This week on the Gamification Roundup we have a number of interesting articles for the gamification enthusiast to ponder: Rajat Paharia of Bunchball provides some gamification patterns to consider for enterprise implementation. IBM is rewarding office weightloss with cash but has users input their own data. The Asian Games market is growing rapidly – could mean a huge untapped potential for gamification in the Asian market. One corporate training application blurs the line between teaching company policy and providing liability insurance. And finally, a report proposes the potential for good gamification to create a dystopic environment. What do we make of all this? Find out after the jump.
Bunchball’s Rajat Provides Adept Level Knowledge on Gamification – Forbes, May 14
Rajat Paharia, CEO of Bunchball (and a featured speaker at our GSummit), explains how gamification in enterprise is an ongoing process of understanding what steps lead to success. He looks at key patterns of gamification to achieve this, including managing employee learning speed, maintaining visibility on employee performance, and using gamification to identify flaws in process design. Many articles released about gamification are for novices; this is more of an adept article about gamification in enterprise.
IBM to Incentivize Weight Loss with Cash – TheVerge, May 14
IBM is in process of patenting an office weight loss application that will monitor a variety of health metrics, provide real time feedback, and offer monetary rewards for those who exercise and eat well. It can even be altered to fit vegan or kosher diets and provide more dividends for parents who provide their children better food. The only issue with this and many other diet apps is that it requires the user to input food data. Can you really trust your user if they have a financial gain to have from lying?
Asian Global Games Market to Reach US$70 Bn in 2015 – ChannelNewsAsia, May 16
Not necessarily gamification per-se but Unity Technologies, a large game software developer, has seen a %5 increase in revenue from its Asia Pacific Arm in a span of 18 months. Unity is projecting their Asia revenues to double every year for the next five years. It will be see how the growth of the gaming industry will affect gamification in those same regions and if it will produce new powerhouse startups that can combat the big B’s in the future.
Games: Corporate Training or Lawsuit Insurance? – Fortune, May 15
A corporate training business has created a gamified training application called True Office CEO. The appplication was designed to provide an interactive and fast-paced game medium for employees to learn about company policies and rules. It also confirms whether or not the employee has retained learned knowledge through a 10 minute quiz after the game is over. The real breadth of the app comes from the analytics platform that is able to measure how long users actually studied policies to protect the company from liability lawsuits. One must wonder if this is really for training or simply lawsuit insurance.
Gamification Addiction – PewInternet, May 19
An interesting report by the Pew Internet has pointed out the possibility that the increasing use of gamification might lead to a sort of “gamification addiction”. Successful gamification relies on effective interaction with human reward pathways. Could the best gamification be abused by political and economic powers in the future and we become disposable players in a game to satisfy our gamification needs?
Image (CC) – by Frinthy
