October 4, 2026
Headlines

2013

The Goldman Sachs NYC Scavenger Hunt for Charity

Alex Landa35 mins

With the simple rules “do not tamper with the clues” and “no private motorized transport”, 20 Goldman Sachs employee teams armed with bubble gum cards, a seating chart for Kevin Bacon’s wedding, a plastic cube, and a three-stanza poem all competed to win the scavenger hunt Midnight Madness.

Originally founded in 1996 by Mat Laibowitz and his Columbia University friend Dan Michaelson, these teams of NYC based financiers and some of their friends took to the streets to decipher clues to win the hunt – all for charity. For almost two days, these contestants live in their own reality solving puzzles that would make even Sherlock Holmes or the most hardened gamer cringe.

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employees accept gamification

6 Tips for Getting Employees to Accept Your Gamification System

Gal Rimon36 mins

Julie has recently been hired to a global sales team, she is eager to prove her worth. She keeps receiving countless emails letting everyone know her new co-workers are being awarded badges and accumulating points in some way. When she tries to find out why she is getting all these public notifications that are clogging up her inbox, her manager tells her it’s some gaming platform his boss made him use – “it’s a mandate from up high, I had nothing to do with it”.

During lunch, her cubicle mate tells her that three months ago the company decided to implement a gaming platform announced with great fanfare by the higher ups, but since then the only thing that’s different is that they have a desktop app that gives them “meaningless points for meaningless actions”. Once her lunch break is over, she marks all the emails as spam.

Could this have turned out differently?

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wearedata watch dogs

Be a NSA Spy in this Promotion for The Watch Dogs Video Game

Ivan Kuo13 mins

Watch Dogs is Ubisoft’s big upcoming game about big data, government spying, unscrupulous agencies, and vigilantism set in the Windy City of Chicago. Amidst all the uncomfortably apt news of whistleblowing and Edward Snowden, creative agency Paris BETC has created a “hyped-connected” visualization tool that offers a way of seeing all the enormous amounts of data publicly available.

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gamification gurus

Are You a Gamification Guru? Join our Community Op-Ed Program!

Ivan Kuo72 mins

After seeing the results of the Top 40 Gamification Gurus leaderboard in the beginning of the month (I joined the list at #35!), it’s helped me really visualize the passionate people who are working in this industry, as well as the evangelists promoting the idea of engagement with fun design.

I’m certain most of the people on the list have thoughts, ideas, and great information to share with the gamification community and I would like to make these voices heard, which is why I am excited to announce the start of our Gamification Community Op-Ed Program!

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measuring the ROI of gamification

How to Measure the ROI of Gamification

Gal Rimon45 mins

Measuring ROI is an elusive task: you have external factors that affect the results; measuring the baseline is a subjective process; forecasting future impact is hard and even calculating the actual investment is a project by itself.

That said, one can measure almost anything (I recommend reading the book How to Measure Anything). There are testimonies of increased sales results after implementing gamification systems by 5-15%. But, I believe we need to dive in to understand how to analyze success.

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melvin greer gabe zichermann

Melvin Greer on Gamification in STEM, STEAM, and the Government

Ivan Kuo22 mins

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 Melvin Greer, Senior Fellow at Lockheed and Martin

Be sure to catch our next episode this Thursday, July 18 at 1PM ET/1800 GMT, where we feature Tim Chang of the Mayfield Fund (@timechange) as our next guest.

In this week’s episode, Gabe and Melvin dive deep into the developing work happening in teaching STEM and STEAM (the A is for Art) education initiatives. The audience also asks a number of great questions as it relates to learning, knowledge transference, and emerging tech in ed. Melvin also gets into the intricacies with government gamification initiatives and the challenges of their implementation.



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To learn more about gamification in ed and government, follow Melvin on Twitter at @Lead_Innovate. You can also learn about Melvin’s upcoming events and projects at MelvinGreer.com

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Project Spark Allows Players to Create Any World They Want

Alex Landa05 mins

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3 for short) is an annual event where developers showcase their latest electronic and gaming projects. Each year this event announces new video game consoles, games, and other media that are deserving of the big stage. Among this year’s presentation of the next round of console wars, shooters, sport games and RPGs, there was one announcement that stood out in the crowd as innovate to say the least: Project Spark.

Project Spark (PS) was a big part of Microsoft’s press conference at E3. The main concept behind PS is that players create their own worlds filled with characters, story, an evolving environment, or anything else they want.

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gamification revolution

Rajat Paharia discusses Loyalty 3.0 and the State of the Industry

Ivan Kuo01 mins

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 Bunchball Co-Founder, Rajat Paharia.

In Rajat’s second appearance on the show since December, he and Gabe talk about the book’s rise up the New York Times Best Seller List and have a deep discussion on the current shortcomings of the loyalty industry. What’s holding loyalty back now and what will it have to do to really sustain itself in the future? For more information on Rajat’s new book, check out Loyalty30.com. Watch the full video to find out:




Download this episode (right click and save)
In Rajat’s second appearance on the show since December, he and Gabe talk about the book’s rise up the New York Times Best Seller List and have a deep discussion on the current shortcomings of the loyalty industry. What’s holding loyalty back now and what will it have to do to really sustain itself in the future? Watch the full video to find out:

For more information on Rajat’s new book, check out Loyalty30.com

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Badgeville Rumored to Make Big Organizational Changes Since New CEO

Ivan Kuo22 mins
Things have been relatively quiet at Badgeville since new CEO, Ken Comée, stepped up to the plate back in April to lead the company but we recently received a tip that Badgeville is on its way to making some major organizational changes within the sales department. Comée has a strong track record in growing B2B companies, so this organizational shift is likely part of his strategy to move Badgeville forward.
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Vogue Raptor Easter Egg

Why You Should Have Easter Eggs like Vogue’s Hat-Touting Raptor

Ivan Kuo49 mins

“Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A,”

And boom: you’ve just earned yourself 30 lives because Contra for the NES was too damn hard. If you’ve never heard of any of these terms before, Contra is an notoriously difficult side-scrolling shooting game that was released back in 1988 on the Nintendo Entertainment System. The button combination above, known as the Konami Code, is a cheat that granted players 30 extra lives to progress through the hair-tearing game.

And in the case of Vogue’s UK website – this code does something awesome and you should have something similar for your own website.

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i-kifu

How Gamification is Finding Its Way into Japan’s NPO Sector with i-kifu

Heong Weng Mak012 mins

Since its first emergence of the word in 2010, the gamification movement has gained the attention of a wide range of audiences, reaching to all four corners the globe. From the corporate offices of America to the Streets of Hong Kong, gamification has made an impact in people’s daily life. Speaking of making an impact, non-profit organizations are realizing the potential gamification could be used as a tool for change and a organization called i-kifu based in Tokyo, Japan is aiming to do just that. Gamification Co had the opportunity to interview i-kifu founder, Nhat Vuong to talk about his web-based platform.

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earn your wings foodie badge

Earn Your Wings: Air Canada’s Successful Gamification Venture into Loyalty

Gabe Zichermann211 mins

There’s little question that the loyalty “industry” has an innovation problem. With few exceptions, the world’s largest loyalty programs (mostly in travel, finance and retail) are mostly the same as they were 20 years ago. Social, mobile, gamification have struggled to find a footing, even as they are the entire foundation of next-gen loyalty systems such as those developed by Square, Belly or any number of gamified providers. With so much inertia and torpor, it’s easy to give up on traditional loyalty providers when it comes to innovation…but perhaps the old dog has a few tricks left.

A few weeks ago, through a social sharing post by a friend (this data point will be crucial), I came upon a new promotion run by Air Canada, called Earn Your Wings. The program created a leaderboard of top flyers during the promotional period that were ranked based on a range of activities. These included, but weren’t limited to, miles flown and were supported by a series of badges awarded for different activity loops. Top players split a large pot of 10 million miles at the end of the promotion period, and that activity seemed especially fierce, which is what really excited me.

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