GSummit 2013 Day 1: Mario Herger Enterprise Workshop Edition

GSummit’s Enterprise Workshop: Everything you Need to Know to Get Started with Gamification

Hello and a warm welcome from San Francisco! We are proud to announce that GSummit SF 2013 has kicked off successfully!

Today was the first day of events and it was specially tailored for companies looking to earn a GSummit gamification certification. This certification is used as proof that you have gone through training of how to implement gamification properly to fit your and/or your clients’ business objectives. Both workshops focus on the core ideas of identifying your users and understanding what game concepts best motivate/engage them.

This year, we held two certification workshops:

1) Enterprise Workshop ran by Mario Herger (SAP Enterprise Gamification Expert)

2) Advanced Workshop ran by Gabe Zichermann (The man, the myth, the legend)

A Summary of Mario’s Enterprise Workshop

Innovation is bringing things that have nothing in common together. This is the philosophy that is shared among both workshops, but Mario’s expertise in driving community engagement is what specializes his talk towards enterprise gamification. Not only are your consumers one community, but the workplace creates a tight-knit “family” community. How can you gamify the workforce?

Mario first focuses on how to understand employee motivation and relates it to the concept that “play is manipulation that indulges curiosity.” Breaking it down by gender first, he claims that men tend to compete when there is any chance of winning, but women compete when there is a high chance. Making motivation more abstract to roles, he claims that there are 8 dimensions to any player: social role, professional role, skill level, player type, generation, gender, playing style, culture. For example–focusing on skill level–gamification can be used to excite rookies (onboarding) into further engagement (skill building) to achieve competence in skills (mastery).

Focusing on the implementation of engagement, he showed a video of how SAP uses Crytek’s Cry Engine 3 (same engine used for the popular EA game Crysis 3) to leverage CRM. The result was, as Sascha Goto–an attendee–says, “Really looked like a Sim City type game!” By using high-end graphics and an user interface, the act of navigating through CRM databases was made FUN–which is the ultimate goal of any gamification design. For other examples, he cites how Angry Bird’s game mechanics are engaging and he also explained how board games such as Chutes and Ladders can give insight into successful gamified applications.

As an exercise, he asked the audience to “mash-up” an entertainment show (TV, movie, etc.) with a video game in order to practice the same strategy SAP uses when drawing inspiration from Chutes and Ladders. One example that was derived was to use Tamagotchi’s step-by-step mechanics to encourage students to actively participate in their online classes.

My favorite idea Mario states is the idea of IZOF: Idividual Zone of Optimal Functioning. Similar to the concept of flow, Mario says that when a player is in his/her IZOF, competition is much more effective.

On completion of either workshop, attendees are encouraged to submit their project proposals to Engagement Alliance in order to obtain an official design certificate.

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