Gamification by Gabe Zichermann

Summary: let’s play business

The main purpose of Gamification, as Gabe states, “(…) is to help people get from point A to point B in their lives — whether that’s viewed through the lens of personal growth, societal improvement or marketing engagement”. It’s like making fun out from whatever you do. Regardless of your task domain: working, shopping, making business. Gamification focuses on business related aspects of your live. During lecture, Gabe shows how to increase users engagement, how to bound people to your service, how to attract them with your product via methods used during the process of game design. Basically saying, how to introduce game mechanics into your business. Gamification, in the context of Video is “the use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users and solve problems”.

Playing games has been around us for quite some time. There are some great ideas behind it that Gabe reveals to us. During the class, you will be told how to provide people with fun, how to bound people to you via various means of gratification, discover players motivation, get the idea of users’ stories, be aware of players’ type, the mastery levels, ways of attracting people and many many more. You will be told how to approach these issues. How to utilize them in order to get most of them. You will get the basics of gamification process – where to start, how to develop the game’s mechanics, how to adapt to new circumstances. In fact, there are so many information within the material, that you will probably watch it twice, at least.

Another great benefit is that you can actually follow the exercises that are solved during the class. Gabe prepared accompanying materials at his site: gamificationu.com. You can download workbook for the course and follow all the exercises that the audience of the class is solving. This is really a plus. You will also get a bunch of links and information sources that you can use for making your research in gamification area much easier.

What can I say when it comes to Gamification Video? In general, this is great material. It is well presented, well edited, and contains great stuff.

Drawbacks? There are always some. First of all, be warned that four episodes of the Video can not be converted into iPod version via iTunes. There is something wrong with episodes 8, 9, 10, 11. But this is an issue only in case you intend to watch it on iPod. Secondly, Gabe focuses mostly on just a few products when it comes to discussion regarding certain topics. I think it would be much better if material contained bigger variety of products described in context of the gamification process. Last issue is, that the class is not for everybody. If you think that doing business must be boring and there is no place for fun at all, and you don’t want to be convinced that there is another life out there – don’t by it :)

Would I recommend it to a friend? Definitely.

Product page: http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920017639/

P.S.

you can also find Gabe’s lecture here: link. If I can be honest, O’Reilly’s material is more like a workshop and much more involving and demanding from the listeners (e.g. you can follow exercises if you like to)