Source: http://mygamification.com/2011/gamification-goes-mainstream/
Monday, April 29, 2013
Gamification: Mainstream Since 2011
The idea of gamification has been flying around for a couple of years. Gamification was even short listed for word of the year in Oxford’s Dictionary 2011. In the end of 2011, some stats on this concept became available:
Source: http://mygamification.com/2011/gamification-goes-mainstream/
Source: http://mygamification.com/2011/gamification-goes-mainstream/
Sunday, April 21, 2013
How Gamification Became the "New Normal"
Are you convinced that Gamification is already spread enough within Business?
According to Prof. Werbach, here are some organizations that already use Gamification:
But also this concept helps to generate a sizable amount of money. Check this out:
According to Prof. Werbach, here are some organizations that already use Gamification:
But also this concept helps to generate a sizable amount of money. Check this out:
Saturday, April 20, 2013
GAMASUTRA-2
Putting it together visually
All of this can be represented in a sort of ’3D’ / TriDimensional version of our two Acting On diagrams from earlier.
How do you create a balanced system for all types of users?
It becomes complex to handle so many user types when compared to five types like Player and then Philanthropists, Socializers, Achievers and Free Spirits.
One should create a system that appeals to the four basic intrinsic motivations and user types. Also, one should make it social, meaningful and give people some freedom before integrating a well thought out reward system (points, badges etc.). Through this, we are not creating a system that relies on the rewards to run but getting intrinsically motivated people. It is important to keep in mind that you want more of the intrinsically motivated users if possible because they will keep coming back, keep producing content. Also, these eight types of users can help us decide how to balance the system.
But, if the system is flooded with Self Seekers and Exploiters then you stand the chance of devaluing everything. Self Seekers run the risk of generating lots of meaningless content whilst exploiters will reduce the value of things like up votes and likes if the rewards are badly implemented.
Philanthropists and Achievers can both help a system thrive. Philanthropists want to help everyone. They want to answer questions and guide users. Achievers, depending on the type of system, may also wish to do the same. They are interested in being the best – at mastering things. They will want to give the best answer to a question, not so much to help the user, but to know they were the best. However, as their main aim is self-enrichment, they can also give very little back to as system aimed at teaching!
Free Spirits and Consumers tend to give very little back to the people, consumers especially. Too many of either of them and the social aspect of your system stands a good chance of not working. It is possible that consumers are all you want (with a loyalty scheme), but it is worth considering you can get greater value from engaging everyone else.
Socialisers are great for evangelizing a system and bringing more people to it, however, they don’t add content to systems as much as other types. Networkers are similar, whatever their motivations may be. However, networkers will bring in anyone, not just relevant people. Too many of them and the social aspect of the system can become diluted. Look at users on twitter with 30,000 “friends” then look at what content these friends actually generate. The likelihood is that of these 30,000 people, they only interact with a tiny fraction – so will other users.
Also, exploiters are the most likely to “cheat”. They are the ones who will “exploit” loopholes in the rules to gain – even if it is at the expense of others within the system.
Final Sutras
Below is an overall view on how to support different user types.
Although these are to give conceptual insights,, real life is not as black and white. Users will most likely display traits from multiple user types. But, they will usually have one that guides them more than the others. They are also likely to change user types as they get to know the system. In systems where rewards are used in the onboarding process, but are phased out as the user becomes more capable, you will see them going from extrinsically “motivated” user types to intrinsically motivated types. This is when they realize that there is more to be gained from the system than just the points and badges.
Putting it together visually
All of this can be represented in a sort of ’3D’ / TriDimensional version of our two Acting On diagrams from earlier.
How do you create a balanced system for all types of users?
It becomes complex to handle so many user types when compared to five types like Player and then Philanthropists, Socializers, Achievers and Free Spirits.
One should create a system that appeals to the four basic intrinsic motivations and user types. Also, one should make it social, meaningful and give people some freedom before integrating a well thought out reward system (points, badges etc.). Through this, we are not creating a system that relies on the rewards to run but getting intrinsically motivated people. It is important to keep in mind that you want more of the intrinsically motivated users if possible because they will keep coming back, keep producing content. Also, these eight types of users can help us decide how to balance the system.
But, if the system is flooded with Self Seekers and Exploiters then you stand the chance of devaluing everything. Self Seekers run the risk of generating lots of meaningless content whilst exploiters will reduce the value of things like up votes and likes if the rewards are badly implemented.
Philanthropists and Achievers can both help a system thrive. Philanthropists want to help everyone. They want to answer questions and guide users. Achievers, depending on the type of system, may also wish to do the same. They are interested in being the best – at mastering things. They will want to give the best answer to a question, not so much to help the user, but to know they were the best. However, as their main aim is self-enrichment, they can also give very little back to as system aimed at teaching!
Free Spirits and Consumers tend to give very little back to the people, consumers especially. Too many of either of them and the social aspect of your system stands a good chance of not working. It is possible that consumers are all you want (with a loyalty scheme), but it is worth considering you can get greater value from engaging everyone else.
Socialisers are great for evangelizing a system and bringing more people to it, however, they don’t add content to systems as much as other types. Networkers are similar, whatever their motivations may be. However, networkers will bring in anyone, not just relevant people. Too many of them and the social aspect of the system can become diluted. Look at users on twitter with 30,000 “friends” then look at what content these friends actually generate. The likelihood is that of these 30,000 people, they only interact with a tiny fraction – so will other users.
Also, exploiters are the most likely to “cheat”. They are the ones who will “exploit” loopholes in the rules to gain – even if it is at the expense of others within the system.
Final Sutras
Below is an overall view on how to support different user types.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
How Fun Can Make A Difference!
Although Gamification is quite new as a stand-along concept, the approach has been implemented a long time ago.
According to the professor Kevin Werbach (Wharton, University of Pennsylvania - the first official lecturer on this subject) gamification is mainly listening to what games can teach us, learning from game design and appreciating fun. So, Gamification as a concept can be implemented in many areas:
Sweden is rich for examples of the last approach - changing the behavior in a social context.
One example is 'Speed limiting'. In order to stimulate drivers to keep the speed within the limits, Stockholm's Police went beyond the fines. On one of the speed limit radars they installed a lottery sign, explaining the rules. Part of the fines, collected from those who exceed the speed limit, will be randomly given to a driver who kept the speed within the limits. The results were astonishing - the average speed was reduced from 32 km/h to 25 km/h. Which is a 22% reduction rate.
Another example is 'Piano stairs'. The objective was to stimulate people to use the stairs vs. the escalator. The Odenplan metro station, (in Stockholm) had its stairs turned into a piano. So, stepping on the stair would make a piano key sound. As a result, 66% more people chose stairs over the escalator.
So, Gamification can be used in many different cases, even in changing behavior.
But also in Marketing. Coke Zero had presented this amazing marketing campaign for the new Bond movie, Skyfall . The objective of the video was to stimulate the discussion and engagement around the central campaign idea of ‘Coke Zero drives you to unlock the 007 in you’(1) . The buzz generated by the campaign has reached 7M views on Youtube and gained one of the highest sharing rates on-line as well as high coverage in off-line media. So, objective was achieved by far.
Although this last example is not 100% Gamfication in action, it illustrates great potential in applying the concept in engaging with consumers.
So, be ready for more games in real life!
According to the professor Kevin Werbach (Wharton, University of Pennsylvania - the first official lecturer on this subject) gamification is mainly listening to what games can teach us, learning from game design and appreciating fun. So, Gamification as a concept can be implemented in many areas:
- externally (e.g. in Marketing, Sales),
- internally (e.g. HR, Productivity enhancement), and
- for behavioral change (Sustainability, Health and wellness, etc.).
Sweden is rich for examples of the last approach - changing the behavior in a social context.
One example is 'Speed limiting'. In order to stimulate drivers to keep the speed within the limits, Stockholm's Police went beyond the fines. On one of the speed limit radars they installed a lottery sign, explaining the rules. Part of the fines, collected from those who exceed the speed limit, will be randomly given to a driver who kept the speed within the limits. The results were astonishing - the average speed was reduced from 32 km/h to 25 km/h. Which is a 22% reduction rate.
Another example is 'Piano stairs'. The objective was to stimulate people to use the stairs vs. the escalator. The Odenplan metro station, (in Stockholm) had its stairs turned into a piano. So, stepping on the stair would make a piano key sound. As a result, 66% more people chose stairs over the escalator.
So, Gamification can be used in many different cases, even in changing behavior.
But also in Marketing. Coke Zero had presented this amazing marketing campaign for the new Bond movie, Skyfall . The objective of the video was to stimulate the discussion and engagement around the central campaign idea of ‘Coke Zero drives you to unlock the 007 in you’(1) . The buzz generated by the campaign has reached 7M views on Youtube and gained one of the highest sharing rates on-line as well as high coverage in off-line media. So, objective was achieved by far.
Although this last example is not 100% Gamfication in action, it illustrates great potential in applying the concept in engaging with consumers.
So, be ready for more games in real life!
Saturday, April 13, 2013
GAMASUTRA-1
One should understand the commonly misunderstood yet over used metaphor from game design that we use in gamification, “Player Types”. Following is an attempt to create something similar to Richard Bartle’s player types, but for gamified systems.
A Flawed Metaphor for Gamification
Analyzing the common usage of Richard’s player type theory makes it obvious that as a metaphor for gamification, it is useful but flawed. Gamification is not the same as MMORPG’s (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) – the thing that Bartle’s Player Types is designed for. There is one massive assumption. In pure games, players WANT to play. In a gamified system, that is not always going to be the case. Also, gamification does not generally include much in the way of gameplay.
Concentrating on the intrinsically motivated users, there are four basic types. The diagram below shows how this looks.
Players are the ones who like to get the achievements in the system; they like to see their names on the leader boards. They like the “game” of it all. They are also the most likely to make use of “loop holes” to gain an advantage. There are to play the game and are happy with the extrinsic rewards.
Socialisers are the ones who want to interact with others. They like to be connected to others. They are interested in parts of the system that help them do this. These are the ones will evangelise your internal social networks. Most motivated by the social connections aspects of relatedness.
Free Spirits like to have agency. They don’t want to be restricted in how they go through their personal journey. They will be the most creative, have the fanciest avatars, create the most personal content, but also like to explore. They seek self-expression and autonomy.
Achievers are the ones who want to be the best at things, or at least be achieving things within the system. They want to get 100% on the internal learning system. They do this for themselves and are probably not that bothered with then showing off to others about it.
Philanthropists want to feel that they are part of something bigger. They want to give back to others. These are the ones who will answer endless questions on forums, just because they like to feel they are helping. They want a system that allows them to enrich others and feel a sense of purpose.
As you can see, those willing to “play” can fall into any one of the five categories (or any combination of the five). However, they are the only ones who will fall into the player type. Those who are not willing to play the game to collect the rewards and climb the leader board, can still be motivated and engaged, you just have to try harder and be less obvious. That said, if you look at it – you still have the most powerful intrinsic methods available. It is easy to see that each type of user will need different types of motivation within your system. It goes again to show that you have to cater for everyone, not just the players with a points and badges system. This is likely to cater only for the smallest number of people. For this, we will ignore the player user type, concentrating instead on the intrinsically motivated groups. These types follow a simple pattern.
• Philanthropists and Free Spirits both prefer to act within a free and unstructured environment.
• Achievers and Socialisers tend to need a structure around them.
• Socialisers and Philanthropists are not looking to gain anything material from the system. They are there for the warm fuzzy feelings they get from engaging with or giving to others.
• Achievers and Free Spirits are there for varying degrees of personal gain. Not in bad way though. Achievers are interested in improving and gaining understanding. Free Spirits want to be able to create and use the system to best suit them.
So, we can categorize these as the following
This leaves us with eight user types, four intrinsically motivate and four primarily extrinsically motivated. The next step is to look at what these eight types are acting on, in our gamified system. They describe whether a player is interacting with or acting on people or the virtual world. This gives us two diagrams to help visualise this. The first describes the intrinsically motivated users, the second the extrinsically motivated.
As you can see, within the Player User types there may well be some crossover of motivation. Consumers and Exploiters may share many of the same traits but the difference is, exploiters will try to find the boundaries of the system and how that may benefit them while consumers just want to get their reward with as little action from them as possible.
Possible Interactions
All of these different user types have the potential to affect each other in your system.
For example, Philanthropists are the parent figure. They are the ones who are likely to want to help anybody they can, no matter of the other person’s motives. Exploiters, on the other hand, will make use of anyone and everything they can to get personal gain from the system.
Socialiser and Networkers will wish to interact with people. Neither will be after anything from people
directly. In the case of a networker, their reward comes from being connected; where as the socialiser’s reward is knowing you and interacting with you.
Self Seekers have no real interest in in the people within a system but they are just a means to an end. In a similar way, Achievers are not there for the people, they are there for self-enrichment. The big difference here is that the Self Seeker is the one who will collect badges and trophies in a system to show off their expertise to others. The Self Seeker is very similar to the Bartle Achiever player type!
Free Spirits and Consumers have the least impact on any of the other users. Their interests are purely personal, using the system to get what they want from it. Other users are of no direct interest to them.
Stay tuned for Gamasutra-2!
Reference: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AndrzejMarczewski/20130318/188620/Gamification_User_Types.php
A Flawed Metaphor for Gamification
Analyzing the common usage of Richard’s player type theory makes it obvious that as a metaphor for gamification, it is useful but flawed. Gamification is not the same as MMORPG’s (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) – the thing that Bartle’s Player Types is designed for. There is one massive assumption. In pure games, players WANT to play. In a gamified system, that is not always going to be the case. Also, gamification does not generally include much in the way of gameplay.
Concentrating on the intrinsically motivated users, there are four basic types. The diagram below shows how this looks.
Socialisers are the ones who want to interact with others. They like to be connected to others. They are interested in parts of the system that help them do this. These are the ones will evangelise your internal social networks. Most motivated by the social connections aspects of relatedness.
Free Spirits like to have agency. They don’t want to be restricted in how they go through their personal journey. They will be the most creative, have the fanciest avatars, create the most personal content, but also like to explore. They seek self-expression and autonomy.
Achievers are the ones who want to be the best at things, or at least be achieving things within the system. They want to get 100% on the internal learning system. They do this for themselves and are probably not that bothered with then showing off to others about it.
Philanthropists want to feel that they are part of something bigger. They want to give back to others. These are the ones who will answer endless questions on forums, just because they like to feel they are helping. They want a system that allows them to enrich others and feel a sense of purpose.
As you can see, those willing to “play” can fall into any one of the five categories (or any combination of the five). However, they are the only ones who will fall into the player type. Those who are not willing to play the game to collect the rewards and climb the leader board, can still be motivated and engaged, you just have to try harder and be less obvious. That said, if you look at it – you still have the most powerful intrinsic methods available. It is easy to see that each type of user will need different types of motivation within your system. It goes again to show that you have to cater for everyone, not just the players with a points and badges system. This is likely to cater only for the smallest number of people. For this, we will ignore the player user type, concentrating instead on the intrinsically motivated groups. These types follow a simple pattern.
• Philanthropists and Free Spirits both prefer to act within a free and unstructured environment.
• Achievers and Socialisers tend to need a structure around them.
• Socialisers and Philanthropists are not looking to gain anything material from the system. They are there for the warm fuzzy feelings they get from engaging with or giving to others.
• Achievers and Free Spirits are there for varying degrees of personal gain. Not in bad way though. Achievers are interested in improving and gaining understanding. Free Spirits want to be able to create and use the system to best suit them.
So, we can categorize these as the following
This leaves us with eight user types, four intrinsically motivate and four primarily extrinsically motivated. The next step is to look at what these eight types are acting on, in our gamified system. They describe whether a player is interacting with or acting on people or the virtual world. This gives us two diagrams to help visualise this. The first describes the intrinsically motivated users, the second the extrinsically motivated.
As you can see, within the Player User types there may well be some crossover of motivation. Consumers and Exploiters may share many of the same traits but the difference is, exploiters will try to find the boundaries of the system and how that may benefit them while consumers just want to get their reward with as little action from them as possible.
Possible Interactions
All of these different user types have the potential to affect each other in your system.
For example, Philanthropists are the parent figure. They are the ones who are likely to want to help anybody they can, no matter of the other person’s motives. Exploiters, on the other hand, will make use of anyone and everything they can to get personal gain from the system.
Socialiser and Networkers will wish to interact with people. Neither will be after anything from people
directly. In the case of a networker, their reward comes from being connected; where as the socialiser’s reward is knowing you and interacting with you.
Self Seekers have no real interest in in the people within a system but they are just a means to an end. In a similar way, Achievers are not there for the people, they are there for self-enrichment. The big difference here is that the Self Seeker is the one who will collect badges and trophies in a system to show off their expertise to others. The Self Seeker is very similar to the Bartle Achiever player type!
Free Spirits and Consumers have the least impact on any of the other users. Their interests are purely personal, using the system to get what they want from it. Other users are of no direct interest to them.
Stay tuned for Gamasutra-2!
Reference: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AndrzejMarczewski/20130318/188620/Gamification_User_Types.php
Friday, April 5, 2013
How to successfully implement Gamification
Brian Burke, January this year, wrote in a Forbes article that "by 2014, 80 percent of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives." ... Maybe this is not what you where expecting from a blog post that is titled "How to successfully implement Gamification ." ... Gamification is a great tool that according to Burke is at the peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle (also mentioned in one of our previous posts). This does not mean that it is not a great tool for businesses to take advantage of and make money, but you do have to keep a couple of things in mind when doing so to be effective. Burke lists out four suggestions that might help your business when thinking about implementing Gamification into your business´s strategy:
1) Do not confuse activity with results - Seek out examples of companies that have achieved their business objectives. (Some examples seen below)
2) Think of the audience as players not puppets - The target audience must be engaged with meaningful incentives.
3) Clearly identify the business objectives - To guard against this, when an opportunity to leverage gamification is identified, what must follow is a statement of clearly defined business objectives and a critical analysis of the suitability of gamification to achieve those business objectives.
4) Design for player centricity - To achieve success for companies starting in gamification, the first design point is to motivate players to achieve their goals – and those goals should overlap with the business goals.
Bunchball, one of FastCompany's 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2012, is helping many companies implement Gamification into their business in many different ways. Click on the following image see an example of Bunchball's work and listen to his founder talk about keys to success:
1) Do not confuse activity with results - Seek out examples of companies that have achieved their business objectives. (Some examples seen below)
2) Think of the audience as players not puppets - The target audience must be engaged with meaningful incentives.
3) Clearly identify the business objectives - To guard against this, when an opportunity to leverage gamification is identified, what must follow is a statement of clearly defined business objectives and a critical analysis of the suitability of gamification to achieve those business objectives.
4) Design for player centricity - To achieve success for companies starting in gamification, the first design point is to motivate players to achieve their goals – and those goals should overlap with the business goals.
Bunchball, one of FastCompany's 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2012, is helping many companies implement Gamification into their business in many different ways. Click on the following image see an example of Bunchball's work and listen to his founder talk about keys to success:
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Other successful examples include:
Warner Brothers was able to gain a 360° view of customers while dramatically increasing user generated content, sales of WB products, and traffic to movie sites.This was done by implementing an interactive, Bunchball-powered Insider Rewards Program—to drive loyalty among existing and new fans of Warner Brothers’ content.
Created a social halo effect for Adobe web traffic, and increased Photoshop sales exponentially, delivering high resolution success. They did this by illustrating to customers how easy it is to learn. Enlist Bunchball to create a gamified Photoshop curriculum.
The following is an example of how Pepsi is using Gamification with the help of gigya:
We hope these examples help you see how Gamification can be good for your business.
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