rewards

What You Want vs What You Need

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Jujitsu What You Want vs What You Need

My JuJitsu instructor always used to say,

“I’ll teach you what you need, not what you want”

This always struck me as a fabulous way to look at teaching in general and one that I used myself as a JuJitsu instructor, mentor and everything else I have done that involved passing information to others.

Getting what you want is very rarely as important as getting what you need. In fact, getting what you need more often that not allows you to then earn what you want. In martial arts, like most things, you need the foundations, the boring things. The form work, the katas, the hours and hours of repetitive grind. The same is true in games. You need to get the basics before you can do the interesting things. You may not want to do them, the tutorial level is often not the most exciting, but you need them to be able to then go on and do what you want to do in the rest of the game. Read More ...

Gamification: When Badges are Better than Badgers

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The Ninja Badger Gamification When Badges are Better than Badgers

Many years ago, I made a typo in a tweet when I mentioned badgers instead of badges. I even turned it into a blog, “Adding badgers would be more gamification than badges.”

It was a slightly idealistic view of badges, where I was almost saying “don’t use badges as they are bad”. I was young and impressionable! However, it was the first time I mentioned my philosophy on badges and rewards in general

“Rewards should recognise achievement, not be the achievement”

This is as true now as it was then, but it is not the only viewpoint and it is not 100% accurate. Badges get a bad reputation in and around the gamification industry, often seen as a lazy way to try and inject some activity into a system. This is true of far too many implementations, so I wanted to look at a few ways in which badges are better than badgers and what we can learn from that. To be honest, I could have called this article “50 Shades of Badges” as there is no black and white at all when you start to dig into their benefits and their pitfalls! Read More ...

What’s the difference between Intrinsic Motivation and Extrinsic Rewards

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Red pill blue pill1 What 8217 s the difference between Intrinsic Motivation and Extrinsic Rewards

A very common question in gamification is “What is the difference between Intrinsic and Extrinsic” when talking about rewards and motivation. Well..

  • Intrinsic motivation: Personal/internal needs and reasons acting.
    • Relatedness, Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose are examples of this.
    • You don’t play video games for the reward, you play because you enjoy them
    • You read for pleasure, not monetary reward.
    • You spend time with your family because you want to.
    • Learn because you want to improve and be better.
      • Read More ...

    • Schools, Rewards and FFS

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    Prize 1490968987 Schools Rewards and FFS

    Chatting to my daughter today and she was telling me about the latest incentive/bribe scheme the school was running to get kids using RM Easimaths – a gamified maths app. The app, by the way, is brilliant.

    The set up was this. Most hours on the app gets a prize…

    So, anyone know where this is going?

    I’ve written about his in the past 

    The first thing that happened was a couple fo kids got caught out logging in to the app and just leaving it running for hours and hours. The rules, such as they were, did not prevent this as they were looking at a quantitative analysis – the number of hours, rather than qualitative for example, number of questions done per hour of use. Anyway, they put a stop to that, to an extent, but still were only really measuring time, but with a few sense checks in there. Score one for lack of understanding. Read More ...

    Focused Feedback and Attainable, Maintainable Goals

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    Focused feedback and goals Focused Feedback and Attainable Maintainable Goals

    Don’t Mention Gamification

    I was challenged recently to talk about gamification without mentioning games or gamification! The reason is that many people have not got time to dive too deep into the meanings and on its own, gamification as a word is confusing, to say the least. So, I took to YouTube and had a go!

    My thoughts revolved around two core concepts; Focused Feedback and Attainable, Maintainable Goals.

    Focused Feedback

    Feedback is essential for engagement in anything we do, whether it is related to our job, social life or hobbies. Without feedback, we don’t know where we, how we are doing or where we are going. Not having feedback is like driving without seeing the road or a map! Read More ...