Stroke my joystick

Doctors are now finding creating ways to use gamification to help therapy patients recover. This particular implementation demonstrates how one doctor was able to develop a game to encourage stroke patients to regain strength that they had lost on one side of their body.

Check out second 20 that displays the recent stroke patient playing the innovative game to gain back his strength.

Doctors are catching on to this trend and developing games for all types of patients, from cancer, diabetes, asthma, depression, autism, and Parkinson’s disease. In each case the game is seen as a motivator to encourage and engage the patient in their recovery activities.

This movement by the health industry towards gamification seems intuitive: to encourage patients to repeat daily activities create incentives through games. Therefore, there is no doubt that we will see more implementation of gamification in the health industry in the near future. So why not implement the best form of gamification that will produce the best results for patients?

The health industry should team up with game-developers, to create gamification solutions that are dynamic and sustainable. The current gamification solutions encourage, but fail to vary and become monotonous after very little time. Allow game-developers to create dynamic solutions that continually entice patients with new challenges and new goals for sustainable therapy.  

Game Quiz: What percentage of gamification applications currently fail?
a. 20  b. 40  c. 60 d. 80
answer to last posts quiz. c. 50. Over 50 percent of innovative processes will be gamified by 2015. That's a huge percentage and it's important that gamification processes are implemented with gamification expertise to guarantee their success.

I'm addicted to Coke!

Coca-Cola is using gamification to inspire recycling in Bangladesh. We admire Cokes efforts but there is much to be improved. Bangladesh has a little bit of a pollution problem and Coke is supporting the effort to alleviate the problem. Check out the video that demonstrates how coke is using gamification to inspire a good cause and produce results.

Cokes shows how to successfully implement gamification to support a good cause. Coke uses the videogame machine which encourages participation that produces positive results.

We understand that coke has other motives than to reduce pollution in Bangladesh, namely PR and marketing. Nonetheless, they have promoted a simple gamification implementation that produces results.

Our real concern with the gamification implementation by Coke is that it is impulsive and not sustainable. Real gamification implementation needs to encourage repeat involvement. 80% of gamification implementation fails because there is no incentive for repeat participation. To be truly successful Coke needs to set a goal that all participants can work in cohesion to strive to achieve. 


Pop Quiz: According to the Gartner report what percentage of innovative processes will be gamified by 2015?
a. 20%   b. 35%    C. 50%   d. 70%
check out the next blog for the answer.

Founder of Gamification proved wrong!

Rajat Paharia, founder of Bunchball and leader in gamification, recently published in the Huffington Post his thoughts and definition of gamification, defining gamification as motivating people through data.

We would like to challenge his definition.

First off, a game by definition is characterized by a set of rules and competition or strife towards specific, discrete outcomes or goals by human participants.  Paharia's definition fails to encapsulate the concrete definition of the root for gamification.  It's true that the end goal of gamification is to motivate employees, but perhaps not by setting a definition for gamification that discards the true essence of competition, goals and human participants.

Furthermore, Paharia argues that gamification engines capture big data generated from online experiences to motivate better results. However, this definition wrongfully disjoins motivation from human behavior and synonymies' it to production.  Motivation is a human behavior and they can no be separated.

We defend that Gamification is any type of goal-oriented competition designed to motivate employees by encouraging engagement.

This singular definition encapsulates the essence, purpose and true design of gamification.

Here is a perfect example of applying gamification that encourages engagement and motivates healthy habits through a goal-oriented process that niether incorporates big data nor online experiences.

I'm going down, I'm yelling Tinder!

You know what tinder is. You've flipped through the scores of photos of equally curious single patrons in your area. As a male participant you've probably just swiped right on an average 95%. As a female, you've probably been a bit more cautious. But we've all swiped through the photos.

And just in case you've been living in a cave for the last year and are just resurfacing now. Here is a hiliarious video breaking down tinder to its true core.

Tinders' world wide popularity has been credited to it's user-friendliness and exploitation of jaded human behavior. Two aspects of Tinder that are undoubtedly true. But the real success of Tinder is it's gamification of a dating-site. Being able to swipe left or right and finding matches from those swipes. Other sites before Tinder tried to as depthless as Tinder but never found success. It was the creation of the swipe of profiles that really led to Tinders' success and hilarious youtube videos in it's honor.

Pick n Play!

We can say that, in general:

We are curious about new things
Even more curious when they are hard to figure out at first
We don't like being told what to do

Video games succeed because they are intriguing and have few instructions. 

Making our way through increasingly hard levels is very rewarding. 

We like to play your way through.
We like to challenge ourselves...

Check how McDonald's increased user engagement with a rewarding billboard game! 

Giddeyup your workplace!!

Current productivity levels at work are at an all-time low. A recent  Gallup poll   reported That 71 percent of the U.S. work force feel disengaged at work.

Technology is affecting the way we function in society. With the internet always a click-away, we have constant access to an infinity of information. This plethora of information has caused changes in both negative and positive ways. As a result people  have more visual acuity and can process information faster. However, these bursts of information also cause addictive behavior, and consumers become bored much more easily. 

The change in societal behavior, however, has not resulted in a change in work functionality. This change has propagated the rise of the disengaged worker. 

We need to adapt our work environments  to correlate with the more stimuli-imbued employee. The most effective way to engage this neo-employee is through gamification. We have seen how it can be used in marketing, exercise, and reconstitute mundane tasks. And we will continue to provide models to implement gamification at your work. 

Old models to Increase productivity through compensation are out-dated and have never had validity.

Check out this video debunking these old models of motivation

March Madness

Over 60 million people fill out a NCAA tournament bracket each year. Everyone fills out the brackets from The most ardent fans to the ones Who Have never heard of a guy named Krzyzewski. 

We love the stories Cinderellas. The mid-majors. The buzzer beaters and the hectic first weekend.

But I bet you Did not realize the NCAA bracket is the ultimate form of gamification in marketing.

Check out this article in Forbes magazine about the power of gamification and it's Ability to Influence consumers. 

Gamification Madness

Beer Me That Timesheet

Motivating employees is one of the key tasks for any manager.

In the article One More Time How Do You Motivate Employees by Frank Herzberg, in describing how to motivate employees, Frank claims, "Forget praise. Forget punishment. Forget cash.  You need to make their jobs more interesting."

This is where gamifaction can step-in to help out. A manager can try his best to make a job more interesting for his employee, yet there are some tasks out there That are implicitly boring. One such task common to Most offices work, timesheets.

Well, check out this video how one manager was able to use gamification, to make even the mundane task Most seem interesting.

Don't Work out, Game out!

One of our main goals for our blog is for readers to understand how they can bring gamification into their field or business. 

One of the easiest segues for gamification was into the fitness industry. We have seen the application of gamification in treadmills and stationery bikes. With new adaptive screens that allow you to race other virtual runners, or chase down dragons. 

Creating a fun and competitive environment, these interactive machines are designed to increase the riding-time, giving riders a better overall workout. 

The objective for any fitness organization, whether a gym or a equipment designer is to show a competitive advantage in bringing results to their clients. Gamification is one way companies have found that advantage to outsell their competitors in the fitness industry.

W'd like to share a video that takes gamification in the fitness industry one step further.

 

The Game is on!

Welcome to our Gamification Blog!

We are very excited to present you our latest findings on Gamification. They will blow your mind!

Before we share with you one of our favorite video related to the subject, let us give you a bit of background on what  Gamification really is :

Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems. (Source: Wikipedia)

Gamification can be applied to many different business aspects with a focus on Improving: user engagement, physical exercise, data quality, timeliness and learning efficiency.

We will update our blog with fun videos that preview the great potential in different applications of Gamification.

The first one is  about increasing invest Increase user engagement with a brand.

Enjoy the video!