy you get when people react the same way as you do on a stream. This video of a streamer is a perfect example of what I mean: check out the explosion of chat laughter that happens around 0:19.

Twitter can’t ever replicate this kind of interaction because it isn’t made for this type “short-form commentary” that is really only natural to speech. I’d argue that Tweets are often constructed with viewership and sharability in mind but chatroom activity is pure and unfiltered social commentary at its finest. You can’t find this experience anywhere else and dare I say it, it’s almost like I’m actually watching the video with these people.

I think the implications for having a chat window next to a video playing dramatically changes how that media is perceived and could lend itself immensely to real sports as it has for “eSports“. Chatrooms offer this immensely satisfying and immediate stream of information that can be maintained in a semi-controlled environment. Traditional broadcast media should start to offer an alternate/optional viewing method that allows viewers to chat instantly about what’s being played. As more and more people begin to cancel their cable TV subscription entirely, I suspect this will become more common with streaming services and online events.

The second screen concept came into fruition in a very interesting period of consumer technology. Tablets, smartphones, online media streaming, and the decline of cable subscriptions have all played a large part in what makes the ADD-centric second screen concept work. The reasons for which why these tactics work also ironically prove something else: the second screen concept can also work without, well, the first screen.

Second screen is inherently an odd concept, especially when it comes to engagement, because viewers are dividing their attention between two devices that are in two different locations. Truly engaging viewing experiences should simply be contained in one location and in one screen so that viewer’s full attention can be focused. Second screen tactics seems to only cater to a technologically savvy and younger crowd.

While Gen-Y is becoming increasingly distracted in a state of constant multi-tasking, I’m not convinced they’re performing any of their daily multi-taking effectively. By thinking about gamifying the TV experience in ways that go beyond adding an additional screen, we can focus on making the original viewing experience even more engaging and accessible by taking a few cues from the gamer community.

Flickr Image by val sv

The post 3 Ways to Make TV More Engaging Without the Second Screen appeared first on Gamification Co.

The Gamification Co Buyer’s Guide has been steadily growing ever since we first launched it back in November 2012. It’s the only comprehensive selection of gamification vendors with filtering elements to help you find the right partner to help you implement gamification into your organization.

Now that there are 60+ qualified gamification vendors listed in the database, we decided to celebrate this milestone by offering each vendor a free service upgrade to receive lead generation from their company profile. Typically available only to Tier 2 subscribers and above, lead generation will now be available for every company for a free 90 day trial. Now, customers and organizations looking for gamification can come to the Gamification Buyer’s Guide and connect directly with our listed vendors.

Compare and Contact Vendors Directly on the Search Page

Our Buyer’s Guide is an excellent resource for anyone looking to implement gamification into their organization. Now, it has become an equally valuable asset for gamification providers as a business development tool.

Check out the Gamification Co Buyer’s Guide to see our comprehensive list of gamification providers and reach out to your potential gamification partner now!

The post All Gamification Companies in the Buyer’s Guide Now Have Lead Generation appeared first on Gamification Co.

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act is on the verge of altering the investment landscape, finally enabling startups to procure capital from investments that follow the model of crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The crucial difference is that the funds are given out as true risk/reward-bearing propositions. 

The world of investment, at all levels, typically carries the nomenclature and ethic of gamification even though it is engaged in the serious business of real money. This means that it is a natural fit for gamification startups. Some are bringing unorthodox approaches to crowd investing that borrow ideas from an extremely fun and popular source – casual online games.

The crowd funding startup Seeds is a game-based interface that links potential funders to those seeking micro-loans. The concept of “Farmville meets Kiva” may not sound intuitive to many, but the mechanics of Seeds are designed with a keen awareness of the virtual currency models and economics of online games.

Traditional crowdfunding sources offer some form of benefit for the donors – an advance copy of a book or album, for instance. On the other hand, online gaming is an addicting passtime for many, with many paying consistently for the privilege of playing or for game-enhancing content. Seeds is counting on combining the generosity of donors with the enthusiams of online gamers.

The game world of Seeds is based upon the premise of exploring and rebuilding a virtual civilization. The game includes a large virtual map in which the gamers can perform actions such as constructing buildings. The gamer can complete this task the slow, difficult way, or can pay with in-game currency to speed-up the process.

The founders of Seeds have taken into account the fact that people will use real currency to buy downloadable content or in-game features. The model they have chosen is to “monetize impatience” and the proceeds raised from the sale of virtual currency become available for microloans. The same goes for the purchase of in-game virtual goods.

Very wisely, the platform is designed for mobile-to-mobile lending, making it very easy, casual, and intuitive. This also takes into account the competitive element as mobile gamers can compete with eachother while on the run.

As all of this game activity occurs, the funds are made available to a network of connected micro-borrowing entreprenuers, such as the one in Nairobi that received the application’s first disbursement.

The creators of seeds note that the world engages in a collective 3 billion hours per week playing computer games, and hopes that effort can be harnessed to bring forth positive change through entrepreneurship both abroad and domestically.

The post New Seeds Startup Brings Gamification to Venture Capital and Microlending appeared first on Gamification Co.

The Gamification Revolution is the only live gamification webcast featuring Gabe Zichermann and fellow gamification experts every week. Join us and have all of your gamification questions answered by these experts.

This past week’s guest was GSummit veteran, Jessie Rogers. Jessie has been working with Gamification Co and has GSummit since Day 1.  In this week’s episode, Gabe and Jessie discuss how the gamification landscape has changed in two years and what it means for the future to come. We also get some insights about some of the speakers and behind-the-scenes information.

Check out the video below for the full interview.

Be sure to catch tomorrow’s Gamification Revolution episode at 1PM EDT with educator Lucas Gillispie as he discusses using World of Warcraft as an education tool in his classes as a part of WoWinSchool.

The post GSummit SF 2013 Recap with Jessie Rogers appeared first on Gamification Co.

This past GSummit 2013 in San Francisco conference was again powered by the world’s first real-time gamified twitter app for events, Memecube. Running on its second iteration, Memecube 2.0 allowed all the attendees at GSummit to engage with the best speakers and ideas coming out of every session in a contained Twitter environment. 40% of all GSummit attendees engaged with the application, creating 4775 tweets with the hashtag #gsummit and an additional 4135 check-ins to food truck vendors and sponsored presentation booths.

“We were really surprised that people would tweet more than 20 times in average,” said Justin Schier, the Chief Creative Officer of Dopamine and creator of Memecube.

“With the Memecube application, we were able to create enough buzz with the hashtag #GSummit to make it one of the top trending topics for the day, which is really impressive considering we only had around 600 participants,” stated Schier. According to a Sysomos social media analysis on the GSummit hashtag, the phrase garnered 12.7 million impressions and 8,337 mentions of the hashtag by 822 users in 3 days.”

These statistics (available as an infographic) demonstrate a level of engagement and conversation that has never been seen before in events. Social media activity is typically ablazed at conference with a seemingly endless stream of event-related hashtags but there is no effective way of monitoring these ideas without being glued to a Twitter client with 5 infinite streaming columns of data, let alone identifying what the best tweets and ideas were and then discussing them. You simply get lost in the noise.

Individual Speaker Sessions Contained

Memecube’s session-specific design contains users’ tweets relative to the talks they’re currently watching and ranks the best ideas within each of those sections. Not only does this quickly offer quick access to the tweets attendees find most valuable, it actually organizes this information for the entire event and for each individual talk. Furthermore, the contained tweets for each talk offer a very strong source of feedback for the speakers about the talk, giving them an average rating, positive acclaim, and even criticism.

It is a given that people will always have something to say about the talk they’re watching, so why not offer a tool that contains all the great information people are sharing and bring out the best memes of the event with fun game elements? The secret sauce of Memecube and its ability to promote GSummit’s best ideas was the prizes it offered to the top users.

This year’s GSummit offered secret sessions with Gabe Zichermann, a signed copy of The Gamification Revolution and even a gamified toothbrush. Last year, secret sessions also included a card-counting lesson by Jeff Ma of Bringing Down the House fame and a championship Monopoly lesson on a customized probability board by GSummit speaker, teacher, and 2nd place US Monopoly champion, Tim Vandenberg. These prizes are what really drives the engagement factor up among the attendees but something critical for this idea to note is:

If you didn’t want to participate in Memecube, you never had to. All attendees could simply use Memecube as an interactive schedule for the event and never had to tweet a single time to do so.

The positive reception coming from Memecube users has made it clear that there is a market-need for an exciting Twitter client for events and it’s now ready to be harnessed for anyone wishing to engage with their attendee audience.

The GSummit Schedule

Schier adds:

“We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from many attendees and Fortune 500 Companies at GSummit and now it is ready for market. With this newest iteration of Memecube 2.0, we believe our real-time gamified twitter app for events is ready to be used for any conference or event that wants to contain and optimize the Twitter conversations that are happening around them. All of Memecube’s features are customizable and can be turned on or off based on the needs of the event. Additionally, Memecube could even be used independently from Twitter to truly keep important and sensitive information only available to a select few.

Memecube generated 4775 tweets with only 250 engaged users over 2 days. Consider what is possible for events that have 1000, or even 5000 attendees using Memecube in tandem and competing for big prizes at these large events? We’re excited at what will be possible with Memecube and we hope to bring these engagement levels to many more conferences and events in the future”

Memecube was handcrafted by Dopamine Labs, the creative gamification agency who also built the world’s first gamified social reading application ReadSocial App. Check out the Dopamine website at dopa.mn for more information about their applications and services.

Memecube Website

The post Memecube’s Success as the the World’s First Real-Time Gamified Twitter App for Events at GSummit 2013 appeared first on Gamification Co.

If one area of engagement can be taken for granted, it’s the one when people engage again in passionate discussions on the term “gamification.” It doesn’t matter if you are coming from inside or outside the industry. It seems to engage. Given that, alone that would already a big case for keeping that term. But let’s not hasten the things, let me go through that step by step

Recently Kris Duggan, co-founder and former CEO Badgeville and gamification-evangelist (ok perhaps more “whatever-you-call-it-but-not-gamification”-evangelist) took up the torch to lead the latest rally against the term (http://upstart.bizjournals.com/news/technology/2013/04/30/kris-duggan-of-badgeville-on-gamifying.html). Kris and others have certainly not one, but many good points when they talk about the initial reactions of corporate (and we only talk about “boring” enterprise) when they are confronted with that term. And I agree with many of them. And knowing Kris, who in the spirit of every innovator, needs to be convincing, smart, and sometimes a little bit of a prankster, is certainly one of the best minds to open that topics for an honest discussion.

But my take is the following: Get over it. The train left the station. This era and concept will be know as the gamification age. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t say that to defend the word. I haven’t coined it. When I learned about it in Summer 2010, I found only 500 search results on Google. I wasn’t sure if this is even the right word of what I was looking for, but I think I grasped that this may be important. I kept noticing it popping up more and more often in the months to follow.

Here is the thing: I hate the term gamification AND I do like it a lot.

What I hate about it is that people think it’s about playing games. It’s not. I hate about it that the gatekeepers of game-design think we “rape their baby.” Which we do not. Or that we pull together arbitrary concepts and brand it gamification. We do not.

What I like about it seeing when idea-people hear that term and their eyes start shining. They grasp the power of the concept immediately, even if they don’t yet know how to do it. And it always means “fun.”

When we introduced the concept of “gamification” the first time in an internal corporate blog of a large software company over 2 years ago, the reactions where overwhelmingly positive. The video-gamers amongst the colleagues came out and understood it right away, and even the non-gamers just embraced it. You could feel that they were starving for such a concept. One commentator summarized the mood the best: “I have hope again!”

Big Corporate

As somebody who’s spent over 20 years in big corporate, I certainly got my dose of buzzwords. Empowerment, synergistically, collaboratively, leadership skills, world-class, customize, customer satisfaction, mindshare, proactively , and all these other words were deemed good enough by corporate managers to bore the hell out of employees. Don’t even talk about, whether they ever made sense or if employees – or the managers themselves – understood them.

It doesn’t stop at mission statements, when we come to technologies and concepts, gamification shouldn’t be the only term to be questioned. Or have you ever had passionate discussions, of how stupid actually the term “cloud” is? Or “social analytics?” The list goes on, and I just mention a few of the recent ones: “big data” (what does that mean: fat? Tall? Or just much?), “internet of things”, “idea management” (as if you can control it), “mobile device” (my pants are mobile too), “e-book readers” (are this now the people reading, or is it the device reading it?). Feel free to fill in the blanks and create your own list of terms that claim to be something that they are not.

For the very same “higher-ups” it’s actually totally ok to pump empty buzzwords in their mission statements and communications to their workforce, but the word “gamification” makes them cry for something that makes them feel serious?

Which reminds me of a routine from the comedian Lewis Black, where he tells about how he got an invitation to perform in front of government officials in Washington D.C. under the condition not to use any bad language (which is a trademark of his political comedy). This was back then in the Bush administration.

“These are the people who are the first line of defense when it comes to the terroristic threat, but the word “shit”makes them cry!”

The word gamification makes the same managers cry, who fall the most for gamification themselves. They are vying for the best parking spot in front of the main office entrance, they want the largest corner-office and the biggest corporate car. They find nothing weird about doing “simulations” of scenarios to “beat” the competition, which they actually do in meeting rooms turned into “war-rooms’, when they are not enjoying the business lounge cocktails that they earned during their trips collecting miles for their frequent flyer programs. Has anyone told them that this actually is gamification?

A more interesting discussion sparks from folks who’ve done parts of their homework. “Badgification” or “Pointsification,” and a really stinging term called “Exploitationware” have risen, because most of the current work done by our industry goes this easy route. And we all know that this criticism is correct. We need to become better. But I rather discuss the model and concept behind gamification, and the justification for labeling it as “badifigcation,” than loosing time on the original discussion.

Alternative Terms

To be fair, there have been alternative term suggestions from Kris and others. Engagification, persuasive design, behavioral design, motivational design, recognition program are some of them. And they all sound fine and honest. And boring. Because one thing that excuses us from thinking about when using these alternative terms is “fun.” How can we add fun to a task for our players? If you use a different word, then you invite everyone on the project team to an easy way out. It’s surprisingly difficult to make something fun. But if you have to think of what’s fun constantly, you keep the player in mind and need to ask yourself over and over again: is this fun? And there are ways to make things fun, game-designer Jon Radoff talks about fun-motivators at length in his book Game On. The payoff in real numbers with fun in mind is certainly larger.

The surest way to understand that a company has an engagement problem and that they’d need gamification the most, is when their higher-ups tell you bluntly that they dislike the term. Or if the subordinates are afraid of such a reaction. Those people are not going to rock the boat and question existing business models. Instead of trying to grasp a concept, get interested in new topics, allow people to play with concepts and ideas, all they do is spend their time on telling you how much they dislike a term and why. And by telling those opinions to the very same people that they so desperately need to create new ideas. This is the very same behavior that kills engagement of “subordinates.” The engagement that is necessary to be creative. John Cleese of Monthy-Python-fame many years ago gave an excellent talk about the importance of fun and humor for creativity, laying out exactly the same principles that we encourage through gamification.

Concepts to Discuss

While I am not against finding a better term for describing what we are doing (and no, I don’t consider, engagement/motivational/persuasive/behavioral/… Design as better terms for all the reasons I mentioned), I’d rather prefer having us spend the time on the pressing problem of lifting gamification to the next level and away from points and badges (of which still way to many approaches rely on them only). I’d rather have us understand better the concept of competition, and why this works only for a narrow area in a corporate environment. I’d rather have us talk way more about positive psychology, the flow zone, the cheating and how to reduce it, methods of how you get an approach done that adds value for the player (employee), what fun motivators are, how willpower comes in, how we work an create habits etc.

So many topics, so many areas that we haven’t yet talked about or found best practices, but we discuss for the umpteenth time the term gamification. Sure the term is perhaps not ideal. Sure it’s easier to muse about this. Because I actually don’t need to understand the concept, but can have an opinion. But do we really want to Sarah-Palinize this industry?

Definition

The term discussion also distracts from the still less than ideal definition of the term itself. Ask three gamification designers and you get four definitions (as the joke goes). In the enterprise context as a practitioner I don’t care, if we call it gamification, serious game, simulation, engagification etc. What I care is whether this thing helps me solve a business problem.

Note: Personally, I actually make the case that enterprise gamification is an umbrella term for all of those mentioned before. The cross section of those disciplines is what makes gamification so successful.

Three Step Approach

I can talk a lot of likes and dislikes, but here is what I do in my standard talks on gamification: I take a three step approach. In the first one I shatter stereotypes about games and video-games. Looking at a couple of facts that counter the common notion of the game industry and comparing the levels of engagement and work done by gamers to employees, you can feel the gasp. In the second step, audiences realize that gamification is nothing exotic. Gamification is something that they have encountered in many situations of their life, on many websites and apps that they use. And my audiences keep sheepishly admitting that not only do they use these sites, but also fell for the gamification there. Having their attention, the third step is the last step to have their resistance wither: we talk about numbers and how well gamification – even the most simplistic approaches – work. Latest at that stage, you have the full attention of corporate people. When a concept and technology helps solve a business problem in such spectacular numbers, then a discussion of a term seems ridiculous and useless. Who cares?

Not that I am not a realist: I know that toning down your message may sometimes support your cause better. But this should not put the term itself up to discussion. And that’s what we have to teach our evangelists in the corporate world. Help them make the gamification-case by keeping them honest.

Coming back to Kris kicking off the latest round of engaged discussion on the term, I’d rather suggest to start small and much closer to home: isn’t it time to find a new name for this company called “Badgeville”?

Flickr Image by otherthing

The post The Term Gamification: Why I Hate It AND Why I Love It appeared first on Gamification Co.

Well at least it used to until Facebook took down the app, according to an article posted by TechCrunch yesterday.

Social Roulette is a play off Russian Roulette: a game in which you place a single bullet in a revolver pistol, spin the barrel, and pull the trigger at yourself. If you’re unlucky, the single bullet will be in that chamber and subsequently send you into oblivion. Social Roulette is a play on this concept but instead of losing your life, you would only lose your all of your Facebook posts, pictures, and friends. Obviously, losing your Facebook life isn’t as severe as your actual life (or is it?) but it is fascinating to consider our online social lives as its own kind of currency that could be wagered and lost. After all, the only “prize” for surviving the game is a Facebook status that says “I just played Social Roulette and Survived”

Social Roulette had only launched on Saturday before Facebook disabled API key access for the application. Facebook has its business built on advertising models for its users, so having an application that removes users altogether will be harmful to their revenue model. However, Social Roulette still built a decent fan following despite only existing for three days. Social Roulette’s homepage touts testimonials from Gawker, a “former Facebook user” and a cool 11K likes on Facebook. Clearly there is an interest in wagering and potentially losing aspects of our social life; a gamble needs to be meaningful in order to be exciting.

In the modern digital age where the tendrils of social media permeate all facets of our lives and true privacy is disappearing, Social Roulette serves as a reminder that social networks and the constant connection to the internet is not always a good thing, even if it is ingrained into daily routine.

Developers making games and/or gamification applications should consider how to leverage this desire to get away from the ever-connectedness of social networks to make for unique experiences. While Facebook’s actions against Social Roulette prove that it is difficult to create applications that restrict access to Facebook, consider utilizing awkward social experiences in disincentive systems (things users don’t want to motivate action).

I can imagine an application working on motivating users to perform a certain action, and if they fail, their Facebook profile picture is changed into an awkward photo with that creepy guy from last weekend Or, failure could result in the “poke” of an ex-lover or even a message stating “hey baby” to a random person on the list of people they never talk to on Facebook. Maybe you could even wager the friendship of 10 friends, like Burger King asked of Facebook users in 2009 and got 230K friends “sacrificed” in a week for a free Whopper before Facebook had Burger King stop the app.

It is difficult to assign the value of our social connections. Not only because there is no way to do so with money but also because people assign different values to their online social lives and their offline social lives. I implore designers to think about this social-discrepancy in their systems to make for more interesting social experiences. I am really waiting for the day a game or application will challenge me to consider the value of my online social networks against that of my offline social life.

And to be honest, I hope choosing my offline social life will be the easy choice to make.

Flickr Image by Emmanuel Gadenne

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During the intermission breaks at GSummit SF 2013, we decided to show some videos that described some of our favorite uses of gamification in social good. Take a moment to watch our videos and meet the team!

The post Gamification Co’s Favorite Social Good Gamification Examples appeared first on Gamification Co.