Many moons ago, I wrote a piece on Feedback Loops a system used in games to help balance or unbalance a system. Whilst I was designing the boards for my gamification inspiration cards I started playing around with the idea of activity loops. These are essentially the same idea as feedback loops, but rather than balancing or unbalancing a system, they are used to encourage a user along a desired path of activity. They do not make it easier or harder to achieve my goal, they encourage the user to achieve a goal.
Gamify your drive home
One of the day to day activities that I gamify in my life, is driving. More specifically, driving economically. Best of all, you don’t need to have some expensive gamified car (like the leaf) or any apps.
My car, like most now, has an on-board computer. I have this set to always show me my current miles per gallon (MPG). The game that I play with myself revolves around keeping the MPG number as high as possible. I do this by basically driving sensibly. Not having the air-con on all the time, being in the right gear etc. It is a very simple bit of gamification that revolves around two basic mechanics. Feedback and reward.
Gamification Inspiration Cards
Introduction | About the cards | Want to buy a deck? | More ways to play
Introduction
I don’t know what it is, but I love cards. I think it stems from my parents, who were avid Bridge players. We always had several decks Bridge cards lying around. I like how they feel in your hand, how they smell, how they sound as you shuffle them. When I first discovered that people had been producing sets of cards for everything from project management to game design and of course gamification, I was a happy man! I own several of these kinds of decks now and love them all.
Gamification User Types: Free Spirits
I thought I would dig into some of the User Types a little more deeply from time to time. This week I would like to look at Free Spirits – as they have been causing a little confusion for some.
These types are looking for autonomy and some form of freedom, both of “movement” and expression, in your system. This can come in several forms, but for our purposes I want to concentrate on two main variations of our Free Spirit.
[inlinetweet tweeter=”daverage” suffix=”#gamification”]Free Spirits want to explore your system or change it in some way [/inlinetweet]
What if they don’t want to play?
One of the questions I get asked all the time is,
“What if people just don’t want to play your game? How do you engage them?”.
The answer comes in two parts, both as important as each other. One you may not like, but you have to accept it!
The first is, make sure you have designed the system properly. If you have just added some badges and a leaderboard, then you are going to engage a very small number of people for any length of time. Consider looking at the User Types and design more to support them. People often say that people don’t engage with gamification because gamification is bad. The truth is that many gamification designers are bad – and so they create bad gamification. This is true of any industry and especially new technology, just think how wrong most companies got social media at the beginning!