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.

Web design, when did the rules change?

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When I first started in web design things were different. We only need to worry about HTML 4 and 2 browsers. We concentrated on quality of the content as that was pretty much all there easy. Content was front an centre.

Then flash came along. Suddenly we had a way to integrate really rich media and interaction in out web pages. With a tiny download, we could have cross platform compatible sites, that look the same in any browser and would deliver the same experience to all.

Then Steve jobs decided that Flash was bad and suddenly everyone jumped on his shity band wagon and started to get rid of flash. Instead they created a new version of HTML (because XHTML was too hard for them to follow) and instead of having to just download a tiny plugin, you had to totally change your browser to get things working. Read More ...

Gamification: Questions that keep me awake at night!

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1389645 14492518 Gamification Questions that keep me awake at night

This week there is no real blog post for you I’m afraid. I am in the middle of trying to produce a talk for next week and enjoying the Coursera Gamification course. Instead, here are some questions that I have spinning in my head that I would love to answer. Can any of you amazing gamification lovers out there give me your opinions? Maybe you have some burning questions to ask as well, add them to the comments.

  • Is gamification more behavioral psychology applied through the lens of a games designer or games design applied through the lens of a behavioral psychologist?
  • Are we spending so much time trying to define what can and can’t be included in gamification, that we are missing out lots of opportunity to just create great experiences using any and all tools we can?
  • Are short marketing campaigns that employ gamification really a bad thing?
  • Can everything be gamified in some way?
  • When will companies wanting to gamify things start employing games designers?
  • If you were to write a job description for a gamification person, what would you write?
  • Will we be talking about gamification in 5 years time?

One final thing, if you have not already filled it in, I would love to get your opinions on the definition of gamification with the public survey I am running! Read More ...

Gamification: What the Experts Think

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Gamification Gamification What the Experts Think

A few weeks ago, I sent out a short survey to about 15 people in the Gamification world. The idea was to get a some simple answers to questions I have pondered over time. I thought it would be fun to get them all to give answers to the exact same questions. Here are the first round of answers!

Massive thanks to the first run of responses – Scott Schnaars, Marigo Raftopoulos, Michael Wu, Mark Sorrell, Barry Kirk, Erika Webb, Steve Bocska, Jesse Schell, Scott Sinclair, Ivan Kuo,Toby Beresford, Anthony Williams Read More ...

Where has the Courage gone in the Games Industry?

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Big y Where has the Courage gone in the Games Industry

As we begin to enter the world of the next gen of games consoles, I was reminded of a post I wrote for my games site Yet Another Review Site in November last year and thought it was worth a repost!

People often ask where the innovation has gone in the games industry. I have been guilty of it on the past. In fact, this article was going to be titled with that exact question.

Innovation is alive and kicking – but where is the courage?

However, the more I drafted the piece and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that innovation is still alive and kicking in our industry, albeit sometimes quietly. What is missing now is courage. Read More ...

Does fun have a place in Gamification – Video Blog

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Gamification Does fun have a place in Gamification 8211 Video Blog

Hi all. Well, this is my first try at a video blog. It took far to many goes and as you can see, the version I had to go with has terrible lighting and a really bad angle. (This is due to a lack of Malteser boxes to balance the iPhone on – true story!). In this 9 minute video, I explore the role of fun in gamification – as I currently see it. Let me know if you like this format and I will see if I can do more of them in the future.

The Script. I kind of stuck to it!

Hi, and welcome to this, my first video blog. Thanks for watching and if you are a regular reader of my blog, thanks again! For the rest, the address is at the bottoms of the screen. Read More ...