Extrinsic Rewards and the User Journey

A couple of small bits this week whilst I pull together more substantial work (I’m not a machine!!) First a small revisit of my Flow and User Journey work. In various conversations I have had about the use of rewards in a gamified systems the general question is always “do you need rewards at all”. My answer is that it can’t hurt if it is done properly.  One thing that…

LoyaltyMatch just received exciting news from BlackBerry regarding our RewardingYourself Loyalty Wallet app.  From more than 70,000 BlackBerry 10 apps we are one of 15 chosen (3 in each category) for this award.

The RewardingYourself Loyalty Wallet combines loyalty functionality with shopping functionality to help customers manage, synch up, store and maximize all their loyalty…

To anyone involved in game design, feedback loops will be a well known concept. To those in gamification, they are often talked about, but not everyone will know what they actually are and how they can be used.

Feedback loops come in two main flavors; positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops. Which ever you are looking at they are constructed in a similar way, with two or more phases.

• User performs an…

Defination of Gamification

According to Wikipedia..

(Gamification is the process of using game thinking + game mechanics)

• To Engage Users
• To Solve Problem

According to Margaret Wallace…

(The Applied use of elements found in gaming for non-game consumer applications, products and other…

Last week I started to explore my ideas about the different types of users there are likely to be in a gamified system. I have had loads of feedback, mostly very positive. Thanks for that. One question that keeps coming up is “what about the Player user type”? “There must be more too it!”. The answer is, of course, yes. There is a lot more.

What I…

It had to happen eventually. I had to look at some kind of “player type” theory.  Many people have one, Richard Bartle probably having the most famous and most abused of the player type theories out there.

What’s it all about Richard?

For those that don’t know, Richard Bartle labelled players as one of four types to help him understand how they interacted with each other and their environments in MMO games (Massively Multiplayer Online). The labels he used initially…

Can Gamification be a cure for an ailing economy in North America, in a white paper from Mcgraw-Hill that relates the following statistics from a report from the AEEE from 2008 they analyzed the effect of educational achievement on 45 metropolitan area economies if the dropout rate from schools were halved.  It is estimated that each year 1.2 million students drop out of high school and will fail to gain the much needed skills to move into the job market.  As we move from a post industrial…

1.    Create exploration-style games

2.    Use baby steps

3.    Work with a (virtual) coach 

4.    Make it Fun

5.    Tell a story

read the full blog post : Five…

Long title, short answer - I really have no idea. I've been intimately interested in gamification since Coursera.org released their first gamification class (via Wharton's Kevin Werbach). It was a great course, and a heck of an intro into the concept of gamification as a business tool.



I find that, despite my MBA and finance background, I learn more towards the education side of the spectrum - I'm really interested in the ways that gamifying (spelling?) a classroom can increase…

Hi guys & girls,

please be so kind to check out this model of Gameplay Mechanics that I developed and the short video with explanation how I look at game design and share your thoughts. Maybe I left things out that you feel are essential, but I tried to keep it as simple and generic as possible. I hope you like the voice over… it’s inspired by Fallout 2……

Here is an interesting post from the gamification-research community, that I wanted to share with you.

----

Hi,



this is Esteban Romero-Frías (below is a short bio given that this is my first post in the mailing list)



I am writing to introduce a project intended to gamify wiki projects based in MediaWiki Software. We have Wikipedia in mind to think about solutions to improve engagement.

We are giving our first steps. Here you have some information about the…

Interestingly I decided to take a Game Theory Course at Coursera, and was surprised that this particular course was not ‘game theory’ as we think about in Gamification, but the game theory as in mathematical modeling.  The description of Game theory is the strategic interactions between self-interested parties, how these self-interested participants would behave in interactions and how these interactions should be structured to lead to good outcomes. These types of games are used in all…

Over the last week I have been looking at ITIL V3, it dawned on me as I progressed through the ITIL lifecycle that Gamification shares a similar lifecycle.  Through I have yet to hear the term Gamification Lifecycle, I would venture to state that business that have adopted ITIL for service delivery may have some advantages over non-ITIL organizations. 

Looking at ITIL and its five key principles (Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual…

What follows is an exploration of what happens when you start to map player journeys in games onto Flow theory and then try to bring that into the workplace. Just for fun! It was inspired by Mr Scott Golas after seeing last weeks post on relatedness. It may or may not have any worth, but it has been fun to…

I have written about this whole thing quite a lot already, but I have some new insights based on things I have witnessed recently.

We know that extrinsic rewards are meant to demotivate people when doing anything that is even slightly creative. So why do we keep seeing them being used in gamification and marketing. On the face of it, that kind of thing works well. Offer a…

While I was talking to the doctor on Monday waiting for a minor surgery, he saw me reading Fogg’s book on Persuasive Technology. Asked to explain quickly what this was I told him it was the application of technology that when applied would help persuade users to do something. The simplest example I could explain was the Radar sign you often see that posts your speed as you approach it, showing you your speed compared to the speed you are supposed to be doing. This often persuades those who…

Another quick one, prompted by an interesting behaviour exhibited by my daughter today.

I have mentioned before the research that has been done on motivation in the past by the likes of  Edward Deci and the writing of Dan Pink and more.  All of them point to the same thing, extrinsic rewards are bad for intrinsic motivation. The basic reasoning is that at some point, no matter how careful you are, the reward will become the reason to do the task.  The extrinsic reward replaces the…

Hi all.  Well, this is my first try at a video blog.  It took far to many goes and as you can see, the version I had to go with has terrible lighting and a really bad angle. (This is due to a lack of Malteser boxes to balance the iPhone on - true story!). In this 9 minute video, I explore the role of fun in gamification - as I currently see it.   Let me know if you like this format and I will see if I can do more of them in the future.…

Hi Gamificators,



"If you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play it, it’s recreation. If you work at it, it’s golf." - Bob Hope



I am getting fat, so I just bought the Nike+ Fuelband. That's a fancy-looking tracking device to wrap around your wrist and allows you to set and achieve goals: how much "Fuel" - a Nike-currency you want to achieve/burn, and how many steps you've done). Ivan Kuo from Gamification.co wrote an interesting review on that piece:…

I had a great little article set up for today about forums, chat rooms and gamified social networks. However, with GsummitX London happening today and considering some of the things I am reading of late, I wanted to rant instead. Buckle in 

Badges and points systems. You know them, and loads of you seems to love them. Now, precisely to sound like a …