Gamification

Non-Competitive Leaderboards

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Wearables1K Non Competitive Leaderboards

Leaderboards are evil. They create competition in environments that may not benefit from competition. They make more losers than winners and only engage the top 10 players on the board.  Right? (out of context quotes ahoy!)

Well, yes and no.

In reality it is not quite as simple as that. It all comes down to intent, presentation and interpretation. If the point of your leaderboard is to create unnatural competition between groups of people, then you may find you don’t get the results you expect. Not everyone wants to compete, so if that is your intent you will often find very short lived engagement. As soon as people find they are not in the top ten, you tend to find they lose interest. The competition then revolves around the top players, leaving the rest actually disengaged from the process. Read More ...

Lowering barriers with Gamification

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732172 48635269 Lowering barriers with Gamification

I did a very enjoyable talk at the Knowledge Cafe the other day. The audience was made up of various interested people, varying wildly in age – but with a majority belonging to Knowledge Management. It stood out for me in two ways. The first was the fact it was the first time I had done a talk with no slides. I gave the audience the option of having slides or not – they unanimously opted not (a lesson to learn here)! The second was that it was the first time I had really spoken about the concept that gamification can be viewed as lowering barriers. Read More ...

Engagement – What are we talking about?

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10309649 10153344097952619 1236186563670714891 n Engagement 8211 What are we talking about

Engagement. A word that is thrown about in gamification with all the abandon of a child dancing and singing to Frozen…

The thing is, what exactly are we talking about? What is engagement.

As ever, I took to the dictionaries to see what the word on the street is. Looking up engagement is a fruitless task as you get such gems as

A formal agreement to get married

And

The action of engaging or being engaged

However, looking up engage is a far more satisfying experience.

[with object] Occupy or attract (someone’s interest or attention) Read More ...

Why User Types?

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Me presenting the gamification user types hexad Why User Types

Second post in a day, not very SEO clever, I know.

I wanted to take a moment to explain my view on User and Player types and their use in gamification.

First up, some bullets so you get the idea quickly.

What User Types are not;

  1. Perfect
  2. Applicable to every situation or project
  3. The same in all contexts
  4. Pure science

What User Types are;

  1. A tool in an overall toolkit
  2. Easy to use and get your head around
  3. Useful if you understand their limitations
  4. In my case based on motivation (eg Self Determination Theory), observation and research

I created the my User Types, because I wanted to use something in my thinking and design that focused on users, but was not built for games. I had been using Bartle’s types, but they just did not fit well with gamification – this is something he repeatedly tells people! It was also very hard to talk to people in enterprise about killers (i.e. people who take pleasure in the harm they can cause others). I also wanted to approach my types from the perspective of what motivated people rather than how they behaved. Read More ...

Gamification World Congress 2014

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20140526 094318 34998058 Gamification World Congress 2014

Wow, what an amazing couple of days.

Last week was Gamification World Congress 2014, the biggest Gamification event in Europe and I think in the world with over 600 people. They all came together over 3 days to celebrate the best Gamification has to offer in 3 days packed full of talks  (seriously 9 am until 8:30pm with over 30 talks on the second day!) and workshops.

On day one, 60 delegates attended 4 workshops, run by Sergio Jiménez, Mario Herger, Alberto Tornero and me.

The workshops were great fun, I think everyone enjoyed most of the content they got to see and work with. My own had some highs and lows – which I am going to build on to create my next one (details soon I hope). Read More ...