People want gamification to mean certain things to them. They want to take the word and try to bend into whatever they think will sell their next big idea to someone. This tends to lead to people arguing about what it actually is and what constitutes a gamified product. Two such ideas seem to be Playful design and Serious games. Some think that they are gamification, others that they have no place near the word. Personally, I think we should stop trying so hard to define a made up word and just start learning what we can from the people who use it!
Technology
Is Importance the same as Influence.
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.
Gamification The Next Generation: Introduce, Engage, Retain
The stages of brand engagement
I have been thinking about the stages that a person goes through when becoming “involved” with brands or any system that is being gamified. I may be wrong, there may be more too it. However, as I see it there are three distinct phases. Introduction to the brand (or whatever). Engagement with the brand. Finally retention / loyalty to the brand.
Within gamification, many people talk about the introduction phase, as I see it. Rewards, badges, points and the like. These all help introduce people to the gamified system. For a short period of time, rewards can entertain people and introduce them to certain concepts to do with the brand. We know that this works, but has a short shelf-life if used in solitude. However when trying to nurture brand loyalty, you are not interested in short periods of time.
Monopoly: A Fun Example of Gamification
This is a post that I originally wrote for EnGaming – Repoduced with kind permission (go check them out!!)
Time for some fun
Every now and again I like to just write something for fun. After writing lots and lots of gamification articles, I got to thinking of fun / daft examples. People often quote video game references when talking about gamification. However, it was when I saw Jon Guerrera talking at GSummit (via On-Demand I might add) about using Post-It notes to gamify his life, I was reminded a more low tech example I had mentioned in the past. Monopoly.
GSummit,Bubbles, Badges and the Future
I have been catching up on the events of GSummit over the weekend. I was very heartened to hear so many people talking about moving beyond badges and xp systems. They were looking for the next phase of engagement. You just need to look at FourSquare recently ditching its gamified elements to see that we are hitting the first big dip in user interest in this kind of thing.
However, there were still quite a few talking about promoting engagement with the use of simple badging / xp systems. I must admit, at first I was a little confused. Then I realised that I was totally missing the context that these ideas were being discussed in.