The Perception of Fairness

Fairness 1552486027 The Perception of Fairness

Coin Master. Have you played it? I have. It’s currently the top grossing game on mobiles. If you have not played it, it’s a fruit/slot machine. You put virtual money in, spin the reels and possibly win more money. You then use that money to build a series of villages, upgrading parts of one village until the whole thing is completed, then move on to the next one. You can also ruin friendships by attacking peoples villages, knocking their development back and costing them virtual money. It is a phenomenon, with a staggeringly well thought out social media presence and gameplay that is essentially addictive. I don’t say that about games usually, but this is pure addictive, gambling-based button pressing. But it is simple, relaxing and pleasing on the eye – so I play it. There is probably a whole blog peice there to be written actually! Read More ...

Gamification: Overjustification Effect and Cheating

Happy New Year everyone. I was going to start the year with a little article on how I problem solve, but an opportunity arose to write about something that I have been wanting to write about for a while!

When extrinsic rewards go bad

A couple of nights ago, I was bombarded with notices about comments on one particular blog post. Each was from a different, but similar anonymous email address and contained “Nice post xxx” where xxx was a number. Each comment also came from the same IP address.  I was about to block the IP totally, when I noticed that the leaderboard on my site had one very clear leader. It also showed that had a very unusual stream of activity – multiple comments on one post, multiple likes and tweets and g+ across pages and more. They had found a loop hole in the way CaptainUp manages scores. I knew it would probably happen and truth be told the culprit was not a great surprise to me.  What did surprise me was an article that he then published about his experience with gamified systems on my site and another. Read More ...

Disruptors: My Negative User Type

One of the questions I get asked about when people see my User Types, “What about Killers?” Now I have spoken about the Bartle Killer type and why I don’t really account for them in the types. In a nutshell, Killers want to destroy and humiliate other players in MMO’s. This is not a behaviour we are trying to build for in gamificaiton and as my User Types are written to help give ideas and structure for designing systems – they didn’t really have a place. This is especially in enterprise gamificaiton where this type would be handled with internal policy! Read More ...

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