I was asked to present at Suncorp last week on gamification and my research in the area. Here’s an edited version of the presentation slides if you’re interested (minus the top secret research stuff!). It provides a general overview of gamification and thoughts on design.
Gamification – Defining, Designing and Using it from Zac Fitz-Walter
I’ll be launching a free gamification newsletter in the next few weeks. This newsletter will provide handpicked gamification articles from the week around a number of topics.
For a free weekly fix of gamification sign up now:
This is completely free and don’t worry, your email will never be used for anything but sending you issues of the Gamification Weekly.
Image: Brett Jordan
2013! Where did you come from? Oh hey and it’s nearly February as well… Okay, well I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to take a brief look at gamification over the last few years and see how it’s evolved (or levelled up?). Since then it really has become the popular kid at school, taking off in 2010, becoming a huge buzzword in 2011, getting some ridiculous seed funding (I’m looking at you Badgeville) in 2012, and now in 2013 (apparently the year of gamification, sorry snake), it’s interesting to see how the term and concept continues to change. This blog post takes a quick look at the history of the term and what we might expect from it in the future.
Here’s a TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) for those of you who just want an overview:
I ran another study this year looking at the use of a gamified mobile event application for university orientation. I’ll be sharing a paper highlighting the results of the study at the OZCHI conference in Melbourne at the end of this month.
Along with this paper I’ll also be presenting a couple of other short papers I co-authored and participating in the Play in Unconventional Places workshop on the Monday.
I’ll make sure to post a link to slides and to the papers once they’ve been published. If you have any questions about the research, conference or publications then contact me.
Here’s a neat little video on the little games that we may often play subconsciously while waiting, bored and just filling time.
It’s interesting, I remember playing a similar game in the car when I was little except I would face forward watching the road ahead of us. As we drove I would imagine the car launching into the air to avoid any of the road cast in shadow and then landing again on the sunny parts to recharge it’s jump power.
The video shows how we may often turn to play and games to fill time, and how many of us may create very similar games in similar contexts. Also to me it shows we are all game designers to some extent, even if we don’t realise it.
Kai Huotari and Juho Hamari have just co-authored a new paper, presented at the MindTrek 2012 conference, that provides a new definition for gamification from a service marketing perspective.
They define gamification as “a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences in order to support user’s overall value creation“.
They argue that the previous definition by Deterding et al. (2011) highlights that “only non-games can be gamified” which has issues due to service desingers having difficulties identifying exactly what a non-game context is because “the existence of a game is dependent on the subjective perception of the player/user”. Where past definitions are based on the use of game elements, this new definition emphasises the goal of gamification rather than the methods and it’s relation to previous service marketing research.
The definition has already spurred some interesting discussion on the Gamification Research Network mailing list, both praise and criticism.
You can read more the new definition and access the paper from here: http://jhamari.tumblr.com/post/33158604130/gamification
I was recently asked to talk a little about my research and life studying at QUT and here’s the result! Close ups of nerdy toys and Star Wars pillows included…
Drupal 
is a popular free and open-source content management system that can be used for anything from personal blogs and simple sites to large community and forum sites. And now badges and points are coming to Drupal via support from Badgeville, a large gamification platform available for websites and online communities. This allows Drupal administrators to award customised site interactions such as posting, commenting and voting with points. It’s difficult to find how much the solution costs but according to a techcrunch post, the pricing of a Badgeville gamification solution starts at upwards of $2000/month. So it’s definitely aimed at the larger sites and communities.
Listen up all you gamification nerds, if you haven’t seen this video you should definitely take 8 minutes to watch it.
Apart from it’s beautiful visuals, it is totally creepy and raises some important questions around the ethics of merging games and real life. Traditionally games have been defined as closed, formal systems that are entered wilfully by players (Costikyan, 2002; Avedon & Sutton-Smith, 1971). Generally there is this idea of a boundary that exists at the edge of the game called the magic circle (Huizinga, 1950). When we are in the magic circle, playing the game we can have different thoughts, feelings and values than when we are out of the game (Schell, 2008). However, when we start using technology Continue reading
I just returned last week from Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference and wow, what a trip. I started to write this post while I was at the conference but didn’t get the time to finish it! So after recovering from jet lag and getting back into work I figured I should take time on the weekend to change all the present tense to past, add some sweet photos of Tim Cook and share it.