It’s that time of year again! The end of year round up. Quite a lot of blogs this year, though a little slower at the end 😉
It has been a mixed year for me. It was my first full year of working in gamification, for better or worse! I’m very happy where I am though so all good. I’ve spoken about everything from the future to how I shave since the start of the year.
A massive highlight was getting the Contribution to the Industry award at Gamification World Congress, which was a huge honour!
Leaderboards have been a staple of gaming and gamification for as long as both have existed. From Space Invaders, to baseball, to your gamified CRM system – all have had leaderboards in there somewhere.
The reasoning goes “if you are the top, you feel special and if you are at the bottom, you don’t want to be there so are motivated to improve”.
It sounds great, doesn’t it? Instant engagement. DO well, feel special. Do badly, be motivated to do better. In some cases, this is can be the case. In sports, it is a way of knowing where a team is in the league and how many points they need to improve by. In space invaders it was a way to create a more social or even personal challenge in the game, helping to create that “one more go” feeling. If I have one more go, I know I can be better than AAA or myself.
With the news that a hacker group is using gamification to try and get people to engage in DDoS attacks, I got to thinking about what type of user may wish to engage with this.
Initially, the Disruptor sprang to mind, more specifically the Destroyer type. They act on the system to disrupt it and normally for not very nice reasons! However, there was an issue. Disruptors are self-motivated, they are not there for reward as much as recognition or just plain mastery and enjoyment. So using points and prizes to coerce a disruptor behaviour actually sits more in line with the Consumer type in the Player section of the Hexad.
In my last blog, I introduced the concept of Meta-Rules. These were the non-system or inherent rules that actually guide how people play.
I spoke about them rather abstractly, describing them in the following way
These [meta-rules] rules are beyond what you would consider written or system imposed rules. These are fluid rules that can change moment by moment. These are the rules that define how play unfolds. These are the unspoken rules that children manage to communicate to each other when they are playing, where the situation is constantly changing, but they always seem to be able to adapt to the changes without fuss
No great insights into gamification in this post, more me revisiting play, toys and games – again. When I need to clear my mind of clutter, I tend to consider the nature of play. That is probably why I write about it so much! I doodle about it on the plane, at night, when I have time to kill. I always come back to play. Dutch, a friend of mine in the gamification world likened it to Einstein’s “thought experiments”. Of course, I am not comparing myself to Einstein. The only things we have / had in common is dyslexia and a love (at one time) of physics.
