[BLANK_AUDIO] Hi there, I'll be your professor in this course. Now, don't worry, I'm not actually going to teach the class from inside a video game. But I am going to show you how some of the techniques that designers use in games like this one can be applied to problems in business, education, health, and other fields. That's a technique that we call gamifcation. Hang on a second, I'll get out of here. [BLANK_AUDIO] Much better. Hi there. I'm Kevin Werbach, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. And I'm thrilled that so many of you have signed up for this online course of the emerging field of gamification. In the next six weeks, I'm going to teach you about what gamification means, and how you can apply it to solve real world problems. Some of you may not be familiar with the concept of gamification, so let me give a brief introduction here. I'll give you a much more concrete and detailed definition later on. Gamification is about learning from games. So, what can we learn from Angry Birds? Well, we can learn that there's something really popular there. Angry Birds and its various incarnations has been downloaded over one billion times. Can one billion people be wrong? But there's more to it than that. Gamification is about learning from games, not just in the sense of learning about the games themselves, but understanding what makes the games successful. Understanding what makes the games engaging. Understanding what games can do, why games have power. And then taking some of those techniques, and thoughtfully applying them to other situations which are not themselves games. So, for example, let me show you a service called Samsung Nation. Again, we'll talk about this in more detail later on. Samsung Nation is something that Samsung has on its corporate website, and it's a system using what we call game elements or game mechanics to solve Samsung's business problem. Which is they want more people to come to their site, and they want people to do things on their site to interact with their products, to write product reviews, to watch videos, to find out more, to register products they've already bought. So what Samsung has done here is to build a site using simple elements that they've developed from games. Things like leaderboards. Things like, badges to reward achievements. Things like point systems. And they've taken these and applied them to a situation that isn't a game. The situation is Samsung wants you to spend time and do stuff on their website, so that you will eventually buy more products. That's an example of gamification. It's not by any means the only kind of example of gamification. As we'll see, gamification is by no means limited to these kinds of contexts that you see here. But it's a good example as a starting point of what we're talking about. So in the next series of lectures, I'll start to unpack what exactly gamification means which will then allow us to start to understand how to do it effectively, and what are some of the challenges in applying these techniques. And if you're curious about what the things are on the bookcases behind me, well, you'll just have to watch the rest of the videos to find out.
