Tag Archives: Gamification

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ARGs – the Ancestors of Gamification

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Google-Ingress
Alternative Reality Games (or ARGs for short), are games that interact with the player in a real setting or, in other words, in real-life. These kind of games are reported to create in the player a kind of immersion more powerful than any other type of game. And it’s easy to understand why – the player is part of the game. A good story and the use of a number of communication channels available to the players lets them live that story, by being a significant part of it.

Solving puzzle after puzzle, the player goes on collecting clues to the next challenge, always in an effort to solve the main plot of the story. Continue reading

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Crowdsourcing: an Approach on Human Computation

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Crowdsourcing Human Computation Minions

Crowdsourcing is the process of reuniting a group of people with a common interest around a specific subject related to that interest. This group of people will be a crucial part on the development of the subject, since it will be their input that helps with the definition of the subject itself.

Oxforddictionaries.com puts it like this:

Crowdsourcing – “Obtain (information or input into a particular task or project) by enlisting the services of a number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet: «she crowdsourced advice on album art and even posted an early version of the song so fans could vote for their favorite chorus»” Continue reading

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Marketing Research and its Future

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Marketing Research Apparel Clothing

Of the various marketing research strategies available and applied by companies, we will focus a bit on customer marketing research. customer marketing research plays an important role on a company’s relation to its customers. It helps the company to comprehend the needs and wants of its target audience, allowing them to create or adapt products based on the output of their researches.

But, let’s face it – marketing research can be extremely boring to the customer, specially if it is based on questioning. And, most of the times, customers get nothing out of it. Continue reading

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Attention Span and its Influence in Education

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Attention Span Education OwlToday, education faces one of the biggest challenges ever: the decreasing of students’ attention span due to over-stimulation of their brain by external stimuli, which requires their attention in a immediate and intermittent way.

To ask for their attention through traditional learning methods, and expect them to blindly trust that it will be useful in their lives and that it will bring them medium-long term gratification, demonstrates to be a futile effort, due to the behavioral systematization raised by the mechanics of those external stimuli. Continue reading

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Stuff you should do… Gamify it!

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Stuff you should do - exercise and diet of healthy food

Picking up from where we left last week, where we spoke briefly about stuff you must do, we will now focus a bit on stuff you should do.

What distinguishes stuff you must do from stuff you should do? Well, for starters, despite the motivation (or lack of motivation) you feel towards something you must do, eventually you will always end up doing it. But it doesn’t work like that for something you should do. You know that if you did it, it would be beneficial to you, but…

Why not leave it for tomorrow? Continue reading

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Gamification and Crowdsourcing

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gamification & crowdsourcing

Gamification – Past the details

A lot of talking is being made around gamification nowadays. But sometimes the discussion is built around something that is not as important as it appears to be at first sight.

Points, badges, ranks, levels… these are important mechanics to consider when creating a game, but if a game isn’t able to entertain without them, forget it! It’s not a game, it’s some kind of Frankenstein made of weak and superfluous gimmicks.

When you play chess with a friend, you don’t have any of these elements, but you still play and you still have fun. Continue reading

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Habits and Time Management

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Habits and time management

Skills and tasks

A gamification model, usable in more than one type of task, must admit the possibility of pre-validating skills necessary to accomplish a new task. If you want to learn how to play the guitar, but have already mastered bass guitar, you already possess some skills necessary to play guitar. You acquired them while you were learning to play the bass guitar.

So it doesn’t make sense for the player to re-learn skills that he already has.

This way it is easy to understand that if one gamified environment requires 2 months to master, and another one requires 3 months, if both games share some of the skills necessary to complete them, you will not need 5 months to learn both. You will need considerably less time, depending on how many skills are shared in both games. Continue reading

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Level and its Authority

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In video games, experience is a factor that has great influence in the status of a player. A newcomer (most commonly called a noob – the famous slang term for a novice) is a player that is portrayed as inexperienced, weak and/or irrelevant.

Players with a higher level tend to react in different ways towards them. Some despise the noobs, others feel pity for them and want to help them increasing their experience levels. They are often seen as the runt of the pack.
There was obviously a time when these high-level players were also noobs, but their experience level reflects their investment on the game and respect is earned almost automatically. Continue reading

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Spectator in Gamification

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This idea may surprise you, or not even a little bit. But sometimes people get into games – in this case multiplayer games – just to interact with others. These people seek the social aspect of the game, or just want to see other people playing.

For now we will call this individual the spectator.

Ok, but what’s the purpose of the spectator in the process? How will this person improve our approach on gamification? Well, bridging this process with video games, we can easily understand how these people can help out.

A game follows a set of rules. These rules control the environment with which you interact, validating your actions and therefore evaluating your results and evolution, and granting you a new level if it’s the case. In real life we don’t have yet a way to control the environment with which you interact or even a way to track your evolution in the gamification process. You have to, in some way, get all the data and evaluate it by yourself. Continue reading