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.

4 part SAMR Model to Analyse Gamification

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SAMR for Gamification Examples 4 part SAMR Model to Analyse Gamification

I love coming up with new models and frameworks, I find them really handy and hope that when I share them that others do as well. However, I am also a great believer in not reinventing the wheel!

Recently I happened to see a comment from one of my favourite people on Twitter, Alice Keeler, that mentioned something called the SAMR model. Now, knowing that Alice is an awesome thought leader in the education space, I knew this was probably a model I wanted to look up – and I was right.

What is SAMR?

SAMR stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition. It is a model that is used in education to analyse and validate the potential of new technology in the classroom.  They idea is that you put the new technology in question, into one of these four categories. Read More ...

Randomness, Serendipity and Gamification

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Random 1415617109 Randomness Serendipity and Gamification

Recently I have been trying to write a few games, just for fun, with my daughter. There area  couple of card games and I am trying to make a single player board game.

Making a game with a 7 year old is an interesting experience. I got asked to go into her room as she had a new game she wanted to play. She had made a game board with LEGO. You had to get from one end to the other, with certain bricks having modifier effects on the game (move faster, move slower etc). She said I could go first, so I asked “how do we decide how many spaces to move?”. I expected a dice or something, but no. Her answer was “just pick a number between one and ten”! Read More ...

Game Mechanics in Gamification – Revisited

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Mechanics 1415029772 Game Mechanics in Gamification 8211 Revisited

Many moons ago I wrote about a massive misunderstanding in gamification around game mechanics and what they actually are. There were several lists around that said they were key game mechanics, which turned out to be very little to do with actual mechanics. Fast forward almost 2 years and, well it is getting better, but there is still a lot of people getting it confused. That is easily done as even in game design circles there is an argument over what they truly are, but there is a general high level agreement at least. As I summarised in my post: Read More ...

Using fantasy in gamification

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Fantasy 1414758630 Using fantasy in gamification

Fantasy is not the sort of thing that most companies would think of first when they wanted to motivate and engage employees. It sounds a little too un-worky.

If I have learned anything over the years though, fantasy is essential if you want people to break out of standard ways of thinking. Fantasy is a safe place for peoples minds to dream, create and explore ideas.   It is a place where they can make mistakes without fear of punishments, where they can be someone else who is potentially braver or totally different from themselves. Great innovations can come from daydreams, imagine the power you could harness by facilitating this mentality! Read More ...

Have a Batman break to keep motivated.

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Batman and mug Have a Batman break to keep motivated

Last Friday, I began a little experiment – Batman’s big day out.

It was the start of a series of little bits of fun I will be capturing and putting up on social media, following the story of my little LEGO Batman figure.

Now, the point is I wanted to have a bit of fun on my Friday and possibly bring a little to my friends along the way. A question that came up though was

“Have you no work to do?”.

The answer was – of course I do. However, the total time take on Friday to do this was about 30 minutes. As I work with a VDU, I am meant to have a break every hour. If I smoked, it would be acceptable to take 45 minutes or more a day for smoking breaks. So is 30 minutes of something that I enjoyed, kept me motivated, was creative, brought joy to others and helped increase social media traffic for me that day a bad thing? Of course not – and I am not giving myself or anyone else cancer having a Batman break! Read More ...