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Gamification: Questions that keep me awake at night!

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1389645 14492518 Gamification Questions that keep me awake at night

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!

Gamification Survey

I should have a bit more for you all next week, sorry for the lack of real content today!!

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Does fun have a place in Gamification – Video Blog

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Gamification Does fun have a place in Gamification 8211 Video Blog

Hi all. Well, this is my first try at a video blog. It took far to many goes and as you can see, the version I had to go with has terrible lighting and a really bad angle. (This is due to a lack of Malteser boxes to balance the iPhone on – true story!). In this 9 minute video, I explore the role of fun in gamification – as I currently see it. Let me know if you like this format and I will see if I can do more of them in the future.

The Script. I kind of stuck to it!

Hi, and welcome to this, my first video blog. Thanks for watching and if you are a regular reader of my blog, thanks again! For the rest, the address is at the bottoms of the screen.

I thought doing a video blog could be fun, may have been wrong as this is about take 20, but still. Fun is in the eye of the beholder. Which brings me to our topic. Gamification and fun. One of the reasons I started to write about Gamification, was it sounded like it should be fun, but no one ever seemed to mention the F word, or at least very few. So, if you read my blogs you will know I mention it quite often. It wasn’t until a chat with Scott Schnaars, from Badgeville, that I questioned this approach.

First, let’s get a definition of fun. Fire up google and type; define fun. You get the following.

Noun: Enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure: “anyone who turns up can join in the fun”.

That is all very subjective. All words that have very personal meanings to each of us. What’s fun for one may be torture for another.

I have been trying to get motivated to run for ages. I have tried lots of iPhone apps to try and Gamify the process, but to no avail. Then I was told about Zombies Run. You are put into a story, where a small settlement is trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. Your job is a runner, getting supplies and the like. As you run, you collect items and get story updates by radio. From time to time you will need to outrun a zombie horde by picking up the pace. When you our are finished, the items you collect can be used to fortify our settlement. For me it is great fun and has really helped get me off the sofa.

However, generally, by its nature, Gamification tends to be involved when we are wanting to alter behaviours. This is usually for a purpose that goes against our “normal”.

Daniel Pink talks about what motivates us as human beings ,in his book, Drive. For a quick overview, check out his TED talk – The Surprising Science of Motivation. He defines three things. Autonomy, mastery and purpose. When you are forced to do something, you are breaking the autonomy part of this. You can’t force people to have fun.

For example, many companies have mandatory computer based training. What can happen is that someone is told they have to make the training more engaging. They decide that this must mean make it more game like. The trouble is, they are not game designers. What you end up with is often a patronising mess, with cute graphics and meaningless events. What should have been a 15 minute video and quiz takes half an hour and the end user has really gained nothing.

So, should those involved in Gamification ignore fun. If we can’t please everyone, should we bother at all? Of course we should. There is nothing wrong with trying to make things more enjoyable. If all manage is to raise a smile, you have improved the user experience. The trick is to not just add things for the sake of it. Focus on mastery and purpose. Make them feel like they have achieved something. Test. Test on real users, introspection is fine, but you must try your “game” with the people it is aimed for. As I say, what you find fun, others may find patronising.

Extra Links

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The Original Gamified Social Networks – History Teaches us about Gamificaiton

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1215912 73521777 The Original Gamified Social Networks 8211 History Teaches us about Gamificaiton

Seeing the news that Badgeville was to gamify social networks got me thinking about the old days. Social networks are nothing new. Back in “the day”, we all used to use forums (and bulletin boards before that) and chat rooms to be social online. Forums tended to focus on specific topics, with chat rooms just a real time free for all. What got me thinking though was realising that a lot of these used to include elements of Gamification, forums especially.

There was this stuff called kudos or Kama. When you said something of interest or that was helpful, users could reward you with these – a bit like when someone likes you on Facebook or +1 ‘s you on Google+. Kama and time served would also very often go towards some sort of rank on the forum. Higher rank and Kama signified a user you could trust and who was useful or interesting on the forums.

The key factor here was that users were not adding content to get rank or Kama. These came to display recognition of contribution. The users created the content because they wanted to. They wanted to help or be interesting – ,altruism. Chat rooms would often take this a step further, with extra features being given to users who had been contributing over set time periods – levelling up so to speak.

With luck this is all sounding a little familiar. Experience points, rank / recognition badges, levels, altruism and community.

These are all tools from the Gamification arsenal we speak of so often. Forums and chat rooms used (and still use) all of these to great effect. Points and badges are used to recognise not incentivize. Levels are used to introduce features over time. Community is used to encourage and built to keep users engaged.

The future is often just a reinvention of the past. In the case of Facebook and Twitter it is a reinvention of the forum and chat room idea given a vast global scale. Looking back at ideas that worked and that may share some of the ideas of newer inventions can often lead to great results. Remember, Gamification is just a word, a collection of ideas and techniques pulled together under one umbrella. Whilst this may have lead to greater understanding of the psychology of these ideas, we have still been using most of them for many years!

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Playfulness, Seriousness and Gamification

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1197684 36768950 Playfulness Seriousness and Gamification

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!

Let’s Get Playful

So what is playful design? For me it is taking something that is intrinsically boring and trying to make it a little more fun. I saw a lovely example of this from Playgen. They showed a registration form that was mandatory. Now, I don’t know about you, but I hate filling in forms. Their approach was to try to make the form an interactive experience, a game if you will. Rather than ticking a box to select gender, you had to choose between two avatars. Steps were done in a wizard style, so you were not just given a page of text boxes. Each step was colourful and fun to look at. Once you had finished, your digital self was “born” and the registration was completed.

Now this is not that new an idea. RPG games have been using this for a long time. Choose your character. Use sliders and the like to change the age, height, weight etc. All the while, there is a graphic representation of the character evolving as you fill in your “form”.

The upshot is, that this is talking a pretty boring process, and adding game like mechanics and ideas to make it more engaging. I think that pretty much covers the tick boxes for something being gamified?

Let’s Get Serious

Serious games seem to split the ranks of gamification advocates. Some think that they have no place in the world of “proper” gamification, some (myself included) think they embody it. But first, what is a serious game? A very basic example is a game called Number Invaders. The idea is to help teach children math in a fun and engaging way. When I was a kid, my dad wrote a game for me on the Spectrum ZX called(I think ) the Maths Train. It was based on a game we had at school on the BBC Micro. The idea was that every time you got a question right, the train would move closer to the station. It was simple, but I loved it. Number Invaders takes this idea to the next level. You are given a problem to solve and you have to shoot answer with your space invader inspired ship.

Of course, this is a tiny example of what can constitute serious games. This can be applied to political simulations, stock market simulations and much much more, but they all take the same approach. Take an intrinsically uninteresting or none game like process (eg learning maths, for many not that intrinsically interesting or rewarding), adds game like mechanics and ideas and makes it more engaging. Again, ticking the main gamification boxes for me.

I Don’t Care if You Agree with me

I don’t’ expect or even want you to all agree with me. I just want you to have a think about what I am saying. Gamification is many things to many people. It is a terrible word that should never have been coined, but we have it so have to live with it! Stop being so precious about loving or hating it and get into your heads that it is here, it always has been here in one form or another and it is going to stay. We all need to be on the same page, whether we totally agree with each other or not, we are all trying to do the same thing.

Make the world a hell of a lot more playful, fun and engaging!

 

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Gamification The Next Generation: Introduce, Engage, Retain

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Gamification 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.

This is where the real engagement is needed. Once a person is interested in the brand, you need to keep them engaged with it. Ladders and badges can only do this for so long. They need something a little more meaningful to become actively engaged with a brand.

Finally, you want to keep these people. You want their loyalty. When you finish a video game, what happens? Normally there is a hint of a sequel. The company does not want to lose your loyalty to the game, so they start to spread information about the next game. Whilst they do that, they release little extras to keep you playing the old game. However, what is even more important is that after a game has finished, people tend to talk about it. Forums spring up to discuss it. Events occur in social media, and people link together to discuss it. Multiplayer keeps people playing it for longer, not just because of the game, but also because of the community. Community breeds a lot of loyalty and interest. The number of times I have bought a game, not because of the adverts or information that has come out, but because my community are playing it, has my wife in fits of rage at times!

But how?

The first part is easy, introduction. There are dozens of ways to badgify your system or your brand. There are dozens of companies that will do that for you. The next two phases are a little harder. Here I want to talk about a company that I mentioned in GSummit,Bubbles, Badges and the Future. Pug Pharm.

I recently had a demo of their system, Picnic™ Customer Engagement Engine, with company founder Steve Bocska and I have to admit it had me intrigued for a number of reasons. The first was Steve himself. Unlike many people in the gamification world, he is not a marketing person. He is actually a games designer. He has credits on games such as EA’s Simpsons Hit and Run, Ubisoft’s CSI games, Disney Interactive’s Buzz Lightyear and more. The next thing was the approach to gamification and brand engagement. Whilst Picnic does the standard badges and leaderboards, it is the other bits that caught my attention. The way they handle engagement and retention is pretty unique (if it isn’t please let me know as I would love to see how others are doing this).

The demonstration that Steve used, he said was a pretty basic use of the Picnic system (I won’t mention the brand). It had leaderboards and points, but the engaging bit and the fun bit was the use of a system they call i-Cardz. These are a bit like Pokémon or Top Trump cards in digital form. Doing various games, actions and activities, you can collect these i-Cardz. Each one is related to the brand in some way, be it cast members, vehicles or locations. Some are rare, some can only be found at specific times and some may even be unique. These cards are then used to create collections using game boards. The brand can set competitions and activities where you have to say, put your favourite cast members on a cast board or put your favourite vehicles from the series on a board.

It is the next bit that I really liked though. Once you have created these game boards, the system matches you with people who have similar boards. You are given a little leaderboard that shows you how close a match you are to others and gives you the opportunity to connect with them. This is the really clever bit for me, as it starts giving you ready made communities. As I have said, communities control much of brand loyalty.

It all looked fun and Steve had a few facts and figures that gave weight to the fact that people really enjoyed playing the game and getting involved with the communities that were created as a result of it. The website for the show found that they had a marked increase in people staying on the site and getting involved. As a system it was also incredibly flexible in its approach to gamification. I was shown how the creation tools worked and I think even I could use them!

Who wants to be a Chamillionaire

Another example of how important the community aspect is for all of this comes from a very unlikely place. Rapper, Chamillionaire. He has used Bigdoor to gamify his website. People can earn badges and points by sharing stuff from his site. He has cited that there has been a 25x lift in fan engagement since he started to gamify their experience. Each badge that is awarded from the site has some kind of special meaning to the fans. The leaderboards tell other fans who the biggest fan actually is (a point he has used when people have actually approached him proclaiming to be his biggest fan). However, I am not convinced this is the reason he has such a massive following. The thing with Chamillionaire is that he manages his social presence himself. He runs his own brands community and directly engages with fans as much as possible. He has combined the rewardification with proper community to cover both engagement and retention. When the fans have collected everything they can, they will still be loyal because they now that he is loyal to them through his constant, direct involvement with them.

So is there a take away from this? For me it is to never forget the importance of community when you are looking at brands and gamification. That is where a lot of the longevity will come from. The other is to be inventive and fun with the brand. Don’t rely on ladders and badges alone, use more. Give people something that has meaning to them.

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