Part III: The Importance of Motivation This is the third part of an ongoing series on the role of gamification in modern education by Andrew Proto. If you missed them, catch up with “Part I: the Unique Obstacles Teachers Face” and “Part II:Technology’s Role in a Gamified Classroom.” Even the best teachers won’t be able…
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…
Last week I had the unexpected pleasure of keynoting the TIES conference in Minneapolis. The invitation came at the last minute when their scheduled keynote (the incomparable Jane McGonigal) fell ill. Luckily, the organizers reached me in time so I could make it to Minnesota, and because I had done a recently featured TEDx talk…
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…
We’re on a treasure hunt for the top potential gamification interns in NYC. Gamification is the process of using game mechanics and game thinking to engage users and to solve problems. Our role in this world involves our blog blog at gamification.co, a big conference called GSummit, global local meetups called GSummitX, and creative consulting….
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…
Awesome attendees and super engagement were the themes of the night at the first GSummitX meetup in NYC on November 30 at AOL Headquarters. When you put 45 people in a room, most of them strangers to one another, the level of engagement is generally networkish-y, but we got beyond and leveled up with this…
In the emergence of a new design discipline like Gamification, there are many successes and failures that contribute to the overall body of knowledge within the industry. In our case, the meme burst onto the scene so aggressively in 2010, that with some notable exceptions, most of us have been scrambling to simply put our…
We are hard at work preparing the next GSummit for Spring 2012 to be held in San Francisco. Some details are still to be determined, but we would like to invite you to join us in getting a head start to select the next round of creative and innovative individuals to take the stage at…
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…
Since the dawn of the blockbuster gamification industry, I’ve been compiling, distilling and summarizing design patterns and systems. The objective has always been to help people across diverse industries such as marketing, healthcare, education, consumer tech, CPG and others find common entry points to this exciting new design approach. Over the course of the last…
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…
In my lectures and workshops on Gamification, one of the topics that folks find most interesting is Choice Mechanics. In a nutshell, there are a wide range of possible frameworks for designing user choices within a system, but conventions (and research such as the awesome Tyranny of Choice) have revealed a few key patterns that…
