Gamification

Grinding to Mastery and Flow

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Grind to Flow Grinding to Mastery and Flow

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”. Read More ...

Gamification World Congress 2015

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FullSizeRender Gamification World Congress 2015

Well, I am back from the 2015 edition of Gamification World Congress in Barcelona and what an event it was! The organisers put on a slick, deep and incredibly rewarding conference.

Day one saw a series of workshops, with me kicking off with Gamification Design Thinking. Feedback was positive and personally I had a great time delivering it! I also attended Yu-Kai Chou’s Octalisys workshop as well as Monica Cornetti’s. Both were a wirlwind of useful information!

Day two was the first day of talks. There were many inspiring talks, but two stood out for me. An Coppens did a fantastic talk on the feminine viewpoint around gamification. Lots of food for thought about how men and women differ and how to build for that. She also got us to dance…. for the second year running! The other talk that stuck in my mind was Pete Jenkins’s talk on gamified CRMs. It may have been the “Kerching” sound effect, but it was interesting and opened my eyes to certain possibilities! Read More ...

How I wrote and Published a Book for Under £50

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CM8poksW8AAY0mS How I wrote and Published a Book for Under 50

As you may have seen by now, I have a new book out! If you had managed to miss that, check it out here 🙂

The purpose of this blog is to give a quick overview of how I got it finished and published in print and ebook formats.

This was a project I started in around February 2015. I had been wanting to create a print version of my previous book for a while, but decided that it would be much better for everyone if I created a totally new book. It would be better value for my readers and actually better for me as it would help cement a few concepts in print! It turns out that academic world really doesn’t like referencing websites. Read More ...

Being Kind When Discussing Gamification

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Minecraft Being Kind When Discussing Gamification

I talk to people about gamification quite a lot! The conversation usually starts with a little curiosity, then some scepticism and if I have done well, enthusiasm.

One thing that happens in probably 9 out of 10 conversations is a little section I like to call “No, it’s not about making games”. You all know this one. The person you are talking to suddenly has a moment of revelation as the think they have understood what you are talking about and say “Oh yeah. Minecraft!”. Read More ...

Dark Personalities and the User Type Hexad

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Dark personality Dark Personalities and the User Type Hexad

A while back, I was asked how “Dark Personalities” fit with my Hexad of User Types. At the time, I had no answer – because I had never heard of dark personalities.

So, as I always do, I responded with honesty and promised to look into it. I have touched on it with how I now explain disruptors in my book and in some papers I have helped with – but have never really mapped them out to make it easy to understand.

The first thing is to discuss what dark personalities are. It seems to stem from an article in the Journal of Research in Personality by D. Paulhus and K. Williams. They describe three types of dark personalities: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Read More ...