It'll take KNOW HOW

Pharmaville

2012-02-12T21:02:00.001-05:00

Pharma marketers have always been reasonably slick at finding target audiences and grabbing their attention. But, like any other industry, it's the call-to-action that poses more of a challenge. Adherence to treatment is the holy grail for pharma, in chronic disease categories where the drop-off rates can be staggering. Seems all the CRM programs, patient tools, reminder texts and smart pill bottles in the world won't change that.

Why do some patients adhere fully to treatment regimens, and yet others fail? Human behavior is a complex, illogical beast. If we always acted out of fear for our health, there'd be no cigarette smokers. And adherence rates in oncology would be perfect. Well, they're not.

Behavioral scientists know that to improve adherence, you need to actually change behavior, not just predict it.

Pharma media flagship MMM (Medical Marketing & Media) says the answer is video games, or rather gamification, which is the application of game mechanics—rules, points, challenges, levels, rewards, countdown clocks, leaderboards—to instigate behavior change.

It works because, for whatever reason, games turn people into highly productive, willing, relentless, focused, optimistic, socially dominant versions of themselves. We are really, really good at them.

Gamification is getting a lot of play right now. If you are familiar, you'll know there is a mounting body of the evidence to suggest that, not only can it successfully change human behavior and improve health outcomes, it might even be capable of changing the world.

Employer Brand Goes Social

2012-02-09T14:53:00.000-05:00

Technology has changed the game for today’s job-seekers: candidates are searching on websites such as Facebook or LinkedIn, and asking employers questions using Twitter or a smartphone application, or app.

Companies, for their part, are turning to new channels to find talent, especially among “passive” candidates – typically experienced professionals who might not be actively involved in seeking a job, but could consider a career move if an interesting opportunity appeared on their screen.

LinkedIn has established itself as a venue for job-seekers to demonstrate their experience and expertise. Facebook is more about putting the idea of working for a particular company in front of would-be candidates, especially students and recent graduates.

This is also the experience of employers, who have turned to social media channels to improve their “employer brand” and reach new audiences. This requires being consistent in the way the company markets itself as an employer and in how it treats candidates, both those it hires, and those it rejects. "Every person we touch through our recruitment channels is a potential customer, whether we hire them or not.” says Laura Frith, vice president of global resourcing and talent solutions at Intercontinental Hotels Group

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What Higher Ed Can Learn From Video Games

2012-02-07T18:11:00.000-05:00

Game-based learning is so effective because when individuals are actually engaged, for example with a game they enjoy, their minds experience the self-fulfilling gratification of coming to understand how to succeed regardless of the game's entertainment or real life learning value. This is much more effective when you compare it to memorizing facts in cheap textbooks.

The benefits of delivering game-based learning to educate college students or train employees for a new job are huge when you consider the following stats:

72% of U.S. households play computer games or video games on a daily basis
Approximately $25.1 billion was spent on video games, hardware and accessories in 2010
1 million+ subscribers spend approximately 23 hours a week playing World of Warcraft
Surprisingly, 42% of all game players are women so there is (almost) equal motivation from both sexes

We live in a world where all ages, sexes and races are willing and motivated to learn specific skills if we engage their problem-solving skills via a well-designed game rather than the same old lecture in a classroom. For example, game-based learning is now being taught to train:

Surgical students on proper laparoscopic techniques on virtual patients
Pilots in training via flight simulators until they are ready to fly real aircraft
New emergency responders to deal with callers under duress
Fire fighters and police in simulated hazardous or dangerous, life-threatening settings

"Gaming for Ziploc"

2012-02-07T07:15:00.000-05:00

Recyclebank, a Philadelphia-based startup says it is revolutionizing the way people approach sustainability, and the key to that revolution, it says, is games. They use "gamification," or the use of game mechanics to modify behavior. By engaging in online activities, users are prompted to adjust their lifestyles offline in ways that let them live a little lighter on the planet. The company calls this "gaming for good."

Gaming for good or gaming for greed? The games steer users in other directions, as well -- toward brands, retail outlets and services, which collectively form Recyclebank's network of corporate partners like garbage hauler and infamous greenwasher Waste Management. Recyclebank is, after all, a for-profit operation -- and its games are as much about promoting products as they are about prompting green behavior.

"We firmly believe in the carrot versus the stick approach for motivating people to change their behavior, and gaming is a key part of this strategy," wrote Jeff Harse, a spokesman for the company, in an email.

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Who Owns the Employer Brand?

2012-02-06T20:43:00.000-05:00

Some organizations are realizing the enterprise value of employer branding and are instituting marketing leadership roles that specialize in and have direct (budgetary) ownership of the employer branding function.

After a significant employment branding initiative, PepsiCo’s Paul Marchand, Global VP Talent Acquisition, mentioned “Sometimes HR should divorce itself from employment branding” . Seems his employer branding initiatives require certain capabilities and expertise which may be above and beyond the core competencies of HR

How Well do Schools Use Social Media

2012-02-06T06:54:00.000-05:00

Schools are on a short list of organizations that have been notoriously slow to adopt emerging tech. But within the last few years, as social media becomes more integral to students’ lives, educational institutions are finally catching on, and catching up.

When it comes to higher ed, there are not only opportunities for digital learning, but digital marketing too. Some schools have taken the reigns on both sides, with mixed results.

See Mashable

How Games Motivate

2012-02-06T06:30:00.000-05:00

Gamification And Self-Determination Theory

Games are not just for fun anymore--and indeed "fun" is not a good enough description for the psychology of gameplay anyway. Designers are trying to "gamify" applications which traditionally were not game-like at all. This is a type of design thinking that has spread from the gaming world and is now merging with the User Experience Design / Interaction Design world.

Beyond the hype and mistakes of gamification that might be going on right now, there does seem to be a design thinking emerging with the intention to increase engagement and motivation of products.

Dustin DiTommaso, experience design director at Mad*Pow, presented "Beyond Gamification: Architecting Engagement Through Game Design" and covered how Games keep people in intrinsic motivation. There are three intrinsic motivation needs

Competence
Autonomy
Relatedness

Competence

This is about meaningful growth. Good games achieve a path to mastery. The user experiences increased skill over time. There are nested short-term achievable goals that lead to success of the overarching long-term goal.

The experience should be that of a challenge. If you're familiar with Csíkszentmihályi's Flow, it is similar (or perhaps exactly the same) as that.

As with most good interaction design, there has to be feedback. Specifically, there has to be:

Meaningful information
Recognition
Next steps

On the meaningful info item: Progress should be made visible. But, rewards have to be meaningful. Rewards for meaningless actions are not good in the long term--users will hack (or "game") the system if they get bored and/or detached.

Failure should be allowed in a graceful manner if it provides an opportunity to learn and grow. This might sound weird for interaction design where usually you don't want users to fail at all. Mad*Pow supposedly has done research to back this up.

Autonomy

The game belongs to the user. Choice, control, and personal preference lead to deep engagement and loyalty. There has to be the right feedback for the type of autonomy for a given user. Experience pathways can be designed "on rails" to limit or give the illusion of freedom.

To motivate sustained interest the game should provide opportunities for action. For example, on a ski mountain, there are literally multiple pathways, and multiple levels of difficulty.

Relatedness

This is about mutual dependence. We're intrinsically motivated to seek meaningful connections with others.

A game should provide meaningful communities of interest. The users should somehow be able to value something in the game beyond the mechanics that run the system. The users should get recognition for actions that matter to them. And they should be able to inject their own goals. An example of a system that allows user-customizable goals is Mint.com.

It's also worthwhile to think of non-human relatedness. Dialogues between user interface avatars and humans actually matter and affect motivation. They are a type of relationship. So scripts, text, tones, etc. are very important.

More from Samuel Kenyon

Dopamine for the Classroom

2012-02-06T05:55:00.000-05:00

A neuroscientist at Bristol University says that computer games stimulate the brain’s reward system to produce dopamine, a chemical “which helps orient our attention and enhances the making of connections between neurons, which is the physical basis for learning.”

Speaking at the Learning Without Frontiers conference in London last week, Professor Paul Howard-Jones said “computer games are very, very engaging. And just as nuclear fission can be used to make bombs or generate electricity, games also have a light side and a dark side.”

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centers. Dopamine also helps regulate movement and emotional responses.

The whole truth at New York Times

Human Capital: 7 Billion Is Just A Start

2011-11-18T23:12:00.000-05:00

Earth now has 7 billion people. Should we prepare for the catastrophic ?

In 1968, "The Population Bomb," that warned of famines in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation and advised governments to impose population growth limits. Despite it being a tome of gloom and barbarism, the book became a best-seller.

Predictions of mass human tragedy by end-of-the-worlders have always been wrong and spectacularly so. We have had an uncanny way of using our minds to overcome all of the environmental challenges we've faced.

No one can say what the right number of people is for this planet. Perhaps population growth is not a plague, but an opportunity. Some would say that humans are in fact a resource, an infinite form of capital. More people mean more minds able to solve problems and sustain human progress.

And if not, there's always Soylent Green

"Gamification as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon,”

2011-11-11T05:02:00.002-05:00

Talk about hype! Thanks Gartner.

Who loves trend report Memeburn besides meme? Good coverage on Gartner's reckoning -- that by 2014, more than 70% of the Forbes’ major companies will have at least one “gamified” application.

The research company says that although the current “success” of gamification is largely driven by novelty and hype, it is positioned to become a “highly significant trend” over the next five years.
Gamification is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems, motivate people and engage audiences.

Typically gamification applies to non-game sites and applications in order to encourage users to adopt them. Gamification works by making technology more engaging, by encouraging users to engage in desired behaviours, by showing a path to “mastery” and “autonomy”, and by taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in games.

Gamification can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, filling out tax forms, or reading web sites. “Gamification aims to inspire deeper, more engaged relationships and to change behaviour, but it needs to be implemented thoughtfully,” said Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner. “Most attempts at gamification currently miss the mark, but successful and sustainable gamification can convert customers into fans, turn work into fun, or make learning a joy. The potential is enormous.”

For a gamified application truly to engage its audience, three key ingredients must be present and correctly positioned: motivation, momentum and meaning (collectively known as “M³”).
According to Burke: “The vast majority of gamified applications today lack or misplace at least one of these ingredients, which means gamified applications run the risk of falling into disuse, once their novelty wears off.”

Motivation is inspired by most of today’s gamified applications primarily by offering extrinsic rewards and/or weak intrinsic rewards to direct behavioural changes. Extrinsic motivation comes from outside an individual and is inspired by rewards such as money and grades. Intrinsic motivation exists within an individual and derives from that person’s interest in, or enjoyment of, the task.
“Framing the right motivations is an important consideration when designing gamified applications,” said Burke. “It’s essential to use the right mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, combined with appropriate player relationships — competitive or collaborative.”

Momentum depends on sustained engagement. In gaming, momentum is achieved by balancing the difficulty of the challenges presented with the skill levels of the players. If players find challenges too easy, they will soon get bored. On the other hand, if challenges are too difficult, players will become frustrated. Gamified applications need to engage players quickly and maintain their engagement through deft use of game mechanics such as challenges, rules, chance, rewards and levels.

Meaning is about serving a larger purpose. To succeed, gamified applications must provide rewards that are meaningful to the participants. Different people will find different rewards and incentives meaningful, but many will value opportunities to help charities through donations, lose weight, master a specific skill or achieve a significant task.

“Gamification could become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon,” said Burke. “During 2012, 20 per cent of Global 2000 organisations will deploy a gamified application. IT leaders must start exploring opportunities to use gamification to increase engagement with customers and employees, with the aim of deploying a gamified application next year. Understanding how to apply game mechanics to motivate positive behavioural change is critical to success.”

How Angry Birds Can Change the World

2011-11-01T20:43:00.000-04:00

Every young person has played Angry Birds. Just like Hollywood blockbusters, popular video games have become universal reference points for youth around the world.

What makes this game fun and how can we apply the same design elements to social change?In other words, how do we make creating change more fun and engaging?

What will be the Angry Birds of Occupy Wall Street and will it be the catalyst?

Social innovators are trying to figure out how to engage people distracted by the tsunami of information and content generated by everyone. It is the age-old problem of the "knowing-doing gap" -- between what we know we should do and what we actually do.

We know we should be eating more healthful foods but we gorge ourselves with hamburgers and french fries. We know we should be reducing our use of plastic bags and bottles but we rarely carry reusables with us.

There's a limit to how much we can appeal to logic and reason to get people to "do the right thing." The upper limit for recycling (of municipal waste) seems to be 30 percent, even after decades of promoting such practice. For greater success, we have no choice but to appeal to other motivations.
Games, especially video games like Angry Birds and online games like Farmville, teach us what humans are motivated by.

We're motivated by feedback that's frequent and rapid, challenges that are not too easy or too hard, rewards that are both expected and unexpected, a real sense of purpose or epic meaning, mastery of skills, productivity, accomplishment, involvement of other people, and some degree of autonomy. Those are just a few of the more popular game dynamics.

Gamification is not a panacea. In some cases, it may even do more harm than good. But if much of social change involves behavior change, then we need to start taking cues from Angry Birds.

Thanks Charles Tsai

Wexler is BACK

2011-10-31T07:14:00.003-04:00

OK Gang,
Been an exhilarating month of dynamism and change. Sorry to have ignored my dear reader (s)

Let's plow ahead and share ideas on what's new and spanking in digital experiences.

Had a birthday and it is a new day....

I was the keynote in Orlando at a to rapt audience of 80 or so continuing education executives.

My topic: you all are going to blow it if you do not recognize the changed learning needs of next generation students. You can access my slides here.

I also was a speaker at the Interactive Marketing Conference in New York last week. Good news -- I was fascinating. Bad news -- at 3pm on a Friday the audience was slim. My topic and stump speech: Games and the future of mankind

Along these lines, a nice white paper from Columbia professors on gamification in education

Accenture’s Gamification

2011-09-21T07:27:00.000-04:00

My conversations at Accenture surround human capital and internal culture and the idea that simulation can help them communicate business process. A good piece from SeekOmega reviews their efforts to cobble a solution.

It covers Accenture’s Chris Crawford's approach to provoking discretionary effort to affect the social alchemy at Accenture.

“SharePoint forms the heart of our social networking capabilities within Accenture,” says Crawford, “We use it as a content management system, a publishing platform and for internal communications.”

Corporate Demographics	Social Demographics
230,000 employees	SharePoint 2010 platform with NewsGator add in for Social
Located in 120 countries	Yammer for microblogging
$25 billion in annual revenues	115,000 employees have filled out profiles
Headquarters in Ireland	5000 profile updates a month
CEO: Pierre Nanterme	1000 blog posts a month
List of Executives	12,000 video items posted to Accenture Media Exchange
	4200+ monthly microblog updates

Crawford and his team quickly realized that the key to higher adoption of SharePoint starts with user profiles. They found a direct correlation between the number of customized user profiles, and the amount of internal collaboration. Crawford says, “Those profile pages are a key reason for the success of our collaboration efforts.”

So Crawford began to organize ‘complete your profile’ contests and publishing stats on the percentage of the company that actually did. Soon however, Crawford realized that the profile page can only tell a small fraction of an employee’s story. The rest of the story lies in learning the details of an employee’s expertise and knowledge.

To surface that, Crawford and team again returned to gaming principles. “We started an internal recognition program to encourage our employees to contribute to SharePoint,” Crawford said, “We look and we measure how people are contributing, how they are connecting, and how they are communicating, and score them on their activities.”

Crawford discovered that in order to have a thriving social business solution, the solution must still provide meaningful value in isolation with or without a gaming dynamic.

To draw an analogy, casinos excel at game mechanics. They understand that people love to play games, but their customers may become bored if rewards or recognition are missing. So casinos have mastered the art of increasing contributions (or cash deposits) by providing a controlled gaming environment designed to extract more money from their customers.

Admittedly, the cash acquisition goal of a casino is different from Accenture’s content contribution goals. And yet, there are some intriguing similarities. For example, casino employees are encouraged to identify and interact with their patrons to extend the gaming activity while keeping them in the building. And casino loyalty points are strategically used to reward customers for continued game play.

But what’s most striking is the conditions in which their customers tolerate. Smoke filled rooms, drunk patrons, hysterical yelling, so for most of us, we’d never go again. And yet they do. The results as we all know are nothing but astonishing. Have you heard of a casino that has failed?

By the same token, if one asked corporate employees, most do not want to take the time to visit the corporate intranet. Like the casino, there is some initial value in visiting it; but the novelty fades away if the user experience is unpleasant, no one is using it, or the employee can not find the information they are seeking.

Flush in the understanding of this inherent dilemma, Crawford believes the gaming principles they are using give the house an edge. His team deals badges to Accenture’s employees for accomplishing various tasks or to specify how long they’ve worked at Accenture. “That’s proven popular because a lot of people enjoying see it (on their profiles),” explains Crawford.

Mark Twain once observed, “What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it.”

Accenture’s results suggest that instead of extracting dollars, Crawford and his team are extracting content from their employees by leveraging these principles. They’ve created an environment where points and badges are the social currency that rewards and compels employees to contribute to SharePoint.

No Longer a Novelty Song -- Alleyoop

2011-09-16T12:40:00.001-04:00

Gamification Summit yesterday at a lovely event site -- downtown at Jewish Museum on the Hudson.

We showcased the new game Pass it On! there.

Ran into Gerard LaFond, my old industry mate from Persuasive Games who now is launching a learning offering for high schoolers called alleyoop.com

Alleyoop - the College Readiness Network for Teens -- has Turned Learning into a Game.

Alleyoop is a college readiness game where players earn and exchange Yoops for premium learning activities like step-by-step video instructions, interactive exercises and live online tutoring to get on track or get ahead. Alleyoop creates a personalized playlist of learning activities and missions that adapt to a teen's progress on our site. Using sophisticated algorithms, they can track a student's progress and provide game-based recommendations to meet his or her learning needs.

From caveman to college!

More later!

Gamification Summit Today!

2011-09-15T10:26:00.000-04:00

Heading down to the Gamification Summit with my AXA Equitable client today – where she will debut Pass It On!, to the gathered audience.

As coverage by the New York Times indicates... the game was launched by AXA Equitable to introduce consumers to the importance of life insurance.

The game is part of the emerging trend of “gamification" -- which is the process of using game thinking to solve problems and engage audiences.

Please check out the Times and follow this link there to play the game.

You could win the $25,000 ! Use this link to easily share the game with friends and colleagues.

AXA Equitable is using competitive game play in an avatar-based world to engage consumers and make life insurance relevant and fun.

Game mechanics may join social media as an essential element in how marketers increase engagement and build brand relationships by rewarding consumers with meaningful learning experiences. "Gamification” is being surfaced in marketing circles as the next frontier in web and mobile.

BrandGames in the New York Times today!

2011-09-12T17:13:00.000-04:00

Coverage by Stuart Elliott in the Media and Advertising section online.

The article covers Pass It On!, our new video game launched by AXA Equitable to introduce consumers to the importance of life insurance.

AXA Equitable is using competitive game play in an avatar-based world to engage consumers and make life insurance relevant and fun.

Please check out the Times and follow the link there to play the game.

The game is part of the emerging trend of “gamification" -- which is the process of using game thinking to solve problems and engage audiences. Game mechanics may join social media as an essential element in how marketers increase engagement and build brand relationships by rewarding consumers with meaningful learning experiences. "Gamification” is being surfaced in marketing circles as the next frontier in web and mobile.

Tea Party Zombies Must Die

2011-09-09T07:15:00.001-04:00

I was approached recently about leveraging the power of games for use in the 2012 election, to change behavior and engage young voters. Ours would be a project to educate on issues....
While contemplating what would undoubtedly entail playing with fire, the news broke:

Conservatives are angry about a new video game that allows players to slaughter “tea party zombies” and murder zombie versions of Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin among others.

The online video game, called “Tea Party Zombies Must Die,” was released by the New York-based StarvingEyes Advergaming.

Zombie versions of Palin, Bachmann, Beck and the Koch brothers are involved in the game, which enables users to bludgeon Bill O’Reilly with a crow bar, shoot Glenn Beck with a semi-automatic weapon, or stab former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin with a knife.

The game was created by StarvingEyes Advergaming, which apparently creates online video games for promotional purposes, and its site says its clients include Pepsi, NASCAR, History Channel, Mountain Dew, Red Bull, and GM.

“The game was just a personal project. I am not worried about it effecting business,” Jason Oda told the Media Research Center (MRC), which blasted the game, with content editor Stephen Gutowski posting: “While it is disturbing to see that some people believe it would be fun to mow down your political opponents, it's also quite odd that an advertising company with a diverse portfolio of high profile corporate clients from Meow Mix to Pepsi would create a game to allow those people to do just that.”

Oda in 2004 released a game that allowed characters to fight monsters that represented members of the Bush administration.

“Liars in the world of entertainment will tell you that what happens on screen has no real-world effect. Which is why corporations spend billions every year using visual mediums to get people to change their behavior,” said BigGovernment’s John Nolte.

And yet another blogger suggested that the incident revealed a double standard in the media. “Any propensity towards amusement is immediately stricken from my imagination the instant I picture the indignant media firestorm that would undoubtedly arise if the growling death targets resembled, say, Barack Obama,” notes Townhall’s Guy Benson.

Some researchers contend that first-person shooter games, where the user wields weapons to attack human targets, encourage actual acts of violence by helping a potential gunman to visualize and practice an attack. Lt. Col. David Grossman, a former West Point psychology professor who has written several books on violence in the media, calls FPS games "murder simulators".

Read more on Newsmax.com: New Video Game 'Slaughters' Beck, Palin, O'Reilly

90% of all corporate learning is informal learning

2011-09-08T06:55:00.000-04:00

Because a consulting organization is only as good as its people, Deloitte wants its people to learn every which way. While classroom training still holds an important place, Deloitte emphasizes the importance of informal learning, including learning through social media--public social networks as well as company-controlled enterprise social networks. Meanwhile, about half of Deloitte's formal training has shifted online.

Nick Van Dam is the Chief Learning Officer for Deloitte which employs about 170,000 people worldwide. He says 90% of all corporate learning is informal learning, including information gleaned through social networks

He called me in to write a chapter in his new book Next Learning, Unwrapped.

"Ours is an intellectual capital business," van Dam said. "There is no software, no hardware we're selling--it's all about the people." Deloitte plans to hire about 50,000 people in the coming year, many of them straight from university recruiting programs, so it has to continually bring new people up to speed, he said.. "Almost everyone is coming in with a smartphone, tablets, iPads, and they're on Facebook LinkedIn, you name it. They embrace technology, and it's part of how they learn, how they collaborate. We need to support the needs of our talent, where we provide them working technology they like to use and have been using before they joined Deloitte".

That the company still values classroom training is shown by the fact it is investing about $300 million in Deloitte University, a training facility in Dallas that is due to open later this year, van Dam said. "About 50% of our formal learning is online based, but we're making significant investments in both."

Full Story

How Hottest Startups Got Their Names

2011-09-07T05:24:00.004-04:00

I was naming a product today, a new game engine. My antennae always tingle when a naming assignment comes along -- hitting dictionaries and thesauri to cross reference wordplay and find the be-all name.
To highlight the also-ran... today's winner that wasn't selected for the game engine (in which one navigates an avatar step by step across a game board )

car·a·cole (kr-kl)
also car·a·col (-kl)

n. A half turn to right or left performed by a horse and rider.

intr.v. car·a·coled, car·a·col·ing, car·a·coles also car·a·cols

To perform a caracole.

Best of all it has provenance: [French, from Spanish caracol, snail.]

Kinda matches my Fibonacci, no?

Even more exciting is what Caracole finds you in google. Try it dear reader...

#1 is" Pretentious Pontification Corner" which suits this post well. They pontificate about the Edmund White’s 1986 novel Caracole and the meaning of the word “caracole”: “caper” in English, “prance” in French, “snail” in Spanish. Caracole reads as a cunning dissection of the New York intellectual scene.

Ever wonder how today’s Hottest Startups got their names?

Some of our favorite startups were sired by picking names out of hats, by throwing out odd proper nouns that might be cheap domain names and by haphazardly removing vowels.

Take a tour -- Great slideshow through a billion dollars in dart-throwing

Not sure then about the namechoosing for Caracole in Ohio -- the first licensed adult care facility in Ohio for people living with HIV/AIDS

Serious Play in Seattle

2011-08-23T07:02:00.001-04:00

I am off this morning for Seattle where I have been invited to speak at the Serious Play conference.at DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash.

“A Boot Camp for Serious Learning”
Serious Play Conference speakers will include authors of the latest books on game development and design, the top analysts covering serious games, senior developers of award winning products and project directors already leveraging games for corporate and military training, healthcare and education

My topic

Enabling the Workforce to Create their Own World through Play
Games enhance organizational performance and individual development by translating the dynamics of business into self-led experiences. This session will examine Sims in corporate learning that create authentic, nuanced environments for risk-free practice and skill set development through learning by doing. We’ll look at how games can modify themselves to better “fit” each individual by observing our decision making and problem solving skills to learn what interests and challenges us.

For more information, visit www.seriousplayconference.com.

Gartner Gamification Hype Cycle

2011-08-23T06:47:00.000-04:00

Gartner's adds gamification to the Hype Cycle. It wasn't present in 2010. Gartner tracks technologies through a lifecycle that begins with a technology trigger through the plateau of productivity. The idea is that companies can use the assessments to decide whether to invest in specific technologies.

Just past the peak of the hype cycle is when a technology is being adopted by more than the early adopter crowd. Immediately after that stage is when bad press begins. (Why? Because the less enthusiastic crowd starts finding out what's wrong with the technology, or how it didn't quite meet their expectations set by the early adopters.)

According to Gartner, a technology that's in the trough of disillusionment is still sparsely adopted - less than 5% of the audience has fully adopted a technology while there. Once 20% to 30% of the audience has adopted a technology, Gartner considers it at the plateau of productivity.

as it's an area that's moving fast and showing very little disappointment.

Gamification Backlash

2011-08-22T08:01:00.002-04:00

When teachers gave you gold stars for good work, you were played at school. The stars would be put against your name on the wall, which we’d now call a leaderboard. This encouraged competition: ten stars might have earned you a sticker or a treat, much like boosts or pickups in a computer game.

In classes based on ability rather than age, you might even have earned enough points to “level up” to a higher class. Quests, assignments, rewards, achievement points, levelling up: these are the mechanisms that underpin video gaming. They’re also the ones used in gamification – the use of gaming mechanics to make real-world tasks more compelling.

Gamification is now being applied in the workplace as the gamer generation moves into the mainstream workforce. It will be up to management, often of pre-gamer generations, to figure out how to educate themselves to the gamer culture, and how to speak to it effectively.

Not everyone believes the gamification hype. Professor Richard Bartle, co-creator of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), the world’s first multiplayer online game, says that gamification is currently “just a marketing view: people are doing it because they want you to buy their stuff. When people use loyalty cards to earn points, they’re not doing it because they’re loyal, they’re doing it because they’re being bribed.”

A “gamification backlash”, which is being tracked by Jesper Juul. This links to research that shows people are demotivated by extrinsic rewards (such as points) and do their best work when the rewards are intrinsic (they like what they’re doing).

Michael Wu, principal scientist of analytics at Lithium Technologies, says three factors drive human action: motivation (the player wants to do something); ability (they have the resources to do it); and a trigger, or “call to action”. According to Wu you have to have them all at the same time. Wu’s point is that merely applying gamification techniques doesn’t necessarily work: you have to design the software to drive actions.

The use of computer graphics for simulation and training, for example, with challenges, a goal you have to achieve, multiple paths you can take, timed moves forward – all those things are familiar video game techniques.

In the future, we’re going to see more companies incorporate those techniques to motivate their employees in a way that is more friendly, and has a better interface. We all want to have fun in our daily lives, and games have been part of human life forever.

Hemp Tycoon Stokes Game-Based Learning

2011-08-19T06:09:00.002-04:00

The inevitable blend of advergaming, game-based learning and self-parody gets fired up at [adult swim] Online, which Cartoon Network has grown into a lifestyle brand that includes a record label, clothing and merchandise, and an ever-expanding library of games.

Hemp Tycoon is the game with the highest current user rating. As the name suggests, this game parodies Roller Coaster Tycoon and also salutes Farmville. It's depth and its alignment to CN brand are an example of taking the platform to a new level. Stay tuned, man. Visit this great blog for more to feed those late night intellectual munchies

Meanwhile, tune into SXSW and vote for the latest tract under consideration: Play Time? Kids and Game-Based Learning. Vox Populi says 'sounds like fun'.

Sara DeWitt of PBS KIDS and Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon University will weigh in on games in Austin. Their agenda:

There is a lot of talk at the government, industry, and producer level about the promise of games in education, but has anyone really proven true educational outcomes from informal gaming? In this presentation, Sara and Drew will share some of the most effective gameplay mechanics for teaching kids, discuss how challenges and rewards influence outcomes, showcase video of kids engaged in gameplay, present some of the latest theories for skill-scaffolding within games, and share outcome data from real educational gaming evaluations.

Questions
Answered How can games help with learning?
What are the characteristics of a good learning game?
What are good learning gameplay mechanics?
Why are games and learning similar?
How can you design a strong learning game?

Why Don't People Finish Videogames?

2011-08-18T07:39:00.002-04:00

Videogames have grown immensely in the last 30 years to become a mainstream fixture alongside movies and music. But you wouldn't know it by how often players finish their games.

In fact, the attrition (or bounce rate) of video games is pretty pathetic. 90% of players who start a game will never see the end of it. That's a lot of unfinished games.

And it's not just dull games that go unfinished. Critically acclaimed ones do, too. Take last year's "Red Dead Redemption." You might think Rockstar's gritty Western would be played more than others, given the praise it enjoyed, but you'd be wrong. Only 10% of avid gamers completed the final mission, according to Raptr, which tracks more than 23 million gaming sessions.

Of every 10 people who started playing the consensus "Game of the Year," only one of them finished it.
How is that? Shouldn't such a high-rated game keep people engaged? Or have player attention spans reached a breaking point?

Who's to blame: The developer or the player? Or maybe it's our culture?
The correct answer is, in fact, all of the above.

The aging gamer
At the beginning of the 21st century, the average gamer was pushing 30 -- mid-to-late 20s, to be exact. They weren't playing as often as they did in their adolescence, but in between entry-level jobs, earnest slacking and higher education, there was still ample time to game.

Fast forward to today, and the average gamer is 37, according to the Entertainment Software Association. The average age of the most frequent game buyer is 41 -- nearing Just for Men-type levels. They're raising kids. In the middle of a career. Worried about retirement. Not only that, but time is precious for gamers of all ages.

The longer the game, the higher probability a player will abandon it. "Red Dead Redemption" takes upward of 30 hours to complete, according to howlongtobeat.com, and few players are willing to commit that much time.

A glut of games
Not only that, but the accelerating rate at which new games are released cannibalizes existing games and further distracts the already inundated player.

Not only did gamers have more time in the eight- and 16-bit days, but they had fewer games to complete.
Of course, engagement levels vary by genre and difficulty. 'Red Dead Redemption' is the lowest completed high-profile game because it's so big.

The gaming platform has an impact on completion rates as well. Low-caloric and hyper-short web games are finished 85% of the time, according to Backloggery.com, a website that helps players finish the games they already own before buying new ones.

Either way, this shifting demand is more than enough to sway developers in a different direction. For starters, they are creating less epic games, at least in terms of duration.

With the expectations so high for visual and audio fidelity, lifelike animations, enemy behavior and movie-quality cinemas, it can take two years for a team of 100 people to create six hours of playable story. At an average burn rate of $10,000 per man month, that's $24 million just in developer cost. You're not likely to find a publisher that will foot the bill for extending that campaign to 20 hours. Of course, why make a 20-plus hour game when most players aren't completing them, as is the case with "Red Dead Redemption"? The answer is, most publishers don't.

Growth of online multiplayer
Which brings us to perhaps the biggest contributing factor in the decrease of lengthy campaign modes. It is this: Gamers may say they like playing epic single-player games. But when push comes to shove, what they really want is online multiplayer.

"The trend of low completion rates is equally driven by the growing importance of multiplayer," says Scott Steinberg, head of video game consulting firm TechSavvy. "Companies are more aware than ever of where and how games are being consumed, and what features players look for. As a result, they're de-emphasizing single-player, which seem to demand lower levels of player time, energy and investment."

Case in point: "Call of Duty: Black Ops." At an average of 67 hours played, it's the most-played recent game by far, according to Raptr, followed by "Halo: Reach" at 43 hours.

But that's not entirely true. What's really happened is that with their change in lifestyle, gamer tastes have evolved. Instead of "Zelda"-like games that take longer to start and resume, they're more inclined to play stop-and-go titles in bite-size games.

The future? Shorter games
So it's come to this: People have less time to play games than they did before. They have more options than ever. And they're more inclined to play quick-hit multiplayer modes, even at the expense of 100-hour epics.

Is that a problem?

Not at all Steinberg agrees: "Just because you don't slay the final boss or rescue the princess doesn't mean you can't see most of, if not all, of what a game has to offer in the hours leading up to it."

Gamers are already warming to the idea of shorter games. Many games now have a 40% to 50% completion rate, thanks to 10-hour campaigns instead of the 20-30 hour ones of yesteryear. Of course, that's good or bad depending on how you look at it. It's better than before. But it still means that more than half of all game content never gets appreciated.

Thanks to Blake Snow for the great piece. See more

Walmart's Sales Stuck

2011-08-17T08:09:00.000-04:00

Will Wal-Mart culture be the downfall of Wal-Mart? As goes Wal-Mart, so goes the nation?

Wal-Mart announced eight straight quarters of negative same-store sales in the U.S. -- even as it's taken a new-old position on emphasizing lowest prices. Wal-Mart's results are considered a bellwether of consumer spending because the company draws nearly 10% all non-automotive spending in the U.S.

Walmart is fighting a perception that maybe it doesn't really have the best prices in town anymore. A report from Consultancy WSL Strategic Retail that finds that 86% of 1,500 Walmart shoppers in an April survey believe that they can get a better deal elsewhere -- primarily at dollar stores.

Citigroup analyst Deborah Weinswig says that many customers are driving to stores closer to home to scrimp on gas. Meanwhile, she says, the company "has lost mind share in the U.S." Morgan Stanley's Mark Wiltamuth says it was "shocked" by a survey of 1,100 customers that found that 60% thought they could find a better price at a competitor. That includes Amazon.

A low cost for a Wal-Mart customer is actually a higher cost for many other stakeholders, mainly referring to the American economy, in that 80% of Wal-Mart’s suppliers are Chinese, and that’s a lot of pressure on American producers. More and more companies are moving their operations in Asian countries in order to cut costs and stay competitive. Some countries are trying to protect their own manufacturers by introducing import duties.

The bottom line is that Wal-Mart offers consumers a wide range of products at very low prices at the expense of putting people out of work and lowering living standards.

Thanks to Patrick Nadeau

Diner Dash -- for Cash

2011-08-15T07:47:00.001-04:00

Ready to Smile?

How does any company encourage teamwork? At Pret a Manger, executives say, the answer is to hire, pay and promote based on — believe it or not — qualities like cheerfulness. There is a certain “Survivor” element to all of this. New hires are sent to a Pret a Manger shop for a six-hour day, and then the employees there vote whether to keep them or not. Ninety percent of prospects get a thumbs-up. Those who are voted out are sent home with $57 and no hard feelings.

(This Pret Post content derived from post by Rob Horning based on a a link to this NYT article about Pret à Manger and their monstrous use of surveillance, emotional management, and gamification to motivate. )

The crucial factor is gaining support from existing employees. Those workers have skin in the game: bonuses are awarded based on the performance of an entire team, not individuals. Pret workers know that a bad hire could cost them money.

Instead of solidarity against management, each worker becomes the face of management, another Stasi spy for the happy police. But that is not nearly enough surveillance to allow Pret’s management to discriminate among workers:

Pret also sends “mystery shoppers” to every shop each week. Those shoppers give employee-specific critiques. (”Bill didn’t smile at the till,” for instance.) If a mystery shopper scores a shop as “outstanding” — 86 percent of stores usually qualify — all of the employees get a £1-per-hour bonus, based on a week’s pay, so full-timers get around $73.

“There’s a lot of peer pressure,” said Andrea Wareham, the human resources director at Pret.

Pret reinforces the teamwork concept in other ways. When employees are promoted or pass training milestones, they receive vouchers, a payment that Pret calls a “shooting star.” But instead of keeping the bonus, the employees must give the money to colleagues, people who have helped them along the way.'

“Rewards, through bonuses or ‘outstanding’ cards, affect behavior,” Ms. Wareham says.

In the end, it’s just Pavlovian manipulation, not genuine recognition of the worker as a human. The incentivizing of feeling leaves no space for the employees to be recognized in and of themselves. That’s what is so creepy about going into a Pret—you know they are being forced to be nice to you and are being carefully watched by other fake-nice bosses and informers.

Every new employee gets a thick binder of instructions. It states, for example, that employees should be “bustling around and being active” on the floor, not “standing around looking bored.” It encourages them to occasionally hand out free coffee or cakes to regulars, and not “hide your true character” with customers.

Are human interactions so conditioned by the imperative of exchange that giving and getting something for nothing is the best way to simulate genuineness, or sincere benevolence?

Unless you believe that it’s more fun to be forced to pretend to be having fun while working a deli counter—maybe the findings that people who are forced to smile report being happier apply here also. Pret’s annual work force turnover rate is about 60 percent — low for the fast-food industry, where the rate is normally 300 to 400 percent. Stockholm Syndrome is a powerful management tool.

Gamification -- An Exerblast

2011-08-12T07:08:00.000-04:00

My friend Bill is having a blast with his invention...Exerblast. You must check it out -- wellness gamified.

Along those lines, great postings on Topcoder.com...thought I'd paraphrase:

The topic of wellness is the perfect space to examine gamification more thoroughly. There are 3 main reasons gamification can be so impact-full in the wellness arena.

Competition is a Pillar of Gaming

It's true, not everyone is playing a game to win. In fact, four different types of players have been identified (achiever, socializer, explorer, killer) each with different desires as it pertains to why they are playing the game in the first place. But within each player category, individuals are still competing, some more actively and openly than others, but all competing on some level. Competition is innate to games which leverage such tactics as scoreboards, levels, achievements and earned status. As it relates to wellness, weight-loss and social motivation to lead a more active life-style, competition is an extraordinarily powerful motivator. Keas.com is a company focused on setting up healthy competitions within organizations. They leverage gamified tactics and at their core, the game itself is one big competition. Enjoy their video below.

Saying gamified applications won't take hold, based on today's technological landscape would be akin to saying social networking would never take-off back in 2003. Just like social media and social networking needed the advent of the Web2.0 movement to really blossom, gamification is patiently awaiting (or perhaps helping to bring about more swiftly) the coming 3.0 era where inter-connected devices "talk" with one another for specific purposes in order to benefit the human receiving the data.

Perhaps the most logical and simple argument as to why gamification can be a game-changer specifically in the wellness category is due to the fact that the human being playing the game will actually feel the results. Playing a game to earn a free cup of coffee or receive an upgrade to first class on your next flight might be all the motivation someone needs to partake and do so consistently. But feeling better in a pair of jeans, lowering your blood pressure or simply eroding that stubborn 10 lbs. is another level of gratification and leads me to believe that gamificaiton in the wellness sphere has a long, long way to run.

'Gamification Is @#!*% '

2011-08-10T07:45:00.000-04:00

Repost of ripost from Bogost:

"In his short treatise On @#!*% , the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of @#!*% . We normally think of @#!*% as a synonym--albeit a somewhat vulgar one--for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that @#!*% has nothing to do with truth.
Rather, @#!*% is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, @#!*% have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit.
Gamification is @#!*% .
I'm not being flip or glib or provocative. I'm speaking philosophically.
More specifically, gamification is marketing @#!*% , invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where @#!*% already reigns anyway.
@#!*% are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous, and it does precisely what the @#!*% want: it takes games--a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people--and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.
Gamification is reassuring. It gives Vice Presidents and Brand Managers comfort: they're doing everything right, and they can do even better by adding "a games strategy" to their existing products, slathering on "gaminess" like aioli on ciabatta at the consultant's indulgent sales lunch.
Gamification is easy. It offers simple, repeatable approaches in which benefit, honor, and aesthetics are less important than facility. For the consultants and the startups, that means selling the same @#!*% in book, workshop, platform, or API form over and over again, at limited incremental cost. It ticks a box. Social media strategy? Check. Games strategy? Check.

The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about--a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter.
This rhetorical power derives from the "-ification" rather than from the "game". -ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. -ification is always easy and repeatable, and it's usually @#!*% . Just add points.
Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity. That may be true, but truth doesn't matter for @#!*% . Indeed, the very point of gamification is to make the sale as easy as possible.
I've suggested the term "exploitationware" as a more accurate name for gamification's true purpose, for those of us still interested in truth. Exploitationware captures gamifiers' real intentions: a grifter's game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next @#!*% trend comes along.
I am not naive and I am not a fool. I realize that gamification is the easy answer for deploying a perversion of games as a mod marketing miracle. I realize that using games earnestly would mean changing the very operation of most businesses. For those whose goal is to clock out at 5pm having matched the strategy and performance of your competitors, I understand that mediocrity's lips are seductive because they are willing. For the rest, those of you who would consider that games can offer something different and greater than an affirmation of existing corporate practices, the business world has another name for you: they call you "leaders."

(from Atlantic Magazine)

Harvard Business Review: Game Mechanics Motivate Employees

2011-08-09T08:23:00.001-04:00

Of all the things that can get people deeply engaged in their work, the single most important is making progress — even if that progress is a seemingly small step forward.

This is the progress principle. As obvious as it might sound, the motivational power of progress is a big surprise to most managers. In a survey of nearly 700 managers , asking them to say which of five employee motivators they think is most important, a mere 5% ranked progress as number one — way behind conventional motivators like incentives and recognition.

They should have placed it way ahead. To keep a team jazzed about its work, managers must start thinking like video game designers. Managers may be unaware of how important progress is to human motivation, but it's one of the first secrets that every good video game designer learns.

Of all entertainment forms, video games are among the most engaging. People, especially young men between the ages of 15 and 35, spend enormous amounts of time and money immersed in the fantasy worlds of the massively multiplayer online game space. What keeps them hooked? To a large extent, it's two additional secrets of the video game designer: constant progress indicators and achievement markers. Virtually all video games feature "progress bars" that are constantly visible onscreen as players engage in the game. These bars are tangible indicators of how close the player is to reaching the next major game level, the next step within the current level, and the next mini-goal within the current step.

Achievement markers are a bit like the badges that Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts can earn for mastering particular tasks. In a video game, achievements attained by each player — for any of a staggering array of ever-changing challenges throughout the game — are posted for all players to see.

By the way, that future is now, people: The Boy Scouts last year have officially introduced a video games badge into their awards curriculum. Earning the belt loop requires explaining the ESRB video game rating system, officially inking video game sessions into your calendar along with homework and chores and learning to play a new “approved” video game.

Truly effective video game designers know how to create a sense of progress for players within all stages of a game. Truly effective teachers do this in the classroom for their students. Truly effective managers do the same for their subordinates. Here are three particularly effective techniques:

Keep everyday progress on your mental agenda. Of course, before you can mark progress, people have to actually make progress. So the first step is to support progress every day, by creating a "climate of attention." Most project review meetings, which involved top managers asking challenging questions of project team members, constructively shaped projects for the better.
Find small wins even in setbacks. The new product development work of the teams we studied was very difficult, technically, and they suffered frequent setbacks. Create a climate of psychological safety, where people didn't fear being punished if they admitted mistakes or encountered failure in trying a new idea.
Mark progress in many ways, large and small. Most new-product-development teams had a weekly meeting specifically devoted to noting their progress against goals, analyzing and drawing lessons from setbacks encountered, and making any necessary course-corrections. Usually, the overall progress was small, but team leaders helped the scientists and technicians see how they were moving forward on their pathway.

Does your organization have a climate of attention to progress? Are there progress indicators and achievement markers? Do they work?

Thanks to Teresa Amabile (Professor of Business Administration) who researches what makes people creative, productive, happy, and motivated at work. With Steven Kramer she coauthored The Progress Principle

Gamify the World Zelda!

2011-08-04T06:26:00.000-04:00

Forbes quoted me on gamification trends three years ago. Now it is hotter than ever.

“Gamification,” as the trend is called, is the use of game elements everywhere — from the classroom to the shopping mall. Gartner estimates that by 2014 more than 70% of major companies will have at least one gamified mobile application

Lee Sheldon at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute teaches his students: like they’re playing a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. He divides the class into small groups called “guilds,” which complete quests such as taking tests and making presentations to earn points and then advance to a new level. At the end of the course, he determines the grade by points and skill level. Ever since he turned education into a game, he says, “the average letter grade in the class went from a C to a B, and attendance is almost perfect.”

Sheldon uses the same techniques as companies such as Foursquare — turning the world into a game. Sheldon takes advantage of the way popular games reward completing small tasks, and high-scoring players move proudly to the top of the leader board.

Starbucks, for instance, has used game techniques to revolutionize its rewards program. Instead of receiving punches on a card for buying coffee, customers earn stars. Once they get enough stars they “level up,” as game developers would call it, and become a “green” or “gold” level customer, with a host of new benefits such as free refills. “Gamification is really about understanding what motivates your users and designing for those incentives,” says Gabe Zichermann, author of the new book Gamification by Design.

In the best games, players understand what’s expected of them, experiment with ways to achieve their goals without significant penalty and immediately see rewards for their accomplishments. Slaying the dragon in “Legend of Zelda” earns players new weapons and brings them one step closer to facing the final boss and saving the princess, but if they fail they simply restart the level. The game has complex puzzles, some as complicated as the material in the average college course, yet it does a far better job breaking objectives down into easily digestible parts.

Some educators think games debase the institution. But for members of the Millennial Generation, they are second nature. “We made the games to imitate life, but now life’s changing to mimic the games,” Zichermann says.

See Forbes

Dr Kneebone's Simulation

2011-08-02T07:21:00.000-04:00

Dr Roger Kneebone is more than connected to the thighbone -- he's an innovator. In recognition of his contribution to the field of medical education, he has been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship.
Among the activities recognised by this award is Dr Kneebone’s work in simulation-based learning.

His work has included developing medical simulations which use both inanimate models and professional actors to create an authentic clinical scenario, as well as simulation set-ups which are low cost, realistic but highly portable, such as the inflatable operating theatre.

Click here for a hands-on demonstration of the simulated surgery on Channel 4 programme Jamie’s Dream School.

In 2005 Dr Kneebone founded the UK’s only Masters in Education in Surgical Education. His work with young people has included involvement in the College’s Reach Out Lab

The National Teaching Fellowship Scheme aims to inspire and celebrate teacher excellence, and is funded by the Higher Education Funding Councils for England and Wales and the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland.

MTV Taught Us Well

2011-08-01T07:33:00.002-04:00

MTV first aired on Aug. 1, 1981, thirty years ago. Music videos transformed music into a visual and auditory experience. Embedded within each short music video was a vivid story -- a narrative -- that made the song (and story) more memorable.

Today, we, as entertainment consumers, no longer just watch and listen -- we control and create. With increasingly powerful personal computers and the ubiquity of the Internet, a great deal of our time is spent interacting with multimedia -- music on iTunes or videos on YouTube. The answer to any question is available immediately through Google. On-demand movies, music and games are available 24/7. Many of these items can now be downloaded, remixed and shared with others. Neuroscientists tell us that the more senses we engage, the easier it is to retain and apply information. MTV can take some credit for this rewiring of our brains.

All of this helps explain why we in education need to change our traditional lecture format. Under this antiquated approach, learners must forgo their control over pace, content and context of the topic. They are not allowed to control what, when or why they are learning. So despite numerous advances in technology and the science of learning, the majority of our teaching remains lecture-based, for no better reason than it is the easiest approach.

It is time for a change. , must adapt to our new roles as guides or facilitators rather than the end-all, be-all oracles spewing forth knowledge. If we fail to adapt, learners will revolt, leaving us obsolete.

Educational methods that embrace technological advances are needed to enhance the learning experience, and games-based learning is a powerful solution to these challenges.

With online games, users hear and see the virtual world around them but also directly control the narrative. They are able to see the outcome of their actions in real time. If they make a mistake, they reflect on other approaches and try again. The reward center of the brain fires when they achieve the micro-goal, encouraging them to tackle the next challenge.

This cycle of trying, making mistakes, reflecting and trying again is central to learning. The best consumer games chain together micro-challenges into something that is neither so easy as to become boring nor so hard that the user gives up.

Gaming technology offers many other advantages over traditional methods, including the ability to compress time, augment reality, pace yourself, collaborate with others and obtain instant feedback. Because the environment is served from a computer, we can track every choice the individual makes, both correct and incorrect. Remediation is immediately available. Students today crave creation, collaboration and feedback in small, immediately accessible doses. They also have the greatest visual acuity of any generation, and rely on technology to improve their efficiency. It is the teachers who must adapt.

These changes have been slow in coming, but are necessary for the new breed of learners.

Based on our students' emerging preferences and my own experience both as a facilitator and learner using interactive techniques, digital game-based learning will have a prominent place in the future of education, especially in health care.

Go to Pittsburgh for more from Dr. Jeffrey Taekman

Teens Driven to Distraction

2011-07-29T11:32:00.001-04:00

A new Simulator helps teens behind the wheel focus on road hazards, not phones or food.

The flashy red Corvette glides down a divided, four-lane cityscape thick with stoplights, moving cars, parked cars, moseying pedestrians -- at about 35 miles per hour.

The cellphone on the dash suddenly buzzes; the young driver reaches for it, checking an incoming text, not noticing a truck is stopped at a light the truck until he’s almost on top of it. He brakes, but still rear-ends the truck with a crunch of metal and shattered glass.

Luckily this isn’t a real crash. He’s seated at a simulation console as part of the mobile course Distractology 101, which gives new drivers near-real-life run-ins involving distractions and obstructions.

It seems a lot like a video game. Participants sit at control panels mocked up like mini Corvettes with steering wheels, gas pedals, brakes, and giant screens in front of them. But the object here isn’t destruction, it’s distraction.

In what is sure to trump the old 'scare tactic' driver Ed videos, Distractology 101 teaches the dangers of “gabcidents’’ (the result of paying closer attention to a cellphone conversation than the road); “sender benders’’ (collisions that result when drivers are distracted by sending text messages); “snackcidents’’ (in-car eating being the culprit); and “spincidents’’ (what might happen to those who fiddle too much with the radio or an MP3 player instead of watching the highway).

The 36-foot-long, bright yellow trailer has been parked at roughly 50 locations - including high schools and police and fire stations - and approximately 2,600 youths have fastened their seat belts for 45-minute “DistractU’’ sessions.

Outsourcing Dear John?

2011-07-27T08:26:00.001-04:00

Hues Consulting in Atlanta has made the impersonal personal again in personnel, with a service that lets companies outsource their candidate follow-up obligations. Not since 'Rock The Boat' has Hues made news.
Hues believes that a letter or email telling them they didn't make the cut isn't enough. "People are fed up with the lack of communication. They feel disrespected, minimized and ignored. It seems companies are forgetting that human element" says Adrienne Graham, CEO of Hues.
The "Recruiter Response Team" service takes the burden of closing the loop off of recruiters' plate and gives candidates closure (along with respect and dignity).
For overworked recruiting staffs that can't find time to dump candidates themselves, the Hues corporation solution brings the human element back to recruiting -- albeit third party disconnected humans. Better than nothing?

The phone script?

"Up to now we sailed through every storm
and I've always had your tender lips to keep me warm
oh I need to have the strength that flows from you
don't let me drift away my dear, though you didn't get the job

So I'd like to know where, you got the notion....."

It supports the employer brand...if you want it to say 'we overreach, impersonally source, cannot manage inventory, and serve our people if not well then at least the second best we can'

WPP Backs Gamification: Greenblatt sees Greenbacks

2011-07-26T06:42:00.000-04:00

I met Mindshare CMO David Adelman when he was a J&J. He told me our talk about the future of game-based learning was an eyeopener. Maybe I should have stayed in touch -- the Mindshare juggernaut has added north of $1.5Bn in net new business billings in 18 months. That's a lot of golf and alot of success!

Some is from gaming. With revenues and usage climbing steadily in the sector, they appointed Geoffrey Greenblatt to the new position of director of gaming. According to Nielsen, over half of all American adults now engage with video games, which is enough for Greenblatt who declares that the space has arrived as a mainstream channel for marketers; it is not just a vehicle for reaching kids and teens anymore.

"You have to consider gaming to be the 21st-century entertainment form, and it's certainly arrived," he said. "It is demographically agnostic," he added, "any age, any sex, any demographic out there is now playing games."

Last month, PriceWaterhouseCoopers issued a new report predicting 8% annual ad growth in the North American video game market over the next five years (through 2015), reaching the $1.5 billion mark. During the same period, consumer spending on games in the region will climb more than 4% annually, reaching $17.5 billion.

Greenblatt sees social gaming as a trend that's just hitting its stride. "It's not just a fad," he said.

His favorite game? "I'm a serious fan of 'Fruit Ninja.'

Earlier in his career, Greenblatt was a planner and buyer at Publicis Groupe's MediaVest.

Gamification -- The Casual Buzzword

2011-07-25T07:56:00.002-04:00

One of the hot topics of discussion at the Casual Connect conference in downtown Seattle (which highlights everything you could possibly imagine about the casual games business) has been “gamification,”

PopCap CEO Dave Roberts

PopCap CEO Dave Roberts kicked off his keynote address on Tuesday with 10 things he hates about the casual games business. The #1 item on his list? You guessed it: Gamification.

On Wednesday, at a press event, PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka elaborated on Roberts’ remarks, telling GeekWire that he doesn’t have a problem with the concept of gamification. What Kapalka can’t stand about gamification is the name. After all, he holds games as sacred products. Creating a term like gamification does more to harm to the business because it actually dilutes down what a game means. And, in his view, a game has one simple goal: to be fun.

The term certainly has come on strong in the past 12 months. A Web search for the term about two years ago. Google returned just four results, Now, according to a recent search, there are about 1.6 million results.
At this year’s Casual Connect conference there’s no shortage of panels about the concept: “Smart Gamification: Seven Core Concepts for Creating Compelling Experiences:” or “Gamification for Everyone: What’s your Strategy?” or “Gamification and Social TV: The New Way to Watch.”

A new consultancy called Research Through Gaming (R.T.G.) applies game mechanics to improve respondents’ survey-taking experiences, collecting ‘Playspondent’ feedback to boost response rates.

UK based RTG provides gamification consultancy as well as working on specific online and off-line research game design and development. RTG is launched by former Nebu exec Betty Adamou who hopes to give a much-needed facelift for market research. ‘There’s definitely a benefit of being first in market with R.T.G. as the first provider in MR solely focused on gamification. I’m looking forward to the future of market research, which I hope will have more and more of a creative and innovative edge’.
The firm is online at: http://www.researchthroughgaming.com/

Dillinger Shot at Biograph

2011-07-22T14:26:00.000-04:00

American gangster and bank-robber John Dillinger (June 22, 1903 – July 22, 1934) died 77 years ago today. He was charged with, but never convicted of, the murder of an East Chicago police officer. This was his only alleged kill. His gang robbed two dozen banks and four police stations. Dillinger escaped from jail twice.

In 1933-34, among criminals (Baby Face Nelson), Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger was the most notorious of all. Media reports were spiced with exaggerated accounts of his bravado and daring. After evading police in four states for almost a year, Dillinger was wounded, and returned to his father's home to recover.

He returned to Chicago in July 1934 and met his end at the hands of police and federal agents on July 22, at the Biograph Theater. Federal agents, led by Melvin Purvis, moved to arrest him as he left the theater.

See the slideshow...

Little Leah Epstein entered as he departed ....

Gamification =Tower of Babel?

2011-07-21T07:50:00.001-04:00

There needs to be a gamification shake out as the Web outside of Facebook continues to become more social.

"Gamification" indicates when a system of game-like constructs are put in place to incentivize users to engage with a brand, product, or service. Game mechanics are on the verge of exploding as websites look to reward their most loyal visitors and syndicate content. In fact, Gartner Research predicts that by 2015, more than half of companies managing innovation processes will employ game mechanics. Further, in that same timeframe, M2 Research forecasts that the game mechanics production will generate $1.6 billion in revenues and will account for 23% of social media marketing budgets.
This impending surge makes sense as game mechanics has the potential to reach website visitors in ways that marketers have only dreamed of. Yet efforts to gamify sites can fail because those game mechanics remain siloed from the rest of a site's social elements.
In essence, gamification can't just be a light layer sitting atop a website like a cherry on a fudge Sunday, with social rewards being served up to any user who merely "likes" your page. Users should be rewarded for interacting with your site in positive ways--like sharing, commenting, chatting, and logging into your site through a social network. And the only way for that to happen is if your site's game mechanics are actually able to interact with your other social functions, all speaking the same language. It's not an easy task for your IT team or developers especially as social networks constantly change or upgrade their APIs, which can stop your site's social elements dead in their tracks, leaving your visitors confused and unengaged.

Game mechanics are going to be an integral part of companies' social strategies for keeping their customers engaged when they're not on Facebook. But right now the market is littered with point solutions all offering different components coded in different languages--there are just too many cooks in the kitchen.

See http://www.fastcompany.com/1768213/game-mechanics-gamification-gigya

Gamifying Salesforce.com

2011-07-20T06:38:00.000-04:00

‘Gamification’ of consumer apps like Foursquare through points, badges, mayorships has become a big thing over the past 18 months. Now US startup IActionable wants to bring game mechanics to the enterprise market too, with an app for leading cloud-based business platform Salesforce.com.
Engage is built to integrate with Salesforce accounts, adding points, challenges, achievements and leaderboards to working culture. IActionable says that its platform can: be used to increase productivity; be used as a training tool, helping to improve Salesforce adoption amongst new staff by helping them get used to the platform and encouraging old hands to use it to its full potential; help improve performance monitoring, and spur on healthy competition between employees.

Applying game mechanics to work is nothing new – sales teams in businesses around the world have long operated leaderboards and rewards schemes to motivate staff. Opinions will vary, but Salesforce.com’s ‘chief scientist’ JP Rangaswami recently spoke about how gamification was the future of the motivation and performance management in the workplace, so expect to see more of this kind of thing in the future.

Watch the video

Work for McKinsey? Irv Wexler Wouldn't

2011-07-19T08:57:00.000-04:00

When my dad graduated Harvard Business school in the 50s, his passion was marketing and his destination was retail. He basked in the glow of marketing for a career that ended 10 years ago today.

When I asked him in the gogo 90s why he didn't go to wall street like so many of his classmates, he looked at me deadpan and said......"Why didn't you"?

Today's M.B.A. students from top-ranked schools are increasingly naming technology firms as their most-desired employers, according to a new survey, recalling the fervor of a decade ago, when the dot-com boom attracted plenty of freshly minted business-school graduates.

Still, the top spot in the survey went to a consulting firm, according to employer-branding consultant Universum. When asked to pick up to five ideal employers out of a list of 170, about 29% of students named McKinsey & Co. and some 28% named Google Inc.

Tech company' popularity has risen over the past few years. No. 9-ranked Amazon, which was chosen by 10.6% of students, was selected by 6% of students in 2008.

Jana Pompadur Kierstead, head of Harvard Business School's career and professional development office, said that the percentage of the class of 2011 taking finance roles increased about five percentage points to 39% from the prior year, due almost completely to more students going to hedge funds and private-equity firms.

Stanford Graduate School of Business student Eduardo Hurtado, who is co-president of the finance and investment club, said that finance students are looking at hedge funds or venture-capital firms, rather than at traditional banks. "People don't want to spend [years] in a role before they get to have some kind of larger impact, which is something you can get in a smaller firm," he said.

Way to show your passion and apply yourself to change the world, Eduardo.

News You Can Use

2011-07-18T06:45:00.001-04:00

Google is in the news with a gamification project. Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends.

If badge adoption seems familiar --Foursquare makes this a central part of their service. The first time you unlock a badge on Foursquare, the service gives a positive feedback loop that makes members want to use the system even more.

Similarly, Google has created a way to make some fun and competition out of what you already do – that is, read the news. They’ve created categories with badges that allow you to level up and share your achievements if you wish.

Google plans further developments to this project as they get feedback and observe the usage. In addition, it’s highly likely that they’re determining news reading habits from the data they’re receiving, which in turn will lead to better optimization or customization of news stories. Google’s news badge system could usher in the era of truly customized news stories for readers everywhere.

Gartner is predicting that by 2015, more than half of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes.

Google has designed some 500 badges to recognize avid news reading. The badges are sharable, though Google has opted not to share potentially sensitive information--the specific articles read for a badge award.
"Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends," explains Google engineer Natasha Mohanty in a blog post. "Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation, or just plain brag about how well-read you are."

Read More

The Future of Loyalty

2011-07-15T08:28:00.000-04:00

Loyalty is a game that both consumers and retailers play. Now, it’s not so much the points we collect than the interaction between the consumer and the brand and increasingly the social visibility of these interactions that is important.

The traditional mechanics of collecting points to earn prizes isn’t going to cut it forever. Gamification is finding its way into all aspects of marketing. The difficult question for retailers: the only goal within a traditional loyalty card is the redemption of points -- there is no motivation to interact on a deeper level. How to add in gamification metrics to the existing programs?

Things like Facebook ’Likes’ and social media check-ins will fuel the next generation of loyalty schemes as consumers put a higher value on social currency and immediate rewards. Foursquare is an example of how brands use social currency to reward consumers and make them feel valued.

What’s different about games from conventional media is that whatever you watch passively is going to be less valuable to you tomorrow as you’ve seen it already. But a game like chess is way more interesting the tenth time you play it than the first

Gamification and the Classroom

2011-07-12T06:23:00.001-04:00

Hand in hand with the gamification of the classroom is the topic of using games as assessment.

Games often assess players in ways similar to schools, using letter grades, numerical or percentage scores, and ranking. Dance Dance Revolution gives you a letter grade at the end of a round. Shooters give all sorts of statistics like kill-death ratio. In RPGs you have levels, All of this is “gamified” with leadership boards and rewards.

Then there is the self-imposed challenge that players do on their own, usually independent of the game’s goals -- such as playing through a game without ever dying, or achieving 100 percent in all the game’s treasure hunts. All players pursue self-imposed challenges, whenever they set off to challenge themselves to do better than they did last time, to beat their best score, to continuous improvement.

This is something all of us do in our “real lives” as well. We try to read more books than we did last year. We try to run an additional mile in the morning. We try to eat more vegetables. We try to eat more organic. We try to reduce our carbon footprint. We try to learn a new language. Make ambitious New Year’s Resolutions.

For this to work for schools, student would have to be graded against their past performance. The greater their improvement, the better their grade. Performance isn’t compared to a standard but to yourself. Students could set goals for themselves on a regular basis, and teachers could check in to and then further challenge them to newer, more difficult ones. It’s be a genuine feedback cycle, not a surprise ending at the end of the year.

Thank you techchange,org. Much more here

55 % of Workers Want Gamification

2011-07-08T07:39:00.001-04:00

When the world catches up with a vision you've articulated for years it is rewarding. The only downside is if you don't get the business, or recognition when they finally step up to the plate you invented it can sting doubly . Especially so if the newly awakened is a close friend or colleague..

According to a new report launched by Saatchi & Saatchi S, "55 percent of Americans want to work for companies that use gamification as an incentive to boost productivity."

The report (launched at the 8th Annual Games for Change Festival) finds that 27 percent of surveyed respondents confessed to playing for at least 30 minutes at work, with an additional 8 percent admitting to playing between one and two hours every day.

For Michelle Byrd, co-president of Games for Change, this is the new normal. Games offer the scale to engage people from all types of sectors, communities and perspectives on a single core issue. "Games are everywhere today. They are on your computer, on Facebook, as part of corporate responsibility initiatives, colleges, etc.," she said .

Saatchi CEO Judah Schiller: "This is the next opportunity for companies. Through active participants in gaming, people see the consequences of their choices instead of reading an excel sheet. We're moving from a very linear world to a virtual world where we can truly tell consequences and test behavioral science."

Fun at Work

2011-07-07T07:31:00.001-04:00

Clearly, every employer cannot be Google or Facebook, but every workplace certainly can be fun and enjoyable. A lot of people – especially millenials who, surveys point out, prefer open, innovative and flexible
workplaces.

Engaging employees, who today represent several generations and a multitude of backgrounds, requires creativity, innovation and some muscle. But for professionals in the banking and accounting sectors, is there a tolerance for fun? Wells Fargo‘s SVP and Creative Director Michele Ronsen insists that the focus remains on cultivating an enjoyable workplace, but not necessarily fun “in a gaming kind of way.”

But research seems to show a different reality. According to a new report by Saatchi & Saatchi, “55 percent of Americans want to work for companies that use gamification as an incentive to boost productivity.”

“Games are not just an isolated trend. Companies are adapting to these next generation tools to engage their employees in a better fashion and produce happier employees,” says corporate strategist Christine Arena, author of The High-Purpose Company.

Continue reading -- Forbes has more

Gamification to Keep Employees Engaged

2011-03-28T22:57:00.000-04:00

The power of games to drive response and change behavior the is driving corporate interest in what is being call "gamification" .

According to the Los Angeles Times, research firm M2 Research estimates in a recent report that spending on gamification projects will grow to as much as $2.8 billion by 2016 from $100 million this year. The story quotes M2 Research analyst Wanda Meloni:

We know anecdotally that engagement increases substantially when game mechanics are applied. How that affects customer loyalty and translates in terms of increased revenue is still being worked out.

InformationWeek describes an SAP product demo that incorporated game elements , and sent a member of its technical team to the recent Gamification Summit in San Francisco. Assurant is also experimenting with business training games to help get employees in line with corporate strategy during a business transformation. The first module, covering corporate strategy, featured a challenge in which the company president, in avatar form, hangs from a parachute. With each wrong answer, the parachute lost a string. It was a hit when demonstrated for employees at an all-company meeting. Successive games allowed employees to spend a virtual “day in the life” of coworkers and learn all of the myriad and sometimes complicated ways Assurant earns money.

Meanwhile, as dispartte elements from the serous games and loyalty industries coalesce around the banner of Gamification, there is debate asto whether it is the right flafg to unfurl. At GDC 2011 on Tuesday, a panel debated over the term "Gamification."

Having a provocative term such as "gamification" has put a spotlight on a category very closely related to "serious games." "Gamification," after only about year of existing, already has 552,000 Google references, while the at least decade-old term "serious games" has 770,000.

Full Story

"Gamification is the new Web 2.0 "

2011-03-28T20:11:00.001-04:00

BatesHook is my favorite name for a marketing firm. Ms. Bates and Mr. Hook are avid bloggers and well-respected marketing consultants, so this entry caught our eye:

"Gamification is the new Web 2.0 "

Mr. Hook says "Try it out: Next time you talk about the future of marketing, add the words "Gamification" and "Game Mechanics." Suddenly you morph from marketing expert to marketing genius. You might be promoted on the spot. The world will be your oyster. "

He goes on to half-ridicule, half-celebrate the power (and the hype) around game-based communications.

Hook's points:

Gamification will transform education and finally fix that darn Global Warming thing.    Seriously, wouldn't you study that much harder if a class valedictorian was called "White Knight Paladin Level 20"? Of course you would. At least that's what Seth Priebatch, the founder and Chief Ninja (You can't make that stuff up.) of SCVNGR told the world at his South by Southwest keynote in Austin. He referred to the education system as "one of the most perfect game ecosystems that's out there, "full of challenges, rewards, rules, allies, enemies, countdowns, and incentives, "all sorts of things that basically make school the best real-world implementation of a game that's out there. Priebatsch called education "a poorly designed game; it's kind of broken."

What is gamification?    Gamification is the use of game place mechanics in order to encourage people to adopt applications and, ultimately, change behavior. Think about Foursquare: People are encouraged to check-in at physical locations in order to earn badges, mayorships and rewards (coupons, freebies, etc.). Gamification or Game Mechanics work because it makes technology more engaging/entertaining by encouraging desired behavior and taps into the human desire to play a game. It can help to perform tasks that are normally considered boring or arduous.

Gamification will gain in importance     There's a good case to be made that 'Pleasure' should be added to the 5 P's of marketing. Why shouldn't pleasure be an extension of a great customer experiences? Right now, customer experiences are mostly limited to well-working and easy to use. In the near future, a great customer experience has to add the fun factor. When you're being rewarded to do your timesheets, you'll them more timely. And it might be even a task you'll be looking forward to. You can create 'player journeys' to reward people with status, access and power – you create meaning inside of the mechanics. Loyalty programs can be expanded through leaderboards, each customer interaction can become an enjoyable experience.

But, please, don't overhype the hype Gamification is an important tactic to help change human behavior. It can make life more entertaining and more pleasurable. It will make arduous tasks more enjoyable. It can be used to change bad habits and transform into more positive actions. But, let's stop the hype before it gets really started. Let's deliver on small promises before we promise the world.

And speaking of hype. What's the theme of this months (5th annual) Ad Age Digital Conference? "New Gaming Economy" with a keynote delivered by EA's CEO. With 700 attendees over its two days.and a goal to showcase the best and most interesting digital innovation, highlight how technology is changing consumer behavior, and highlight what's working for marketers...gamification should be giving Mr. Hook ample targets

Reality is a Broken (Record)

2011-03-11T06:46:00.001-05:00

Jane McGonigal is the poster child for Gamification. Her hand hurt after she signed all those books at the Gamification Summit. She's working it -- but kudos for having your life's focus be a leading opinion at a perfect time.

She touts what I tout -- her new research shows that games, and playing games, could have a positive impact on people. Jane McGonigal claims that game designers might just be the very people that had the best chance of positively impacting the most lives.

Her first book, a big-picture tome called "Reality is Broken," which takes the research she had been talking about and implementing in her games, and in keynote addresses from SXSWi to the Game Developers Conference to TED, and beyond, and uses it to make the argument the whole world can see, that games can make the world a better place.

Here's a 45 Minutes on IM interview:

Q: First of all, congratulations on the book. Maybe you could start by summing up for those who haven't seen the book why "reality is broken."
McGonigal: I investigated the reasons why games seem to have an increasing pull on us. We're up to 3 billion hours playing online games a week. I realized that compared to games, reality feels broken: it doesn't engage us or motivate us or inspire us or connect us as effectively and reliably as our best games do. This isn't necessarily a problem. Many people are effectively using games as a way to recharge from reality. But I think it clearly points to a problem with reality itself. Why should virtual worlds make us happier than the real world? Why shouldn't we feel as motivated, optimistic, ambitious, determined, resilient, and collaborative in our real lives?
And why do you think games can make people's lives better?
McGonigal: Games provoke positive emotions and strengthen our social relationships in really key ways that ultimately make us not just happier but also healthier and more successful. The book presents research that suggests that how we feel in games can spill over into our real lives--the confidence, the optimism, our willingness to help others. I write about why games make us more likable to others, and how they make us more likely to stretch outside our social comfort zone in ways that can make our real social networks stronger. That's the first half of the book-- looking at how "ordinary" computer and video games are charging us up and making us better. They're more than escapist. They're helping us get what we want out of life, and helping us spend time as the best versions of ourselves.

.
Along those lines, you recently said that gamification of tasks should make them harder, not easier. First, explain gamification, and then, why harder?
McGonigal: Gamification, means to take an ordinary task--running, losing weight, meeting up with friends--and adding a "game layer" to it, like points, levels, badges, leaderboards. Making something gameful, as I call it in the book, means making it more like a game, and we know that games are designed to be challenging. So gamification isn't about making real life easier. It's actually about making real life more challenging, in ways that we want. We want to be challenged to run more and faster (Nike +), or to get in shape (the Game Diet), or to see our friends more often and actually get out of the house (Foursquare).
The big game project I'm working on now is for the New York Public Library. It's called Find the Future and we're gamifying going to the library. But we're not just giving you points for showing up at the library, or achievement badges for checking out books. We're focusing on a real challenge instead. By playing this game, you write a book. A real book. You can write the book in eight hours. There will be 500 gamers, locked in at the library, allowed down into the 40 miles of underground stacks, and if they win, they write a book, and it goes in the permanent collection of the library.
So, you talk a lot about your biggest goal--that a game designer will win the Nobel Peace Prize within 25 years. Why is that so important to you?
McGonigal: I think we need an epic win condition that we can aspire to, something that we can weigh our game design decisions against. When I take on new games, I use that as a criteria. Do I think that making this game will improve the odds of some game designer eventually winning a Nobel Peace Prize? Not every game is anywhere close, but it's a direction to head in. And I think that if anything can harness global engagement, it's a game. We know that world peace requires global engagement. I also believe that we can improve people's quality of life--their health, happiness and well-being--in meaningful ways with games. And if we make games that can measurably improve quality of life statistics, we should get the Nobel Prize for that.
How would you have responded if someone had told you when World of Warcraft launched that by 2010, people would have put 6 million work years into it?
McGonigal: 'Quick! Let's add one tiny thing to the game that players could do for a minute a week that would add up to 100 Wikipedias worth of collaborative effort.' It's too late now for WoW, but not for future games. I really feel that if we could put tiny opportunities to be of real heroic service into our games--a five-minute optional side mission--we could accomplish really extraordinary things.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20029551-52.html#ixzz1CD68XWZU

Big Brother Can Watch

2011-03-08T20:24:00.002-05:00

Employers can put limits on what employees can post on social media sites, according to a recent federal appeals court ruling.

The decision provides some balance for the National Labor Relations Board’s charge that a company violated labor laws after firing an employee who posted negative comments about her supervisor on Facebook. That case was settled in the employee’s favor before it got to the hearing stage. And it made a lot of employers nervous about just how far they could go to set limits on employees’ use of social network sites.

The earlier case, in heard in federal appeals court in Georgia, involved a probationary firefighter in Savannnah who posted photos of herself in uniform on her MySpace page. Problem was, she also posted revealing photos of herself, including at least one in which she appeared to be nude.

An anonymous tipster let Savannah Fire Department officials know that the woman’s postings might conflict with the way the department wished to be portrayed. Her superiors decided to give her an oral reprimand, the mildest step in the department’s progressive discipline process. When confronted, however, the woman became “defensive and combative,” claiming she’d been singled out — other male firefighters had posted photos related to the department. But she refused to name them.

She was fired for insubordination. The woman sued, claiming gender discrimination. That claim was dismissed. But here’s the part that’s of real interest to employers:
The court confirmed that an employee can be fired for violating an employer’s policies on photos posted on a public website.

So where do you go from here? An employer’s social media policy should clearly define the limitations on employees’ work-related use of social media channels. Areas to cover:

Require employees to identify their association with the employer whenever an employee is using social media to comment upon the employer’s products or services
Unless an employee’s blogging or online postings are officially sanctioned and reviewed by the employer, the employee should be required to use conspicuous disclaimers that his or her views do not represent the views of the employer
Set specific rules on the use of photographs and names of co-employees or customers, and

Remind employees of the employer’s right to monitor their social media postings and other online activities for compliance with the employer’s policies.

Make sure your policy doesn’t restrict employees’ right to engage in “protected concerted activity” under the National Labor Relations Act — in other words, you can’t stifle your workers’ rights to discuss workplace issues. Full Story

Gamification to Keep Employees Engaged

2011-03-08T15:11:00.001-05:00

The power of games to drive response and change behavior the is driving corporate interest in what is being call "gamification" .

According to the Los Angeles Times, research firm M2 Research estimates in a recent report that spending on gamification projects will grow to as much as $2.8 billion by 2016 from $100 million this year. The story quotes M2 Research analyst Wanda Meloni:

We know anecdotally that engagement increases substantially when game mechanics are applied. How that affects customer loyalty and translates in terms of increased revenue is still being worked out.

Among the story's examples of companies using gamification are NBCUniversal, which increased page views and stickiness on the website for its "Psych" series when it added games that allowed fans to earn points.
SAP is also exploring the idea of using gamification to get users more engaged with its enterprise software. It's a worthy goal, given the way many people feel about the software they use at work.

InformationWeek describes an SAP product demo that incorporated game elements , and sent a member of its technical team to the recent Gamification Summit in San Francisco. Assurant is also experimenting with business training games to help get employees in line with corporate strategy during a business transformation. The first module, covering corporate strategy, featured a challenge in which the company president, in avatar form, hangs from a parachute. With each wrong answer, the parachute lost a string. It was a hit when demonstrated for employees at an all-company meeting. Successive games allowed employees to spend a virtual “day in the life” of coworkers and learn all of the myriad and sometimes complicated ways Assurant earns money.

Meanwhile, as disparate elements from the serous games and loyalty industries coalesce around the banner of Gamification, there is debate as to whether it is the right flag to unfurl. At GDC 2011 on Tuesday, a panel debated over the term "Gamification."

Having a provocative term such as "gamification" has put a spotlight on a category very closely related to "serious games." "Gamification," after only about year of existing, already has 552,000 Google references, while the at least decade-old term "serious games" has 770,000.

Full Story

How video games can make you smarter

2011-03-06T22:34:00.001-05:00

CNN weighs in with a broad piece on games and learning. Love it as "news" and the bleeding edge runs long and I guess wide:

Critics often accuse video games of making players lazy, inept and socially awkward. Contrary to popular belief, though, many build, not burn brain cells by requiring extensive problem solving, teamwork and dynamic decision-making skills.

Also capable of building players' confidence and helping them see the world from multiple viewpoints, games can be powerful learning tools.

At minimum, they readily encourage fans to fall on their face then pick themselves up and try again, promoting hands-on learning without the fear of ridicule or embarrassment.

Following are four ways that video games can actually help make you smarter. The next time some cretin demands you drop the controller, consider citing all as you strike a wounded pose and educate the poor Neanderthal.

Hands-on experience

More interactive and absorbing than passive forms of entertainment like movies and TV, video games promote higher levels of engagement because observers are actively and enthusiastically involved with on-screen activity.

It's a point author James Paul Gee emphasizes in "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy," which argues that digital diversions promote more substantive learning. As he once told UK newspaper The Guardian, "good video games ... are complex designed systems that players have to learn to engage with reflectively and strategically." Many children can pass biology and physics tests, he points out, but few can apply that knowledge to solve real-world problems.

Job training

Businesses and universities are increasingly turning to interactive simulations and virtual worlds as training tools to educate employees.

From Cisco to NASA, the U.S. Army to IBM, numerous corporations, government organizations and colleges have all employed interactive learning solutions.

Consider Loyalist College in Ontario, which offered students a simulation of U.S./Canada border crossings where they played the role of guards, and actually saw the rate of successful test scores jump from 56% to 95%. Or the Hilton Garden Inn, which built a custom 3-D hospitality training game for the PlayStation Portable, reasoning that it's more informative and reasonable for staffers to experiment by interacting with virtual customers.

Contextual learning

Video games may soon save lives as well.

According to Dr. Jeffrey Taekman, the director of Duke University's Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center, "serious games and virtual environments are the future of education."

Besides offering medical students the ability to practice on patients (which is much safer in the digital world), simulations offer health care providers several upsides. Chief among them, he says, are the abilities to make choices, see results and apply information immediately.

Beyond allowing for greater scalability and group collaboration than traditional classrooms, every decision made in a virtual world, he continues, can be tracked and benchmarked against best practices, then standardized or archived for others' review. "The traditional textbook will soon become passé," he suggests. "Gaming platforms will offer an interactive way for students to learn and apply information in context."

Teamwork and collaboration

Massively multiplayer games such as "World of Warcraft," "EVE Online" and "City of Heroes" may seem like idle fantasy and sci-fi escapes.

But many require active teamwork and high-level project management to do well. Collaborative elements often take the form of loose alliances disguised as in-game guilds, factions or virtual corporations where players join forces to complete objectives such as seizing territory or battling otherwise unstoppable opponents.

Requiring direct management and informed decision-making at multiple levels, group heads quickly learn to delegate responsibility, direct personnel and steer allies toward a common goal. Actively promoting teamwork between seemingly disparate individuals located states or entire countries apart, he says, all ironically offer preparation for a job in today's increasingly virtual workforce.

Full article at

Dear Reader

2011-03-03T06:28:00.001-05:00

Sorry about the one-for-Feb. If a blog falls in ther forest and no one reads it, does it still fall short?

An incredibly dynamic month that should have been parsed in these digital pages. Here's to nonposting becoming occasional sharing becoming a resource as promised.

Went to Gamification conference in SF and the swarm of excitement surrounding this nascent rallying post was terrific. 400 attendees trying to figure out an epicenter. In that I've been ringing this bell with other terminology and with aligned though fragmented game-based offerings for years made it both rewarding and a little scary. As this train chugs I'd like to engineer it, or at least conduct it, or at least ride it in a prominent berth.

The topic continued to make waves within the industry at the GDC last week. Read the LA Times for more. Met Amy Jo Kim in the articles at the Gamification conference...smart as a whip.

Mario Kart Long Division and Suicide Prevention

2011-03-03T06:14:00.001-05:00

This teacher is a one-stop game dynamo, using the Mario Kart game in a literacy & math context. She is tracking, and cobbling, a competency in games based learning educators.

A good resource page is at http://gbl.betterthanworksheets.com/ and her blog is worth a spin.

Meanwhile, a role-play training simulation entitled "At-Risk for High School Educators" has been listed for Suicide Prevention. In the simulation users assume the role of a high school teacher and engage in simulated role-play conversations with emotionally responsive student avatars exhibiting signs of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. The training has been adopted by several states including the Texas and New York to provide training to more than 70,000 high school educators. See the demo

"We need to teach our kids"

2011-02-03T16:51:00.001-05:00

In his State of the Union address President Obama placed the need for excellent education and superb teachers at the center of his speech to Congress and the nation.

Innovation and American welfare depend upon building human capital and that could only be accomplished by parents dedicated to the education of their children, and by creating excellent schools that housed and honored exceptional teachers. He noted: "In South Korea, teachers are known as 'nation builders.' Here in America, it's time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect."

Are President Obama's goals illusory, if worthy objectives?

The NAS report said: "Our public education system must attract at least 10,000 of our best college graduates to the teaching profession each year." But how is that goal attainable when teachers in the United States miss out on the three forms of rewards that draw individuals into occupations: prestige, income, and power to articulate and develop the curriculum?

Consider a few facts. The vast majority of women in the K-12 system continue to be white women. The average starting salary in the New York City public school system for a student just graduating from Columbia College who teaches Chemistry is about $45,000.

The simple fact is that the quality of the K-12 teachers today is not what it once was. It will take major incentives, and not only higher salaries, to enlist today's most talented women and men to consider careers as K-12 teachers. Maybe the truth is that as a society we don't really value or understand the consequences of good education systems.

Full Article

What Google Could Learn From Pixar

2011-01-29T11:48:00.000-05:00

Google has reached a pivotal moment in its history. What can it do to expand beyond its incredible core business, which is now reaching a more mature phase? For insight on how it can develop, let's look to Pixar.

Pixar is as close to a constant learning organization as there is, with a proven ability to reinvent and a genuine cultural humility. Google's founders could learn from Pixar's founder and president Ed Catmull's prolonged and determined efforts to counter the natural human reactions to success by aspiring to proactively (and honestly) seek-out and solve new problems constantly, recognizing that he doesn't have all the answers on his own.

Rubbernecking

2011-01-27T22:27:00.000-05:00

Embarrassing Bodies – almost four million people each week watch it – invites members of the public to discuss the lumps and bumps of their most intimate problems with a team of telegenic doctors.

It's far beyond anything that you would normally see outside the special-interest sections of the Internet.
When the new series begins on Friday, it promises to introduce us to a woman with two wombs and a man with "a protrusion he has kept hidden for 10 years". Tune in soon to find out where.

Clearly, gawping is why the show remains so popular. But what does it achieve?

Dr Ann Robinson, a GP in north London, warns about the dangers of the program becoming a form of "medical porn". Besides, she adds, the whole focus on embarrassment may be missing the point. "Often what stops young people is that they don't find medical services very accessible. To be honest, we have to worry about what's stopping them coming through the door, not what's stopping them dropping their trousers."

Millionth Sim Education License SOLD

2011-01-27T00:03:00.003-05:00

Dassault today announced that one million SolidWorks software licenses have been purchased by educational institutions.

Many millions of students at these institutions have fuelled their studies in science, technology, engineering, and math, and gone on to obtain rewarding careers in the design and engineering community.

Students start learning sooner, learn more over time, and graduate better prepared for their careers. They get all the capabilities a professional engineer needs – including uniquely integrated Simulation software to teach statics, dynamics, thermal problems, elasticity, and fluid-dynamics – in the most intuitive package available.

Many students combine their learning with competition like the Battlebots IQ competition.

“We think it’s important that students have easy access to these capabilities so they can bring the advantage of experience to their internships and entry-level positions.”

-- Marie Planchard, director of world education markets.

Thank you Dassault

irresistible ideas for play based learning

2011-01-26T23:48:00.002-05:00

Terrific site from Australia on Play based learning

They share irresistible ideas, and introduce realistic, simple, exciting ways to present creative and imaginative open ended play based learning experiences to children in the early learning years from pre-kindergarten to primary school.

They say:

* Play based learning is active learning, which is developmentally correct for every child.

* Play is the basis of all children’s learning.

* Each child’s play experience is unique.

* Learning should involve long uninterrupted periods of open-ended play.

* Learning experiences should be presented in an irresistible way.

* There is no right or wrong in children’s play … there is just play!

Something in here for everybody.

Game-Based Learning: Alex Games

2011-01-26T23:43:00.001-05:00

Alex Games Ph.D is an Assistant Professor of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University. He spoke about current research trends in game-based assessment to the Game-Based Learning group.
Games defined assessment as a process of deciding what claims we can make about student knowledge explaining that that is dependent upon one’s theoretical approach to learning. Understanding that we can decide what counts as evidence of knowledge and then what tasks or situations will elicit that evidence. He explained how game-like knowing is situated.

Fish Taco: Listen to Younger Workers

2011-01-11T00:04:00.002-05:00

Two west coast swings in next 30 days.

Gamification Summit in SF in 10 days. You wanna talk hype? Been years since I've seen this level of dander was flying. Start your engines here. More to report in the coming days.

Then, heading to San Diego to speak at the Training Conference in a few weeks. Besides eating fish tacos, hoping to share ideas on game-based learning with 1000 or so human capital developers. First in a series of ideas emanating from the Conference surrounds Boomer perspective on the the generational divide relating to Millennials and other generations in the workplace.

Are they really that different? A TLNT.com article covers how they're as not visitors from Mars.

This Millennial generation has been examined, poked, and probed every way possible. But Boomers, were viewed a whole lot worse. From parents to institutions, we were seen basically the same way that now pontificating about Generations X and Y.

These new generations has given us tools that have changed the course of humanity. Blogs, Twitter, YouTube,are all results of a generation following through on its dreams.

The reality is that Boomers have much to learn from their younger workers. This is a generation that has been defined as willing to collaborate and a focus on teamwork. Games have helped with this orientation. Who needs the boss when the PC serves up every answer? For more see Ron Thomas

Maintaining “personal brand” while employed

2011-01-06T22:04:00.002-05:00

A recent Smashing Magazine article explains that the cornerstone of a personal brand is the quality of professional contributions. Companies and colleagues that don’t fully grasp the power of social media to benefit them may view an employee who devotes time to it as a “show horse,” not a “work horse.”

The key, is to “make your employer the star.” Be clear to disclose your employer on all media you present. Help make your company a thought leader by its association with you.

Of course you want to have the right employer. As your personal brand has been developing and growing, has your employer been supportive? Is there a broad corporate understanding of the benefits you can bring through promoting your thought leadership externally? If the answer is ‘No’ then it may be time to evaluate new opportunities.

Career in Talent Management

2011-01-04T21:43:00.001-05:00

Dr John Sullivan used the following criteria to select companies that anyone interested in a career in talent talent management might want to join:

Firm included in the current BusinessWeek or Fortune rankings as a top place to work.
Firm has won awards or been written up for excellence in talent management.
Firm has been a “launching pad” for talent management leaders who now serve in a leadership role at other major firms.
Firm has continued to grow and hire, in spite of economic turmoil.

Bold Innovators in Talent Management

Google — it takes a bold and nontraditional approach to every aspect of talent management. There is no talent management function that is more data-driven or that has built a stronger employer brand. Microsoft — this firm has come into its own as a powerhouse in innovation regarding talent management. Its approach to managing contingent labor is literally the best in the world.
Zappos — if you desire a culture that produces amazing business results but typifies “crazy” more than any other firm, Zappos should be your choice.
Apple — no firm has been more successful at innovation and product brand building across different industries. Apple would be at the top of this talent management list except that its executives are known for downplaying the importance of talent management and HR.
Sodexo — it is a talent management innovator in an industry that is not known for pushing the envelope. It has bold talent management leadership and leads the way in so many best practices that it’s hard to call it out for anything in particular, but worth paying attention to are its metrics, diversity, and military recruiting initiatives.
DaVita — being an innovator in talent management within the medical industry is unfortunately quite unusual. Nevertheless, this function has leaders who can only be labeled as both innovative and aggressive. They lead the way in aggressive recruiting, business-like metrics and building manager satisfaction with the talent management process.
Facebook — it might be the next Google because it has successfully poached top talent away from Google. It is building a reputation and a strong employer brand. Everyone working at Facebook knows that they are literally changing the world and their talent management leaders are no longer satisfied being second to Google.
Starbucks — if you want to learn how to manage in an environment of extremely rapid global growth, this is the place for you. Its growth rate requires the talent management function to continually reinvent itself, which means endless opportunities to learn. Starbucks has also built an incredibly strong product and employer brand.
Wegmans Food Markets — It is amazing that despite being a “regional grocery chain,” the firm was named a Best Company to Work for in America. This firm excels in all aspects of management, including employee engagement, employee retention, hourly employee development, and customer service.
Infosys — you might find it unusual for a firm headquartered in India to make this list, but its talent management practices are award-winning. The firm is so attractive that it routinely recruits American college students into its ranks. .

Foundation Firms in Talent Management

These firms have built talent management functions that have proven over the long term to be the best training ground for future talent management leaders. It is the fact that many of these foundation firms have literally populated the leadership ranks of other major firms with their alumni.

PepsiCo — this firm has developed more successful talent management leaders than any in our profession. Its business-like approach to talent management is often copied. The firm also excels in global talent management, diversity, and leadership development.
Johnson & Johnson — this firm also has a well-earned reputation for developing talent management leaders that assume leadership roles at other major firms. Instead of innovation, it is known for superior execution and a truly global approach.
Southwest Airlines — this firm was innovative in all aspects of talent management long before “the war for talent” began. Its innovative hiring, teambuilding, and employee engagement practices are still widely copied.
GE — it’s not an exaggeration to say that no firm does traditional leadership development better than GE. In talent management it also excels at internal movement, differentiated incentives, globalized practices, and releasing deadwood.
IBM — even though it is a foundation firm, it continues to lead the pack in managing remote work and globalized talent management. Its internal redeployment process and their leadership development are also among the best in the world.

Social Media And Your Personal Brand

2011-01-03T13:55:00.003-05:00

Social media is all about personal branding. Grow your personal brand, with respect and proper attribution to your company as an ambassador, and the company benefits through the greater exposure of a positive voice out to the market it serves.

Many market-facing professionals still resist the call to participate in social media and to be brand ambassadors. Companies are a collection of individuals with all the diversity that is inherent in its employees. A company brand is directly impacted by the voice of its employees, along with customers, partners and the larger community and ecosystem in which it participates. Social media conversations build my personal brand -- and build the company brand.

Brian Solis predicts that in 2010, Social Media will rapidly escalate from novelty or perceived necessity to an integrated and strategic business communications, service, and information community and ecosystem. Our experiences and education will foster growth and propel us through each stage of the Social Media Marketing evolution.

So what are you waiting for? Here are a few basic tips to get you started advancing your personal brand and social media presence.

Persistence may be the single most effective technique for growing your personal brand.
Find your voice. Who are you online? What is your social persona? I
Use your manners and common sense. Be nice and say thank you. (...Brian and B2B...thank you)

Welcome to my new BLOG

2011-01-02T22:56:00.000-05:00

2011 -- and a commitment to musings, liftings and regifting. A stake in the ground delivering a combination of theory, practice and news you can use. I'll put in the time....let's see if you all let me know whether it is worth it. Welcome.

Influx was a chance to share ideas. Making Games and Making My Way.

I believe that gaming may well become the predominant art form of the 21st century, as film was of the 20th, as the novel was of the 19th. Players navigate the possibilities by their choices and actions, invited to create and interact with elaborately simulated worlds and story lines. Every player's path is unique. Games enable people to create their own world through play. The gamers' mindset -- that they learn in a totally new way -- is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

Games may be the mirror of what is to be -- a rewarding engaging, emotionally connected simulated life, which blurs the line between what we today consider the flesh-and-blood baseline for what is real and what our children may.

The line is blurred by the actual automation of flesh and blood, where human-worthy robots are a part of life. The line is blurred by our interface with the machine. In the future the Wii (with controller) and the new Xbox Kinect (without controller) may be seen as the antecedents of the man machine meld as these technologies add truer emotional and neural connection to actually simulate life. Kurzweil's vision is for the exponential increase in the rate of innovation of computer technology reaching an inevitable tipping point that allow us to transcend the limitations of our biological bodies and brains and fully map and ‘upload’ our infinitely complex chemical computers – our human brains – to machines.

A direct interface between humans and machines. He calls this the Singularity. Kurzweil’s recommendation -- that we all take very good care of ourselves, to survive our mortal trappings till that day -- so we can participate and ‘live forever’.

It’s unfathomable. It’s magic. But if Kurzweil is right, it will probably be game environments featuring emotionally-connective artificially-intelligent avatars, dynamically attuned to datapoints that are maximized by assessment-driven best practices in human behavior gleaned from social networks that will make that life worth living.