Technology

Well, as promised to those wonderful people who came to listen to me preach about Gamificaiton, here is the slide deck – all wrapped up in a pretty slide share thingy. Download the presentation to get the full notes – I have written the talk out long hand – well how it was meant to go!!!

Couple of Comments

A few great points made after the talk.

1. Choice is great, but there has to be scope, boundaries and rules. Too many choices will overwhelm the user. However, choices do not always need to be big. It may just be that you give the user the choice of the background of a web page.
2. Don’t be tempted to reset points systems to try and get people re-engaged. That will just annoy them!
3. Even pumping new content into a purely extrinsic (PBL style) system will not keep people engaged indefinitely.

Transcript of the Slides

Slide 1

I am going to try and present you more of a look at what gamification actually is, some of the dangers and a few ideas you can take away to think about.

As is traditional now, I have started my slide deck with a picture of an Angry Bird. It would seem that this grumpy piece of wild life has come to encapsulate what far too many people think gamification is. However, this is the last time you will hear me mention that game! You may notice a few clichés and over the top moments in this presentation, for which I apologize in advance. I tried to have fun making this slide deck – not sure how fun that will be for you though – but I shall come to that later! Read More ...

This week there is no real blog post for you I’m afraid. I am in the middle of trying to produce a talk for next week and enjoying the Coursera Gamification course. Instead, here are some questions that I have spinning in my head that I would love to answer. Can any of you amazing gamification lovers out there give me your opinions? Maybe you have some burning questions to ask as well, add them to the comments.

• Is gamification more behavioral psychology applied through the lens of a games designer or games design applied through the lens of a behavioral psychologist?
• Are we spending so much time trying to define what can and can’t be included in gamification, that we are missing out lots of opportunity to just create great experiences using any and all tools we can?
• Are short marketing campaigns that employ gamification really a bad thing?
• Can everything be gamified in some way?
• When will companies wanting to gamify things start employing games designers?
• If you were to write a job description for a gamification person, what would you write?
• Will we be talking about gamification in 5 years time?

One final thing, if you have not already filled it in, I would love to get your opinions on the definition of gamification with the public survey I am running! Read More ...