And Phil, creating a gamification platform is nothing like creating a game. You’re not in a hit-driven business selling to consumers.

Right, I get that. I tried to address that in another post I just made, but just to be clear, I completely understand the difference between the content and the platform play. I’m just not sure the biggest opportunity in gamification is in the platform (love to be proven wrong here).

It’s a standard enterprise technology/sales model. Nobody buys SAP, Oracle, etc. and just uses it out of the box. You customize it and pay for services on top of it, to make it meet your specific needs and to fit your context.

Right, but when was the last time an enterprise/sales model promised to deliver “fun” and “addiction”? That’s not why I’d talk to Oracle. Even tools like Photoshop and Unity 3D don’t promise “fun”, at best they promise to get out of the way of the creative process. Maybe I’m wanting too much from gamification, and what we’re really talking about is engagement. In my mind, game mechanics are about much more than engagement. One doesn’t play football for engagement. One plays football for the passion, the adrenaline, physical catharsis of simulated war. Fantasy leagues are a better analogy, but even they wouldn’t get traction if they weren’t wrapped around a super-compelling actual game (fantasy noble prize winners anyone?).

1) Utilises Social Currency – For competitive behavior to take hold you need to show what your peers are doing. 99% of loyalty programmes today don’t do this. They are very insular – one to one between brand and member.

In games, PvP or zero-sum mechanics are only attractive to a relatively small audience. Global leaderboards usually just discourage starting players, gainer leaderboards bias towards new players, or players who haven’t hit the high-level diminishing returns. Friends leaderboards are more “fun”, but also a crapshoot in terms of how competive you can be. The best ranking systems are those that pit you against users with similar skill and similar play pattern (the new StarCraft II rankings are good example), but these won’t usually be your “peers” and gamification implementations seem to be more appropriate and motivating when you know the people you’re competing against (I could care less to compete in FFP against Randall Pierce from Boise)

Point is… is peer competition a big enough market? Especially in situations where different users have drastically different parameters?

1) Utilises Social Currency – For competitive behavior to take hold you need to show what your peers are doing. 99% of loyalty programmes today don’t do this. They are very insular – one to one between brand and member.

I think gamification pundits overestimate the mass-market appeal of competitive game mechanics. Like I said, competitive games, especially large-scale competitive games are niche products. The vast majority of mass-market games are single player (challenge scales to the skill of the user) or multiplayer co-op (MMOGs).

Competitive ranked, leaderboard-style mechanics are hardcore. It’s not an easy thing to make these fun or accessible by any stretch. If anything, it’s one of the “difficult” challenges in gaming, although it’s a necessary evil when dealing with PvP game mechanics. To apply these mechanics to real-life challenges is both simple/obvious, and perhaps the least appealing, hardest-to-make fun mechanic.

I haven’t heard any talk (so far) about co-op gamification mechanics. Probably because these are much harder to “bolt on”… they require deep understanding of the social interactions within the system, and possibly modifying the target enterprise to increase cooperative and social behavior. Co-op FFP? Sounds like a ton of fun actually, but you’d have to do a lot of work to make it happen, and probably change the airline’s business model.

3) Recognize the interaction – Loyalty is directly linked to the purchase transaction as this typically funds the points. Gaming requires more interaction – check-ins, reviews, likes – whatever. These need to be encouraged, recognized and reward. Gaming mechanics help to do this and this in turn creates more frequent brand interactions = increased brand engagement.

This is the kind of talk that gets me riled up. Yes, the quoted text is valid, and it’s a good thing to keep in mind. No, it has almost nothing to do with games. Calling “more interaction” “gameplay” or a “game mechanic” is where I call b*sh$%t (I’m smiling when I say that). Seriously, doesn’t that sound like trying to ride the buzzword train? Do we really believe that providing immediate feedback to the customer is a “game mechanic”?

You know what’s funny, is often games will have some feature inside the in-game store, where the more items the player buys, the more loyalty points they get, which in turn gets the player a discount, or better prices, etc. Last game I saw this in was Paper Mario… Even Nintendo is jumping on the gamification bandwagon!

Anyway, I’m glad you posted, because this gets to the meat of what was digging at me during the panel, and I greatly appreciate going to the “source” to discuss the topic. You know I’m 90% sure I’m wrong anyway, which of course is just me covering my ass, but it’s also kind of true.

Just because they’re not new, doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.
And just because they’re not new to you, doesn’t mean they’re not new to anyone else.

Yeah, I’m not gonna argue this one. Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun, and a new implementation, or new way of looking at things as you say, is a huge part of what new models are all about. I think the thing that got to me was that in a lot of cases, folks were literally building businesses on the same principles before “gamification” caught fire, and it seems that now these plays are suddenly validated only from the attention that social games have been getting this past year. There’s nothing actually wrong with that, it just bugs me because a) we’re not done “gamifiying” social games, which has been our mission at Gravity Bear from the get-go, and b) because it kind of disses all the hard work that innovative incentive marketers have been doing up until now and c) games (content not platforms) used to be the kiss of death for VCs, and now they’ve found an (apparently) sanitized, platformable model that takes the game mechanics, and safely implements them in the “real world” of curing cancer and balancing your budget. Sour grapes in other words

Their core content needs to be their unique & defensible strategy, game mechanics just help make the experience more compelling, while enabling businesses to guide and drive high value behavior. Does it matter if it’s unique and defensible if it enables them to make more money? No.

Right, that’s completely true. So, let me ask you this, what’s the actual opportunity for a gamification platform or toolset? Tim asked that in the panel, and while I understand that there wasn’t time to go into specifics, the gist I got was stuff like ranking, peer competition, points/achievement, immediate feedback, etc. I would assume some sort of transportable user profile would be important for a platform play, so users can “advance” across different implementations. I kind of get the appeal of that, but is that the kind of thing that’s really going to go the distance?

Actually, before I go too deep into this, I should do more research on your product and take you up on the demo offer before I rant about the platform stuff to hard. Ping me and we can set something up (LinkedIn, or Tim has my email). Put it this way… I’m skeptical that there is a HUGE opportunity for a gamification platform, but like I’ll keep saying, I could be wrong.

Another way of phrasing this, is the platform opportunity like Flash, or is it like the offer walls?

Here’s a specific thing that came up in the panel. At one point, after several comments about “bolting on” points and leaderboards, someone said that the task of gamification was delicate business (maybe Amy Jo Kim?), that it wasn’t a bolt-on solution, and that the true value will come from the innovative and appropriate implementation from smart gamification designers. In other words… good gamification is as hard as making good games! It seemed like for a moment there was general consensus and nodding that good gamification was basically a content play. Or as game developers hate to hear, “a hits driven business”.

So what’s your take on that? I’m guessing that it’s provide the enabling platform?

3) “Fancy-pants name”: Whatever you may think about the word, I’m glad that there’s a name for this that is sticking.

I can get that, esp given the history and examples you cited. Again, part of me is saying “what’s wrong with gamifying games? Why give up the ship there just because Facebook took away all the free money?”. But my love is big, and games are fun, so if it works, it works. Besides, that gripe is a much larger topic that shouldn’t directly impact talking about game mechanics outside of games.

I’m sure lots of my frustration is sour grapes (seriously, lets gamify social games). I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about the gamification topic since VGS, and my thinking is evolving as I knew it would. I’ll post more about my musings when I’ve got proper time, but in the meantime thanks for taking the time to post here and lend depth to the conversation. I sincerely appreciate it.

Oh, one more thing Rajat… you made the comment that if your “status” towards a health goal was made public to your family (say “lose weight” for example), that it would be incredibly motivating for you. Do you mean that? From anecdotal observation, it seems like that kind of “accountability” doesn’t usually work that well. How do you (as a platform) provide tools so that kind of transparency doesn’t turn into nagging, and hence run counter to its intended purpose?

Best,
Phil

And Phil, creating a gamification platform is nothing like creating a game. You’re not in a hit-driven business selling to consumers. You’re selling a technology platform that businesses can customize and build on. It’s a standard enterprise technology/sales model. Nobody buys SAP, Oracle, etc. and just uses it out of the box. You customize it and pay for services on top of it, to make it meet your specific needs and to fit your context. If I remember right, most enterprise companies derive 60% of revenues from product, and 40% from services.

- rajat
Founder, Chief Product Officer
http://www.bunchball.com

The reason why this is offensive is because it completely discredits games as an art form or intellectual challenge for the designers and the players. Games are not an escape from our every day problems, they are training for them. Games are teaching tools that teach some abstract system.

Not following how what I said discredits games as an art form or intellectual challenge…

The point I was making is that the appeal of games over “real life” is that they are almost always fair, with clear and transparent rules and mechanics, with everyone coming into the system with the same basic tools. Usually games are a “perfect” or idealized abstraction of a real-life system or problem. Whereas in “real life”, people might be coming from an underprivileged background, lack self-esteem, working with a disability, committed to other responsibilities, consider themselves too young or too old, consider themselves too busy, too weak, too whatever to accomplish what they dream of accomplishing.

Also, in “real life”, things happen that really aren’t “fair” as we like to think things should be. People are robbed, screwed over, get sick, get in accidents, are cheated out of life-savings, bullied, dumped, etc. Games usually try pretty hard to mitigate these types of things, and present worlds and situations that are “fair” to the playerbase.

The examples you gave of Chess, Settlers, and Diplomacy are great examples of idealized, fair, abstracted versions of life systems. There is an enormous chasm between playing Settlers and playing the stock market.

But this process, put in the hands of skilled designers, can really do good things for the world!

Exactly! And that’s a big part of the point I was trying to make. In order for things to be “gamified”, there needs to be careful, hands-on treatment by designers, entrepreneurs, thinkers, etc. Regardless of what we call it, applying game mechanics to real-world situations can produce positive and fun results. All I’m saying is that this isn’t a novel or new idea, and that as far as I can see, it’s going to be very difficult to come up with generic or universal tools or business models to “gameify” any old thing.

In other words, if it’s just as hard to gamify an arbitrary real-life thing, and VC’s don’t like investing in individual games or content-creation enterprise, then why the shift now? It wouldn’t make any more sense for a “gamification” design shop to get funded than a game development studio… same risks, not much more upside. Maybe less, since it’s harder to directly monetize the customer.

I don’t want to make too big a point of that last part, because there’s a rabbit-hole of special cases and exceptions when we start talking about individual opportunities.

Anyway, I don’t think I was making the point that you took offense to, if I understand correctly what you’re point was.

Despite this being a rant there was really only one part I found offensive, being a game designer:

“The reason why people spend time on game achievements instead of real-life achievements is because real-life achievements are 1) hard 2) perhaps a lot harder for you than they are for other people 3) might actually not work out.”

The reason why this is offensive is because it completely discredits games as an art form or intellectual challenge for the designers and the players. Games are not an escape from our every day problems, they are training for them. Games are teaching tools that teach some abstract system. It’s no coincidence that this abstract system often represents some real life problems (Spacial Relationships in Chess, economies in Settlers of Katan, or Social interactions in Diplomacy). The reason why they are so essential to our evolution is because they have allowed us to prepare for real life situations (ie. hunting) without real life risks.

I understand it’s easy to get caught up in the buzzword, oversimplified, marketing jargon regarding gamification. But this process, put in the hands of skilled designers, can really do good things for the world!

The difference for me with gamification – and as you say, the thing that excites – is how this is put together. The main difference between standard loyalty and loyalty gamification is 3 fold.

1) Utilises Social Currency – For competitive behavior to take hold you need to show what your peers are doing. 99% of loyalty programmes today don’t do this. They are very insular – one to one between brand and member.
2) Recognize achievement – many programmes, especially FFP do this using tiers, but unless you virtually live in the airplane you’ll get nothing. What gaming introduces is the concept of additional levels, other forms of reward (badges/status/etc.) and the ability to get lift from the masses, not just the 20% giving 80% of revenue.
3) Recognize the interaction – Loyalty is directly linked to the purchase transaction as this typically funds the points. Gaming requires more interaction – check-ins, reviews, likes – whatever. These need to be encouraged, recognized and reward. Gaming mechanics help to do this and this in turn creates more frequent brand interactions = increased brand engagement.

It’s less about something new and more about a new way of thinking.

I’m having trouble parsing out your key points, but I think your last line captures it:
“I don’t think there’s anything 1) new and 2) unique or defensible to build a truly scalable industry around even if you slap a fancy-pants name on it.”

1) “Nothing New”: Agreed. I used to work at a design firm called IDEO, one of my favorite quotes from my time there was “Innovation = Invention + Opportunity”. In 2007 when we started working on our Nitro Gamification platform, we took the existing Invention of Game Mechanics, and combined it with the Opportunity to (a) take Game Mechanics out of the gaming world and (b) provide them as a scalable, flexible web service so that anyone could leverage their power without having to build them from scratch.

Just because they’re not new, doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.
And just because they’re not new to you, doesn’t mean they’re not new to anyone else.

2) “Nothing Unique or Defensible”: Sure. There’s not many businesses on the internet that are unique and defensible. Could Google copy what we do? Absolutely. Could they copy what you do? Absolutely. Could they copy what every startup ever covered on TechCrunch does? Absolutely. So I’m not really sure what your point is here. If businesses see a value in using gamification to drive business goals, and they don’t want to (a) build the technology (b) build the expertise, which is the case 99% of the time, then there is a market opportunity to provide the technology and expertise to them. Big companies like Hasbro, MySpace, Comcast, NBC, Warner Bros, small companies like IMHOMedia, and even non-profits like HopeLab have all validated that market opportunity by becoming our customers.

If your argument is that it’s not a unique and defensible strategy for the companies that are using it, then I agree with that. It’s no different from integrating social networking, or a Facebook Like button, or anything else. Their core content needs to be their unique & defensible strategy, game mechanics just help make the experience more compelling, while enabling businesses to guide and drive high value behavior. Does it matter if it’s unique and defensible if it enables them to make more money? No.

3) “Fancy-pants name”: Whatever you may think about the word, I’m glad that there’s a name for this that is sticking. Over the years we’ve had to be very evangelical and educational, and figuring out how to describe what we do has been a challenge. We’ve talked about game mechanics, metagames, I even tried to get the phrase “web catalytics” to stick. In the end, we settled on gamification for the simple reason that it implies that there’s something existing (your site, community, media, etc.) that’s being transformed, rather than something new that’s being created. It’s a process, not a thing.

I’d be happy to give you a demo of our platform sometime. You might even think it’s cool.

best, – rajat
Founder, Chief Product Officer
http://www.bunchball.com