Gaming

Experience Points and Gamification – Getting it Wrong

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Experience Points Experience Points and Gamification 8211 Getting it Wrong

Gamification often uses points, deal with it. They can form a solid backbone to a system, after all, they are just a granular form of tracking and record keeping!

My issue today is with a misconception about using experience points in gamification. In games, we know that experience points are used in many titles. In a game, experience points (XP) are gained by doing tasks, completing missions, killing the bad guys and more. Often, the early stages of games see the user “grinding”, doing small, unskilled repetitive tasks over and over again, to gain XP. Read More ...

Making a Free To Play (F2P) Strategy That Doesn’t Suck

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As a parent, Free To Play (F2P) games are the joy and bane of my life in equal measure. Kids these days seem to be near impossible to entertain for any length of time. This being the case, video games are like comics were in my day – plentiful and cheap, especially on mobile platforms. Unlike comics, many games now present themselves as free.

Free is a tough term, though, like anyone games developers need to make money. So games that seem to be free on the App Store, tend to be Free to Play. The concept of F2P is that the game can be played for free, but you can pay for certain features. Read More ...

Using familiarity and Nostalgia to Boost Gamification and On-Boarding

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If there is one thing that Pokemon Go has shown me, it’s that nostalgia is a powerful tool in onboarding. The main reason I played it to start with? I used to love Pokemon – just like everyone else I knew. I was around 16 or 17 when it first appeared on the Gameboy in the UK and I immediately fell in love with it. This is a familiar story for a couple of generations as the game has managed to reinvent itself (or at least add more Pokemons) every couple of years since then!

When I heard about Pokemon go, it was not the clever use of augmented reality that attracted me, it was the chance to be Ash and go and “Catch ‘em all” that got me. Once I played it, it felt familiar. The Pokemon matched to those found in my first encounters with the game. Pikachu was there, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Pidgey etc. I felt comfortable, as if I was in the cartoon I used to watch back in the day. Read More ...

Pokemon Go: The Good, The Bad and Some Lessons

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Writing about Pokemon Go is almost as popular as actually playing it, so I thought I would join in the trend.

TL:TR It’s great fun but needs to have some careful consideration around safety concerns

In case you have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, let me just set the scene. Pokemon Go is a game based on the popular Pokemon franchise. It sees players using their mobile phones to hunt down and capture Pokemon in the real world. Using Augmented Reality (AR), Pokemon pop up all over the real world for players to capture and train. Once caught, they can be leveled up, evolved, battled with at Pokemon Gyms and more. Read More ...

Save Your Best Songs for the Encore

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Years ago I read an interview with a musician (whose name escapes me), where he was giving advice to new musicians. There was lots of good stuff, but the one that really stuck with me was this.

Save your best songs for the encore, even if you never get the chance to play them.

At the time, this struck me as very odd. However, over the years I have started to see where this guy was going. The first thing is that all your songs should be good – if you rely on one or two and the rest are fillers, people will notice. If you are so confident in your songs that you can leave the ones you feel are best for a potentially never heard encore, you are on to a winner! Read More ...

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