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Experience Points and Gamification – Getting it Wrong

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Experience Points Experience Points and Gamification 8211 Getting it Wrong

Gamification often uses points, deal with it. They can form a solid backbone to a system, after all, they are just a granular form of tracking and record keeping!

My issue today is with a misconception about using experience points in gamification. In games, we know that experience points are used in many titles. In a game, experience points (XP) are gained by doing tasks, completing missions, killing the bad guys and more. Often, the early stages of games see the user “grinding”, doing small, unskilled repetitive tasks over and over again, to gain XP. Read More ...

GWC16 – Well That Just Happened!

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IMG 9858 GWC16 8211 Well That Just Happened

Last week was the 5th edition of Gamification World Congress. I have to admit, it was great fun. There were some extremely good talks, I especially enjoyed the parallel stage that had a nice mix of academic and practical talks going on.

A couple of highlights for me were Kevin Werbach and Yu Kai Chou. Kevin spoke about the need for more rigour in the industry, to start using more empirical data and not just intuition – a cause close to my heart these days! Yu Kai, in the face of his slides not working, pulled off a fabulous talk from the heart about the industry and how important games are to him and us all. Read More ...

The Future of Gamification

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Augmented reality 1476093062 The Future of Gamification

Recently I was honoured to be asked to be part of a documentary about games, their history, and evolution. One of the questions that I was asked that really got me thinking was “What is the future of gamification?”

I am asked this quite often and tend to go with a safe answer. In my view, we will not speak about gamification within the next few years. It will be spoken about in the same way social media or digital is, just  another part of various strategies. In the case of gamification, it will become part of a standard set of tools for experience design. Read More ...

Play in Context

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Play in context e1474889485746 Play in Context

As you may know, the concept of play is very important to me. I feel that it is one of the true keys to engagement in adults, but as I was speaking about recently, adults often have no idea how to play. They have the intrinsic desire to play battered out of them by the “real” world. Unlike children, they don’t see the potential for play in the world around them. Some blame work for this – they often say that the opposite of play is work. However, I prefer to go with Dr. Stuart Brown’s (founder of the National Institute of Play)  analysis in this case, that the opposite of play is actually depression. Read More ...