5 Things You Should Know About Gamification

As a business owner, leader, manager, HR or talent development professional, you can learn how to create fun and rewarding gamified experiences to achieve the business objectives that are crucial for the success and profitability of your organization. But you’ll have to begin with a willingness to think differently.

Here are 5 things to consider in gamification design.

The Gamification Quest: A 7-Minute Design Challenge

This challenge was created for participants at the Training 2016 Conference and Expo sponsored by Training Magazine. It is designed to give a quick overview of the gamification strategy design process for Talent Development Programs. 

Are you up to the challenge?

    

The Gamification Quest: A 7- Minute Design Challenge from Monica Cornetti (LION)

About the Author:  A gamification speaker and designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as a #1 Gamification Guru in the World by UK-Based Leaderboarded. She is the Founder and CEO of theSententia Gamification Consortium and the author of the book Totally Awesome Training Activity Guide: Put Gamification to Work for You. Monica is hired for her skill as a gamification speaker and is considered at the top of her field in gamification design for corporate learning.

Connect with Monica on Twitter @monicacornetti or the company websitewww.monicacornetti.com or www.SententiaGames.com

Gamification... The Adventure Continues

We arrived back in Austin late Saturday night, and as the wheels touched down, we looked at each other and said, "That was a GREAT trip!" 10 days in Valencia and Barcelona, Spain as part of my participation in the 2015  Gamification World Congress. The event itself was one of the most organized and best run events that I have ever been a part of as both as a speaker or an attendee. And the people were amazingly warm, gracious, generous, and FUN!

I was honored to deliver a workshop on Day 1 of the Congress on Gamification in the field of Talent Development. I also attended two workshops, one given by my colleague Yu-Kai Chou

Player Centric Gamification Design

There are fundamental questions that encourage a creative gamification design. You should ask yourself these questions before you begin the gamification process as well as throughout your design and roll out stages.

For example... "What causes some employees or customers to engage in a gamified process, while others disengage in frustration? Why is it that some gamification mechanics appeal to some people, but have no effect on others?"

Others have tried to simplify the human tendency to play, but our willingness to invest time and energy into a process or experience ultimately comes from our core motivators. 

Player and User Types for Gamification Design

In this episode of Gamification Talk Radio Andrzej and Monica explore the use of player and user types in gamification. The history of their use in gamification, the short comings of traditional types, and how to make use of the Gamification User Types Hexad - a user type classification model that Andrzej created

• What user types / player types are - a brief history
• Why they are important to gamification
• How to make use of them for your gamification strategy and application

About Andrzej Marczewski: A Gamification expert at Capgemini UK, keynote speaker and author of Gamification: A Simple Introduction. He has spent 14 years as developer and a lifetime as a gamer.  Andrzej is also the creator of the Gamification User Types Hexad, the first taxonomy and framework specifically designed to help gamifiers create solutions that put the user at the center of the experience. Connect with Andrzej at http://gamified.co.uk and on Twitter @daverage.

About Your Host:  A gamification keynote speaker and curriculum designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as the #1 Gamification Guru in the World by UK-Based Leaderboarded. She is the author of the book Totally Awesome Training Activity Guide: Put Gamification to Work for You. Monica’s niche is gamification used in the corporate environment. Connect with Monica (@monicacornetti) www.monicacornetti.com

Gamification: Badges Revisited

My consulting work within the field of gamification allows me the opportunity to work with fascinating people and forward thinking organizations who are seeking new ways to level up their business or learning outcomes. This week was no different – and our topic for review was all about badges.

If you’ve read any of my previous articles you’ll find that I repeatedly remind us that gamification is much more than points, badges, and leaderboards – yet I don’t want us to forget that each of those game elements can have significant value in our gamification design.

Creative game thinking and game design has the potential to tap into the full range of human emotions and motivate a wide range of behaviors that will help you to achieve your business and/or learning objectives. That’s the beauty and value proposition of gamification. If you take the specific behaviors you’ve defined, you can then design your gamification strategy to create an experience that will cause people to do what you want or need them to do.

The Gamification of Talent Development

Gamification is definitely the BUZZ word of 2015.

If you're in the Talent Development, HR, and Employee Engagement fields, haven't you heard that gamification is in high demand and will continue to be for at least the next 7-10 years?

And isn't it true, if you do a quick job search on any job site for trainers, instructional designers, eLearning developers... you'll see that gamification is on the list of preferred, if not REQUIRED, skill sets?

Gamification: Become a Player

To become a player, one must voluntarily accept the rules and constraints of the game. This acceptance of the game’s rules is part of what Bernard Suits calls the lusory attitude. (Lusory derives from the Latin word for game.)

The lusory attitude of the players is defined as the “State of affairs where in one adopts rules which require one to employ worse rather than better means for reaching an end.”

For example, in the game of golf:  The objective is to get the ball in the cup on each hole with the least amount of swings of the club. Whoever has the least amounts of swings wins the round. Putting it in the hole with your hand would be best way to do that. You would not choose to take a stick with a piece of metal on one end of it, walk 300 or 400 yards away from the hole, and then attempt to drive the ball into the hole with the stick.

Put Gamification to Work in Talent Development

 

Gamification invites people to participate and engage by integrating game mechanics and game dynamics into non-game contexts. My favorite space to use gamification is in the area of Talent Development.

By adding game mechanics to training, Gamification not only increases interest, it makes training FUN! 

The goal is to increase learning and engagement through key concepts found in game design and behavioral psychology. When participants first encounter the game, they rely upon a combination of visual cues, called game elements, to not only understand how the game is played, but also how success is defined and determined.

The most common include: 

Roman Rackwitz - Gamification: The Difference Between Motivating and Rewarding

Disengagement costs real money!

In a survey from Gallup Inc. with employees, only around 15% say that they feel a high emotional connection with their employer. AND 24% even admit that they don’t have any commitment for their workplace and company.

But what drives people? Each employee in each organization in each country has different motives. You can be driven by money, status, burning ambition, power, lifestyle, sociological character and much, much more.

On this episode of the Gamification Talk Radio program Roman and Monica discuss how you can discover your individual way of using game-like behavior to unfold the powerful engagement of your employees – to truly motivate them.





About Roman Rackwitz:  As the founder of Engaginglab he leads the first established Gamification Agency within the German speaking countries. He is rated as a Top 10 Gamification Guru of world wide Gamification Experts by Leaderboarded. Roman is the Chair at GamifyCon, a German Gamification Conference and co-founded GamFed, the world’s first Gamification Association. An associate professor at different educational institutions since 2012, in 2014 he created the first official lecture at Munich Business School where he teaches about ‘Gamification for HR & Marketing.’ www.engaginglab.com

About Your Host:  A gamification keynote speaker and curriculum designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as a #1 Gamification Guru in the World by UK-Based Leaderboarded. She is the author of the book Totally Awesome Training Activity Guide: Put Gamification to Work for You. Monica’s niche is non-technical gamification used in the corporate environment. Connect with Monica (@monicacornetti) www.monicacornetti.com

Gamification, Like Hot Fudge on Ice Cream... or is it??

While points, badges, and leaderboards are important elements of gamification projects, gamification is more than just drizzling these elements onto a business process like hot fudge on Blue Bell Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream.

Gamification requires a great deal of thought about the entire design of the system, including understanding the nature of your users, thinking about what you’d like them to do and how best to make them do it.

As with any type of program design it needs to be carefully considered, designed, and reviewed. If you’re going to gamify your training and development then you’ll need to have knowledge of psychology, motivation, and game design, and understand the potential pitfalls of each.

Here are four areas to consider:

Good Gamification in Corporate Training Means Good Storytelling

Studies show that learners comprehend and retain more through stories. And storytelling, when used in training design, allows us to connect to the learner on an emotional level and helps to create interest in the learning topic.

Since training should be more than just about delivering facts. When developing high-quality, effective gamified training programs, we should weave stories into the instructional design and delivery – framing the quest (or learning adventure) in a spellbinding story.

For example, I was hired to gamify a 6-hour Payroll Law class. I was told, “Do your thing… make it fun and interactive. We want them to hire us, so they should understand how complex payroll law really is, and at the same time they should walk away from the day with a basic knowledge of the many components of the law.”

Are Gamers Your Ideal Employees?

My adventure into the world of Gamification formally began in the summer of 2012 when I received a call from a client asking me to develop a Gamification Workshop to teach problem solving skills for managers. I was honored to be asked and thanked her for thinking of me.

I assured her that I was the ideal person to hire for this design and delivery … after all, since 2003 I had earned the reputation of using games to interact and motivate participants in all my leadership, strategic thinking and communication workshops.

However, as I asked her about her objectives and outcomes ... I was quickly Googling the word “gamification.”

Truth was, at the time, I didn’t have a clue what gamification was. I had heard the term bantered around … but as of yet it wasn’t anything I had turned my focus to. A lot has happened since then.

Fortunately the first article I stumbled upon was by Adam Carstens and John Beck called “Get Ready for the Gamer Generation.” (TechTrends, 2005)

What I read started to change my entire way of thinking about the Gamer Generation and games in the workplace.

I then sat fascinated while watching a TED talk given by Californian game designer, Jane McGonigal. She says that by the time they turn 21, a dedicated gamer will spend 10,000 hours playing video games – exactly the same amount of time they will have spent in formal education.

According to McGonigal, four miraculous things happen to gamers while playing during those 10,000 hours.

• First, they become urgently optimistic, overwhelmed by a desire to win
• Second, they bond closely, as those who play together are more inclined to like and trust each other
• Third, it makes them happy over-achievers, sitting at their screens for hours in a state of focused bliss
• And finally it furnishes them with some sort of epic purpose – a larger-than-life reason for being

What interests me about these four stats is that they are precisely the things that make up a model employee – an optimistic, idealistic team worker who is blissfully happy to create, innovate, and work away all day and all night.

Indeed, if only some way could be found to make the working world a bit more like World of Warcraft, then not only would offices vanish, so would all problems of morale, lack of engagement and slackers.

But before I got too carried away with this high-tech nirvana, a couple of other things occurred to me. From observing the excessive gaming that went on in our recreation room, as my now 20-something sons grew up playing endless hours of games with their friends, I also remembered that video games make people lazy, grumpy, and addicted to instant gratification.

They also make you terribly inefficient: You feel productive … while achieving nothing. They make you think you can do things you can’t, like be a global ruler or score goals like Tom Brady when you're actually not in shape enough to even run round the block.

But then … don’t we see those same traits from some of the Boomers in our working world -- inefficiency, laziness and overconfidence?

Maybe the new version of the workplace run by the Gamer Generation won’t be all that different after all. It will be good and bad. Just as it is now.

Forward thinking organizations everywhere are beginning to understand the power of gamification to increase engagement as well as the bottom line and are quickly learning how to leverage its power. Let’s enter the world of Gamification together.

Game On!

More Gamification Articles:

• The 4 Questions to Ask Before Implementing Gamification
• Gamification Simplified
• Why You'll LOVE Low-Tech Gamification for Corporate Training

For more ideas on the power of gamification to increase engagement, get started with the Gamification Design and Implementation Program.

About the Author: Monica Cornetti
Founder and CEO, Sententia www.SententiaGames.com www.monicacornetti.com

A gamification speaker and designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as a #1 Gamification Guru in the World by UK-Based Leaderboarded. She is the author of the book Totally Awesome Training Activity Guide: Put Gamification to Work for You, writes The Gamification Report blog, and hosts the weekly Gamification Talk Radio program.

Joshua Roberts - Video Games to Create Powerful Scenario-Based Learning

 

Recently Joshua Roberts wrote an intriguing blog article about instructional design -- Choices and Decisions in E-Learning – What We Can Learn From The WalkingDead (Video Game) Series – I was hooked . Immediately I thought, “Who is this guy? I need to connect with him today!"

And, this week on Gamification Talk Radio, Joshua and I explored how to take advantage of video games in the world of learning.

Action-based Learning... The Art of Design

Research has demonstrated that people learn best when they are actively involved in the learning process. Over the years, action-based learning has been proven to appeal to all types of learners, as it accelerates knowledge and skill acquisition, and ensures long-term retention.

Action-based learning uses experiential and accelerated learning techniques such as immersive simulations, game attributes, and other interactive activities to help learners develop insights and transferable understanding as they internalize new information.

Well-designed games and simulations that focus on strategic business issues are extremely powerful learning tools because they are able to engage and motivate learners well beyond more traditional teaching methods. Gamification adds the mechanics that triggers the actions to fulfill the individual motivations and needs. All of these work together to ensure key learning and business objectives are met.

Sententia’s Leadership Development Program is artfully designed so that learners can easily connect the stories, tasks, and insights they experience during the program with their day-today work lives. This unique, trademarked program engages and involves participants and motivates them to learn..

Is now a good time to schedule a Sententia World Explorer Essential Leadership Skills in a Diverse Workforce™ training program for your leadership and management teams?

For more information on program content and how it works, you can view our Slideshare presentation or Download our Facts Sheet

For more ideas on adding game thinking and gamification to your work and play go to:  http://www.monicacornetti.com/gamification 

Let’s play!

About the Author:  Monica CornettiFounder and CEO, Sententiawww.SententiaGames.com
www.monicacornetti.com

A gamification speaker and designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as a Top 4 Gamification Guru in the World by UK-Based Leaderboarded. She is the author of the book Totally Awesome Training Activity Guide: Put Gamification to Work for You, writes The Gamification Report blog, and hosts the weekly Gamification Talk Radio program.

David Mullich - Gamification and Learning... A Game Designer's POV

My guest is David Mullich, a video game producer and designer, and our topic is – Gamification and Learning

Today David and I will explore gamification from the perspective of an experienced video game designer who uses gamification in the classroom to teach game design to students.

1. How traditional video game designers view gamification
2. How to use gamification in the classroom setting
3. How to teach gamification to others

This is a perspective we’ve not yet explored on Gamification Talk Radio, so let’s play…




About David Mullich is a video game producer and designer who has worked at Activision, Disney, 3DO and the Spin Master toy company. He is now is a freelance game consultant as well as Course Director for Game Production at The Los Angeles Film School and co-creator of the Boy Scouts Game Design Merit Badge.  As both an advocate and teacher of gamification, David is consistently rated as a top gamification guru on Leaderboarded. You can connect with David at http://www.electricsheep.biz, davidmullich.wordpress.com, and on Twitter @David_Mullich.

About Your Host:  A gamification keynote speaker and curriculum designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as the #1 Gamification Guru in the World by UK-Based Leaderboarded. She is the author of the book Totally Awesome Training Activity Guide: Put Gamification to Work for You. Monica’s niche is gamification used in the corporate environment. Connect with Monica (@monicacornetti) www.monicacornetti.com.

Thiagi - Games and Gamification Part 2

Should games be fun or should they be serious?
Should games be cooperative or should they be competitive?

Part 2 of the Sententia interview with Dr. Thiagi - We begin with a review of the 4 C's of Games and how they can be applied in gamification design strategy, explore the importance of storylines and narratives for comprehension and retention, and conclude with FUN!!



About Thiagi:  Dr. Sivasailam (Thiagi) Thiagarajan was born in Chennai, India and has lived most of his life in Bloomington, Indiana. An expert in the area of game design, Thiagi has designed more than 400 training games and simulation and has written 40 books on the subject. He has conducted workshops on interactive training in 25 different countries around the world. Connect with Thiage - www.thiagi.com, @thiagi

About Your Host: A gamification speaker and designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as a Top 4 Gamification Guru in the world by UK-based Leaderboarded. Monica’s niche is gamification techniques that can be used within the corporate talent development environment. Connect with Monica @monicacornetti. www.monicacornetti.com and www.sententiagames.com