Gamification: Some More Views

First of all, thanks to everyone who has viewed or downloaded my Gamification presentation. It has had over 600 views on Slideshare, which is fantastic! Looking forward to my next chance to do the talk (hint hint people!!!)

Also, check out this short interview I did with the Association for Interactive Media & Entertainment 5Qs Gamificaiton

A little while ago, I did a piece called “What the Experts Think” where I invited industry experts in gamification to give their opinions. We, I opened this up so any one can answer and here are the first answers I have had. I will leave the survey open as I would love to get more of you to tell me your thoughts. Thanks to everyone who has been involved so far 🙂

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Jonathan Kohl, Independent Consultant, Kohl Concepts Inc.

Twitter: @jonathan_kohl

Website: http://www.kohl.ca

1. What description would you expect to see of gamification in a dictionary?

2. If you could write the dictionary entry for Gamification, what would you write?

Applying game-like concepts and structures into situations that are not normally thought of as games. e.g. business, education and government.

3. What is gamification to you ?

Applying game like concepts to any situation that has game-like aspects. A game to me, and my colleague David McFadzean, is any situation that involves conflict and co-operation. If you view a game in this way, many human endeavours can be viewed as a game. If you then apply concepts of rules and behaviors, strategies and tasks, risks and rewards, skill and chance events, cheating and compliance, and set boundaries around where game play is appropriate, you can model just about anything as a game. If you analyze potential benefits, as well as unintended side effects, and it looks favorable, and you have team buy-in, you just might be able to implement it with real, live people. In fact, David McFadzean and I have created a process strategy called “the Software Development Game” which uses game-like approaches to software development teams to help them determine an optimal mix of tools, strategies and processes at a particular time.

I also look at gamification from a product design perspective. It is one useful approach for helping us make our apps more engaging and effective. People will spend enormous amounts of time on repetitive tasks in a game or entertainment app, but may struggle in other areas. We can try to tap into that enormous productivity by making other applications more engaging. Furthermore, we can use it to enhance training, learning, and information sharing on policy, law and safety.

Gamification is interesting, because if you define it in just the right way, and analyze a task, role or job from a game perspective, you see game-like patterns that emerge that are inherent in the thing itself. For example, at work, we complete tasks for rewards, and we have quests to move to different levels of our careers. There are also political games where there are clear winners and losers. Gamification can bring enormous visibility onto behavior that is underground, not visible and not well understood. This is a powerful tool that can have both positive and negative consequences.

4. If you could choose a different name for gamification, what would it be?

Game theory is taken, and it is also a field I study. I’m not sure what I would call the approach David and I have taken, which uses concepts from both game theory and gamification: game-theory-fication?

I’m not sure I’d use another term, gamification works for me for now for certain approaches using game concepts. Game theory is another.

5. What would you rather be?

banana

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Roman Rackwitz, Engaginglab, Founder & CEO, Germany’s Gamification Evangelist

Twitter: @RomanRackwitz

Website: http://www.engaginglab.com

1. What description would you expect to see of gamification in a dictionary?

2. If you could write the dictionary entry for Gamification, what would you write?

It is called Gamification not because of the Product “Game” but because of “what Games are able to unfold within its players.”

3. What is gamification to you ?

We are able to focus, concentrate, take risks, try harder, do things the other way and stay engaged for hours while playing a game and at the end still don’t feel exhausted. Facing meaningful challenges and to have just the possibilities or better even experience the achievement to overcome these obstacles is one of the deepest, most natural feeling we can experience as human species. That’s build by evolution.

I believe that Gamification is the tool to transfer these amazing potential of games to unfold our full potential into reality. Thinking about the epic challenges we are facing as a species in the future this is the tool we need to survive.

4. If you could choose a different name for gamification, what would it be?

Flowification

5. What would you rather be?

Eagle

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Halil Furkan Kesler

Twitter: @Hfurkankesler

Website: Http://www.halilfurkankesler.com

1. What description would you expect to see of gamification in a dictionary?

2. If you could write the dictionary entry for Gamification, what would you write?

Creating engagement and interaction with using game elements and driving them into organizational goals.

3. What is gamification to you ?

Companies tried every way to maximize their profit. They bought everything belongs to human. Souls and emotions included. Now, they want to drive peoples urges.

Hardcore gamers knows the impact of dophamine. You create a virtual world and try to get the success which you can not get in real life. Because gamers are generally losers. They are winners only in games. Everyone wants to win. If you lose most of time, you become unhappy. Gamers searches the happiness in virtual worlds. Games promise happiness to gamers. But it is temporary. So it becomes an addiction. I call it success addiction.

GAMIFICATION IS BRIEF FORM OF SUCCESS ADDICTION.

It is like substance abuse. Substance is dophamine here. You can broke the keyboard if you can’t win the game. This is ambition. It is result of a great motivation. Dophamine is a motivation booster and we gamers are so weak when we got dophamine. I’m sure there is a lot of gamers who really hit their head to monitor because of their ambition. I more like punching keyboard. 🙂 You will remember this video. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C-KhSTgo3YA

This is real. Dophamine is real and now, business world discovered this weapon (weakness). Nowadays, markets want dophamine and so, gamification is a rising trend. And we are working to serve dophamine to companies, for their/our profit. I am a pessimist guy and this is a pessimist sight to gamification.

There are positive usages of gamification, especcially using gamification on education. But i’m at the pessimist side. So, i use it to make profit because i am the bad guy. >:D

4. If you could choose a different name for gamification, what would it be?

Success Addiction

5. What would you rather be?

Dragon

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Jorge, A PhD Student and a teacher in an Institute of Technology

Twitter: @jmapsimoes

Website: http://www.edulearnind2.blogspot.com

1. What description would you expect to see of gamification in a dictionary?

2. If you could write the dictionary entry for Gamification, what would you write?

The use of game design elements in non-­game contexts, to drive game like engagement in order to promote desired behaviors.

3. What is gamification to you ?

Everything we can use from games (every kind of games) that can be usefull outside games mainly what involves a deeper engagement, increases motivation and promotes flow, the simple pleasure of doing something with mastery.

4. If you could choose a different name for gamification, what would it be?

Many people in the gamification world don’t like the word but I think the word is here to stay. I read somewhere an alternative that I like: engagification. But this word probably has less appeal.

5. What would you rather be?

Lion

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Luca Massaro

Twitter: @iamluca

Website: http://weplay.co

1. What description would you expect to see of gamification in a dictionary?

2. If you could write the dictionary entry for Gamification, what would you write?

Using game elements and adapting them to solve non-game contexts.

3. What is gamification to you ?

To me, gamification is just a “hype” term used in the biz tech world.

Gamification is simply a coined term for the action of discovering how people process, think, judge and decide on information. It’s the word that defines how to create appropriate reward/punishment systems to engage people towards desired behaviors.

This level of behavioral engagement is solved through applying game elements and thus the term “gamification.” Not sure what it will be called tomorrow, but gamification is the interdisciplinary study of statistics, psychology, cs, sociology and decision making (the list goes on).

Games help create engaging and meaningful experiences for both the gamification designer and the user.

4. If you could choose a different name for gamification, what would it be?

Behavioral Engagement

5. What would you rather be?

Elephant

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Erik Kraan, software developer @ Netherlands government

Twitter: @koffiemoc

1. What description would you expect to see of gamification in a dictionary?

2. If you could write the dictionary entry for Gamification, what would you write?

Gamification is a paradigm that makes marketing people believe that when you add some badges or other rewards to really annoying stuff, it will make customers getting back. The word originates from the IT industry, where some people believe that when you add some video-game features to boring computer tasks, they will be getting fun.

3. What is gamification to you ?

A way of thinking about your design, of software as well as business processes, that should ask a few questions about it: Is it exciting to work with? Can I see the user of my design as the player? Does it make the goal and the rules clear to the player? Will the user play it again if he didn’t “win” (whatever that may be). Is the design easy and difficult enough? What challenges in the design does the player have to overcome to get into the winning mood?

It would be sad if gamification turned out to be nothing more than adding a complicated reward system in order to compensate for lousy website content, a lousy service or a lousy business process. That would be Pavlov all over again. It is proven that people who perform complicated tasks (like working with software) produce not better when stimulated externally, that is, with some virtual reward system.

4. If you could choose a different name for gamification, what would it be?

Homo ludens oriented design.

5. What would you rather be?

One of the gods from the Disc World. They’re lousy game masters. But it’d be fun and really dada.

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This survey is now open to anyone – please take a few moments to fill it in!! (click here). The answers to this will be made public in a few weeks!!

 

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