As the only conference to recognize excellence in gamification, GSummit SF 2013 has officially opened the 2013 GAwards for voting on the latest and greatest in engagement practices. The GAwards are meant to recognize outstanding achievements in engagement (from 2012) using loyalty, behavioral science and gamification. Through crowdsourced nominations and voting, you will decide who will be…
Endless poets have uttered something along the lines of “love is like a game.” So, instead of playing the game by hanging around bars and arguing about who did the dishes last night, PearHaven decided to gamify the entire process of dating. PearHaven is a social media infused website that incorporates a point system and dating…
“From zero to peak experience in thirty seconds flat – no wonder video games caught on. Never before in human history could this kind of optimal, emotional activation be accessed so cheaply, so reliably, so quickly.” This passage is taken from Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can…
Gamification.Co has a brand spanking new design! If you’re seeing this as a new reader then you should know that GCo has finally gotten a well-deserved refresh in its design since our first post in 2010. We have a number of new features to make your GCo experience much richer, like: The Gamification Buyer’s Guide…
Each week on the Gamification Revolution web show, Gabe Zichermann answers all your burning gamification questions LIVE every Monday at 1pm ET/10am PT/1800 GMT at http://gamification.co/live. This week’s show features Michael Hugos, Managing Principal at SCM Globe and Author of the book, Enterprise Games and a very special guest appearance by Hugos’ wife and cat. Here’s a rundown on some…
I recently wrote an article for my Huffington Post column about how to use gamification to raise voter turnout, called “Rethinking Elections with Gamification.” Dismayed by the huge expense of the US federal election and the continued abysmally low turnout among voters, I thought there has to be something we can do to improve a…
The Following is a Guest Post by Andris Rubins, Managing Director at DDB Latvia The Stockholm School of Economics is a business school in Riga, recognized by the Financial Times to be one of the finest in Europe. Ever since its inception in 1993, the School’s mission has been to facilitate economic growth in Baltics by educating…
Gamification opponents are often quick to point out the flaws in gamification, calling poorly designed experiences as “pointsification” with uninspired and non-additive game design elements in place. These are fair criticisms when the gamified experiences in question are indeed uninspired and non-additive. Such is the case when I noticed a sponsored Facebook ad by Target…
Recently we were asked by some readers to have a discussion about the “Ethics of Gamification,” and it wasn’t the first time we’ve been asked about this. I have avoided this question previously because I didn’t know where to start. When someone asks me “What about the ethics behind gamification?” The answer which comes to…
CAPTCHA is the bane of all user experiences on the internet. They’re somewhat effective at stopping spam-bots but they’re seemingly merciless at preventing humans from being able to read its cryptic text, even if they often do create hilarious unintended meanings. Nevertheless, a solution for this ancient security system is being developed by a new…
Using games in education can make learning more interesting and fun, but they also serve another purpose that is perhaps even more important–games teach us that it’s okay to fail. If you think about it, failure is an essential part of learning and growing, yet in so many educational environments failure is discouraged. In this commencement speech, educational…
I personally haven’t seen any real compelling uses for augmented reality outside of laggy “monocoles” to find restaurants and pretending to see a 3D shape on a checkered pattern. However an internal startup at Google called Niantic Labs, led by former Google director John Hanke, has come up with an augmented reality game called Ingress…
Mastering the mechanics and principles for effective implementation of gamification is no easy feat for any aspiring gamification experts. Yet, mastering the art of articulating and pitching gamification to one’s own organization can be daunting task for many. How does one successfully pitch gamification to their colleagues and upper management? Although the task ahead may…
Leaderboarded, a web application for community managers to “motivate their tribe” by creating an online leaderboard, has today announced a major employee gamification initiative at Capgemini — marking a major social collaboration between one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology, and outsourcing services and the social data startup seeking to rewrite the rules…
I love working to plan the speaker roster for GSummit every year. It’s tough, but incredibly rewarding. With the support of our amazing in-house team, the board and our community, we’ve been able to pull together a list of experts that continues to amaze and delight me each year since that first, sold-out talk by…
