The most logical solution isn’t always the most emotionally successful. This article by Angela Self in the Globe and Mail about reducing debt brought up an interesting idea about achievement as motivation that closely mirrors what we know about gamified design.
While trying to find a way to get out of debt across multiple credit card bills, the most logical is to start paying them off in order of highest interest rate. However, it’s also more difficult to do so, especially if the card with the highest interest rate also happens to be the largest balance. It takes longer to see any kind of change happening while the interest keeps compounding, which can be frustrating and discouraging. For example, a $10,000 debt at an interest rate of 20%, with $500 per month paydown will take about 25 months to fully pay off! Whereas a debt of $1,000 with a 12% interest rate, at $500 a month would take only 3 months.
Ms. Self found that when she reversed the logical process and reorganized the debts in order of lowest balance, she was able to see more progress as she cleared the lesser debts. The more she accomplished, the more positive she began to feel that she could repay everything after all. Simply put: by seeing progress earlier and with more demonstrability, she felt more engaged and motivated.
Just like beating levels or unlocking achievements in a game, this positive reinforcement drives the player to do more & perform better. Credit card debt is by no means a small problem – it can ruin a person’s life if they’re not able to get it under control. This kind of simple gaming element is a tactic often used by debt assistance programs in order to make clients feel more at ease during such a stressful time. They don’t call it gamification, but the principles are still the same. If we can start to acknowledge gamification as constructive tool that it is, we can incorporate it into other difficult challenges to stimulate positive results and help more people feel like winners.
In this recent post on the Cisco blog, Dannette Veale uses common examples to help illustrate what gamification really means – like Foursquare, Quest to Learn charter school, Evoke and Wii Fit. She also quotes Gabe Zichermann and his now famous SAPS model for rewards systems.
Gabe Zichermann has a new op-ed piece on The Huffington Post that just went up today. It’s called “Can Games and Gamification Fix Washington?” It’s about how the many issues that are currently plaguing the US often seem too vast and overwhelming for any real change to occur. Gamification can be used to engage an audience and solve problems – so why not make that audience the American people and empower them to start fixing things? From selecting Supreme Court judges to President Obama’s COMPETES Act, Gabe brings a lot of interesting ideas about gamification to the forefront. Read the article now.
Ed Note: We’re initiating coverage today on the Gamification of Health, the most requested topic among our readers and a subject of extraordinary importance to us at Gamification.Co. Feel free to send us your article suggestions. – Gabe Zichermann
Full-service gyms are currently going through hard times in the US. According to a recent New York Times article, 45% of gym members quit during any given year and the 15% of Americans who currently belong to a gym is rapidly decreasing. The conclusion of the article is unmistakable: the industry has a problem with user engagement. There were a lot of attendees at January’s GSummit from companies eager to engage consumers around health and wellness – perhaps shifting gym management’s mindset from consumers to players (as we recommend in our Strategic Gamification Blueprint).
As fitness consultant Casey Conrad told Catherine Saint Louis of the New York Times, “There’s no question that the social element is a huge, huge piece to getting participation.” But this idea has taken a major hit of late. As any gym member can attest, a set of white iPod earphones is pretty much required equipment, making each user the central focus in a lonely iTunes commercial. Flat screen TVs have also served to separate users from what was once the biggest draw for gyms: community.
Other gyms, health clubs, yoga and martial arts facilities still stress the importance of community to encourage engagement. If you miss a session, others ask “where have you been?,” while still others may notice you’re doing well and cheer you on. While facilities like these outperform the median, they continue to depend on the serendipity of user interaction to drive their success. That is, community is spontaneous, mysterious and unstructured. But not everyone is content to leave results to chance.
The FitBit is a single device that works with many platforms to create a virtual community. source: fitbit.com
Yifan Zhang and Geoff Oberhofer believe they will keep people going to full-service facilities with Gym-Pact. Their business adapts a model, first covered in the book Freeby Chris Anderson, that describes selling memberships at drastically reduced prices and only charging users if they miss a session. The full month’s cost is then charged as a “motivational fee”. This tactic is essentially flawed, as getting overcharged for unused services is already a common complaint of gym-goers. By encouraging users through negative reinforcement, it associates even more negative emotions with the act of getting on a treadmill and does nothing to increase engagement.
WiiFit expands upon the Wii's abilities and includes exercise routines. source: wiifit.com
On the other hand, many players are abandoning the now-solitary experience of brick and mortar gyms and joining communities of mostly solo exercise with social/online connection. Players are purchasing programs and devices that motivate them to stay fit in a more gamified, online way such as the FitBit, Nike+, the WiiFit, and even Nintendo 3DS . The power of this type of positive motivation has been demonstrated in the developing field of positive psychology.
Others, such as Julie Price, previously Vice-President of Digital Products at Club One and Judy Shasek, Cofounder of Healthy Community Development are investigating ways to use games in order to get people to jump on treadmills or just simply get out and run. Julie is concentrating on how to eliminate the de-motivational aspects of working out. She describes her research:
“I was looking specifically at making fitness fun; so games and how you could create a gym made up of just games, where people would go and exercise… In a lot of the research they are finding that people’s rate of perceived exertion is low [in fitness games], but their heart rate is actually a lot higher [than] if they are doing other exercise, so they are getting a huge benefit, but they are not seeing it as work.”
By making the gym a more engaging experience, Julie is hoping help players by lowering the threshold and get over the inertia to begin exercising and then enjoy it once they have begun.
Full-service gyms, even in their heyday, only drew those users that were motivated to get into shape to begin with. Pioneers like Shasek are re-imagining the experience of fitness, bringing together entire communities through games in order to motivate players to exercise. By casting a wider net and encouraging existing communities to get involved, it helps those individuals who would have otherwise fallen through the cracks.
Even as gyms are losing users, players are finding new ways to lose weight and stay fit. With the encouragement and support of gamified community, rewards and engagement, perhaps the “Great Depression” in our national health can finally end. Gyms and other brick and mortar fitness enterprises still form an essential part of that recovery plan, but without gamification, their prospects seem increasingly dim.
Gabe Zichermann was featured very prominently in an article for The San Francisco Chronicle by Casey Newton that was released this past Tuesday. In the piece, entitled “Online game-based marketing can be big business“, Gabe projects that 2011 will be the “year of gamification”, shares his thoughts on why games are so hot right now and weaning consumers off of coupons as a reward.
Why waste time waiting for the bus when you can be scoring points for your ‘hood instead?
January 28th marked the end of Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby in San Francisco. 20 Muni bus stop shelters were outfitted giant, 72 inch touch-screens where travelers-in-waiting can play one of 4 games. All the games were less than 60 seconds so no one would risk missing the bus when it did arrive. Players vied for the top score in order to bring an awesome block party to the neighborhood they represented, with a performance from the band OK Go!
The official site BusStopDerby.com kept the excitement going with a leaderboard, Twitter feed and Flickr stream right on the front page. The contest got a huge response from the players in San Francisco and press all around the country. In the 2 month run of the campaign, over 100,000 games were played and over 2,500,000 points scored. It’s a fair amount of participation considering about 600,000 riders go through the Muni system daily.
There were a lot of positive elements happening simultaneously with this campaign. On the one hand you have a game added to a regular, boring and often frustrating chore of waiting for the bus. The player is able to interact with their surroundings & create fun rather than passively waiting around. The games were simple, so absolutely anyone can start playing without a lengthy tutorial and they were short in length so there’s no chance of someone becoming frustrated or bored. As you can see from the photos, even though solo gameplay was an option, the player always drew a crowd thus creating a direct social element. The social factor is also present in the broader concept of the derby – your entire community is part of your team.
The derby was a cooperative competition where the entire neighborhood worked towards a common goal. And sure, the grand prize is really cool – but it’s much more likely that the status associated with being a part of the winning neighborhood (or better yet, being the one to put them over the top) is the real prize. Too bad there wasn’t a leaderboard for individual participants as well.
Congratulations to North Beach who ultimately claimed victory with 363,650 points! Clearly getting people to work together and make the everyday a little less ordinary has a huge appeal and makes something as dull as waiting for the bus an opportunity for engagement and a thing to look forward to!
As gamification spreads and becomes better understood we can expect to see more chances for play like this popping up all over the place. Penny Baldwin, Senior Vice President of Integrated Marketing and Brand Management at Yahoo! told Ariel Scwartz at Fast Company that the Bus Derby was just the beginning:
We’re going to evaluate [the Derby] based on backend data–how many mobile apps were downloaded in the area, participation, and enthusiasm…We’ll march it out across the nation if it’s proven effective for our business impact.
Spreading the stations out across different neighborhoods and tracking participation with points will likely help Yahoo! discover their target demographic for gamified marketing once they determine what time the most playing occurred, and what groups make up the majority in top scoring neighborhoods. Competitors in the Bus Derby were actually a test audience for what will likely be a larger campaign by Yahoo in the future. After the attention that the Bus Derby has garnered, people will surely be eager to participate in Yahoo’s next venture into gamification.
Experts Exchange is a site dedicated to bringing better IT assistance to the world through competitive gamification. Founded back in 1996, Experts Exchange invites knowledgeable techies from all over the world to answer questions from users in need who assign a point value to their query. A leaderboard keeps constant watch over the top experts and the top 5 site experts get their own special entry in the Hall of Fame!
Earn expert certifications by gaining a certain number of points in one zone (topic/category). Once you reach expert status you can qualify for a free t-shirt and post your certification on your fully customizable profile & make yourself available for freelance hire. Your profile also has a custom “Eeple ” avatar, and blogging options. These features allow users to make attachments to experts they’ve come to trust and really see them as individual people, not just text in a help forum.
Experts Exchange also Tweets your accomplishments to the world so even those not on the site can see how awesome you are.
Brand Manager Gary Weyel had some insights to as about competitive game mechanics that have cooperative benefits:
“The gamification elements of Experts Exchange motivate our experts to challenge one another and earn points. It motivates them to provide good answers fast. Ego is big—experts are rewarded for being smart, not only with the adulation of the askers but with reputation within the community.”
All the hard work pays off in the end with the Annual Expert Awards with categories like “Expert of the Year”-
The expert with the most points for the year- “Juggernaut” – The expert that has answered the most questions throughout the year, and even “Author of the Year” – for the top contributor of articles.
Experts Exchange seems to keep growing and evolving. Even though the site isn’t as big as Quora it still receives about 500,000 unique daily visitors seeking answers. The reason for this success is most likely due to users receiving quick, custom-tailored information from experts with proven ability and a positive reputation. As Gary Weyel puts it:
“The Experts Exchange system is set up to prompt askers to choose the solution that worked for them. On most forums, you have to dig through a ton of posts to find a possible solution. Our system makes it easier to find a proven solution fast.”
So people with questions get fast, accurate solutions. Those with the knowledge are getting rewarded and earning bragging rights and respect. So both kinds of users are able to get the exact experience they’re looking for, in a way that benefits the rest of the community.
Gamification has gotten increasingly more present, but it’s also been getting more “meta”. Many game consoles have been using gamified gaming for sometime now. Both XBox 360 and PS3 have achievement and trophy systems (respectively) where players can unlock special acheivements that are supplemental and complimentary to the games their playing. These motivators work equally well on “achiever” player types who want to win and earn as much as possible, and also on “explorer” types who prefer to investigate the layout of a game, poke around and discover rather than follow a linear design. This style of gamification encourages longer game play by actually extending the experience of the game.
Following in that same vein, the new Nintendo 3DS (available March 27th but you can pre-order now: Nintendo 3DS – Cosmo Black.) will come standard with gamified software to further enhance the experience. The built-in Activity Log tracks what games you play and how frequently. It also acts as a pedometer, counting the steps you take while using the 3DS and awards you with “Play Coins” the more you walk that can be used to unlock special content in other games and apps.
Once you create your “Mii” avatar, you can also interact with other players in the “StreetPass: Mii Plaza”. When this function is engaged you can exchange info including your Activity Log stats with any nearby 3DS players.
The 3DS’s major selling point, however, will be its new 3D function. The concept of 3D gaming seems to have become generally less popular as the technology has actually become more feasible. Or perhaps it was just the “virtual reality” concept that died along with Nintendo’s famous flop of the ’90s – The Virtual Boy. It seems now that Nintendo has learned from its mistakes and is actually using 3D in a new and interesting way, following the new film trend that loves 3D effects. In addition to the adjustable 3D that will add a new dimensional (literally) to games in the library, 3DS’s built-in “AR Games” software allows you to gamify your personal space by actually projecting games onto any flat surface.
The game “Face Raiders” allows you to use the 3DS’s camera to take pictures of your and your friend’s extract their faces and integrate them into a shooting target game. You can move with the handheld console to hit the targets that appear to be moving about real space.
The 3DS makes walking a game, the act of playing a game into a separate achievement game, puts the game into real space and literally puts your and your friends in the middle of the action. Truly this kind of gamified gaming is blurring the lines between real life and play and creating new possibilities to make life more fun!
Game companies have been pioneers of “meta games”, but they’re usually secondary to the narrative of the core game. Recently, they’ve been paying more attention, largely due to the success of XBox achievements and web game sites like Kongregate and OMGPOP. Now the “meta game” is being part of the initial game design on some platforms and creating a more engaging experience and changing ideas about how to play.
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Thanks to everyone who attended the first ever Gamification Summit on Thursday! The turn out was absolutely amazing – nearly 400 attendees along with our phenomenal speakers, panelists and representatives of the press – it was a packed house, standing room only at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco!
Everything went off without a hitch and there were nothing but positive vibes in the room all day long. There were fantastic presentations from Wanda Meloni (M2 Research), Gabe Zichermann, Jesse Redniss (NBC/Universal), Neal Freeland (Bing) and many more!
Jane McGonigal’s gamified afternoon keynote had a huge response with people offering up “Amens!” – literally. It was followed by a book signing where eager buyers were the first to get copies of Jane’s book, “Reality is Broken”, which officially launched at GSummit.
Our Twitter feed was also buzzing all day. Hundreds of users both attending in-person and tracking live put in their two cents on the discussions and quoting our brilliant speakers. You can still take a look at all the feedback by searching our hashtag #gsummit. Our award-winning official photographer, Sion Fullana, also tweeted photos through @gsumit2011, so you can see these and even more images including some of our esteemed panelists.
You can read up on some great articles about the summit. Dean Takahashi from VentureBeat (who was also a panel moderator) wrote up this piece about Jane McGonigal’s keynote and this piece about Jesse Redniss’s case study on the gamified site for the TV show Psych.
If you missed all the action on Thursday, it’s not too late to get in on the game. You can still watch all of the video content on-demand. Register today and get 30 days of unlimited access to GSummit speeches, panels and Q&A.
Thank you again for attending The Gamification Summit. Please enjoy use of the official decks from our speakers to review. To make the most of these materials, we suggest purchasing on-demand video content from Fora.tv, where you can watch archival footage of the conference for 30 days.
The first ever Gamification Summit is underway with a full house and lots of streaming guests. If you want to join the live stream, visit GSummit.com today and get 30 days access to the content – including my keynote.
If you want to follow the discussion on Twitter, search for the hashtag #gsummit .
Gabe Zichermann was a guest today for BBC World Service Podcast: Digital Planet with Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson on the social media episode. Gabe chats with Gareth and Bill about what makes a successful loyalty program, whether or not we should be concerned with over-saturation with gamification and, of course, how excited he is about the Gamification Summit this Thursday!
You can listen to the podcast episode in its entirety here or even skip right ahead to hear Gabe in chapter 4.
If you’d like to hear more of Gabe’s ideas on gamification and learn from other top thought leaders in the industry but missed your chance to get a ticket for GSummit, you’re in luck! Register with Fora.tv to get access to live streaming coverage of the Gamification Summit. It’s the next best thing to being there and a day of learning you won’t want to miss! Register now!
I was recently interviewed by Sharon Panelo of JWT Intelligence for this really great piece that came out online yesterday. We discussed how marketing is changing, how brands in every category can use game mechanics to increase engagement and The Gamification Summit that’s happening next week! Our talk was a lot of fun and I’m really happy with the results.
Of course the Gamification Summit is already sold out, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss it. Register now to get live streaming coverage with Fora.tv. Register before Friday to take advantage of Early Bird savings!
An inside look at Wanda Meloni: Founder at M2 Research
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When asked what she’s most excited to learning at the Gamification Summit, Wanda said, “I’m most excited to talk with companies and learn what they are planning, where they see game mechanics fitting in with their overall strategy, what tools and technology they need, and how it creates specific value to them.”
Hear Wanda talk about the past, present and future of M2 Research at
You can read more of Wanda’s thoughts by following her on Twitter @wandameloni
And don’t miss hearing her speak at the Gamification Summit. Register now for live streaming coverage at Fora.tv!
Congratulations to SCVNGR, the location-based mobile app, for recently raising another $15million in funding from European VC firm Balderton Capital! SCVNGR is a fast-growing location-based site that puts its focus on gaming by giving challenges to go with your check-ins. SCVNGR is among the most business-friendly of location-based apps as hundreds of companies, schools and organizations, both large and small, have run campaigns through SCVNGR including Google, Coca-Cola, Sarah Lawrence College and even the US Army.
I asked Founder, CEO and “Chief Ninja” Seth Priebatsch what SCVNGR has planned for all that money. He has this to say:
We’re actually spending a lot of this funding on something pretty awesome: game dynamics R&D. Over the last couple of months, we’ve discovered some pretty powerful new game mechanics that, when placed in the real-world, can achieve some pretty amazing stuff. So, we’re basically going to expand our team of game mechanists to research, explore, test and experiment with these game dynamics in the real world over the next couple of months. In a couple of weeks, you’ll start seeing some exciting new stuff coming out of SCVNGR.
I’m not sure what to think about this claim of “new game mechanics”. It sounds exciting, but I can’t help but remain a little skeptical. I’m hoping that Seth and everyone else at SCVNGR will surprise us all and bring some brand new ideas to gamification!
