My love affair with text adventures

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Adventure engine 4 My love affair with text adventures

I have to admit, I have always loved text adventures and choose your own adventures. From Lancelot on the Amstrad PCW8512, to 80 Days from Inkle Studios. The way text base adventures make you imagine the world you are in, for me, is priceless!

Now, rather than write a standard blog post on this, I decided to test out my latest text adventure engine – and write the post in there. It does not play well with phones yet I am sorry to say.

Click to give the Why I love Adventure games “adventure” a try. Read More ...

5 Groups of Fun

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One of my on-going side projects on the site is to find out more about what people find “fun”. This does not directly relate to the motivation related content on RAMP or the User Types though. It is all based on a simple question – “What do you find fun?”

This is by no means a comprehensive study and in reality you are far better off considering Nicole Lazzaro’s 4Keys2Fun! However, I am finding it interesting to see what people say.

I have previously released basic results that identified 21 unique things that people find fun. This is based on around 180 responses to the question, but show a distinct pattern. From these 21 “types”, I have started to pull together five distinct groups. Read More ...

A-Z of Gamification

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This is a total cop-out of an article. However, I would love to hear your versions! It all came about when listening to an advert for a kids show called the Dinosaur Train, where there is a song that teaches A-Z using the names of Dinosaurs!

On a side note, I will be speaking at Gamification World Congress in November. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on topics. I was considering a story about real loyalty, but if you want to hear about User Types again or anything else – let me know in the comments! Read More ...

What can comedy teach us about gamification?

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I was reading an old article, on the Telegraph website, that had Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves explaining how comedy works. It was actually much more interesting that I had expected and offers valuable insights into how to apply gamification in a more engaging way.

Whilst it is true that we all find different things funny, the general way in which jokes are constructed and delivered is as important as the content or the context of them.

Surprise

Surprise is the fundamental joke mechanism. Most punchlines rely on an element of surprise – that’s why they’re not funny the third time you hear them. Read More ...

MINDSPACE – Influencing Behaviour

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Sometimes you come across stuff that you really wish you had come up with, but it is so good that shareing it is much better than trying to develop your own version!

One such idea is that of MINDSPACE.

In 2010 the British Government commisioned research into influencing behaviour through policy. What they produced was a report that we in gamification should find really useful – all revolving around this MINDSPACE acronym.

  • Messenger: we are heavily influenced by who communicates information
  • Incentives: our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts, such as strongly avoiding losses
  • orms: we are strongly influenced by what others do
  • Defaults: we ‘go with the flow’ of pre-set options
  • Salience: our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us
  • riming: our acts are often influenced by sub-conscious cues
  • Affect: our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions
  • Commitments: we seek to be consistent with our public promises, and reciprocate acts
  • Ego: we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves

Rather brilliantly, they released all the info in a couple of reports. So follow these links for loads more info, it is really good stuff (if a little worrying that the government are look at how to control us this way…). Read More ...

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