Gamification for Youth

We're about to present to the Foundation for Young Australians this afternoon, to highlight the ways in which gamification can improve program design, structure and delivery. The Foundation is a very innovative organisation here in Australia that has been in operation for 30 years and is continually looking for new and different ways to engage youth.

The presentation below highlights how gamification can be used, drawing examples from many projects around that world that have used gamification in association with interesting multi-platform delivery and more deeper engagement strategies that use more complex game dynamics rather than the run of the mill mechanics of badges and leaderboards.

More on this topic later, but for now enjoy the presentation below :)

Gamification: Foundation for Young Australians

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Gamification for Brands & Marketing

Brand managers and marketers are starting to take an active interest in games and gamification and the first significant public conversation in Melbourne is taking place tonight at the Social Media Club. I'm on a panel discussion with Daniel Ferguson from Spiral Media (representing Zynga and Pop Cap), Harry Ravenswood, Multiplatform TV at ABC and Gavin Heron, Creative Director from Visual Jazz.

I've prepared some notes which I've provided below. I'll post a more significant piece later in the week after the conversations tonight :)

Gamification for brands

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Gamification Flame Wars

Like most practitioners of gamification I have been dismayed at the recent flame wars about the relevance and applicability of gamification outside of games, and in particular, as a tool to be used in the enterprise. From my perspective gamification is a key tool that can assist in resolving the malaise affecting enterprises around the world. But that doesn't mean that I have given my wholesale support to gamification. There are some key limitations that I have already written about here however I believe that as an industry we can work through this so we can unleash its positive and much needed potential. The flame wars have become personal, unprofessional and destructive and it leaves me wondering whose vested interests this is all serving? 

Why I have given my constructive support to gamification: In my work as a management consultant it was becoming clear over the last 10 years that traditional business tools were becoming less and less effective as these static tools were not keeping up with the systemic changes taking place in enterprises and  our communities in general. 

The situation is now so desperate that enterprises can barely crack a 30% success rate in change and project management initiatives. On top of this (and most likely, related to it) international research shows that only 20% of the corporate workforce is engaged on the job. This is a significant problem and it's costing the corporate sector hundreds of millions of dollars each year. 

At the heart of the solutions to these problems is for enterprises to better engage with their staff and their stakeholders. Practitioners like myself have been using a combination of approaches imbedded in systems thinking, organisational learning, role playing games and positive psychology for several years. Gamification adds to the richness of these tools to facilitate positive outcomes for both the enterprise, for staff and their stakeholders. 

While I understand the concerns of the detractors, I believe they are largely overstated. The main reason is that when you look closely at their arguments they assume that business leaders are manipulative and that staff are gullible. Not only is this wrong, it is incredibly naive. 

While there are always exceptions, most enterprises work towards producing positive, sustainable organizations to produce the innovation and productivity that is critical to their long term survival. My work is therefore focussed on using tools which include gamification to assist organizations to do just that. 

The City that Never Sleeps

While in the middle of writing a post on my key insights from the recent Gamification Summit I felt the urge to express my love for the Summit's host city, New York. But as I write, I start to think about the reasons behind this massive projection I've bestowed onto the city.

If love is just an encounter with our unconscious (blame Jung for my tiresome over analysis of my relationships) it occurred to me that the city represents three of the most important drivers in my life - freedom, awesomeness and honesty.

Projection 1: The freedom to create and recreate yourself and to not be bound by the past or the expectations of others. I love the rebelliousness in this and the hunger for adventure.

Projection 2: The blatant in your face cry for totally amazing and awesome experiences, relationships and achievements without the burden of guilt or shame.

Projection 3: The need to be totally honest and authentic with who you are, and for others to be that with you.

Whether New York is any of those things is immaterial (this is a projection remember!) The reality is that every person and every city can all be free, awesome and honest, but sadly this is not always the case. We have a choice: we can chose the safety of a shadow dance or embrace the real magic we carry within ourselves.

So now I'm left wondering why I need a projection the size of New York City? I think it's time to finish that post on the gamification summit :)

Gamification for StartUps

Just a quick post before I dash off to Sydney for the Start-Up Weekend to present on gamification for start ups. I'll provide a more detailed post tonight, but here is the deck for now. Enjoy!

Gamification for start ups copy

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Fun or Not? The Gamification of the Enterprise

The gamification of the enterprise is now in the early stages of development and most progressive organisations are experimenting with what gamification can deliver. In a global business environment where the average success rate in change management, project management and systems implementations is sitting around 25-30%, even a 1% improvement will yield the average enterprise of a savings of several millions of dollars. And that is just the low hanging fruit.

So how do we gamify the enterprise? Let's start with your current business pitch of how you define and focus your business, and we'll compare that to how a game designer would pitch their game to a potential player or an investor.

This will be a little different to the annual strategic planning exercise of developing the enterprise mission statement and goals. That exercise is now past its use-by date and it tends fills the average worker's heart with dread because the process has become mechanical and it rarely results in meaningful or inspirational outcomes.

The first step in gamifying an enterprise goes like this: If you were to reinvent your current business as a game, what would you do differently to engage your staff to play and be creative, inspire your customers to go on an adventure with you and create an awesome experience for all your stakeholders?

Before we start the exercise, complete (or dig out) the mission statement and goals for your current business as the "before" example.

All done? Now let's build a new 'gamified' one:

My Game Pitch*

1. The name of our game is... [redefine your mission as the epic name of the game]

2. Our story is about...[every great game has a great story - what is yours?]

3. Our target players are...[who are your players? Build profiles, make them human, make them real. Which of Bartle's player types are they?]

4. We will be solving the problem of...[this is why enterprises are here, to solve real social needs and real problems]

5. The key fun factor in this is...[what fun, challenges and adventures will you take us on in this game?]

Now have a look at the before and after, The Business Pitch and The Game Pitch. Which is fun and which is not?

The magic of this exercise is that by simply changing the language and the framework, we start to view the world differently through a new paradigm of possibilities. The old language of the enterprise is carrying the baggage of a command/control era. The new language of the enterprise is a gameful one because our number one priority is now the same as that of a game designer - engagement.

Our next posts will dive into internal enterprise systems and processes.

(*adapted from Amy Jo Kim's awesome masterclass which I attended at the Gamification Summit in San Francisco January 2011)

What kind of player are you?

So, you want to gamify your business? Excellent, but let's start with you, the gamification strategy designer. You must first know thyself before we can launch into designing gamified strategies for business. I've run a series of workshops over the last few weeks and one of the key exercise that seems to resonate with everyone is Bartle's player types.

For those unfamiliar with Bartle, his legendary work is used by game designers to target specific player types in their games. There are four basic types - Killers, Acheivers, Explorers and Socialisers, although in a more complex and not often quoted piece of work, Bartle has an excellent 3D model of 8 types of players which we won't explore here today.

Now before you read beyond the pic below, follow this link to the GamerDNA.com site so we can determine what kind of player you are before we launch into the business of gamification - see you on the other side.

I'm a hardcore Explorer tragic [Explorer 93% Socializer 53% Achiever 40% Killer 13%] and the reason that it's important for me to know this is that I need to put my own biases to one side when I'm designing for a target audience that aren't Explorers. As an Explorer, I find that if you don't have enough meaning, challenges, mysteries and puzzles built into your game, I'm quickly bored. And if you keep throwing meaningless points, badges and leaderboards at me, you're going to irritate me.

However if I am designing for Achiever and Killer types, as an Explorer I need to understand that these types of players need something different and I really need to connect with what makes them tick when designing gamification strategies that resonates with them. What we must remember is that all four types are within in us, and despite having a dominant or preferred style, we will play differently depending on the game and the situation.

I need to point out that Bartle's work was not intended to be used outside MMORPG gaming environments. However given the limited amount of material that an industry as new as gamification has to work with, Bartle's types have been used as a broad conceptual framework to help guide target market analysis and gamification strategy design in non-gaming environments. For a bit of balance, see Bartle's own view on the state of play with gamification here.

This is the first part of a series of posts on gamifying your business. Next week we'll look at defining your business, identifying your players and designing the core customer experience.

Until then, play nice!