The fourth video in my series of tutorials (finally!!)
This one is just a short (10 minute) look at points and badges in gamified systems and how to make some use of them. Not all that different from my Points and Badges: Not Totally Evil blog post, but also talks about balancing and best use case.
Enjoy!
A slightly cheating post today. Here are the mechanics and ideas that I have been using when supporting certain user types. I wanted to present them in a non usertype specific way. So instead of Player, here you see “Short term engagement, Activity”. This should help people see a little more clearly how to support different gamified activities.
The smaller / fainter the mechanic or idea, the less impact it has.
Click one of the links to jump straight to the activity.
Education | Innovation, Change | Creativity, Invention | Contribution, Help | Short term engagement, Activity | Collaboration
Yesterday I posted a tweet that got a few nice retweets.
Is there a middle ground where game designers and #gamification designers can meet and create amazing things? Surely yes!
— Andrzej Marczewski (@daverage) March 24, 2014
It is no secret that I would love to get the games industry to become more involved in gamification and have spoken to many people in the industry about it. Ian Bogost refereed to my original plea as a “gentle form of terrorism” saying that it was like me saying to the games industry
Using gamification on my kids is nothing new. I have openly written about my failure as a gamifier when it came to my eldest daughters reward chart! However, now I am trying a little experiment, one that is nice and low tech and involved no points or badges!
On our fridge we now have this little chart.
Throughout the day my wife and I alter the position of the arrow depending on how my daughter is behaving. We don’t tell her what the current reading is – she has to look at the feedback for herself. Of course this is on top of other verbal feedback we are giving her as well. However, this gives her a fixed reminder of how we feel she is doing.
A while back I wrote a piece called Rules Rule, but Shouldn’t Rule Everything. The upshot of the article was that you have to have rules for things to work, but you also have to understand the rules to be able to bend and break them when needed.
Rules are really important in gamified systems, they collapse without them. Some rules are explicit and set by the system. These are the ones that you can’t break without hacking or breaking the system. Others are implicit or implied. These are the ones where trouble can sneak in.
