Gamification of Life

After a long time with no time to post, I find myself posting on Gamification whilst listening to a talk by @Yukaichou from Enterprise Gamification Consultancy at Hult International Business School organised by a student @NKakuev. He has been listed a 'top-5 gamification guru' on a UK Leaderboard apparently and having been to other talks about gamification, here is someone with 10 years' experience that appears to actually know what it is about.

Source: http://www.profacts.be/blog/?p=846

One of the examples he talks about is how to create a game called 'FoldIt' to help create a protein structure for the AIDs problem. The problem existed for 15 years and was solved in 10 days.

Another example listed is SAP Community Network where they added game elements into their system and managed to increase their Active Users by 1300% and Activity by 2300%. As Yu-Kai says, this is not a start-up - that 1300% growth is significant when one is talking about SAP.

Example 3: Autodesk - where people go to different countries and people solve different problems. It might be fixing a bridge (etc.) and you have to use a free trial of Autodesk - the trial use increased 54% and Sales Revenue increased by 29%.

Yu-kai wrote a list of Gamification stats that are useful to help show ROI.

He then went on, through this whistle-stop tour of Gamification, to talk about the Schopenhauer Truth Hype Cycle (compare to Gartner's Hype Cycle)

1. Ridiculed 
2. Violently opposed 
3. Regarded as self-evident

Which sounds like the process people go through with feedback... which brings us to Gartner saying that 80% of gamification attempts will fail due to bad design.  So how do you get better design?

Good Game Design asks the question "How do I want my users to feel?"

Yu-kai went on to talk about 8 core drivers that make games fun (do check out his blog for the meanings behind the headlines), but that also make us want to hang out with friends. These core drivers are:

1. Epic Meaning & Calling
2. Empowerment
3. Social Influence
4. Unpredictability
5. Avoidance
6. Scarcity & Impatience
7. Ownership
8. Accomplishment

Yu-kai gave a great talk about what gamification is and what works, what does not work and how people who want to use gamification should focus on engaging users rather than just causing addiction.  He has a framework called 'Octalysis' based on the 8 core drivers above.  He plots a matrix showing Discovery, Onboarding, Scaffolding and Endgame against Achievers, Explorers, Socialisers and Killers.

What surprises me is the number of people who still don't know what Gamification is, let alone whether or not it should be for them.  This is the same noise people made when social media first came about: 'it's for kids' or 'it's not relevant for my business'.  If you can make people enjoy engaging with your business, they will.  It should be obvious... I'll watch with interest how much people continue to treat this as 'new' over the coming years.

So why the title 'Gamification of Life'?  Is life a game?  There is an end-point.  There is a level of competition in every aspect of life: key points of the game (school, university, grad-school, relationships, marriage, children, jobs, careers, career-changes, recognition, fitness, beauty, wealth, longevity, popularity, altruism....) can cause people to compete and compare themselves with others (favourably or otherwise).

A lot of apps focus on this to help people eat less, do more exercise, spend more sensibly... so it would be interesting to see how this could be used to help individuals 'improve'.  Essentially, I'm thinking of how to gamify therapy: we all need that!

Gamification for Business...

Further to my post a year or two ago on gamification and trade-fairs here's an infographic that benefits for businesses...

Infographic courtesy: OnlineBusinessDegree.org

5 ways to gamify trade fairs and expos

Attending the Ad:Tech exhibition at Olympia in London yesterday and today, I am struck by how untechnical it is. No suggestion of participating online. No suggestion of accessing information online as one moves about (an ideal Layar layer would surely be information on the stands and products on your smartphone as you move about the show floor). No suggestion of moving towards a virtual fair...which is surely the future...but when? I am also struck that between seminars, which can be divided into two groups: those that make an effort to tell you something new and those that don't attempt to hide the fact that they are here to sell their products and services, the show floor can be a little boring if you are not specifically looking for a new supplier of universal analytics or mobile widgets.

So here are some ways to gamify your trade fair experience:

1. At a fair like Ad:Tech, which combines marketing and technical elements, there is a fun game of "spot the techie". The techies who go to this fair are more socially aware than many of their backroom cousins, but still tend to dress differently from your core advertising people. That's not a bad thing. The world needs people who keep servers running and set up websites and provide analytics software. But you can, if you wish, divide your targets along a spectrum from 'Too cool for school' through to 'Übergeek and borderline Asbergers'.

2. Related to this, is spot the brands who do not realise this is the 21st century and there is no place for sexism. They are easy to spot. They have young women dressed in skimpy clothing with the company brand on their chest giving out leaflets and other freebies. If they had men in skimpy clothing that would not improve the issue....we're at a business trade fair, not a disco.

3. Freebies. This is fun. Go around the fair to pick up the best freebies you can. So far I have an aluminium water bottle, a book, a beach ball, a squishy Einstein and a desk-basketball set. No need to buy Christmas presents this year!

4. If you are not trying to watch your weight as I am (well, watch it not changing and wishing it would go away), see if you can get a free lunch from the diffent sandwiches and canapés on offer at the different stands. You could try and get drunk too....there are occasional offers of cheap champagne and wine.

5. Create your own version of X Factor. At the seminars, score the presenters on their performance. You could have different criteria, such as appearance, vocal style, PowerPoint slide quality, audience interaction.... You could even give em feedback, such as "Enthusiastic delivery John but you are in danger of sounding like you are hectoring the audience and borderline irritating" or "Great content Jane but think about how you can use your voice to keep the audience awake".

In fact, this suggests to me a great new idea for a start-up. We will create an app for all mobile platforms (iOS, Android, RIM, Windows) that for any given trade show will provide a list of seminar speakers and exhibitors. The exhibition organiser could use the app to share schedules with attendees, but the game part will be to have easy one-touch buttons to score speakers on different criteria, a sliding scale from übercool to übergeek which you can use to rate speakers and attendees, a 'name and shame' feature to spot shameless sexism by different exhibitors. You could even award badges such as "Runner-up best speaker" or "Too cool for school" to individuals. You could earn points too according to freebies and food consumed.

We could showcase the app at next year's Ad:Tech. We just need to get the chocolate teapots to give away, branded miniskirts, sock-and-sandal combinations for sales staff, and we'll need to take a course on presentation skills. If anyone wants in, just let me know. This time next year we'll be millionaires....