Just as New Year passes us, I thought I would throw out a free chapter from my book. It is one of my favorites actually, all about loyalty!
Now for the tips mentioned in the title :).
If you are looking at gamification in 2016, there are a few things you really need to know about. I am not going to just give it to you, where is the fun in that? Search the site, search Google and see what you can find out!
So, as is tradition, here is a round up of 2015. What a year!!! Research papers, Gamification World Congress, a new book, poetry and loads of exciting projects have made this a most excellent year. Between you and me, next year will be even better!
As with every year, the User Types Hexad has been really popular, but this year my most popular content by far has been the 47 Gamification elements, mechanics and ideas – an old post I pinned! Shows the power of the homepage 🙂 Other big hits this year have been my reaction to Gartner forgetting about gamification (The Hype is Over – Gamification is Here to Stay) and my essay on the 4 essential neurotransmitters in gamification!
Ideas come from the funniest of places. Take this Dodecad thing. I had an email conversation with someone who liked my types, but wanted to change some of the names. I was not into the idea (the names took a really long time to work out!), so politely declined. That’s fine, so is the fact they said that they would go off and make their own with some references and credits to their inspirations. I was chatting to the ever wise and awesome Dutch Driver about this and he jokingly said “They will make a dodecahedron version”.
You may remember in 2013 I tried to establish a code of ethics for gamification. It got a little traction, but ultimately didn’t get much backing.
After GWC this year, I realised that I really needed to try again, as ethics has become even more important to people as gamification has grown. To that end, I have created the Open Gamification Code of Ethics. This is based on my original code, but I am inviting people to contribute to the development of the code as well. I want it to represent to community as much as possible.
One of the things that I noticed at gamification world congress this year, was a few people mentioning Flow in their talks. As most of my readers know by now, I love the idea of Flow, not just as a pure idea of “in the moment balance and being in the zone” but as a guide to how we should design experiences. The logic of keeping the difficulty of challenges in line with the users relative skill is faultless in my mind.
In game design and gamification design we are also used to the idea that you “zig-zag” the users skill with the challenge levels to keep users engaged and in the Flow “zone”.