How do all. You may know that I have a YouTube Channel – AM Guitar
I have started an Etsy Shop now for a bit of fun. Not just AM Guitar Merch, but all the profits go to supporting the channel.
If you are interested, head to www.etsy.com/uk/shop/AMGuitarMerch and take a look around. I’ll be adding more products as I get feedback or think of more!
Let me know if you want any Gamified UK merch up there as well 🙂
In today’s blog, I’ve recorded a video 😀
I’m merging my two passions, gamification and guitar! Guitarists often have effects pedals. These change the sound of the guitar, adding enhancements like echo, distortion, swooshing swirly stuff and more – much like how we use game-like elements to enhance an experience. And, just like gamification, when you add effects to your guitar tone, you need to be tasteful, contextual and often subtle!
Enjoy the over worked analogy and let me know what you think 😀
So, I wanted to give a bit of a life update as the site has been lacking in what I would consider “quality content”. I have had to take a bit of a step back recently for various reasons. I have been writing here about gamification for since 2011 on an almost weekly basis. At some stage, you run out of ideas! I also have just finished the new book, so needed to distract myself away from gamification a little.
As such, I have been doing more music-related content on YouTube. Every year I try to challenge myself with something new. This year it was to start doing more around guitar, a passion of mine for the past 25 years. This saw me starting up the YouTube channel and just this week releasing some music on Spotify, iTunes and Google Play.
Now here is the advice bit… Just like I always tell you in gamification design, I set realistically achievable challenges that matched my skill levels along the way. I don’t set expectations, I set goals. First was to get YouTube going, next was Instagram and now releasing music officially.
Whilst I was doing this, I also (as you know) published the latest version of Even Ninja Monkeys Like to Play. Amazon messed up how this was released sadly, so it has been a bit hard to find on their store. As such I have extended the lower price (12.99 vs 15.99) for another week – get it now!
With all of this said, I shall return to more gamification related content from next week. In the meantime, I would ask something of all of you.
When I started playing guitar, I learned three chords. G, C and A. I had a little acoustic guitar that my Mum bought me in a car boot sale for £6. She told me that if I could learn to play a song and play it well, she would consider going halves on an electric guitar with me. I went
So, I got a chord book and started to teach myself basic chords. I soon discovered that the combination of G, C and A sounded just like Wild Thing by the Troggs. I did some research and found the correct chords for the full song, learned it and went and played it to my Mum. The next week, we went and got a cool looking Charvette guitar with a reverse dinky headstock. It looked the mutts nuts and sounded amazing (to my ears at least).
however, I quickly realised that mastery of three chords was not going to be enough, so I started to learn more and more and more and more and after a couple of years, I was pretty good. I had a few lessons, but mostly just played with a few friends.
Fast forward 24 years and I have started to really dig back into playing properly and am quickly realising that I missed a lot by not formalising my learning a bit more. I find that the theory I chose to ignore, has held me back for years and now I am having to learn it whilst overcoming bad habits that are now deeply ingrained.
How does this relate to gamification?
Well, my buzz for this year in gamification is research and education. The majority of experts in the field started just like me, with an idea that they investigated and began to evolve over time. Others then took these ideas and made them their own, using them liberally – often in ways that were never intended. As things go wrong, the original experts are blamed, because their theories did not work. The truth is, these ideas were implemented without the correct understanding in the first place.
Rather than learning the theory, people just learned three chords (Points, Badges and Leaderboards) and kept using them. Some then learned a few scales so that they could improvise a little, but still did not fully understand what the core of the theory was, so still struggled to get beyond simple improvisation.
As we move through 2018, I urge anyone in gamification to take stock of their understanding and see what they could learn by going back to the source materials and the original research that everyone else based their intermediary theories on. Learn how the scales and the chords can be used, what does work and what doesn’t – based on the deeper information available. There is more and more research available every week on resources like Research Gate. Don’t be afraid to go there and ask researchers for the full texts of their work – they are all awesome and happy to share!
3 chords will get you a long way, if you are innovative, have amazing stage presence, have a huge catalogue of success stories and have great PR, like Status Quo… but for most of us, we need to learn more than that to truly be exceptional.
On that note – if you are learning guitar, here is my tutorial on tuning your guitar by ear! (How slick a transition was that!!)