Employee engagement if often one of the most overlooked aspects of business management. Indeed, while there has always been a heavy emphasis on keeping customers interested in interacting with the business, there is often no talk of how to keep employees themselves enthusiastic about what they are doing. And this is definitely not going to be good, as employees’ lack of enthusiasm will undoubtedly affect their performance. So, how do you bring back their interest?
It’s hard to overstate the popularity of fantasy sports. Many Americans spend considerable amounts of time tweaking their assembled teams of athletes in a virtual competition against other players. They do it out of the fun they have in researching their teams, competing against colleagues, and hopefully, winning their leagues. Many companies have tried to tap into elements of sports competition as a way of driving their employees to work harder or meet targets with varying degrees of success. One of them, Wireless Zone, which is the largest independent Verizon Wireless franchise in the United States, found its employee engagement solution through an application that takes its cue from the same motivations that make fantasy sports both popular and engaging.
Games in education are nothing new. Because of their strategic nature that they share with subjects such as math, reading and writing, games have been used in the K-12 curriculums for decades. What is new is the use of a specific type of game for these subjects: the video game. This is especially the case with language arts. Like comic books, video games (including computer or PC games) in language arts curriculum have been controversial over whether they’re appropriate learning tools. This is because of the violent and seemingly trivial subject matter that video games have been stereotyped with. Besides this, its very graphic nature, moving pictures, has connoted the video game to be as mind-numbing as television has typically been made to seem. Like TV, the video game has been turned into an enemy of the traditionally more academic medium: the book. But these stereotypes are being broken more and more each day. Video games are showing capability of teaching the necessary literacy skills kids need to survive both in their studies and in the workplace later in life.
With gas prices finally coming down, it’s a great summer for a family road trip. Offering nearly 400 destinations across every state in the union, US National Parks not only provide an economical vacation option, they can also provide a fun and rewarding set of challenges for visitors. Collecting badges existed long before Foursquare came…
Starcraft II teaches game theory and multivariable calculus. World of Warcraft gives insight to instructors on how they should structure the classroom environment. Minecraft has even become mandatory in a Swedish school’s curriculum as it teaches urban engineering concepts. To add to this growing list of games for education, Emory PhD Student Samantha Allen has incorporated Halo into her lesson plans for teaching intersectional theories of oppression for her Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) introductory course. This is what I would call an interesting juxtaposition as it bridges the gap between the macho Halo protagonist, Master Chief with sensitive global issues of rights and accessibility to all.
Gamification was a hot topic at this years Games For Change. Former Vice President Al Gore kicked off the 8th Annual Games for Change Festival in NYC with a presentation about global warming that included a little bit of game talk. There is no doubt that he knows what “gamification” is—he said the word 3…
What if instead of having 1 card for all your different loyalty systems (a la Belly) you could just have 1 universal currency for all your digital transactions?
Bitcoins are taking the world by storm – an alternate currency that changes the dimensions of privacy, interaction and value management for consumers everywhere. But how can bitcoins be leveraged for loyalty, engagement and gamification? Join Patrick Murck , General Counsel of the Bitcoin Foundation for this eye-opening and insightful GSummit SF 2013 talk on one of the most important innovations in finance.
Want more GSummit videos? Be sure to also subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the latest videos from GSummit SF 2013 as they’re released. You can also download a copy of this presentation by downloading it here.
San Francisco based startup Kiip has just secured a deal with UK-based sushi chain Yo! Sushi for Kiip’s mobile rewards network. The rewards network has been very successful so far, having gotten a recent $11M Series B funding and this partnership would mark Kiip’s first entry into the international market. Kiip’s current strategy has lent itself very well…
Last time, we featured senior user experience designer, Dr Joerg Niesenhaus from Centigrade GmbH to discuss his team’s recent project in gamifying industrial production process for a large production facility. As a user experience service provider, Joerg’s team was invited by clients from the mechanical and plant engineering to improve their customized production environment.
Watch the full interview below to learn about:
The motivational challenges and consequences of failure faced by industrial assembly line production process.
How the team negotiated and managed expectation with management and collective bargaining units of the worker council.
The thought process in developing a scoring system to challenge and motivate the various production teams.
How the team find its early testers and subsequent advocates to champion for new process changes.
Was there difficulty in convincing the company’s leadership to give this approach a try and the post implementation reaction.
How did the team addressed different user-profiles and the research-process to determine clustering.
We were very happy to have Francisco Schnaas join us at GSummit this year. Below are his bio, video and slides from GSummit SF 2014: Francisco Schnaas is President at Club Premier, Mexico’s leading coalition loyalty program. He is responsible for the travel related partnerships of the program, as well as for the reward portfolio for…
If you joined us for GSummit SF 2013, then you’ve clearly seen how awesome our community is, amidst of sea of brilliant experts, food trucks, and a gamified conference experience. It is our job here at Gamification Co to proliferate the latest and greatest knowledge about the gamification industry, so we’re finally going to begin releasing all of our videos from GSummit SF 2013 over the next few weeks.
We’ll be posting each of the new releases on our blog but if you want to get each of them immediately, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get each video as they come.
To kick off the first video we’re releasing, we want to share a story about engaging audiences with a real sense of purpose. Jeremy Heimans, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of…Purpose, shares his story about using narrative storytelling to transform engagement for corporations, non-profits and citizens with integrity and purpose.
Stay tuned as we release more videos every week! Also, if you’re interested in seeing a particular speaker on GSummit, sound off in the comments below!
Groundbreaker is a gamified stockmarket of potential startups. It’s the bridge between good ideas and real profitable businesses. A simple and effective tool to quickly develop your ideas and have fun! It’s innovation for all. By definition, the word “groundbreaker” means “a person who is an originator, innovator, or pioneer in a particular activity”. But, from…
The challenge of monetization is about more than dollars and cents – it is about continuously enhancing the user experience. Many developers steer clear of monetization solutions, fearing that they will turn off users and cause drops in retention and engagement rates.
However, when ads are presented as personalized they can have favorable implications for user experience and engagement. Below, I will share some data that demonstrates a positive correlation between the implementation of such ads and an increase in overall engagement.
In order to provide some context, PaeDae is a premium ad network that leverages a “reward ad spec” to help app developers monetize. One of the biggest contributors to our success is our commitment to ensuring that reward ads look native, and blend seamlessly into a user’s overall game or app experience.
Gamification platform Badgeville today announced a second round of funding for $12 million. Founded in September of last year, Badgeville has accelerated quickly by bringing in 75 clients from a range of industries. Deloitte, NBC Universal, and Discovery have already produced some great case studies in gamification. The Series B includes investments from Norwest Ventures…
Jim Banister (CEO of Spectrum DNA), Michael Dowling and Zak Kirchner (CEO and Contributing Analyst for Interpret, respectively) have collaborated on the report “gCommerce: The Gamification of eCommerce” that was released last month It’s purpose is to explain how the idea of the “gamer” is changing, how they shop and what it means for business….
