This document discusses gamification, which involves integrating game mechanics into non-game activities to motivate participation and engagement. It defines gamification and provides examples of how it can be used in business, education, health and social change. The document outlines game design elements like points, badges and leaderboards that motivate users. It also discusses challenges in ensuring gamification improves performance and doesn't just encourage rote behaviors. Overall, the document analyzes how gamification can be effectively applied, especially to address societal problems, by aligning incentives with goals.

1. Understanding Gamification:
From Commercial to Social
Bala Iyer
February 2012
@balaiyer
1

2. Trends
• Gamification, social layer and virtual currency
are buzzing.
2

3. What is Gamification?
• Integrating game dynamics into a core activity or
non-game environments in order to
educate, change attitude or behavior and inspire
action.
• "taking the best ideas from games and applying
them to fields where they are not usually used”
[Gabe Zichermann]
• Core activities -- business
process, service, community of purpose, content
management, campaign management or product
use 3

4. Purpose
• Drive motivation, participation or
engagement.
• Education, change habits, attitudes and
behaviors and inspire action
30-day rule
4

5. What can we get out of it?
• The technique can encourage people to
perform chores that they ordinarily
consider boring, such as completing
surveys, employee
performance, training, remembering to take
medicine, or shopping.
• Activities are made more game-like (i.e.
fun, rewarding, desirable, etc.)
• We believe that it can also have loftier
ambitions like catalyzing social change.
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6. More than a technology
• It is a capability
• Requires investments in:
– People (designers, developers, change
management)
– Process (methodology, performance)
– Technology (gaming platforms, analytics)
– Governance (policies and review)
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7. Skills Video Games Develop
Source: Online Colleges 7

8. What is a game?
• An environment
• A set of clear rules to win rewards & achieve
victory
• An objective for victory (a quest)
• A way to measure progress against ourselves and
others (scoring system)
• Many things in our lives are an implicit game:
– getting into a good college, landing a good job, finding
a significant other, and credit scores.
Source: Tim Chang, Mayfield fund 8

9. Not New
• We’ve had this for a long time:
– Frequent Flyer Miles
– Frequent Shopper Cards
• We’ve been engaging in it recently without
calling it Gamification
– Foursquare and “Check Ins”
– Wii Fit
– Progress Bars in Social Media Profiles
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10. Categories of gamification
• Consumer Engagement (using game mechanics to
draw consumer attention and sell more goods
and services)
• Employee Incentives (using game mechanics for
more employee productivity or for employee
training, etc.)
• Collaborative work (to encourage teams to
discover solutions)
• Social Change (using game mechanics to
enact social change).
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11. Examples Source: Link
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12. Why pay attention?
• There are more than a half a billion people
worldwide who play online games at least an
hour a day. Gaming is productive. It produces
positive emotion, stronger social relationships, a
sense of accomplishment, and for players who
are a part of a game community, a chance to
build a sense of purpose. I'm interested in
bringing this mindset to our real lives and efforts
to tackle the world's most urgent problems, from
curing cancer to slowing climate change.
— Game designer Jane McGonigal,
12

13. Generation G, Primed for games
• Currently more than half a billion people worldwide playing
online games at least an hour a day -- and 183 million in the
US alone.
• More than 230 million active users play Zynga’s games
• 97% of boys under 18 and 94% of girls under 18 report
playing videogames regularly.
• The average young person racks up 10,000 hours of gaming
by the age of 21. That's almost exactly as much time as they
spend in a classroom during all of middle school and high
school.
• 5 million gamers in the U.S are spending more than 40
hours a week playing games -- the same as a full time job!
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14. Moral hazard problem
• If you reward people for doing something they
are not interested in, you de-motivate them in
the long run
• It's like giving kids a dollar for doing math
problems. They will do the math problems
because they like the money, but will become
conditioned to do it only for the money
-- Michael Wu, Researcher online behavior for
Lithium Technologies
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15. Market
• Gamification market, currently estimated at around $100
million, will grow to more than $2.8 billion by 2016.
• The enterprise represents the largest vertical segment of the
gamification market, accounting for nearly a quarter of the
market.
• Top Gamification vendors are projecting 197% growth in
2012, up from 155% in 2011.
• Gamification vendors report that 47% of client implementations
are for user engagement, with brand loyalty accounting for 22%
and brand awareness 15%.
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Source M2 Research

16. IT Stack
Users
Services
Behavioral
Gaming Change Layer
Social
Applications
Operating Systems
Hardware
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17. Why does it work?
• Meaning
– Connect actions to personal goals
– Tells a story
• Mastery
– Learning is fun
– Scaffolding challenges
• Autonomy
– Play is voluntary
17
Sebastian Deterding Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right

18. Don’t Play Games With Me, Sebastian Deterding 18

19. What are game mechanics?
• They are principles, rules, and/or mechanisms
(much like mechanics in physics) that govern a
behavior through a system of
incentives, feedback, and rewards with
reasonably predictable outcome
Source: Micheal Wu 19

20. Examples of Game Mechanics
• Points
• Badges
• Leaderboards
• Levels
• Challenges
• Virtual Goods
• Gifts
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21. Human desires
• Rewards
• Status
• Achievement
• Self expression
• Competition
• Altruism
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22. Motivation
• Extrinsic
– Points
– Leaderboards
– scores
• Intrinsic
– Challenge
– Learning
22

23. Motivation Triggers
• Personal
– You came back to this site 7 days in a row
• Within network
– You wrote more reviews than your friend
• Across networks
– You are the first to kill all enemies
Source: Badgeville White Paper
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24. Behavior
• Uploading content
• Viewing a page
• Sharing an item
• Leaving comments
• Writing reviews
• Return visits to a site
• Watching videos
• Buying a product
• Adding an item to your shopping cart, or
• Any other behavior trackable with a click or mouse-
over
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25. Source: Bunchball
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26. Gamification Advantages
• Accelerated feedback cycles.
• Clear goals and rules of play.
• A compelling narrative.
• Tasks that are challenging but achievable.
Source: Catherine Aurelio 26

27. Risks
• Poor execution
– It’s boring, it’s incompatible with your goal, etc. As a
result, at best it distracts your user; at worst it damages
your brand
• Mismanaging engagement
– In the “social” era, everyone believes that he or she is a
part owner of brands and content and they believe they
have a vested interest in the direction of the brand
or content
– And every user engaged through gamification has a free
non-legal remedy if the engagement was mismanaged.
• Legal risks
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28. Challenges
• Extrinsic rewards, like monetary bonuses, are
great at encouraging rote behavior
• They actually hinder performance for tasks
that require creativity
• People are motivated by three main things:
autonomy, mastery, and purpose
• Any ethical issues with behavior
manipulation?
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29. Challenges
• Margaret Robertson: Can’t Play, Won’t Play
[2010]
“Gamification is an inadvertent con. It tricks
people into believing that there’s a simple way
to imbue their thing
(bank, gym, job, government, genital health
outreach program, etc) with the
psychological, emotional and social power of a
great game.”
• Exploitationware
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30. Examples
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31. Health
• Being healthy isn’t inherently fun per se, but
could be made more engaging and actionable if
it’s gamified, which starts with
• Measuring daily actions and decisions,
• Providing instant feedback and data back to
users,
• Adding interactivity and game-like mechanics
around this data to make health “playable” by
users.
Source: Tim Chang, Mayfields
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32. 32

33. Source: Wired Magazine, 2008
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34. 34

35. Other Examples
• Sustainability - Nissan Myleaf
• Get fit : NextJump
• Financial – Mint.com
• Save the planet: RecycleBank
• Make research and evangelism count:
Crowdtap
• The biggest loser
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36. Common across good use
• Applying principles of game design to non-
game activities can be done
carefully, artfully, and with wonderful results
• Necessary condition: your
brand, product, service has to make users
better at something
• Just make people better at something they
want to be better at. Kathy Sierra
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37. Platform Providers
• Bunchball, Nitro
• Cubepoints
• Badgeville
• Get Glue
• Bigdoor
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38. Capabilities Supported
• Game mechanics
• Social fabric analysis
• Integration with social platforms
• Engagement analytics
• API based SaaS pricing
• Personalized challenges, not "one size fits all" badges
• The opportunity to compete and collaborate alone or
in teams
• Meaningful rewards for accomplishing things.
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Source: Quora

39. Question
• Can gamification be used to solve societal
problems?
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40. 40

41. 41

42. Gamification for Social Good
• Balancing the federal budget
• Reducing poverty
• Decreasing waste of natural resources
• Reducing energy consumption
• Measuring consumer confidence
• Leading healthier lifestyles
• Other topics will be considered, but
– Must show strong links to a social issue &
– Must have macroeconomic content or context
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43. Framework
• Define Problem
• Identify Stakeholders
• List Critical Success Factors
• Identify Current Challenges
• Apply Gamification
– Mechanics
– Human needs or motivators
– Align incentives with goals
• Perform Risk analysis
• Track Success measures
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44. Apply Gamification
• Define player motivation
• Define your victory conditions
• Set the rules of the game
• Make it social
Source: Addingplay with Playgen 44

45. Alignment
• Define your site’s business goals.
– Which behaviors do you want to encourage?
(Visits, comments, etc)
• Identify & segment site visitors.
– Use deep engagement analytics to understand the
site audience
• Reward Engagement
– Recognize and reward engagement that aligns
with strategic business objectives in real time.
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46. Gamification best practice
• Be clear about business outcomes
• Map your goals with your user’s interests.
• Prioritize the actions you want your users to take.
• Add rewards and prevent users from gaming the system.
• Reward behavior based on the value of the action.
• Use levels to keep users coming back.
• Use real-time feedback on progress.
• Leverage groups and teams to collaborate and push one another.
• Integrate social media.
• Integrate into business processes or core activity
• Measure, analyze and refocus
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47. Virtual currencies
• Are the incentives/rewards that you
offer convertible into real goods
and, therefore, run afoul of virtual currency
regulations?
• Are the incentives/rewards effectively gift
cards and, therefore, run afoul of state gift
card rules?
• Are the games structured in a way so that they
are a legal contest or sweepstakes?
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48. What next?
• Add gamification capability to your toolkit
• What processes do you want to gamify?
• Join gamification communities
• Perform strategic experiments
• Analyze success and failure stories
• Understand the risks
• Make sure that preconditions are validated
• Measure success
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49. Resources
• Catherine Aurelio, TED Talk
• 11 Tips for a Winning Gamification Strategy
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