video games

What if they don’t want to play?

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One of the questions I get asked all the time is,

“What if people just don’t want to play your game? How do you engage them?”.

The answer comes in two parts, both as important as each other. One you may not like, but you have to accept it!

The first is, make sure you have designed the system properly.  If you have just added some badges and a leaderboard, then you are going to engage a very small number of people for any length of time. Consider looking at the User Types and design more to support them. People often say that people don’t engage with gamification because gamification is bad. The truth is that many gamification designers are bad – and so they create bad gamification. This is true of any industry and especially new technology, just think how wrong most companies got social media at the beginning!
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Top 10 Posts and Pages from 2013

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Happy 2014 everyone! Just a quick post to show you all what the top 10 pages and articles have been on my blog in the past 12 months. It fills me with joy just how popular the User Types have been!

  1. Marczewski’s User Types
  2. Marczewski’s User Types and Nicole Lazzaro’s 4 Keys 2 Fun
  3. Game Mechanics and Gamification
  4. The Differences between Gamification and Games
  5. My Gamification Framework
  6. The Effect of Time on Decision Making
  7. Supporting Marczewski’s User Types
  8. Gamification in the Wild – Examples and Case Studies
  9. Extrinsically and Intrinsically Motivated User Types
  10. Game Thinking – Breaking it Down

I’m looking forward to exploring the types more this year, but also getting some more facts and figures behind them (probably…).

My wishes for this year are to get more involved in the practical side of gamification, working closer with the industry as a whole. Doing more talks (UK, get your act together and start doing more gamification events – I am really reasonably priced 😉 ). Also, I would love to do a few guest lectures for game design students, marketing students and the like! Read More ...

Collection of gamification thoughts from the last few weeks

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Hi all.

Not a real blog as such today, just a collection of things I have been doing and saying for the past week or so!

A Video

First off, the video of my Gamification of a Career talk at Gamification World Congress has now gone up on YouTube 🙂

A Picture

I was asked on twitter how my User Types might fit with education, this picture was my first run at an answer.

Some Words

Here is a collection of some of the things I have been saying on twitter – may be of interest to some!!

  1. Gamification is not a technology. It is an approach to solving problems.
  2. Gamification can only be the answer if you fully understand the question.
  3. Use gamification to thank people for doing things, not to bribe them into doing them.
  4. If your system is broken, gamification won’t fix it. Chances are it will make it worse! Gamify to solve a specific problem.
  5. Remember. People play games because THEY want to. People use your gamified system because YOU want them to.
  6. Reward systems in gamification are not inherently bad – just badly implemented. Meaningful pats on the back can help early on in a program.
  7. Gamification can be used to motivate, it can also be used to manipulate – which do you think will lead to long term engagement?
  8. Good gamification is not about tricking people into using a system; it is about building a system people are happy to use.
  9. Gamification is not about understanding games, in the same way as driving is not about knowing braking distances.
  10. A lot of gamification is still like a monkey dressed as a ninja. It may look the part, but you wouldn’t rely on it in a fight!

An Infographic

Finally, an infographic I made that talks you through my gamification framework using lots of other ideas from my blog! Read More ...

Serious Games: Too Broad a Term to be Meaningful

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A while back, I wrote a piece on the difference between serious games, games and gamification. It was simple, but covered the important areas of what makes them different from each other.  Since then, I have had more involvement with serious games (recently helped as one of the judges for the Serious Play Awards for instance) and it has started to dawn on me that we are still confused as to what they actually are.

Yesterday, Mattie Brice posted the following on twitter

Hey y’all, tell me the most popular serious games you know of Read More ...

An Interview with Kaye Elling lecturer in Computer Games at the University of Bradford

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Today I am really happy to have an interview with Kaye Elling. Kaye is a  currently a lecturer in Computer Games at the University of Bradford. Kaye has over 12 years industry experience in game design, with titles such as GTA2, Premier Manager and Bratz on portfolio.

Recently she shot to fame after releasing the 51 things every game student should know, which has now grown into the 100 things every game student should know. With all of this game knowledge, I wanted to pick her brain on games, gamification and women in games. Read More ...

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