You are a master of your games. You reap all those promised rewards in them. You certainly got rewarded for your efforts – your character is the shiniest of them all! Continue reading
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Tag Archives: Motivation
I’d Like a Reward for my Efforts, Please!
Every single game awards players with rewards for their efforts. Awarding with rewards makes sense just by the sentence itself. It’s not always a badge or a trophy. It’s not always gold or credits or whatever form of currency the game uses. It’s not always experience points and level ups. Continue reading
How to Avoid Boredom in Gamification
One of the main objectives in the world of gamification is to make you avoid boredom from those difficult tasks. Gamification helps in the attenuation or even elimination of this boredom. But wont we eventually get bored from gamification itself?
Let’s think about video games for a second… We need to understand that, despite how good a game is, a lot of players tend to get bored and give up on the game after some time. How much time the game stays “alive” depends on a lot of factors, but sooner or later that game will be put on the shelf. Later on, some players might pick it up again, but the game will still get some dust while sitting on that shelf. Continue reading
Crowdsourcing: an Approach on Human Computation
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
Stuff you should do… Gamify it!
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
Job progression gamification
Everyone has daily stuff to do. And there are different stages for stuff. Let’s call it stuff urgency, for easier understanding. Of all the different stages, we will focus on stuff you should do and stuff you must do.
This week’s post will be an insight on stuff you must do. Continue reading
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
Spectator in Gamification
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
Structuring Gamification and Multiplayer Basics
Structuring Gamification
From what we have talked about until now, we already have some clues about what we need in order to implement the concept of gamification.
We already know we need:
- A challenge – the task that you have to accomplish;
- Accomplishment – the conquering or overcoming of the task;
- Reward – the intrinsic or extrinsic value obtained from it, be it satisfaction (intrinsic), a prize (extrinsic), or both.
But this just shows an iteration of it. Effectively structuring gamification should imply creating a meaningful chain of events so that it is not just a one-time venture. Otherwise it would seem to be a bit meaningless, don’t you think? Continue reading
Challenge Real Life
How can we apply gamification in real life scenarios? Well, Nike already does it with Nike+ in one of their specialization environments: running. Nike wants people to move, so they have created a system where people can track their accomplishments. For example, you challenge yourself to run for 2 kilometers. And then comes the end of the week…
There are two possible outcomes:
– You did it! Awesome, now you can aim higher in next week’s challenge and get that rush from accomplishing something you have considered difficult. It’s a great feeling, and you know it!
– You have failed! Well, no need to feel bad about it! It means you must try harder next week because you know how awesome it will feel when you beat the challenge!
In both cases you are looking for that feeling of accomplishment, the choir of angels inside your head praising the hero who crossed the bottomless pit to the other side. Something you considered as impossible before. Continue reading