Rants

Web design, when did the rules change?

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When I first started in web design things were different. We only need to worry about HTML 4 and 2 browsers. We concentrated on quality of the content as that was pretty much all there easy. Content was front an centre.

Then flash came along. Suddenly we had a way to integrate really rich media and interaction in out web pages. With a tiny download, we could have cross platform compatible sites, that look the same in any browser and would deliver the same experience to all.

Then Steve jobs decided that Flash was bad and suddenly everyone jumped on his shity band wagon and started to get rid of flash. Instead they created a new version of HTML (because XHTML was too hard for them to follow) and instead of having to just download a tiny plugin, you had to totally change your browser to get things working. Read More ...

What the Klout just happened?

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Klout. My friend my enemy and subject of some of my earliest posts. In October last year I wrote a blog called Treating the Klout. In it I discussed the big change they had just made to their algorithm that had given rise to many complaints from the community. Some had dropped massively in score, others jumped up. Well, they’ve done it again.

Yesterday saw then roll out their latest calculation. Now they include many more data points to decide if you are influential or not. In my case they have now decided that I’m not really all that influential compared to my peers after all. In other cases they have given people very large upwards jumps indeed. Hell they even downgraded Justin Beiber. Read More ...

Adding badgers would be more gamification than badges.

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Badger Adding badgers would be more gamification than badges

I had a great little article set up for today about forums, chat rooms and gamified social networks. However, with GsummitX London happening today and considering some of the things I am reading of late, I wanted to rant instead. Buckle in 🙂

Badges and points systems. You know them, and loads of you seems to love them. Now, precisely to sound like a broken record, in isolation they don’t work. You can’t make a task more fun, interesting, engaging – whatever noun you wish to use – by JUST adding badges (or badgers as I wrote. Now that would be fun. Mmm give a person a badger everytime they do something right and a honey badger when they get it wrong…). That isn’t gamification. It is like me adding a picture of Mario to a spreadsheet and saying I have created a game. Read More ...

Is Importance the same as Influence.

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Stepping away from Gamification just for a week, whilst is search around for inspiration (suggestions in an email please), I want to quickly talk about something else that fascinates me – influence. More specifically, digital influence. After a great “putting the world to rights” session with friend and Gamification whizz Scott Sinclair (@sinclair300584), I had to come away and write about this.

I wrote about this a while back, talking about Klout and the like. However, this time my angle is a little different. Read More ...

Don’t Love Games? Step Away From the Gamification

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Games. I love them. Board games, card games, video games and anything else you can put the word games after. I play them, I write about them, I think about them, I dream about them and from time to time I even try my hand at making them (http://www.fuzzyd.co.uk/robbers). So what does this have to do with such a business orientated subject as Gamification. One needs to be a savy expert to be able to speak on such highbrow topics – not a games loving lout?

Well Mr suit, that’s where I think you are dead wrong. Jesse Schell in his excellent “The Art of Games Design: A Book of Lenses” asks a simple question. “Do I love my Project”. He goes on to state “If the creators of a game do not love it, the game will surely fail”. So I ask you. If you do not love games, dream about them and want to play them all day every day – how can you talk about gamification with any conviction, let alone make decisions about it’s implementation or design? As horrible as the name may be, gamification contains a key word. Gam(e). Whether you like it or not, implementing gamification is implementing at least some elements that come from games. Read More ...

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