Many moons ago I wrote about a massive misunderstanding in gamification around game mechanics and what they actually are. There were several lists around that said they were key game mechanics, which turned out to be very little to do with actual mechanics. Fast forward almost 2 years and, well it is getting better, but there is still a lot of people getting it confused. That is easily done as even in game design circles there is an argument over what they truly are, but there is a general high level agreement at least. As I summarised in my post:
Using fantasy in gamification
Fantasy is not the sort of thing that most companies would think of first when they wanted to motivate and engage employees. It sounds a little too un-worky.
If I have learned anything over the years though, fantasy is essential if you want people to break out of standard ways of thinking. Fantasy is a safe place for peoples minds to dream, create and explore ideas. It is a place where they can make mistakes without fear of punishments, where they can be someone else who is potentially braver or totally different from themselves. Great innovations can come from daydreams, imagine the power you could harness by facilitating this mentality!
Have a Batman break to keep motivated.
Last Friday, I began a little experiment – Batman’s big day out.
It was the start of a series of little bits of fun I will be capturing and putting up on social media, following the story of my little LEGO Batman figure.
Now, the point is I wanted to have a bit of fun on my Friday and possibly bring a little to my friends along the way. A question that came up though was
“Have you no work to do?”.
The answer was – of course I do. However, the total time take on Friday to do this was about 30 minutes. As I work with a VDU, I am meant to have a break every hour. If I smoked, it would be acceptable to take 45 minutes or more a day for smoking breaks. So is 30 minutes of something that I enjoyed, kept me motivated, was creative, brought joy to others and helped increase social media traffic for me that day a bad thing? Of course not – and I am not giving myself or anyone else cancer having a Batman break!
Gamification to encourage my daughter to read more
As any regular reader will know, I spend a lot of time gamifying my daughter, in a good way. She has taught me a great deal about what does and doesn’t work in the real world.
Most recently I was trying to encourage her to read more, so decided to test out my EEEE framework with her. She was doing it, but it was a real battle, she found it frustrating and not very enjoyable.
My Daughter, based on observation of how she plays games and acts, is part Free Spirit, part Achiever and part Player. That is to say, she likes to have freedom to choose, explore and be creative. She loves when she understands a new concept and nails it, but she does like to see some kind of reward if it is available.
How to Use Game Thinking
A while back I started to introduce my alternative catch-all to Gamification, that is Game Thinking.
Game Thinking takes four common components of game like or games based solutions and puts them under a single banner. Those are Playful Design / Game inspired design, Serious Games, Games and Gamification / Motivational Design (more on that another day). I was asked recently under what circumstances each would be most appropriate, so I hit powerpoint and made the following matrix thingy!
This is very similar to the Thin Layer vs Deep Level gamification model I presented a while ago – though slightly contradictory on the length of gamification engagement, so forgive that one!