Gamification Nation

Welcome to today’s Question of Gamification, the podcast by An Coppens. And today we have a guest, Andy Robertson, who also goes by the Twitter handle @GeekDadGamer, and he’s a video game journalist and the author of the book Taming Gaming. I’m delighted to have... The post Podcast 44: Is gaming bad for my child? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Welcome to a Question of Gamification, a podcast where gamification expert An Coppens answers your questions. Today’s question is How can we compete in an unlevel playing field? Today’s question was triggered based on a number of conversations, I was having online and offline with different... The post Podcast 43: How to compete in an unlevel playing field? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Welcome to a Question of Gamification! Today’s question is, “what have your people been doing in lockdown?” We will take a look at how much they’ve been spending their time on various tools and media, based on the global web index. We will look at... The post Podcast 42: What have the generations in work been doing in lockdown? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Welcome to a Question of Gamification. I’m An Coppens the show host for the show and today’s question is one of mine. Are you all zoomed out? Yes. I mean the Zoom online meeting system or in fact, any online webinar, meeting or conferencing tool.... The post Podcast 41: Are you all zoomed out? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

What does loyalty mean in times of crisis Welcome to a Question of Gamification. I am An Coppens, the show host for this show and the CEO and chief game changer at Gamification Nation. Today, I want to answer the question,  what does loyalty mean... The post Podcast 40: What does loyalty mean in times of crisis? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Today I wanted to give you an update of what we are doing in light of all of the lockdowns internationally. As well as all of the loss of business or contraction of business worldwide.  Thanks to the same virus. I hope at the same... The post Podcast 39: What are we doing for COVID-19? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Welcome to this week’s question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I’m the show host for this podcast and the CEO and founder of Gamification Nation. A question we get always or regularly asked, maybe not always, is what is a gamification strategy and... The post Podcast 38: What is a gamification strategy? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Welcome to this week’s a question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens, I’m the show host and the CEO of Gamification Nation. This week we will follow on from our podcast from last week where we discussed how you could use Monopoly or a... The post Podcast 37: How we took a top grossing mobile game and are making it into a recruitment, onboarding and learning solution appeared first on Gamification Nation.

How games inspire us in gamification? We want to pick a game that you all know to illustrate how we work and how it inspires what we do. I often tell our game designers that you can make any game into something that we can... The post Podcast 36: How to use a game as inspiration for your serious game and gamification design appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Welcome to this week’s, a question of gamification. This week, I’m talking about what makes a great learning game. My name is An Coppens. I’m the chief game changer at Gamification Nation, and also the show host for this show. Serious games must still be... The post Podcast 35: What makes a great learning game? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Welcome to A Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I’m the chief game changer at Gamification Nation, and the show host for this program. Today I’ll give you a health warning. It’s a bit of a ranty post or a ranty show, because... The post Podcast 34: Is gamification different from game design for business? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Welcome to a Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I’m the Chief Gamechanger at Gamification Nation. And first of all we with our first episode of 2020, I would like to say Happy New Year to all of our listeners and followers. And... The post Podcast 33: What are the gamification trends for 2020? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Welcome to a Question of Gamification. This is An Coppens. I’m your show host and also the CEO of Gamification Nation. This week’s question of the week is, “How can you keep your gamification design or your game design fresh? It’s a question we’ve had... The post Podcast 32: How to keep your gamification or game design fresh for the long haul? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Welcome to this week’s A Question of Gamification. Welcome to this show. My name is An Coppens. I’m the show host, and also the CEO of Gamification Nation, and I first of all have to apologise for my absence. We wanted to make this a... The post Podcast 31: How to have corporate learning teams provide you with input for gamification and game design? appeared first on Gamification Nation.

Why is game design so expensive? Hi, this is An Coppens. I'm the chief Game Changer and show host of a Question of Gamification. And today I want to draw your attention to costs because it's a frequently recurring theme for our company for sure and also to draw some comparisons because, when people in business are shopping for a game most of them have not looked at what it takes to make a game. They consider it the same as for example a website or any kind of business application. Now when you think about a game. Even some of the basic casual games that we play on our mobile phones may require several team members several pieces of software and several different lengths of time of development. So I wanted to sort of address the question. Why is it so expensive to design a game or what constitutes the cost of designing a game? Because, more and more frequently people come to gamification and would actually like a serious game. And because both of them have a serious purpose and usually a business objective, it's not unsurprising that this happens. The challenge for us is that they usually come as I say it with a bicycle budget, but would like to buy a Ferrari. And that would be similar in game terminology having the budget for a very simple game like Pac-Man or Flappy Bird and actually wanting let's say a AAA game similar to a World of Warcraft or and ideally compressed for mobile. I mean not unusual as a request to be honest in our world, so. What constitutes the cost? I mean and I wanted too to paint a picture as large as possible. If you're looking for something to the style of a Flappy Bird a simple quiz, one person can develop that. Design it develop it and you probably need only a couple of weeks to do it and then maybe a week or two for testing. If you are aiming to build something much more engaging much more graphically interesting you end up already needing different tools so different softwares to get you started. So that's the first thing. So you need different software licenses, different graphic design tools, game development tools, hosting etc. Now for a big Triple A game and a triple A game. I would want you to think about it along the lines of a Grand Theft Auto, a World of Warcraft and OverWatch. Games that have typically a development team of minimum, five to ten people on them. So in a development team for these kinds of big big name games, you typically have lead game designer who sets the overarching concept. You have level designers you have which are all responsible for one level and that needs to be consistent with the main story arc and the main storyline and fit into the overall vision of the lead game designer, then a narrative designer. You may also find in the larger organizations where the actual narrative is worked out based on levels, based on characters. You may even have character designers who work out a whole story board as story Bible so to speak for each character in the game nearly as developed as let's say a script for a movie if you will and then you usually have several programmers. Programmers tend to program games of that nature in either Unity or Unreal, the two big engines for game design and they will typically Master skills like C# or C plus. So both Unity and Unreal allow you then to push it through to different platforms whether or not it's Android, iOS, PlayStation, web apps, Nintendo's you name it. Most of the development tools allow you to do that. Then on those games you also have graphic designers and animation designers. So the graphic designers may have specialties some are background designer some are character designers. And then the animation designer basically makes sure that the characters can animate the anything that needs to move also moves. Those Graphics can be 2D, 3D. So you may have specialists in 2D graphics or 3D graphics and basically, visual effects need to happen so you could even have a visual effects artist working on ...

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the chief game changer at Gamification Nation and also the show host for this show. This week's question is what are the Learning and Development opportunities that gamification can unlock in the workplace? A big question and it was one that I was asked by a journalist recently who was writing about gamification and other new technologies in the workplace and gamification is obviously considered as one of those So my answer was, first of all to say it's a big question. What are the opportunities? Well the opportunities are quite large. If you think about it most young people will have played games at some point. They may not all be lets say Esports Gamers or really into the big multiplayer online games, but most people have used regularly social media regular games like things you play on your mobile the casual variety and in the wider spectrum of games like multiplayer online games, role-playing games. I would even consider Sports board Games Etc as part of the larger gaming picture. So most young people know that and most young people have on their devices things that are gamified from the get-go. Then they end up in the workplace and they come across often very archaic looking systems or boring interfaces of the things that we use every day. I mean, you know, there's nothing wrong with your Word and Excel and Office products, absolutely, nothing wrong, very functional very, you know very much fit for purpose. So you wouldn't expect there to be game mechanics on top of it. But what gamification can unlock is productivity to use those tools, productivity to complete. So if we look out workplace productivity most managers would love to know how long are my people working on things? What does it take for them to complete an item Etc who's in trouble? Who needs my help? Who's actually doing very well and you know happy to keep plodding along without any hand-holding or anything else? So those kinds of things are really vital for a manager to know and vital for a person to understand. And often for the individual we don't get feedback on our productivity or performance until it's too late or the person either quits or you as a manager have to have a word with the fact that you know, it's not as good as you wanted it to be but if people knew as and when they went how things were progressing and what was good about it, you know, they would already be at a better starting point. So that's the first thing I would say. So what kind it unlock? More productivity, more feedback without having to be there in person. I only think there's still a place for the person face-to-face conversation too, I so wouldn't rule out one over the other but we work with a number of systems where you can have dashboards to see about your performance to look at completion to see how you're doing within the team, to get basically completion rewards, completion unlocking either rewards in the shape of little items or something that you can eventually trade in for real-world items. So whether that is a badge or real-world item, it's a reward for something you've done or simply a dashboard that gives you the impression. Okay. This is where I'm at. This is where I need to go. This is how we're doing. This is how my work is actually having an impact on the larger company because most of us, especially -- and I remember when I was in large organizations, would love to know how our work actually makes a difference to anyone because even the smallest item or smallest thing can have an impact but you don't always know. So knowing the bigger picture goals and how your personal goals play into that can be very interesting very rewarding and actually make people feel good about what they do. I truly believe in workplace productivity and gamification. I think that the two kind of work quite well together. I'm also a big fan of Health trackers and fitness trackers,

Welcome to a question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host of this show and the chief game changer at Gamification Nation. Today we are bringing to you the question, how can I design for people with disabilities? And first thing I was going to say, this is part of the series of inclusion by design. So I promise to share my thoughts, my philosophy, but also the things we do to actively include people and watch out for people in our designs so that they are the most successful as possible. Oh, I also explained in one of the previous podcasts that I see all of the different leaders of inclusion that we should look at. So gender, age, culture and ability as a spectrum. So the spectrum of disabilities and abilities is vast and wide to some disabilities are visible, some disabilities are not, mental health is often considered, under disabilities and you can't see it. Colorblindness is, you know, can be very disabling. And again, it's not visible to us, but the person experiencing it experiences it a lot. Some chronic diseases cause pain. But may not make the person look different on the outside. So from a design perspective that brings with it a whole range of different challenges and, and different interesting points. The first point for people with varying level of abilities, and I'm calling people with abilities because even if you can't see, you can't touch, you have not all the limbs available to you or in use or in working order, you still have abilities. They may be limited, they may be the same. So a person in a wheelchair could just be as mentally able as the next person. We're just not physically able to do the sport. So, you know, you have to see it from a spectrum perspective. And I think even with the analogy with autism and is being quite relevant, which you know, the autistic girl Gretta Turnberg being in the news so much. I find it fascinating how many people are slating her for standing up for something she believes in. Whilst if this was a grown white man, would we have the same impact and the same, I suppose, nastiness towards him. And maybe, you know, this day and age you probably would judging by our current day politicians, but Hey, that's a completely different story and a completely different mindset of all I was wanted to, to bring without analogy is that autism has been recognized as a spectrum. So there's so many degrees and various variations of it manifesting. People have grades of being normally able to do everything and very different in the way that they do and process different things. So the first thing for inclusion for differences of abilities is accessibility and acceptance. Now, accessibility and acceptance. If you think about it, try navigating the world as a blind person. Try navigating the world as a person in a wheelchair to understand what I mean with that. I did an experiment at an event not too long ago where I used monopoly paper money. And asked, you know, can you pick that up with a hand? And of course that was not a problem for the person. Now pick it up with, you know, your hand in your sleeves so that your fingers have knots, the same touch. The person managed to do it but it required a different skills. And then I asked them to pick it up without hands and that then became a lot more challenging. Some people reach for their feet, some people took it with their teeth. So you know, it's, you know, it poses a whole different range of things. And the first thing we often see when we're designing systems for inclusion is that access is the first point. Even from a building perspective where most organizations fail is that person with the wheelchair or the person that is blind, the person with all sorts of physical ailments is just not able to make it through the door. So they fail at point of access. In video software that can be the same and abilities here could range from the physical variety to actually cognitively can they actually easily play and...

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. My name is An Coppens, I'm the show host and the CEO or chief game changer at Gamification Nation. And this week's question is an interesting one which was asked at a conference of people who make a simulations. Primarily question was is gamification just simply manipulation? And I didn't have a chance to answer the question there. And then so I also had it in my mind and sort of play with my mind what is manipulation really. So if we think about it, how and what do we consider manipulation? So I went on a bit of a fact finding mission to get the sorts of dictionary explanation of manipulation before sort of jumping in and giving my opinion on, you know, is gamification manipulation. Yes. No. Or, you know, is it as black and white as that and in the dictionary, when we look at manipulation, it says, "it's the skilful handling, controlling or using of something or someone, whether it's a sculpture you made in an art class or how you convince your friends to do your homework. Both are considered manipulation in the negative sense. It's also explained as exerting shrewd or devious influence, especially for one's own advantage. And so it sort of shows even in, I suppose just pure dictionary terms where you're trying to explain a concept. It's not that straightforward. It's not always negative. It's also not always positive because if we look at is from making a sculpture perspective, because money pinata, it comes from the Latin handful. It's, you know, it could be handling something and skilful handling can be positive. If it is, let's say a sculpture handling a piece of wood or a piece of clay or a piece of stone to sculpt a beautiful piece of art out of it. Yes, it's manipulating the brick to become something different and you wanted to be, and you know, for some people that's probably why did you waste a really good break or really good piece of wood. But for others it's, it's an amazing piece of art and I think it's not that far removed from, you know, when we actually give or exert influence over an individual or someone to do something. Manipulation can be, you know, something good and something bad. And I see it as, you know, a potential of having two faces, both positive and negative. And I actually see gamification in very much the same light. Any good tool used for bad reasons or bad purposes will have bad outcomes. And you know, that's the same with great technology to world over. Even games on simulations can be used to influence people to make decisions that really you want them to consider twice or maybe not make at all. So it's, it's not as clear as black and white. It's more of a gray scale. And then it's kind of how many shades of gray do you need to go to before? For you. It's a, it's a no, no. So if we look at gamification, so gamification in my view is a contains nudges. It contains game elements. It contains an element of understanding human behavior and what are we tending to do and tending not to do and how can we then come to an outcome that is best for the individual for whatever older purpose the gamification was designed for. So let's look at it from a coaching perspective and that smile original background. So I come I suppose to, to world of gamification through the lens of, Oh, a former coach, I was first a sports coach. I coached basketball for years and years and also played basketball for years and years. So for me, coaching always was about understanding where the individual is out with their skills level and then trying to, you know, nudge them forward into their next level of ability. I think back to the team, I coach two of the longest, which were in basketball and in Belgium we had the microbes, the microbes were the youngest possible kids that could take up basketball. You had to be five and a five years old on that category. I think around even all the way to nine if I'm not wrong, I'll be wrong on that.

Welcome to this week's a question or gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host for this episode. And I'm also the chief game changer at gamification nation or also known as CEO. And this week we are continuing down the line of the inclusion by design series. And the question that we want to attack or answer is what are the implications of trying to be inclusive by design and the design choices I need to make. So this week I want to start with an example namely to be a sports watch. Now, It's an example that I've blogged about a number of years ago and it's also a product that I think showcases how inclusion is not always there from the outset and then allows for niche products to appear. And this is a very niche product but actually created out of a need that was real for the target audience. So the BS sports watch was designed for by, designed for and by female triathletes. So those are the ladies that swim, cycle, and run a mega long distances for fun or for achievement. And many of them train very long distances to prepare for competition days. And one of the things that they found is that the sports watches on the market weren't necessarily suited for a female wrists or for their sport because you know, it needs to be waterproof, it needs to be a long lasting battery. It also needs to still be visible so that you can see the various statistics that you may want to see in this situation. So what the ladies did first before designing the watch, they say, well, let's explore if we're the only ones with this problem. And they started asking their fellow colleagues, around and said, look, you know, what would you like in a sports watch that you would take as part of your training? And what came out was people were looking for something slim and ergonomic something that was lightweight to wear. And both those things came up because the traditional watches that were made for women were just smaller versions of what was made for a man and that often then obscured the face and made all the letters smaller. For those of you that are users of smart watches or FitBits, trying to fiddle with lots of things that are tiny means that you often have to repeat some things several times. And if you're like me trying to hit the right application that I want to launch from the Apple Watch is a bit of a trial and error situation. And again, when it's so basically, they say, well, want something slim, ergonomic lightweight to wear, but also a one button to start something really user friendly design. So the user experience needs to be one click we're on, we're off. And you know, easy to do while you're running, while you're swimming, when you're cycling without losing your speed. And obviously because of their long distances and duration of training, that could actually be quite extensive and, for most of us, way beyond our reach. They also needed long battery life, but I mean battery life for those of us that use smart devices, we know how important it is. So when your battery drains without even having lasted the whole day. So, especially then when it's a productivity and a training tool, you do want it to last the distance of wherever you're going, swimming, cycling or running. They also wanted, and this was a feature that had never been included before, was an SOS button. So they could discreetly launch an SOS, to let's say a family member or relative that could checkup where they were on their route or where their GPS location was in the case that they hit an unsavory situation and, you know, way back, I used to train for marathons and often on the long runs I used to do them in the mornings early on a Sunday or Saturday, typically speaking. And sometimes you meet some strange characters, not you sort as I've been, I better keep running fast here because I'm not so sure which way this is gonna go or you know, worse. Again, you end up injured and you need somebody to help and come and collect you,

Feminine gamification viewpoint: Interview with Margaret Burnett Podcast 8: Where to find inspiration for gamification? In a question of gamification this week we are honoured to have the company of Margaret Burnett distinguished professor in Computer Science at Oregon State University. She has carried out research in relation to gender inclusiveness in software use and developed a research methodology to test for potential stumbling blocks your users may face.   An Coppens: Hi, I'm An Coppens from Gamification Nation and I'm delighted today to have with me Margaret Burnett who is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University in the USA. Now, I'm so delighted to have her on board because her research focuses on end user programming, end user software engineering and gender issues in this type of context. Welcome to Gamification Nation today Margaret.   Margaret Burnett: Thank you, I'm delighted to be here.   An Coppens: Thank you. Now, I noticed you have Distinguished Professor as your title, how does that happen?   Margaret Burnett: Well, it's quite an honour and I just received it this last spring so I'm still just immensely delighted about the whole thing. The university passes this honour out to 2 professors per year so I got it this last spring. The criteria have to do with the quality and the reputation of your research and your teaching and mentoring and whether you've really made a difference in some way. I have some awards on some of those fronts and a long history I guess that … A really long history. Anyway, so I won.   An Coppens: Fantastic, it's a great honour to have you so shortly afterwards, we're not just talking to a professor but a distinguished professor. I love that and congratulations also.   Margaret Burnett: Thank you.   An Coppens: Now, the reason that I came across you and the research you have done is because as my listeners and readers know is we work a lot on the feminine view of gamification and I look for research that's been done in that field. When I came across GenderMag, I got really excited, I said, “I want to know what this is, how does this happen, how did this come about?” First of all, what is GenderMag?   Margaret Burnett: GenderMag is a method. It's a process for software developers or UX people or anybody really with some say into how software is turning out. Anyway, they can use this method to spot aspects of their software—the software itself—that might not be as gender inclusive as they liked. GenderMag stands for Gender Inclusiveness Magnifier, so that's what it's all about.   An Coppens: Fantastic. How did it come about initially, is there a background story to it?   Margaret Burnett: Yes, there is, there's quite a background story. It all started with my PhD student, Laura Beckwith who was seeking a PhD topic to work on in about 2002 or 2003. We came up together with the idea of possibly looking at how gender differences might come together with software itself. At that time, there was starting to be a fair amount of understanding in the academic community—not in industry yet—the academic community that there were gender differences that were starting to play out in the workforce and in higher education. But nobody had thought about software itself yet.   An Coppens: That's really amazing that it actually is recognized first in the university world and then further down the line becomes of interest. I think a lot of businesses and software developers still are only starting to recognize this field.   Margaret Burnett: That's right. Laura started reading from 5 different fields and in every case what she was trying to do is ask herself the question, “What does this tell me about software?” As you mentioned earlier, I do human aspects of software development, some of it end user programming and some of it professional programming but...

Welcome to a question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm your show host and the chief game changer and CEO at Gamification Nation. And this is the second installment in our series inclusive by design. When it comes to inclusion, the big question is, how do I know I am being inclusive? How do I know I'm not excluding certain people by being inclusive to other people, et cetera. And you know, what is inclusion in the first place? And I guess it starts with diversity as a spectrum in my view. So the first thing to notice is, for me, inclusion is about culture, is about abilities, it's about gender, it's about age. It may be other choices that are more lifestyle related, but for most businesses, it comes to creating an environment where everybody has the opportunity to succeed, to their level of ability, their level of wish, desire. So I guess it's, in some sense, slightly philosophical in other ways. There's also very practical things to think about. But first of all, let's talk about four areas, of what I would see key, in workplace kind of workplace focus, diversity or work, workplace focused inclusion. And they are a culture, first of all. So culture can be the company culture, but it can also be the country culture. It can be the melting pot of nationalities, cultures that are working for you. And if you're a global organisation, it may be the interrelationship between all of those suppliers, providers, the head office, the local office. And if you are, let's say a national organisation, it can be head office and local office. It can be regional differences. And I think, you know, we all have some sort of culture that we reflect and you know, whether that's a good or a bad one that remains to be seen. But from an inclusion perspective, I would say look at it as a spectrum. Some of us have a global vision and want to make the world or workplace others have a very clear national vision. No, I'm only focused on, you know, this region. Therefore, the people that interact with my clients would need to either support this region as a near native or be a near native. So, you know, so those are the kinds of typical questions that you would ask there. And then a local business may mean you need local knowledge. I mean, just think about it. If we look at a, let's say you're a local taxi driver, you want them to know the local area to get you to your destination as fast as possible. Of course they can be using great apps, I give them the best routes, et cetera. But once the GPS doesn't work or it gets it wrong, you don't want them to be stuck and you know, clocking up a massive big bill. You also want to be able to communicate with them. So in a national context, you could have a scenario where people need to know and we know have been guilty of that in some countries. I visit and speak a lot in many areas. And, you know, at one point I was trying to go by train from one place to another and the person at the rail car desk said, no, you can't do that miss, because geographically that's not possible. And I sort of went, oh, oops, I didn't realize that which he grabbed the, the map where she said, oh here miss, there's a, here's the map of the rail network and you can check for yourself. And you know, I thought it was a very nice, respectful way of dealing with my lack of, uh, the national rail network knowledge. And that's okay. You know, I, I was definitely in the wrong place. And then if you have a global mindset, it might mean that you don't limit yourself to just national or local markets. It may mean that you have a staff that's also diverse and spread out all over the place. And that comes with its own, I suppose its own difficulties from time zones to language use to certain habits that are really acceptable in one culture, but maybe not so much in another. We've worked on a few projects around cultural acceptance and cultural inclusion, including a kind of a fun way of getting people,

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. This week I want to start a bit of a series around inclusion and design. In fact, I want to name it inclusive by design, because it's scenario that we basically focus on quite a bit. And actually I as a woman in the gamification space specifically wanted to join the gamification space to make it more inclusive, because when I looked at the industry of gamification back in the mid 2000s, I saw a lot of young white men and the odd Asian man and they didn't necessarily relate to me. They didn't necessarily speak my language. And some of the designs that I saw also didn't quite appeal to me. At first I said, "Oh, this is maybe just me personally. Maybe it's just not my thing." But then I asked around. I also went looking for research and actually found that a lot of the time it was very one track focused, very much focused on their experience of life, their experience of the world and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just not 100% inclusive because you're only coming with one worldview. Just like if I design something just by myself, it would only have my own worldview in it. So that was not an indication of their masculinity or anything else. But I also felt that we were missing a trick. And actually I was really quite passionate about it. We were missing a trick in a sense that gamification was becoming this big buzzword, especially in the corporate learning space, and it wasn't actually working. And I could see clearly why because it wasn't appealing. It was a lot of the time, very competitive. It was a lot of the time, very superficial. And I went, "No, there's more to this." I knew from my work up to that point where I had been using games, gamification and game elements for all sorts of things throughout change management, throughout leadership throughout training, I knew it worked and I said, "No, no, there has to be another way. There has to be a way that we can be inclusive by design, but we need to change our approach." So basically I wanted to bring that voice and bring that perspective of let's be inclusive by design. Now, just recently I gave a keynote speech at an event, pretty much focused around people in the academic world. And I have to say I was personally challenged a little bit from a confidence perspective I think as well to say that, "Look, I'm not a scientist. I'm a field worker. I'm a practitioner. I work with my clients to the best of my ability." I read a lot of research and I do my best to integrate what people find in it insofar that I can understand it because I also admit some of the scientific papers out there on games, gamification, diversity, inclusion, differences between age, culture, gender, abilities, some of them are seriously hard to make sense of if they're written for scientific purposes. So anything I can read, I will and anything I can't read, I will have to [inaudible 00:02:58] just purely out of practical reasons. What occurred to me is that when we talk about inclusion and diversity or inclusion by design better, it is in fact a conscious action. It is first and foremost an attitude because we all have our preferences. We all have maybe things we get a bit fearful about that make us feel threatened. Just like the academics made me feel threatened like, "Oh gosh, what can I possibly offer? I'm merely a mere mortal living in the world of the corporate sector doing my business the best I can." But you know what? I haven't written a paper about it. I haven't actually proven my theory left right and center. If somebody wants to take on my theory and prove it, absolutely love it. Do talk to me. That bias in my head even was preventing me from delivering the best possible talk. So from an inclusive by design perspective, I also needed to make sure that I could not only engage to myself to the best of my ability, but also deliver something that was, I suppose, interesting enough for the group to take something away fro...

Welcome to the first episode of the Gamification Nation podcast. It's an exciting new way for me to connect and share with you in audio format. We've been hard at work to get this launched and I'm thrilled that we are finally out with this first episode. In this episode, I share with you the most common question on what is gamification and why it's essential in this modern day. How you can use this to advance your business and more. So be sure to subscribe. You can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Don't forget to subscribe! Please don't forget to leave us a review or comment here or even on iTunes and Stitcher. Your thoughts, questions, and feedback are always welcome.

Welcome to this week's A Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the chief Gamechanger at Gamification Nation, and this week's question is a good one. How will VR, AR, MR, and what on earth is the difference between all those, and Gamification play nice? It's a question that comes up from time to time. Because in learning, and in HR, we find that a lot of people have no idea what all the buzz words and all of the... they have an idea, but maybe not a full understanding of what the buzz words stands for and how they can all work together or where they're all separate beasts that you should be treating differently. So, the purpose of today's podcast is to answer the questions of what are these different reality things? Does that combine well with Gamification? Does it not? Should you just do one and not engage with the other? Or, how do you best integrate it into your suite of learning related solutions for your workers, or HR related solutions for your workers? Or whichever way you see fit on using a mix of these things in the workplace. First things first, let's start with the terminology. VR, or virtual reality, is where you typically today need a headset like an oculus rift or a google cardboard or any variety of quality devices in between or above. Basically, what that allows you do to is to escape into a virtual world. Now, in a virtual world, or in virtual reality today, most of the time we need to exclude what is going on around us and we step completely into that virtual space. Which is a great tool for, for example, when you need to simulate environments that people might not be use to. For example, flight simulators are an experience that we could call virtual reality today. Although, we could argue that you could actually play all of it as a mixed reality play because if the person is sitting in the middle of it and touching real equipment but the visuals are displayed on a screen, you're combining virtual reality with reality and giving a lifelike experience even though it's not for real. Simulations, for years have been, in a space in my view, where you find virtual and reality kind of blending together and giving feedback to each other. Virtual reality was designed, originally, with the idea of games. A lot of games, like escape rooms, can be played in virtual reality, but some of the cool games today are completely virtual reality based. If you are not sure what to test or what to try out there's two I would recommend trying. First of all any roller coaster experience, if you're not too afraid of roller coasters that is. And the other one is the play saber where you basically do a massive drum kind of set up and you're trying to keep up with the beat in virtual reality, which is pretty awesome. Or an escape room, of course, where you're in a virtual reality playroom and you need to unlock clues in order to get out. Virtual reality is typically, still today, with headsets which blank out reality. Augmented reality, most of us will have at some point heard of Pokemon Go or at least... you know, maybe not played but at least heard of Pokemon Go the game. Which, basically, brought augmented reality into our everyday, mass presence as such. It's where you combine the camera use of your smart phone with, lets say, fictional characters like Pokemon. And you combine real life and whatever is on your screen together to take some funny pictures, to catch them where they are, where you could be. Further than that, augmented reality is developing and some of the really cool type of material that's coming out is where it is much more seamless so that you don't even need a smart phone anymore. Which you might have holographic screens popping up. You may have heard of HoloLens, where actual human beings are holograms and you can pop up wherever your hologram needs to be for that time. It's basically combining reality with some form of digital augmentation.

Welcome to this week's Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I am the Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation, and this week's question of gamification is one I have. I suppose it's in light of all the global politics that are going on everywhere. It made me question, are we just all part of one large strategy game by a certain amount of players? Before I go into that, I want to draw analogies to strategy games, and what's happening around this, both in the world of politics and the world of business, because that's how, A, I see business but also, B, I think there's a lot we can learn from it. It also encourages you, and that's my hope that I can inspire you to think critically. Okay, if you were in charge of that game, how would you play it? What cards would you play, and what would winning mean? What's the win condition? Is there a win condition, or are we just heading for a zero sum game where there are no winners, only losers? I guess it's probably out of I would say frustration or desperation. I don't know. It's a blend maybe of the two. As you know, I'm a European working a business in the UK, and with Brexit looming we have a workforce that's all spread over the world. For me, being a global business was always the way I wanted to play the game. I never thought of my business as being just a British company. I actually always felt it was a company playing on a global scale, but now currently the strategy of the politicians is potentially pushing a major, I suppose, spanner in the works, let's just say. It's making me adjust my strategies in order to still continue to play the game I wanted to play. Then I also wonder if I'm only part of the larger playing field. I mean, we're a tiny company in comparison to some of the big names in industry, but in the end of the day we all have a role to play in the strategy game whether we're a low-end small business or a high-end major player like an Apple, an Amazon, an IBM, a Google, whatever. We all have a role to play, but also politicians have a role to play because their sense of government's lack of or insights and wrongdoings can have major impacts. I mean, trying to grow any business in war-based countries is no mean feat. Trying to do business when your company or country is at war with other countries is not so simple. Very realistically, I've had one client refused a platform I advised to use because of the company or the country they were from. They said, "Well we can't possibly, as a Muslim nation, do business with a company from that particular nation." It's real, and I would say an oversight by maybe or maybe not politicians in the UK is that EU companies will choose an EU company to do business with as opposed to a British company unless the British company is the cheapest one on the market and offering lower values, which if you think about, I suppose the EU as a governing body, it has a lot of good to offer. It offered the whole continent of Europe peace for nearly 50 years. It brought about lots of rules that are actually good for business, good for humans, and good for the planet. Do we like them all of the time? Of course not. That's the nature of rules. Just like in any game, we don't like having to stick to rules and having some ways they may impede us from doing how we wanted to do certain things. Yeah. I mean, in a strategy game you will always pivot and choose a different strategy based on the feedback you get from the market, the feedback you get from the game, the choices that are left to you. In the current political climate, I'm having to make choices, and the first choice I made was to wait and see. Now with an impending leaving the EU or Britain leaving the EU after all, unless a general election comes up, which is also still a possibility, it may mean having to set up the group entity, increasing the cost space by having to do double accounting and double offices and double everything. It's a realistic choice,

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. On this question, I get asked a lot by parents, "What are my kids learning on video games, on computer games, on mobile games?" "Should I limit their time on it," is typically the second question. "I am worried about my kids playing too much." It's a very frequently asked question by managers in many organisations with children at home. They see that their children are playing and playing a lot, and I suppose with the World Health Organisation, you're marking gaming as a disorder as well. There's a need to explain why and what the case may be with games and what it brings or doesn't bring to your children or young people that you know. The first thing I will say is as a person growing up, my parents were quite protective and we were not allowed games at all in the house. So when I was growing up, I was always borrowing somebody else's games in school in order to play. In fact, I think at one stage my dad thought that Pong was going to blow up the television. And if you don't know Pong, look it up, it's a very basic game with two balls knocked to the side of the screen and you have to sort of play table tennis on the TV screen. So my uncles had to uninstall it quite quickly after it had launched. What we did do, however, is we had a lot of board games. We had a lot of card games. We were all involved in sports. Although computer things were banned, we still got to play. Actually all of my children's parties were sets of games. Most of them I dreamt up. I was lucky to be born in June, and often then the weather in Belgium was quite nice and quite fun. We typically had really fun things in the garden, in our house. The little puddle pool was used as the hinderness that you had to overcome or the obstacle that you had to overcome rather than the hindrance, which is nice Flemish word for that ... it's an obstacle. One group of the party people had to defend the obstacle and either make you go through it, which gave you immunity, or you had to be cunning enough to distract them and run past them super fast and get to the other side. Things like Tug of War, you name it, we did it. For my confirmation, we had this massive life-sized board where you had to roll the dice and you move forward, and based on where you landed you had to go find the clue in the woods and perform whatever task was related to that clue. If the person that was minding that clue thought you had passed you, you were allowed to continue back to the board and the dice. Things you had to do in order to get over a clue were things like dress up and take a photo, solve a riddle. Sometimes you had to find things. There were always fun, cool stuff that happened. So although I never actually got to own a console of any denomination of sorts, I did love to play and my parents did definitely encourage that. Even though when I asked about a career in gaming, my dad was very adamant that there was no money in games. I guess it was a good ... I would have been seven, so a good couple of decades ago. Let's just say that. Today's kids I think have a bit more of a privilege or access ability, I think. And maybe that's also my worldview of a relatively well to do middle class background, because gaming, let's not forget, this is not cheap. So a lot of kids from the lower end of the market families may still not be able to access any game consoles or just purely because of costs. And if they do, they might have to work really hard to earn access to it. So I think if your kids are gaming, you're already in a nice place and you probably have enough money to help them do certain things. So that's one thing. But what are they learning? So think about it this way. If your children are playing as a team with other kids in their class, in their neighborhood, but even with other kids online that they have never met, like is the case in the large games like World of Warcraft where a whole tribe comes together,

Welcome to this week's Question of Gamification. I'm An Coppens, I'm your show host, and I'm also the CEO or Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. This week's question is asked to us from a variety of clients, and it typically goes something like this, is gamification or should gamification be part of a larger strategy? When we get asked that question, it's typically because people have heard that gamification is a thing. They like the concept, they like the fact that we can bring some of the game and play-like feeling into an organisation. But often it also means that they haven't thought through why they want to implement gamification in the first place. Start with why I would say or answer that question with, yes, gamification should always be part of a larger strategy. In fact, I would even say strategy comes first, as opposed to gamification comes first. Now, gamification can be the strategy. I mean, that's also possible. But in the end of the day, you need to have a reason why you are engaging in gamification, why you are even going there. You need to understand if it fits for your culture, if it fits for the type of problem you're trying to solve. Although I feel that gamification has a lot of power and a lot of benefits. It doesn't fix every single problem that you may encounter in an organisation. Sometimes it's simply a case of revising benefits, revising employee rules, or even very simple things as changing things around in an environment. It could be interpersonal related. The one thing you can't gamify is your boss, typically speaking. At best, you can gamify the process, but gamifying people is another story altogether, and gamification in the best form should always be voluntary. Make it voluntary If it's imposed, then as soon as that becomes known, it also causes a backlash of why people don't want to engage or they rebel against it, or they game the system, etc. When you're looking at gamification as a part of your employee facing strategy, I would definitely say it needs to be part of a well thought out strategy, whether that's employee engagement, whether that is a very specific onboarding call, an onboarding strategy, whether that is showcasing how your organisation is a leader in the field. There's a variety of reasons and a variety of things you may want to do as part of a strategy, and gamification could be one. What we see gamification do and where it plays in and ties into strategy, is that it enforces or reinforces the message of your strategy. Gamified on-boarding strategy example Let's give an example. Usually examples work better than me talking about the conceptual side of things. Imagine you have an organisation where people thrive when they're self-sufficient, when they're self searching for answers. Now, when people join the organisation, they didn't always know that. Gamification was introduced to help them through and teach them from day one, "Actually, in this organisation, it's up to you to make your career what you want it to be." What did the organisation do? Actually, they looked at staff turnover and they saw the ones that thrived were the ones that had adopted and became self-sufficient. The ones that left, and left quite miserable in some way, felt that they were left to their own devices and didn't know what to do. They were never taught that, actually, self-management and self-sufficiency is the way to success. That was the strategic input then, that basically made the company decide, "Okay, we want to apply a gamification strategy to solve this." Now, they did test out other strategies as well. What they came up with was, from day one, and I think it even started before, the person joined the company, they were sent access to an app. In the app you received instructions, a little bit like a treasure hunt: "On day one, please find X place in X building, and meet person Y." When they met person Y, person Y scanned their app,

Welcome to this week's a Question of Gamification. How to use our gamification card deck And this week's question is a question from Remco one of our clients who bought a gamification card deck. It's our physical card deck that we designed a while ago, to help us to explain what game design is all about. Why we made the card deck We use it internally but also when we work with people that don't like games, don't play games, don't understand the games or never had anything to do with game design. We also sell it to a lot of people who just basically want to level up their skills and practice their game design. So both audiences buy our gamification decks. For us, it was very much a solution to a need, because a lot of the time when I did HR workshops, and learning and development workshops, I had people in the room that actually admittedly said, I don't like games. And I've never played games, or only when I had to when I was younger, did I ever play games. In order to address that, and still bring them along on a journey, where they could actually end up doing a gamification design for their company, I needed a tool. So that's why the gamification design card deck was born. 1. Choose who you are designing for The first thing I always say is to find out 'what it is?' or aim your design at someone. Now for the purpose of my HR workshops, the other typical challenge was that every participants audience was different and diverse, which makes it really hard to design something together. So I needed the card set that would address that. So the first cards that I would ask you to focus is to pick your target audience: learners, employees or customers.(hint they are light blue, green or orange). If you are aiming at learners, you will use the learner types cards. If you are aiming at employees, you choose employee types cards, or if your gamification is aimed at customers and then you use the customer types cards. You only need the cards of the audience you are focusing on, you can leave aside those audience cards which are not your target audience. Let's imagine we are working on something for our employees, which means we have the green cards in front of us. Then we just decide, which of these are most likely to be the employees that work for me in the company or work with me in the company. So let's say we have the corporate career makers that work in the company. So I've chosen one card as my core target audience. Typically, I would say, you can choose however many that apply to your audience, and apply to the people that you have working for you. Because you have a lot of choice available and we're dealing across customers, learners and employees, one card from these 3 sets is ideal to start with. You can choose more than one, if you're already a bit confident. Once you have three different types all playing together, what I would say is consider having specific experiences to suit each and every one of those audiences, because what you need for each of them for them to make sense and for it to be good and useful, maybe quite different. So for the purpose of today, we have a corporate career climbers, so that's our target audience, 2. Choose a game genre or game type Every game needs to fit in a category. This is where you use 'the type of game cards' (hint: they are dark blue  in colour and have type of game on the back).  I've listed 13 different kinds of games. But there are many more. Mash-ups, where you put two game genres together, can work. What I would suggest here is that you can pick up to maximum two of the type of game types. If you're an absolute beginner, I recommend that you pick only one. The reason for that is you want to keep it simple when you start out. Because the game mechanics once you start mashing game types up makes the game more complex. As a knock on effect it makes it harder to create, it makes it harder to do many things. So imagine that for this purpose.

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host of the Question of Gamification podcast and the CEO and founder of Gamification Nation or aka chief game changer. Today's question of gamification is: what makes gamification fail? Now, first thing, one of my mentors told me at one stage when I was saying, Oh, I don't want to talk about failure, I think failure is bad. And I do, I do have some hang ups talking about failure. I think they're private things I do in private. I don't necessarily want the world to know, he said, "Yeah, but failure is, your first attempt in learning" (First Attempt In Learning =FAIL) If we look at failure as finding ways of how something doesn't work. Then we are also accepting that, we are learning. We are not perfect as we come out, day one, which is also a good starting point, because most of us had to learn the hard way on how to do something right and how things have gone wrong. The podcast this week, therefore, focuses on what makes gamification fail. Unrealistic objectives First thing, I would say is having unrealistic objectives. We sometimes get asked really unrealistic objectives. We want to have a hundred per cent increase in engagement. Oh, good. Well, and dandy, but what's your starting point? Do you know what that is? In most cases, companies don't know the answer to that either. So how can you then know that you are looking for a 100% increase in engagement if you don't even have a baseline? So be real, get real and start with finding out what your baseline is before you start asking and setting really crazy objectives. I'm all for stretch goals. I'm all for being ambitious. But I also want to say that in most cases, gamification has had a positive impact. It's not a regular occurrence that it results in 90, 100 or 200% increase in something. I find those numbers a statistically challenging to accept. If something achieves a 200% improvement then what on earth were you doing before? Or did you exist before? There is a bit of an element of cynicism in that comment for me. Irrelevant to the end-user What else makes gamification fail? Well, if it's not relevant to the end user. Now, that means that you need to get to know your end user. A lot of the time, people who start in gamification, (and we have that sometimes) we are attracted by shiny objects, we could have this and we could have that. And all of a sudden, you end up with a wishlist of ideas. Definitely, in the early days of our gamification company, we would have been guilty of maybe adding more than we needed. Adding way too many mechanics that made it too complex. And in some of our designs, that still happens and then we take them to user testing. And we find out that they're not responding quite as enthusiastic as we had hoped, or as we did, and that happens. Knowing that you are probably going to get excited, you are probably going to add in more than you needed to add in. That is something to be mindful of. And that is something that is also the main reason why you need to have user research and user testing as part of your process. Because that will tell you for real, if you are hitting the mark or not in terms of your designs. So I would say make it relevant. Understand your user. One shortcut to avoid some of these things, is to actually get to know your user better from day one. We're currently working on a project where we are not even sure that gamification is the right answer. Because the first survey that came back from the large user base is telling us that really, they are not interested in game mechanics, they're really not even remotely interested in gaming. They actually want the companies to stick with what it's great at. So we are questioning whether we should even add gamification at all. In our user research step two where we do more qualitative research, we're going to explore these questions a bit deeper. That means having a workshop,

Welcome to a question of gamification a podcast where gamification expert and competence answers your questions. Welcome to a Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host for this show and also the CEO and founder of Gamification Nation. Today's question of gamification is, what is hot in learning? And I guess we should also cover what is 'not' as a sort of balanced approach to answering questions. My interest in learning A lot of our work in gamification covers learning because my background has been in learning and development, instructional design, training. I've been an in house trainer and in house, L&D manager. I've also been an external provider and external trainer, a workshop host and instructional designer, both inside and outside of companies. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that I keep up to date with what's happening and that a lot of my connections are also in this space. It's also where we started Gamification Nation was with ultimately learning related gamification projects. It's also why I have a learning gamification framework, and a book coming out in the space of learning gamification, based on the practical experiences, I've faced implementing gamification for learning in organizations large and small. Chatbots So back to the question of the week, what is hot in learning? Well, one of the hottest topics is chatbots. We see tutor bots or learner bots popping up a lot more. And some of the large consultancy companies have successfully implemented chatbots that basically find the relevant information for you, based on the questions you asked a bot. Some are machine learning based bots, which will search for information and learn to present the good material, others are just simple bots with connections to the whole database of learning material that a company may have. Chatbots function very much like your search feature in some sense. They basically act as the Finder of all of these great materials that people may be looking for. Sometimes, these are only set to work on an internal platform, other times, they can also search online like YouTube, TedX, you name it, any learning related resources that they can get their hands on. So that's one thing. So that's definitely hot. I don't see it changing anytime soon. To make the most out of a chatbot, however, it does need to be relevant and come up with relevant information for your users. If it still doesn't answer the question the user is trying to answer, it will just be annoying. It may serve as a database or a bank of questions of what people are asking or looking for. That's one thing. But if it still doesn't answer those questions, it will soon be seen as another useless tool that L&D has pushed on us and nobody is using. If however, you are a company with a large learning database and you have the trouble of many questions relating to 'where can I find this' or 'I need a course on X and I can't find that', that's when a chatbot can be really helpful. Currently, in most organisations, chatbots are in written chat format, so they won't be accessible through voice on most occasions. But for the future, that is where we are headed, where we ask our Alexa or Siri to find those things. And the voice-enabled bot then goes off and looks wherever we wanted it to look. So the tech is there. how good the tech is, is a bit debatable, depending on the company, depending on how you program that to work, it will have more or less good functionality. What I would recommend if you are embarking on a chatbot project is to make sure that it also has a little bit of adaptivity and machine learning attached so that it can find the best and better recommendations for your users. If you can include user recognition in it, and you can link it to an adaptive platform, you're on a winner. And that brings me nicely to the next what's hot in learning. Adaptive and personalised tech Well, adaptive technology,

Welcome to this week's episode of A Question of Gamification. And this week's episode is all about game addiction. In fact, I had a question this week, can gamification lead to game addiction? My name is An Coppens. I am the show host for The Question on Gamification, and also the chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. Now, I often receive the question, what about my kids, they are always playing Fortnite or they are always playing X-Game. At the time of Pokemon Go, it was Pokemon Go. Today its Fortnite, tomorrow, it may be a new game. And the thing is, game trends will come and go. The one measurable that you always need to look out for is do your kids do anything else but play video games or computer games or tablet games? If they do, then you're probably fine. Can gamification lead to addiction? I guess it could. So the honest answer is that anything where we're rewarding people and making them feel good, which is releasing positive chemical reactions in both the body and the brain can have the impact of achieving addiction. So I suppose the grassroots ingredients are there. Now, when we look at gamification, most of the time, we're speaking about business applications or applications that are not focused purely on entertainment, namely work, fitness, health. Now, I know people who are totally into using their Fitbit, and they would often come out with saying, "Oh, I'm addicted to my Fitbit" and "Oh, I'm addicted to my health statistics, etc." But not to such an extreme that nothing else matters. And this is where I would draw the line. The place when something becomes an addiction is when the person has to achieve beyond all else beyond all other reason. The fact that the World Health Organization has recently approved game addiction as a real ailment or real addiction is sort of to make the point that anything in too many doses or too much will be detrimental to someone's health, be detrimental to someone's well being, both mentally and physically. And those risks exist. The risk with gamification is that, yes, you may do something for a certain time, for longer,  more often, you may be more committed. But so far, I have yet to come across a situation where gamification has become an addiction. Gaming can be an addiction if nothing else exists beyond the game. That means no more social life, no more friends, no more work. In fact, the game always comes first. That's when it gets to that point where you have to win, and would even go as far as potentially ringing the support line of your favourite game, to say, Hey, I'm about to do serious damage, if I don't get a life, or I don't get my points back, etc. That's when we're really talking about a serious situation. In those cases, it's important to work with the individual to make them aware that something is wrong and to also seek professional help to help them through this. This is not something you should tackle on your own or the individual on their own. Like anything, most of us do things for the greater good for and we design for gamification and for games, we want people to become better. We wanted to have every great and positive intention. We also still want people to have a life outside of what we build. So we don't want them to play all of the time. We don't want them to be stuck in a game. And I think if your children go through phases where one game is so all-consuming and all-absorbing if they're still playing with friends, if they're still enjoying, play sports if they're still inviting friends over to come and play the same game, it's okay. Now if we look at the benefits of gaming, and that is something I often get asked about by parents is like my kids are always playing, and they're always looking into this, I want to limit their time. Think about it this way. For a lot of introverted kids, gaming is a way of releasing creativity. In some cases, some of the kids manage teams, manage guilds, run missions,

Welcome to A Question of Gamification, a podcast where gamification expert An Coppens answers your questions. Welcome to a question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host and chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. And this week's question is a build on last week's question of what are the processes that we use? What are the deliverables that we have? And this week is what is the reality of a gamification project? Because last week, we went through the five steps in our process phases: business specifics, user research, gamification design, development and support. And this week, I want to delve deeper into what is the reality like in a gamification project. We just finished a major project which took us nine months to get to where we are today.  I'd love to say it was a smooth and easy process and everything worked according to plan. But hey, that's not reality! In fact, we had from day one, a delay of a number of months, thanks to lengthy terms and contract negotiations and setup negotiations. That's something which in a lot of cases, and a lot of projects is forgotten about. Procurement typically has a say about everything. Commercial terms, we may have a say about too. In gamification and game design, what we aim to do and how we work is that we aim to retain the IP which is what makes it a win/win for everyone. That way we're not limited because of one game design that we used for one client, which would tie us down to never ever be able to use that again. It would be crazy for us to sign away. Let's say the intellectual property for a crossword or an unlocking of content game mechanic, and then to never be able to use that again with future clients. When we are looking at game design and intellectual property, obviously, anything like branding, graphics narrative that we take from the client or that the client already has, even content that the client already has,  that is retained by the client. We just put that into different shapes and formats. Always expect to have negotiations in terms. That is one thing. The reality of a project may mean that you spend a lot longer in the procurement and negotiation of the terms phase. Originally, we had nine months, and then that got shorted down to five months thanks to the lengthy procurement process. That meant some of our design processes had to really work concurrently and in very rapid succession. I remember doing the business scoping phase in two weeks, at the same time, we launched the user research phase, which had already been started, but because nothing had been signed off, we didn't have access to the client's people. So yeah, there is a lot of factors in there. Did it compromise the level and depth of research? Absolutely. And, you know, that's the reality. You know, I'd love to say for every project, we do user research with 10% of the target audience, or idealistically, that's fantastic. In reality, we may only get a fraction of that because of time, because of the budget, because of the due date. I come from the broadcast sector and in the broadcast sector, you often have a go-live date where the promotion has already started for a program or a movie or a production to go-live on a certain date, even a channel at times. Everything else has to backwards fit into the timeline. Sometimes that's not too dissimilar to a lot of our game design processes and project. Often the client has a very definite time. I recall one of the board games we designed, there was a definite conference date. So we had to work backwards from there and say, okay, which printer can still deliver in what time frame? How far can we push the deadline before it has to go to print? And how quick can we work then to make sure that we deliver, so it's fine. And it's a great achievement when we do deliver in those very sharp deadline situations, but sustainably over the long run, we can't do that for every single project.

Welcome to this week's Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens and I'm the show host for a Question of Gamification. And this week's question is one that on occasion crops up more from our competitors if nothing else. Occasionally, also from clients, but it's something we do always answer for clients in proposals. And that is: what is involved in our gamification design process? How does it work? What are the components? What are the deliverables? It may be one question split into a few elements. And I want to tackle that from the ideal project perspective in an ideal world where everything runs smoothly, where you have unlimited resources and unlimited timeframes, etc. Because the reality of any given project may be different. And I'll come back to that next week. The official steps in our process are understanding the business specifics. Now in this business specifics phase, we want to know, why do you want to gamify this project or this process? Why do you want to do this now? What else have you tried? We want to understand the reason behind it.  Then we also want to understand the success measures. How will you know that the project achieves what you wanted to do? How will you know that the project has been considered successful? Does that mean higher numbers recruited? Does that mean higher numbers in sales? What is it that you want out of it? Are there soft measures? Is that increasing confidence, increasing retention of knowledge, deployment in reality? Whatever the success measures are, we want to unlock those in our business specific phase. The other exercise we occasionally do, maybe not all of the time is the Moscow exercise and Moscow. It's a city, but it's also an acronym. And the M stands for: what must be included in the gamified process? What should the gamify process include? What could it include? And what Won't it include? So MSCW and the o's are the bits in between that make it Moscow: what must it have? What should it have? What could it have? And what won't it have? That sort of outlines the scope of a project, because not every project will need everything. Sometimes we also need as a measure of how we can get to good enough? How can we get to a project that will deliver but maybe not, you know, a project that has everything, all bells and whistles on it?  Often budget may drive this but also constraints of software that we have to work together with. That's sometimes gamification tools, sometimes it's actually existing software already in place. It could be existing constraints within a business. We recently quoted for something where people were hired and needed to be on-boarded very quickly into service and it needed to be done remotely. People had no access to the internet, but they did have access to some standalone computers, and it could be envisaged to have maybe some tablets without Wi Fi access, with the games uploaded on it, so that they could still onboard and learn the processes. There is an example with a lot of constraints to it. So in those cases, the must have, the should have, could have and won't have is absolutely essential. The other measures in the business specifics are key performance indicators, the current processes and the current experiences people have, then the as-is process and the to-experience. Because if you want it to be vastly different, we want to map that out. It comes from good process mapping and process analysis. Knowledge, I learned in my consulting days, are sort of to blame for this type of work. But we do want to understand, how does it currently work? Because if we're going to make changes, are we making changes that are so far removed up, we are potentially hitting rejection, or are there maybe processes that could be improved, and we should just go with the process. And in those cases, we also need to buy-in, of the users engaging with those processes. Finally, in the business specifics phase,

Welcome to a Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host, and also the chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. And today's question is: how does a gamification or serious game project stand up in cost, benefits and impact in comparison to a big name game like a World of Warcraft, FIFA,`Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite, you name it, any popular game that people are playing these days? The first answer to this question is that it is a question of budget and resources. Typically, the bigger name games have more budget available than most corporates are willing to pay us for a gamified process or gamification or a serious game, which is the first given. Most budgets in the corporate sector are relatively limited. And the second part is the resources available. So in gamification studios, the majority of us work in quite a lean production team, and we adopt quite a lean methodology to get to the end results. In the larger studios like Blizzard and EA who produced some of the fantastic games that we all love and would love to aspire to create someday. They work with bigger teams. They have many more stages of inputs. We, for example, have a game designer, a graphic designer and a developer at the core of what we do.  We don't necessarily have a story writer, a narrative writer, a level designer, several versions of graphical asset designers, several developers and in-house access to a wider skill set. So whilst it is something we'd love to aspire to, realistically, the budgets that we are given to work with don't allow us to get us there. Does that mean that the benefits of what we create are compromised? Well, actually, not always.  First of all the bigger studios are creating for fun and for lasting engagement and to commercially making the most out of any given game that they dream up and create. Whereas for us, the measures of success are different. Yes, it should be fun to engage in, if it is a serious game. In gamification, the purpose is always the business objective first. The benefits of a serious game and gamification is typically whether it has hit the objective that it was designed for. And the first objective is usually not, it has to be super fun. In most cases, well, it has to attract people to join the organisation if it's for recruitment, it has to improve sales numbers if its sales related, it has to improve skills if it's training related. So that's the first thing, so the objective is different. It should still in terms of fun aspects, and levels of wanting to play again be engaging enough. But some games, you will not replay over and over in a gamified setting. For example, if you're dealing with a game for recruitment, then obviously this is not going to be repeated over and over again by the same person. The intention would be there that the person may play it for a number of times, over a short space of time, even a week, or to gain access to the highest level so that they gained interview or they gain the skills that they need to prove to deliver. In some sense, the purpose is different. So the reusability for any one player is limited. Can it be reused for many more players? Yes, of course. That's a given. The other thing, if, for example, and I'm thinking about recruitment games that are built for competency testing, for example, once you have the result, would you go back again, it's different, it's a different kind of game than a game of Fortnite, a game of FIFA or where you have levels and other types of things that you may want to create. They actually are so much harder, there's much more to earn for so many more levels, so many more interactions and the multiplayer experience. For us, it's back to that question: does this make sense for the purpose that we're building? For some learning related experience it may make sense. And that's where simulators for quite some time have played a big part in training and for pilots,

Welcome to a Question of Gamification a podcast where gamification expert An Coppens answers your questions. Hi, and welcome to this week's a Question of Gamification. This is An Coppens your show host, and also the chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. This week's question is, how can you get started with gamification? Now, for me, that's a double question in one. For some people that means how can I get started for building a career in gamification? And on the other side is how can I get started and put gamification into practice for my organisation? So those are very frequently asked questions we come across. So to tackle the first one, how can we get started in a career in gamification? Well, the first thing I would say is to look to become an intern. Ask organisations like my own, and see if you can, first of all, translate an existing regular game into something that can be used for businesses. That's typically how I asked interns to apply for positions within Gamification Nation. The other thing to do is to start reading up and start following the main people that have shaped the nature and landscape of gamification. More and more degrees and master's programs offer and include an element of gamification. So if you are studying game design, that is for sure, fantastic grounding, and look for those organizations or those Institute's and universities that offer gamification as modules, as part of masters, or degree programs. I know in the UK, there's a number of universities, like for example, Coventry University has some elements of gamification and game design as part of Surrey University, Birmingham, there's a number of them. So do your research and find out from those of us working in the industry, how did they get to where they are now? So to share my career track into gamification, so first of all, I always wanted to be a game designer. So as a kid, I was really obsessed with puzzles and crosswords and was making games from when I was the age of seven or eight years old. And so if you have that passion, then you probably have a good inclination that it might be something you want to do. Then look for a career in game design. My parents told me at the time, and this is many, many moons ago, that game design was not for girls and there was no career initially, you know, you better get a real job. So I guess I took a normal degree. I studied international marketing and I also added a degree or an MBA in change management to it. And then only in the last 15 years did I add a diploma in game design, and I studied everybody that was a somebody in the early 2000s, 2010's. So, at that time, Gabe Zicherman was a key speaker, and I think a lot of his work in terms of books ond courses. He had a number of courses on Udemy, were excellent, and I would still recommend that you visit them. The other person I studied and read most of the works from was Mario Herger. And he had a course called Enterprise Gamification on Udemy. So another one that I pretty much absorbed. And then Yukai Chou, who I mentioned in last week's question of the week, who I did always level one, two, and three, Octalysis framework certifications with and then I read extensively all the books of the likes of Andrzej Marczewski research that came out and at the time, the biggest research was coming out of Canada and the `work from Lennart Nacke and Gustavo Tondello. I quite like and I still follow both guys. I've had the pleasure of meeting everyone at the stage of the various organizations and often spoken on the same stages, the Coursera course by Kevin Werbach. I mentioned that last week. Also useful materials. In terms of the learning space, a number of people to mention are Karl Kapp and he has courses on LinkedIn. And he also has a number of books on gamification and on Game Design and simulations. I highly recommend his field book in gamification is probably the best and most grounding book for anyone in the learning space.

If you have been a regular listener of our podcast then you know we have been a bit radio silent… Show transcription: In this episode, I give you the honest truth of why it happened and how taking part in a challenge like this helped me get started again I should say, apologies for being away. Yes, I did go radio silent on you for some time. And I guess it was my own self-consciousness that sort of got the better of me. I intended to set out and do way more podcasts. And I did. So we have, I think five or six, listed on iTunes, under a question of gamification. And we're back. So the reason why I stopped: I was self-conscious, I had some negative comments, and people complained about the sound. Hence we've invested in a new sound system.  This is our first time trying it. So please be kind, I'm still learning to ropes.  I had already recorded four or five different things without any sound whatsoever. It's definitely a learning curve. But we're back. Now, one of the things that struck me and I suppose it's a question beyond maybe gamification, but relevant in the gamification perspective in terms of me overcoming it with a challenge. I became a bit self-conscious, which often has to do with stepping outside of our comfort zone. And for me, podcasting or video recording doesn't come natural. You would say, that's a surprise. Maybe, for some of you that have seen me speak live and know that I speak on a regular basis. It may even sound a bit bizarre. But yes, it's the reality. I'm actually a very private, introverted person. And, you know, putting myself out there, is always a stretch. In fact, I'll tell you a story. Way back when I was very small, I think I must have been seven or eight. I was probably the superfan of a particular radio show which also shows my age a little because radio shows were still a thing. But on Sunday morning, the Belgian and then it was still the Belgian national radio in Flemish had a show. And it was called whispers out of the paper on the walls. In Flemish, it was called 'Er komt geluid uit het behang' which doesn't translate very well. Anyway. Long story short. Basically, I was their super fan, I used to write in letters, yes, snail mail, those things then did exist. Letters with suggestions on how to make the show better, I asked questions, etc. And then I was invited to the big offices of the radio, in Brussels. And I mean, as a super shy kid, I was totally out of my comfort zone. And although I was a super fan, I was probably the quietest kid in the room. And the producers actually found that really strange because they couldn't get their heads around how could somebody be so into a show and then not be able to speak up and say stuff. For me, podcasting is sort of overcoming that challenge. If nothing else of me wanting to rather be inside outdoors and hide behind the computer. I mean, I would make a great developer. And you know, it's what attracted me to games in some form as well. Because I could play without having to have, other people around me, I could just do them. The same with reading books, which was one of my favourite things to do as a kid. It was my private escape into fantasy land and into a fantasy world. I've been blogging three times a week for the last five years. And podcasting is a relatively new medium or a new part of my life if nothing else. It's a medium that I've started to listen to on my travels I've listened to a lot, I've also taken to listening to audiobooks a lot.  I see the value in it, and I see why it's important for people to do it. But what has made me come back, because I could have happily left 'the question of gamification' podcast die and be overtaken by others in this space. I am back to share more on gamification and answer more questions. I want to make this a little bit more interactive: send us your questions, and I'll aim to answer them to the best of my ability and with my perspective on it.

Podcast 8: Where to find inspiration for gamification? In a question of gamification this week we are honoured to have the company of Margaret Burnett distinguished professor in Computer Science at Oregon State University. She has carried out research in relation to gender inclusiveness in software use and developed a research methodology to test for potential stumbling blocks your users may face.

Podcast 7: Where to find inspiration for gamification? In this podcast I share where you could find inspiration for gamification design. Feel free to share your ideas too.

Podcast 6: How much does gamification cost? This must be by far the most frequently asked question, but also the most difficult to give any straight answer to. Because there are so many dependencies and so many follow-on questions that need to be answered first. In this podcast we give some insight in what will be the key questions you need to find answers to and what to take into consideration.

Podcast 5: Does gamification have to be digital? Very often it has been assumed that gamification is by default a digital initiative, but we find that it doesn't have to be and in this podcast we give a number of examples of no-tech or low-tech options. We also discuss what to take into account when choosing a digital solution.

Podcast 4: Where to start with gamification? When companies decide they want to embark on a gamification strategy the next question is often, where should they start. In this podcast we answer the question and the considerations to take into account when starting a gamification project. Where and how did you start your gamification project? Don't forget to subscribe!

There are between to 80-300 game mechanics that you can implement but to answer what the best game mechanics to use is rather case to case basis. This points to the question of what you're trying to achieve or problem you're trying to solve. In this episode, I'll be discussing some insights on what factors you should consider in designing your game mechanics. Let us know what else you found useful game mechanics in the comments. Don't forget to subscribe!

The most frequently asked question is by far, how do I persuade my manager or my colleagues we should go ahead with gamification. In this podcast I explain what the ways are to build a business case for gamification and then also what persuasion techniques I have seen working. Let us know what else you found useful in persuading your colleagues in the comments. Don't forget to subscribe!