1. Understanding Gamification:
From Commercial to Social
Bala Iyer
February 2012
@balaiyer
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2. Trends
• Gamification, social layer and virtual currency
are buzzing.
2

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

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

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

9. Not New
• We’ve had this for a long time:
– Frequent Flyer Miles
– Frequent Shopper Cards
• We’ve been engaging in it recently without
calling it Gamification
– Foursquare and “Check Ins”
– Wii Fit
– Progress Bars in Social Media Profiles
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10. Categories of gamification
• Consumer Engagement (using game mechanics to
draw consumer attention and sell more goods
and services)
• Employee Incentives (using game mechanics for
more employee productivity or for employee
training, etc.)
• Collaborative work (to encourage teams to
discover solutions)
• Social Change (using game mechanics to
enact social change).
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11. Examples Source: Link
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12. Why pay attention?
• There are more than a half a billion people
worldwide who play online games at least an
hour a day. Gaming is productive. It produces
positive emotion, stronger social relationships, a
sense of accomplishment, and for players who
are a part of a game community, a chance to
build a sense of purpose. I'm interested in
bringing this mindset to our real lives and efforts
to tackle the world's most urgent problems, from
curing cancer to slowing climate change.
— Game designer Jane McGonigal,
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13. Generation G, Primed for games
• Currently more than half a billion people worldwide playing
online games at least an hour a day -- and 183 million in the
US alone.
• More than 230 million active users play Zynga’s games
• 97% of boys under 18 and 94% of girls under 18 report
playing videogames regularly.
• The average young person racks up 10,000 hours of gaming
by the age of 21. That's almost exactly as much time as they
spend in a classroom during all of middle school and high
school.
• 5 million gamers in the U.S are spending more than 40
hours a week playing games -- the same as a full time job!
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14. Moral hazard problem
• If you reward people for doing something they
are not interested in, you de-motivate them in
the long run
• It's like giving kids a dollar for doing math
problems. They will do the math problems
because they like the money, but will become
conditioned to do it only for the money
-- Michael Wu, Researcher online behavior for
Lithium Technologies
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15. Market
• Gamification market, currently estimated at around $100
million, will grow to more than $2.8 billion by 2016.
• The enterprise represents the largest vertical segment of the
gamification market, accounting for nearly a quarter of the
market.
• Top Gamification vendors are projecting 197% growth in
2012, up from 155% in 2011.
• Gamification vendors report that 47% of client implementations
are for user engagement, with brand loyalty accounting for 22%
and brand awareness 15%.
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Source M2 Research

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

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

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

20. Examples of Game Mechanics
• Points
• Badges
• Leaderboards
• Levels
• Challenges
• Virtual Goods
• Gifts
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21. Human desires
• Rewards
• Status
• Achievement
• Self expression
• Competition
• Altruism
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22. Motivation
• Extrinsic
– Points
– Leaderboards
– scores
• Intrinsic
– Challenge
– Learning
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23. Motivation Triggers
• Personal
– You came back to this site 7 days in a row
• Within network
– You wrote more reviews than your friend
• Across networks
– You are the first to kill all enemies
Source: Badgeville White Paper
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24. Behavior
• Uploading content
• Viewing a page
• Sharing an item
• Leaving comments
• Writing reviews
• Return visits to a site
• Watching videos
• Buying a product
• Adding an item to your shopping cart, or
• Any other behavior trackable with a click or mouse-
over
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25. Source: Bunchball
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26. Gamification Advantages
• Accelerated feedback cycles.
• Clear goals and rules of play.
• A compelling narrative.
• Tasks that are challenging but achievable.
Source: Catherine Aurelio 26

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

33. Source: Wired Magazine, 2008
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34. 34

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

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

41. 41

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

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