July 30, 2026
Headlines

Jeff Lopez

Hopskoch Promises a New Take on Platforms

Jeff Lopez05 mins

Hopskoch is a new social interaction platform for publishers and marketers looking to attract, cultivate and retain brand enthusiasts. It was released a few weeks ago by the developer, Sifr, a startup out of New York. Hopskoch makes it easy for a mainstream web and mobile audience to interact with each other and the brands they love through a language of fun photo-taking games and storytelling. The platform already has a growing community of players, and I sat down with Sunil Madhu and Marty Monaco, Sifr’s founders, to talk about the motivations behind the play.

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Click to Participate – Games in Government

Jeff Lopez311 mins

According to Jen Pahlka, founder and Executive Director of Code for America, trust in government is at an all time low except amongst a single demographic: Millennials. This may seem odd, as our generation is typically seen either in a never ending text conversation, wasting time on Facebook, battling friends on Call of Duty, or clicking on cows in FarmVille. But I see these elements as something different. I believe our “wastes of time” have the ability to make our generation into the most participatory generation in the past two-thousand years. As Pahlka puts it, “it’s not that Millennials think the government works now, it’s that they think they can remake the government in their image”. In line with this idea, collaboration and participation through social media is becoming an integral part of the Government 2.0 movement, and I see games as the next step in the process.

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Motivating Learning Beyond Grades

Jeff Lopez18 mins

Education in the United States is in dark times. Although we are one of the richest nations in the world, based upon international testing, our 9th graders are 28th in math, 22nd in science, and 18th in reading. Of course standardized testing as a measurement receives its fare share of criticism, but an even more insidious culprit in America’s…

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The Motivations of EpicWin

Jeff Lopez19 mins

We are kicking off our coverage of the GDC with a bit of EpicWin, a productivity app developed by independent developer, Supermono Studios. EpicWin was the pet project of Tak Fung, an independent game designer that came out of Lionhead Studios, developer Black & White and Fable. Some projects similar to EpicWin include MindBloom, and we previously covered EpicWin in October last year. Since then, the app has entered the top 100 productivity apps on iTunes, and Tak has received a number of requests from schools and businesses that want the app to be implemented. Even smokers are using it to quit, or as Tak says, its “insane because people are just getting addicted” to the game instead.

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Reworking the Fitness Game

Jeff Lopez88 mins

Ed Note: We’re initiating coverage today on the Gamification of Health, the most requested topic among our readers and a subject of extraordinary importance to us at Gamification.Co. Feel free to send us your article suggestions. – Gabe Zichermann Full-service gyms are currently going through hard times in the US. According to a recent New…

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