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the gamification toolkit is a follow-up to the book for the win that I also wrote with Dan Hunter and for the win
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introduced the concept of gamification using Game Design Elements and techniques to motivate people in
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business and we heard from lots of people in companies that they were intrigued by this idea they got the idea
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about how they could use game design principles but they wanted uh to dive deeper they wanted to understand in
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Practical terms what are these game elements these pieces of games or design patterns that we talked about how do you
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apply them and what are some more specific examples of uh companies that have taken these tools and used them
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successfully for motivation so that's fundamentally what the gamification toolkit tries to
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do one of the key takeaways uh in this book and in all the work that I've done
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on gamification is that it's not as easy as it looks these are powerful techniques we're
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seeing lots of examples in e-learning in marketing in management in Innovation all these contexts of companies using
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Game design principles and game elements but you can't just uh take some and
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sprinkle them on to a process you need to think in a systematic way about what are the tools that you have available
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and then how can you apply them in the right way to achieve your goals so one of the key key uh aspects of this book
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The gameification toolkit is to lay out a pallet to show people just some of the
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range of different items and design patterns that you can take from games and get some inspiration of different
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ways that you can go and apply them to serve whatever your business need is one of the examples we talk about in
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the book is Du lingo which is a language learning site and du lingo very quickly has become the
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most successful language learning site on the internet in fact they have something like 60 million users so they
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are teaching languages to more people than the entire United States public school system and you go and look at
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what they're doing compared to other sites there's plenty of other things out
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there that will teach you languages the key differentiator is gamification they have a virtual currency they have
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achievements in the game they have missions they have little rewards and so forth uh all sorts of systems that are
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implemented in an integrated way to reinforce your engagement to reinforce your sense of excitement about the
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learning experience and uh frankly I think that the gamification even though you wouldn't
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call it a gamified service per se it's a language learning service the gamification is really the
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differentiator that's helped them succeed gamification can help to trans form a business but fundamentally
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gamification involves understanding psychology understanding design principles and understanding how we can
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leverage data so it's not that gamification is some new thing that's going to cause us to do business in a
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totally different way the reality is gamification Taps into what makes us human we're engaged by games we respond
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to some of these game elements not because it's some cool new idea that someone came up with but because it
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relates to our basic human drives our motivation for Mastery our desire to be connected to something broader than
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ourselves our response to a desire for achievement and so forth so fundamentally gamification is a tool
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like lots of business tools where if you have a goal and you can Define really well what that goal is and you can
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understand what the population of people are that you're working with whether
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that's your customers your employees or some other group and then think creatively about how to tie in ways to
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achieve that goal going beyond the very traditional mechanisms that we have it's
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not just saying we want to motivate you to do this job by paying you more it's
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thinking very broadly being informed by psychology and being informed by data about how we can excite and engage
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people in very powerful ways so that's really how it can ultimately be transformative but I always caution
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people because there's a tendency to think oh this is some great new technique that will take something that
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people hate to do and make them love it no if you hate to do something you still
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hate to do it but even in activities that some people and in some cases um they seem boring or uninteresting you
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can find uh ways to make them seem engaging and ways to actually make them engaging if you tie them into something
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that motivates people the biggest pitfall using gamification is thinking that all you
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have to do is drop in some game elements so we'll give people points for something and they'll get really excited
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just because the points are there and what we've seen time and time again is
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the services that just do that maybe they'll get some initial engagement people will sort of get excited or at
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least some people will get excited but then it dissipates very quickly and that's not necessarily the end of the
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world if what you're trying to do is just stimulate some initial adoption and
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then you have some great value proposition down the road but most of the time what companies want is ongoing
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engagement so what you need to do first of all is step back and take a broader look at what the tools are and that's
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really what the gamification toolkit adds is it gives you a perspective on 30 different game Elements which even
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aren't all the ones that are out there but gives you a sense of possibility so
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you're not just going and using the same elements over and over again and then
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what you need to do is have a process uh and in our first book for the win we go
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through a six-step process to identify the goals identify the processes identify uh the people involved and so
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forth um and ensure that when you're deploying gamification you're doing it
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in a thoughtful way in a way that uh uh generates data that you can use to improve the system and in a way that you
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can have some confidence will give you some sustained engagement I think of gamification as a
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fairly horizontal technique it can work any place you have people and there's a
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desire to motivate or engage them that's just about anything you can think of um
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and so there are examples that we're seeing of gamification everywhere from uh entertainment type sites to uh supply
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chain and Logistics in very established industrial companies um in uh virtually all parts of the world there's adoption
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of gamification so I think it's a misnomer to think that there's one perfect place for it again the question
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is identifying the goal and then using the right tools for that objective in the context of your organization there's
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not going to be one right way to do gamification every case some gamification examples for example look
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very game likee they've got bright colors they seem kind of fun they're things that show up on screen and pop
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and so forth some gamification is very understated um it's very oper irational
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um because that's right for that context so I think pretty much anytime you have
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something where motivation makes a difference There's an opportunity to look at gamification as a technique and
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then again the question is figuring out is it right for this particular problem what are the right ways to do it and how
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do I systematically think about ensuring that this is the best technique for the
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problem I have at hand we're in an interesting phase right now with gamification about three or four
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years ago there was a lot of excitement so you had all these consultant showing up and saying this is this great new
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thing it's amazing it'll change all of business um and uh not a lot of actual
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adoption at that point there were just a handful of examples that everyone would
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point to and so uh Dan Hunter and I wrote our first book for the win partly to give people a broader perspective to
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organize this space and say all right what is really going on here and what are serious ways to apply gamification
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what we're seeing now is most of those um uh Consultants who are hyping this
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have gone away uh because again lots of companies have found that if you just throw some game elements on somewhere
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it's not going to have sustained engagement so we're seeing now article after article saying gamification is
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dead oh that was an old fat oh it's failed that's not at all what I'm seeing
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when I go out and talk to companies and I go out and look at the market actually
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there has never been more adoption and never been broader adoption um I'm seeing examples in gamification again in
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companies in every industry and all over the world what we need now is more data
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we need uh more research from people like me and other academics to help identify best practices so when you get
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the organizations that say okay I get it I'm sold on the concept but I want to
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see the evidence I want to see numbers that say this is the right solution for my situation this is not we've got bits
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and pieces of that uh but we need to do more um and so a lot of what I'm focused
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on now is partly uh trying to do that research but partly trying to pull it together um because the challenge of
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gamification is it's at the border of a lot of different fields so you have people looking at gamification from the
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standpoint of marketing you have gamification researchers in human computer interaction uh you have
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gamification researchers in management um in all these different business fields and so uh part of the role that
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um I see myself playing is trying to bring those people together and bring that research together and help to
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translate it for organizations who are just trying to make sense of all this [Music]