On Serious Games Sharing Serious Games quality projects
The “Godfather of Gamification” is up on the stage! Gabe Zichermann the mind behind Gamification Co. & Dopamine Inc. is one of the main speakers in Gamification World Congress 2015 and it is easy to why. If you want to feel passion about Gamification, you better listen to one of his appearances.
Education is doomed. Boredom, distraction, demotivation… but a lot of other areas are also affected. The grade of distraction population has reached is impacting economy, deeply. But Gamification is losing its image of a super powerful tool. It is not anymore on the peak of expectation. Why is that? and how are we going to change it?
For Gabe Zichermann it is easy, Gamification needs Behavioral Engineering. A flexible, reusable system for behaviour design and engineering that permits replicate success. Nowadays gamification professionals cannot repeat their success or other companies success. It is not like a bridge or skyscraper. Why?
To build resilient, repeatable, predictable, efficient and inspiring tools to motivate people we need to better understand how our motivation and our behaviour work. To follow this path, we need to follow established patterns but also add something new on top of that. Novelty is crucial for Gamification but novelty’s result must be measure as a way to track what is working for future projects. If we treated gamification projects like research, we would generate more data than most of other related fields.
Most behaviour change doesn’t work. 30% quit rate is a good result for alcoholics in treatment. How could this and similar rates rise? What we need is a GPS map of human behaviour and then design specific approaches based on data.
So, what kind of a gamifyer are you? The Idealist, that wants to change the world? The Opportunist, that looks for personal profit? The Utilitarian, focused on cheap products or The Game-ist, the one that just loves games? Probably you should think about these four when you face your next project.
As Gabe put it ‘We are underselling ourselves treating our work like something unpredictable. It is predictable and can be designed with data and results, so start thinking about yourselves as Behavioural Engineers!’
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