We often mention the “art of gamification”, exploring how game mechanics, design, and dynamics can influence a viewer, motivating them intrinsically or extrinsically towards a desired goal. But determining the source of motivation is often difficult. By turning the phrase around and looking at the gamification of art, I hope to uncover how games, game mechanics, and…
The financial crisis has no doubt impacted us all. The direct results such as unemployment are often uncomfortably close, but the root causes remain distant and removed from our day-to-day lives. People blame Wall Street – innovation outpaced regulation, and financial institutions engaged in overly risky and even predatory behavior – but this also ignores the part each…
Gamification has largely focused on ways to play while you are at work, but what about getting to work in the first place? Regular work commutes are unpredictable, occasionally dangerous, and often overly stressful. An unimaginable number of variables are involved in the simple act of getting to-and-from work, and because of our car culture of hermetically sealed…
Historically, games have focused on competition. Gambling, video games, board games, and athletic sports are often defined by having a winner. On Forbes a few weeks ago, author Haydn Shaughnessy looked at the rise of gamification and the return of game-like competition to the workplace. According to him, too many corporations focus solely on collaboration…
by Kevin Shane and Jeff Lopez On the first month in gamification, we held the inaugural Gamification Summit in San Francisco, kicking off a year that has proven to be an exciting one for the industry as a whole. From funding rounds, to innovative products, to analysis and predictions, 2011 has seen the acceleration of…
Gamification may be buzzing, but it hasn’t quite made the mainstream yet. In conversations outside the industry, it is still common to receive puzzled looks and even a few scoffs when “games” are mentioned in the same breath as business. Despite these holdouts, the future looks bright. “The Future of Gaming” is a recent report…
Gamification has made its way across multiple industries in just the past few years. The process of adding game mechanics to engage users and solve problems has been seen within health, hospitality, business, and education. Although there have been a few offline applications of gamification–one of my favorites being the immersive budgeting games through Innovation…
Ever wondered what plant rooted itself in your garden, or what strange bug somehow survived the bitter cold outside to call your house its home? Or maybe on vacation to warmer reaches, you came across a disturbingly large insect? Some might run the other way, but if you are like me, you’re asking “what the…
CNN recently announced that they fired a swath of employees. Now the global news organization has rolled out new features for their citizen journalist platform, iReport in order to make up for the loss in coverage. The features include the first of many badges that aim to encourage users to contribute pictures and footage of news…
I’ve done a lot of traveling. Although I am often a picture-taking tourist hopping from one site to the next in rapid succession, one of my favorite things to do is hear the stories and learn about the local rhythms of wherever I am. There is no substitute for immersion, but it usually takes more than the one…
With a new gamification offering, Spigit, a company specializing in using social technology and the power of crowds, looks use a game to engage their customers while at the same time generating new ideas. Unlike being forced to sit through Nicholas Cage’s film of the same name, Spigit’s FaceOff offers consumers the chance to be brand consultants and…
Late last week, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA, it’s like DARPA for spies) announced a new contract of $10.5 million to develop “serious games” that include training for US intelligence officers. Along side projects designing the future of silicon chips and predicting the future by analyzing public information, the new program, dubbed the…
In the past, I have been surprised to come across a number of people working on gamification that have never designed games and don’t play them regularly. Luckily, there are also people like Tony Ventrice who works at Badgeville and is a veteran game designer. In the past, he has made games with Playdom and…
The recognition of gamification is growing, and growing quickly. The question is, is it growing too fast? According to Gartner, the movement is somewhere near the top of the hype cycle, which means that there still needs to be some disillusionment before gamification enters its productive phase. MIT’s Technology Review today released an interview with Yahoo researcher,…
This past week has seen the release of a flurry of articles around the web that highlight the business side of gamification. Following an updated announcement by Gartner that 70% of the Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified app by 2014, authors have raced to demonstrate how it has already taken hold in many different…
