No great insights into gamification in this post, more me revisiting play, toys and games – again. When I need to clear my mind of clutter, I tend to consider the nature of play. That is probably why I write about it so much! I doodle about it on the plane, at night, when I have time to kill. I always come back to play. Dutch, a friend of mine in the gamification world likened it to Einstein’s “thought experiments”. Of course, I am not comparing myself to Einstein. The only things we have / had in common is dyslexia and a love (at one time) of physics.
Gamification as a Strategy
The world loves a good aaS. Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Cloud as a Service. Everything these days seems to be “as a Service”. That means, of course, that Gamification platform providers have started to speak about Gamification as a Service. Now, there is nothing wrong with this, though I do find some juvenile amusement at the acronym of GaaS. For me, it just smacks of making it easy for people to implement gamification really badly!
Hear me out. I have nothing against being able to use gamification in a simple way. You will see Gamification as a Service on this site in the form of Captain Up. I have not implemented it brilliantly, it is there for those who want to see it and can be ignored by those who don’t. It actually goes against some of my core messages about designing gamification in from the start. However, there is something to be said for being able to just paste a line of javascript into a page and have gamification up and running straight away. If nothing else, it gives people the opportunity to get involved.
Experience Points and Gamification – 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.
GWC16 – Well That Just Happened!
Last week was the 5th edition of Gamification World Congress. I have to admit, it was great fun. There were some extremely good talks, I especially enjoyed the parallel stage that had a nice mix of academic and practical talks going on.
A couple of highlights for me were Kevin Werbach and Yu Kai Chou. Kevin spoke about the need for more rigour in the industry, to start using more empirical data and not just intuition – a cause close to my heart these days! Yu Kai, in the face of his slides not working, pulled off a fabulous talk from the heart about the industry and how important games are to him and us all.
Come and Play with Ninja Monkey Bot
I’m playing with an AI bot, meet Ninja Monkey Bot. It is a learning bot, with a few pre-programmed answers. Have a play!
