Skip to main content

Gamification by Design

Gamification by Design co-authored by Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham is the first book I have read on the subject. Until now, the most entertaining thing I had read about gamification was an article by Ian Bogost.
Zichermann and Cunningham do a great job of introducing the reader to gamification. The clarification on what it is not comes in the Introduction - it will not help move bad or poor products. They use the metaphor of cake and icing to describe what gamification can and cannot do for you. A great icing job will entice someone to bite into the cake but it will not make them bite twice if the cake is not up to par. Gamification is icing on the cake.
The authors cite examples of success and failure with gamification through out the book to illustrate specific concepts. Each of them offer fascinating insights into human motivation. In the context of gaming in education, they argue putting education ahead of fun makes it less effective and actually impedes the process of learning. As a parent, I can attest to this. I have yet to come across a piece of edutainment software that was a big hit with my child in the way games like Angry Birds or Temple Run have been. As the authors say "Kids could smell the shift from fun to work a mile away".  That is certainly true in my experience.
If you want to learn how to think about introducing gamification into web and mobile applications, this book is for you. This is not a game development cook book but there are a few tutorials to get you started. A technology background would make this book easier to read but is by no means essential.
My only quibble with the book would be the examples selected in the chapter Gamification Case Studies.It would be nice to see more offbeat examples of gamification in action - where  companies have utilized gamification very subtly and been highly successful. The Yahoo or Quora models don't translate widely. Foursquare is a great gamification example but is in a niche where it works well. I was not able to see how any of that may translate to an insurance or brokerage firm for instance - businesses that are not the most "natural" fit for gamification. Even so, I am very glad to have learned how to think gamification and would highly recommend this book.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...