Andrzej Marczewski

Gamification Expert, author, consultant and designer. I love to write about it, talk about it and bore people to death with it! If you really want to get to know me, check out the About page.

SOAP Atoms: Designing Stories That Help People Keep Going

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File 0000000060c471f7af5871767d4180cc 1 SOAP Atoms Designing Stories That Help People Keep Going

Narrative is one of those things people love to overcomplicate. Give someone the word “story” and they immediately reach for epic arcs, heroes, destinies, and some poor character being forced to fundamentally transform themselves by Act Three. That’s all very well if you’re writing films, but it’s far less helpful if you’re designing experiences for real people, in real contexts, on real days where they’re tired, distracted, and just trying to get through.

Over the years, I’ve talked a lot about Narrative Atoms and the Soap Hero’s Journey. They came from the same place: a frustration with big, monolithic narratives that look great on slides and fall apart the moment they meet reality. Read More ...

The Measurement Manifesto

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File 000000007f7071f4af629c99cc1ba1a1 The Measurement Manifesto

Whilst I was working on the Dynamic Narrative Analytics  framework, I started writing this little manifesto. I thought I’d share it with you.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t trust it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t learn from it. If you can’t explain it, you can’t justify it.

Failure so often starts when opinion is presented as evidence and instinct is defended as proof. “I think” gets conflated with “I know” long before it earns that right. Real progress is a transition. From I think, to I know, to you know and you trust that I know. That transition does not come from more data. It comes from the right data and better measurement. Read More ...

The Cost of Cute: When Your Gamification Stops Serving Its Purpose

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File 000000001fd871f5b26dee2f9781c1d1 The Cost of Cute When Your Gamification Stops Serving Its Purpose

Recently my friend David Chandross wrote a great post about how serious games often miss their purpose, becoming more game than serious if you will. That it’s becoming less and less about the learning. That inspired me to reemphasise something I wrote about a while back.

Gamification should help people do things better. That’s it. But somewhere along the way, too many designers decided that the point was to make people play their systems, rather than benefit from them.

It’s easy to spot. You open an app or a training program and you’re immediately pulled into some shiny loop of collecting things, hitting targets, and chasing streaks. The problem is, you’re no longer learning or improving, you’re just playing. The system has become the goal. Read More ...

Your Cart Abandoned You For a Reason

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File 00000000567061f78d6f984ee44b7b41 Your Cart Abandoned You For a Reason

Abandoned cart emails are one of those things that sound almost too obvious. Someone puts a shiny new kettle in their basket, forgets about it, and you gently nudge them a day later with an email that says: “Hey, you forgot something.” Simple. Effective. And for retailers, often the lowest-hanging fruit on the tree.

But then, a few days later, things get weird. Suddenly, the kettle has developed friends. Now your inbox is full of toasters, microwaves, sandwich makers, and possibly even a smug little milk jug. Somewhere in the retailer’s system, a switch has been flipped from “remind” to “relentless.” Read More ...

Dynamic Narrative Analytics: Turning Player Data Into a Playable Story

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Dna2 Dynamic Narrative Analytics Turning Player Data Into a Playable Story

One of the greatest lies we’ve told ourselves in gamification (and business in general) is that numbers speak for themselves. They don’t.

Numbers sit there, mute and smug, like a cat perched on a bookshelf—daring you to make sense of them. And like a cat, they’ll let you project whatever meaning you want onto them… until you get scratched.

That’s where Dynamic Narrative Analytics (DNA) comes in.

This isn’t about algorithms. It’s not about drowning in dashboards. It’s about recognising that every dataset tells a story—and if you don’t write the story, someone else will (probably in PowerPoint, with clip art). Read More ...