Gamification

The Trouble With Types

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Type Lenses 1 page The Trouble With Types

Player Types and User Types, I’m not gonna lie, I love ’em. I imagine that is obvious considering I have spent so long making my own!

However, it’s time for a bit of a tidy up of misconceptions about types –  a misconception my love of them may even have helped to perpetuate.

Misconceptions

Bartle has 4 Player Types

Actually, he has 8. He realised there were limitations and duality in his 4 types, so he created a set of 8 that accounted for this. https://mud.co.uk/richard/selfware.htm

Everyone is Just One Type

No matter what model or taxonomy you use, the likelihood is this is just not true. We probably display all types in our personality, just in different amounts and in different contexts (more on that in a moment) Read More ...

Keeping it Real in Fantasy Worlds

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A Game of Rules

Richard Bartle recently raised a really interesting point about certain fantasy based shows and games after watching Game of Thrones. His complaint was that even in fantasy worlds, there need to be rules and those rules need to be stuck to. Anything that is not explained by the new fantasy rules of the world should then default to the rules of the real world. One example he gives is that of Sam in Game of Thrones. Despite a very active lifestyle in GoT, he doesn’t lose as much weight as you might expect if it were the real world and there is no explanation for that. You can understand the existence of magic and dragons because the narrative introduces them early on — so they are part of the rules of the world. However, lack of weight loss in Sam’s instance seems to be very unlikely. Read More ...

I Am Applying Gamification Because…

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, one of the key pitfalls of applying something like gamification is not knowing what the problem really is or why you are applying gamification in the first place!

A simple tool I like to use is this sentence,

I am ________, because ________.

You start by describing what you are doing or going to do, then you describe why you are doing it and what you hope to achieve by doing it!

I am adding a leaderboard, because the feedback I had from the users was that they wanted to be able to compare their performance to their peers. Read More ...

Using Gamification to Elevate Design

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Whatever you think you think gamification is or what it is for, if you have used it it is usually for one reason – to increase engagement with something. You may not have defined engagement as such, you may have spoken about active participation, or learning transfer, or productivity increase. However, they all point in one direction – to encourage people to do more of something or to do it better.

Some of the projects you have done or seen may have been long term focused, looking to increase intrinsic motivation of participants, others may have just been short term campaigns using simple mechanics to reward activity. Read More ...

New Book and some Slides

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Quick update of stuff!

First, I have a new book out called “The Little Cog”. You may recognise that as I have told the story here before. It is about a little cog who is trying to understand his purpose in the wider world. It is a tongue in cheek message for managers everywhere – but my kids loved the book as well. Here is a link to get it from Amazon and also a video of me reading it!

The second part of this post is about Marczewski’s Core Principles of Gamification. This is a short series of slides I have released on SlideShare that goes through some of my core principles. They are a condensed version of blog posts on the site AND will be coming out as a small colour book in the next few days as well. Here are 3 of the 4 sets of slides that are in the book. Read More ...

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