Gamification

What You Want vs What You Need

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Jujitsu What You Want vs What You Need

My JuJitsu instructor always used to say,

“I’ll teach you what you need, not what you want”

This always struck me as a fabulous way to look at teaching in general and one that I used myself as a JuJitsu instructor, mentor and everything else I have done that involved passing information to others.

Getting what you want is very rarely as important as getting what you need. In fact, getting what you need more often that not allows you to then earn what you want. In martial arts, like most things, you need the foundations, the boring things. The form work, the katas, the hours and hours of repetitive grind. The same is true in games. You need to get the basics before you can do the interesting things. You may not want to do them, the tutorial level is often not the most exciting, but you need them to be able to then go on and do what you want to do in the rest of the game. Read More ...

Learning From Games: Candy Crush and Soda Saga

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Candy Crush Saga from King games is one of the worlds most played games, boasting 93 million daily players at one point! I have always avoided it, but my wife has been into it for years. Finally, when she was explaining a level on the spin-off game Soda Saga, I cracked and downloaded it.

For those that don’t know, Candy Crush and Soda Saga are a genre of puzzle game called “Match 3”, first popularised by Bejewelled (though Shariki was actually the first). The basic concept sees you start with a board full of colourful tokens and you must swap two around that are next to each other to form rows of three.  Create a row of three and they disappear, moving all of the other tokens around. Read More ...

Risk and Reward in Gamification

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Recently I have been playing a game called Punch, Punch, Kick, Punch (PPKP). It is a simple mobile game that only requires 2 buttons to play. One is kick, one is punch. As you play, you have to learn how to time the use of these buttons and the combinations that are most effective against certain foes. The reason I mention it is because it has one of the simplest examples of risk and reward in a game I have seen for a while.

What is risk and reward I hear you cry.. or maybe not, but I’ll explain anyway. It is the idea that if the more you are willing to risk, the higher the reward might be. For instance, the more lotto tickets you buy, the more chance you have of winning – but it costs more, the risk is higher as you have spent more. Read More ...

Reward Excellence not Mediocrity and Expectation

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When designing a reward system, it is easy to be tempted to reward everything!

  • “Hey, you clicked on a button – woot”.
  • “Awesome, you clicked that button twice, go you!”
  • “OMG, you clicked that button 10 times now, you are the button king – have the button king badge!!!!!”

The trouble with this is it devalues rewards very quickly. I have written in depth about rewards and badges before, so won’t go into it here. What I want to put over in this short post, is the need to reward the right things and congratulate others.

Take my daughters school and a previously mentioned issue I have around them rewarding kids for attendance.  100% attendance = a  reward of no homework for a week and a certificate. The issue here is the children being rewarded are 99% of the time not in control of their attendance. It is down to illness or parents taking them out of school for various reasons. It also highlights those who are unable to maintain 100% for reasons out of their control and could turn the class against them. Read More ...

Optimal Experience in Gamification

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In gamification, we often speak about Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow, a quick search of my site will bring up more than few posts on the topic. However, as I have pointed out before, we are not really talking about Flow but rather “Optimal Experience”.

We speak about one very specific part of Flow, that of balancing challenge against skill. As a quick refresher, one of the key conditions for Flow to occur is the perceived level of challenge must not exceed or fall below the persons perceived level of skill. If it exceeds it, the person will become frustrated at the difficulty. If it falls below, they will quickly become bored. Read More ...

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