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This week in European events

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:30:35 +0000

The big noise this week is The Next Web conference in Amsterdam. It’s the conference that spawned a blogging empire, you know. But there’s plenty of other stuff going on across the continent, whether you want to know about HTML5 in Barcelona or feel like putting yourself forward for IGNITE Berlin, which is taking place next month.

Got any events coming up? Leave details in the comments or email them to bobbie@gigaom.com

The Next Web, Amsterdam, April 26-27
Speakers include YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia, and controversial gamification expert Gabe Zichermann.

Deutsche Gamestage, Berlin, April 24-28
This five day event focused on the games industry incorporates a developer conference and awards ceremony that make it the German equivalent of GDC.

Data Science Global Hackathon, worldwide, April 28-29
Timed to coincide with Big Data Week, this series of global hackathons is organized by Data Science London, takes place at local events in places like Helsinki, and offers hackers a chance to compete against other teams around the planet: participants will be presented with a serious data set and asked to do something exciting with it. More here.

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Gamification: more than fun and games, it’s about engagement

Ryan Kim — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:23:48 +0000

Gamifications can have a bad rap, admits Gabe Zichermann, CEO of Gamification.Co. He said people think it means turning everything into Angry Birds.

But he said companies are increasingly turning to gamification to accomplish a number of real world goals and they’re not simply turning everything into a game. They’re realizing that gamification, or the use of key game concepts to engage users and solve problems, can be a powerful way to create happiness and innovation and spur on results and education among its workforce, said Zichermann at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference.

The key, he said, is that our brains are wired to want to go through a process of desire to mastery. That process, which includes incentives, challenges, achievements and feedback, looks a lot like videos games, following a similar path. By tying into those mechanics, companies are able to tap into the higher desires of people, who often see work through the lens of self actualization and esteem. When companies employ game techniques and provides broad metrics tied to social interactions, it can motivate people in very significant ways, he said.

Zichermann said it can be simple like a checkout game for Target cashiers, who get audible feedback noting how their product scans are going. It takes a mundane and job and makes it a little more fun and gives workers a little more sense of control or agency in their lives, Zichermann said.

Other companies are looking to leverage feedback and use it to encourage people. Apps such as Rypple and DueProp are being used by companies to prompt more immediate feedback among employees, so workers can recognize each other in real time for the work they’re doing. Car companies are using feedback in their hybrid cars to encourage users to drive in a more eco-friendly way, showing them the results of their driving habits on screen through representations like a growing tree.

Zichermann said teamplay can also have a strong effect. He noted the experience of NextJump, an employee rewards provider, which now has more than 80 percent of its employees working out because of a new gamified health system that splits the workforce into teams and doles out cash to the teams that work out the most.

Zichermann said that it’s still hard to create the change that companies want to see internally but they’re increasingly seeing game mechanics as a way to accomplish their goals. He said a Gartner study found that 70 percent of the Global 2000 expect to use gamification by 2015 and 50 percent expect innovation to come from game processes.

“In order to get us to collectively create the major change we’re looking for, we need to design things in ways that are motivating and meaningful for people individually. Gamification gives you a toolkit to accomplish that,” Zichermann said.

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Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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Gamification goes to war in a bitter battle of ideas

Bobbie Johnson — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:16:07 +0000

The rise of gamification — adding competitive or game elements to products — has become an increasing point of contention over the past year, with two camps battling it out for ownership of the term. One side argues that it’s a way of providing cheap and effective psychological marketing, while the other feels that it has become a bandwagon full of people who ignore the reality of gameplay in favor of simply adding points, badges and leaderboards.

Now it seems that a spat between two leading figures has left the movement facing a divisive split.

The controversy centers on a new book by Gabe Zichermann of GamificationU.com, a self-professed “gamification thought leader” and chairman of a New York conference called the Gamification Summit. Co-authored by Christopher Cunningham, Gamification by Design was launched last week by popular technology publisher O’Reilly.

At the time, Sebastian Deterding, a designer and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hamburg who is studying game design and behavior, posted a long and detailed rebuttal on the Gamification Research Network outlining what he believes is wrong with Zichermann’s book. Specifically, Deterding claims the book misunderstands a number of pieces of crucial terminology, makes statements that fly in the face of established research, and generally encourages the use of gamification as a cheap marketing gimmick.

The original piece — which, at more than 8,000 words, suggests that the author is clearly angry at what he feels is Zichermann’s misrepresentation of a growing industry — also accused the book of lifting liberally from the work of another researcher, Amy Jo Kim.

In the end, Deterding summed it up in no uncertain terms:

A hundred-or-so pages of other peoples’ ideas hastily copied together, incoherent, often contradictory, and riddled with errors . . . lacking due credit to an extent that borders on plagiarism; mixed with claims that are boasting, unfounded, false, even positively dangerous . . . misunderstanding games and their appeal; promoting a flawed and unsustainable “loyalty-for-cheap” philosophy; artificially pumped up with a long advert . . . and littered with further ego-adverts to go and visit GamificationU.com

The criticisms clearly cut deep, prompting publisher Tim O’Reilly to say on Google+ that he was “puzzled” and planned to examine the claims more closely.

“The issues Sebastian raises are serious enough that I thought I’d try to get more input on the book from those with more expertise on the subject than I have,” he said. “But if the critiques of the book made here are accurate, I’d love to see our team work hard to make it better in future editions.”

That response seemed to have quelled some of the fires, and the affair looked to have died down a little — until yesterday, when Zichermann responded by firing back.

In a response titled “A teachable moment,” Zichermann said that Deterding’s post was a “deliberately libelous” piece of work from “a vocal critic of the Gamification industry.”

On the claims of copying, Zichermann said he had built upon prior art, not plagiarized, in order to “remix, refine and filter a wide range of concepts to distill those that are most relevant” to his audience of marketers and strategists. And then he slammed his critics for being academics engaged in theory, rather than practitioners:

It is spectacularly naive to suggest that research – by mere virtue of its publication – is somehow “the one truth”. Almost every piece of work in social science and psychology has significant methodological problems, and opinions about what works (and why) go in and out of fashion as quickly in academia as they do on the runways.

But Gamification by Design is a practical book for practical purposes, focused not on games at all, but Gamification as a unique, emerging and hybridized discipline. Whether or not academics believe the techniques in the book work, they are based on my experience with dozens of clients, interviews with hundreds of practitioners, and extensive review of the literature and case studies.

This appears to have stirred things up again: Just read the comments.

It’s not clear what will happen next: Despite calling Deterding’s comments libelous, Zichermann does not seem to be suggesting that he will take legal action.

So is this just a tempest in a teapot? Two rivals in an industry going head-to-head is certainly not unusual, and audiences love a good catfight, whether it’s in an area like gamification or between the employees of a blog like TechCrunch. Does this actually mean anything in the larger scheme of things?

The future of play in products is important

I think it means something, because I think gamification is an important topic right now. And it’s no wonder: Games have been one of the most incredible boom industries of the past 30 years, and everybody realizes that making products that reward and delight people can be incredibly powerful. Who wouldn’t want that?

But just as the appropriate use of a playful voice has mutated into the ill-conceived marketing trope of hypercasual language (which I wrote about last week), I think it is fairly clear that we are watching an explosion of applications that misunderstand what being “gamelike” actually means.

Where research shows that real people get a deep and abiding enjoyment from solving puzzles, meeting challenges and achieving self-improvement, the dominant applications of gamification are the most facile: offers of virtual currency, shiny digital badges or a higher position on leaderboards. This concern — that correlation does not equal causation — is at the heart of Deterding’s criticism, and I do not think it is unfounded.

In some respects, this always happens. In his Google+ post, Tim O’Reilly makes a good point, that it is inevitable that those whose work is built upon end up feeling that their ideas are diluted or perverted. To illustrate, he picked his own experience as the man who popularized the term “Web 2.0″ and then saw it change into something different, something more crude:

Yes, I was disappointed to have the term I intended for one meaning be hijacked by marketers to mean something far more shallow, far less interesting. But in the end, I came to accept that it was all part of the hype cycle, and that as Tevye said in Fiddler on the Roof, “Good news will stay, and bad news will refuse to leave.” It’s always a mixture of good and bad.

It’s a fair point. Originators of ideas have little ownership of them, and now that gamification is now firmly on Gartner’s Hype Cycle, any misunderstandings or movements are only likely to get cruder.

It seems to me, however, that there is a difference between understanding that such a shift is always likely to happen, and embracing or endorsing it. Goodness knows I am not suggesting that we leave ivory-towered academics to lead the discussion: Indeed, as a journalist, I am probably considered a bastardizer of almost every idea I lay my hands on.

But I think that when we subscribe to ideas, when we spread them, we make a choice in how we do that. We can act in good faith, we can read the literature, we can try and understand why something happens. Or we can remodel the world to fit an easy, commercially viable message.

Tim has previously argued that we should work on stuff that matters — in his words, that you should “create more value than you capture.” And that, ultimately, is what I think Deterding was arguing, too: that the practice and research shows that gamification can be useful, but that it is about more than just trinkets and psychological manipulation.

Yes, marketers are abusing the principles of game design to try to make crappy products cheap, addictive and, ultimately, more profitable. It’s a growing industry. But it’s fast food for the soul, and we don’t have to revel in it.

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