As a lifelong gamer I’ve always considered video game mechanics to be in a league of their own. I find gaming to create a sense of interaction and engagement not found in other media. Whether it’s an experience point system such as seen in a role-playing game (RPG) or an acquired ability to problem solve from a puzzle game, there’s something special about gaming that appeals to our emotions to make us invested in a story or idea.
When I first heard of gamification I was working at a big data internship with Infosys in Bangalore, India. My mentor explained it to me as “bringing games to the world to drive creativity, production, and behavior change.” I remember calling my parents shortly after to tell them, “Remember all those hours I spent playing Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario, Metroid, and FIFA. Well, I don’t think it is fair for you to yell at me anymore for wasting my time. Have you heard of gamification? Well let me tell you about it…..”
Today Foursquare announced a new round of debt-based financing amounting to $41M in loans and convertible notes. It has been controversial, because debt-based financing suggests the company has a significant performance problem (Jason Gelman has a good wrap-up of the spirited discussion). Foursquare’s problem has become increasingly clear to Gamification folks over the past two years – it’s just not fun anymore. In the transition from a (great) game to a (good) loyalty program to a (mediocre) recommendations engine, they lost the plot, alienated customers and wasted a ton of resources and time.
Grabbing the attention of potential customers can supply a continuous flow of revenue for many businesses while improving productivity. Applying gamification techniques and methods is a great way to encourage customers to visit and to stay for new content, products, or services.
Badgeville has announced on their blog that former Cast Iron Systems CEO, Ken Comée will be stepping up to replace Kris Duggan as the company’s new CEO. Former CEO and co-founder, Kris Duggan will transition to be the company’s Chief Strategy Officer and remain on the board of directors.
Community planning meetings are often times an unpleasant experience for any potential attendees. Participants occasionally have to deal with long-winded formal proceedings, dull meetings and repetitive discussion points just to put forth their personal inputs on key issues. In short, this traditional form of civic planning can be a rather inefficient and tedious process, which discourages local residents from actual engagement.
Now, what if there was a way to make civic planning not only simpler to participate but engaging as well? Designed by the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College (one of many labs across the US), Community PlanIt is a game that aims to get local citizens more involved with community planning.
In conjunction with the release of Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder’s newest book, The Gamification Revolution, also comes the release of ReadSocial App: the world’s first gamified social reading application by Dopa Labs
ReadSocial App creates social communities around books, allowing readers to connect directly with authors, discuss hot topics from the book, and deepen their understanding about the book’s ideas.
Back in 2011 (Wow, has it really been that long?), Gamification pundits Gabriel Zichermann and Sebastian Deterding had a large debate on various gamification concepts.
One of Deterding’s critiques was that, contrary to what Zichermann wrote in his book Gamification by Design, Serious Games and Advergames should not be considered as Gamification.
Adobe and Delta Air Lines both use gamification to drive engagement with their products, which in turn produces a kind of learning and subsequent new behavior for the engaged users. Learning is taking place in this regard but Adobe and Delta have managed to use gamification for an even higher level of learning.
Rather than creating general classes for learning, Adobe and Delta have successfully been able to use games to train people for tasks they want to accomplish and they will both be represented at GSummit 2013 to discuss their training games.
To think, there are still people who say gaming isn’t good for education; try saying that to universities with game labs.
Gamification is a powerful tool that can make the educational experience not only more fun, but more effective as well. Because of the increasing number of successful game labs, more universities are looking to tap into the power of games to reap the rewards from social and interactive learning.
If you’re into minor league baseball and in the quaint area of Lehigh Valley between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, you’ll have a golden opportunity to play some games in the men’s bathroom of the IronPigs’ Coca-Cola Park.
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 SAP Senior Innovation Strategist, Mario Herger. In this week’s episode, Gabe and Mario discuss the challenges involved with designing gamification for employees in a corporate environment, especially when they’re forced to use it.
Be sure to catch a special episode tomorrow at 1PM EST with Gabe Zichermann as he discusses the release of his newest book also titled The Gamification Revolution
Bitcoin — the buzzy virtual currency that’s focused on privacy — continues to gain major traction. For some time you’ve been able to pay for games (or a hitman), invest your earnings and speculate on Bitcoins. In recent days, it’s become possible to use the world’s first Bitcoin ATM and pay your employees in Bitcoins. In short, Bitcoin is angling to be the first broadly accepted virtual currency not issued by a nation-state.
A new study shows that employers are increasingly relying on gamification to increase employee health engagement. According to Buck Constultants, 62% of employers consider gamification the most effective strategy in encouraging employees to improve their health and at least 31% will adopt at least one new health-related gamification strategy in the coming year.
As healthcare costs continue to rise, employers are facing new pressure to encourage employees to be proactive about their health. While there is still insufficient data to determine whether employee health incentive programs are actually saving companies money, it seems that most businesses are not waiting to find out.
The technology and business world has been abuzz with a new term– gamification, defined as the use of game elements in everyday scenarios in order to drive engagement and make work more interesting. This has been seen by some as a game changer (pun unintended) to make boring tasks fun & drive motivation, while others see it as a modern and web friendly extension of the ubiquitous reward and recognition techniques already being used by companies in some form or another.
But the question is, is it always going to be just about points and badges? The answer has to be an emphatic no. While points and badges have served admirably in terms of providing social recognition and motivation to millions of users already, their novelty is rubbing off, and incremental gains are dropping alarmingly.
