Congratulations. You've made it to the last segment of the
first unit of the class. You've earned a badge.
Okay. I'm being a bit sarcastic there.
That's a pretty poor use of gamification without any real context or sense of
meaning, or integration in a thoughtful way with the underlying process.
But, hey, you deserve some pat on the back for getting this far.
Oh, one more thing: You may recall early on I alluded to the fact that you should
keep an eye on what's behind me on the bookcases.
There's one more little game that will be embedded in the videos, starting with the
next unit. Periodically, you'll see something else
that shows up, and there's a message that's encoded in that information.
Okay, so in this last segment of the first unit, I'm going to give you some
examples of gamification in practice and a framework for different places where
gamification can be used. There are three main categories, three
main areas, broadly speaking, where gamification adds value.
And these are external, internal, and behavior change context, so the first one
is external. And here I mean external to the firm or
the organization that you're in. So typically, these are applications of
gamification for customers or for potential customers.
Things like marketing and sales context. The second is internal gamification,
which, as you might guess, is about applications of gamification to people
who are in your company already. Employees typically.
I also put here crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing, we'll talk more about
later, but it's a process of reatching out to lots and lots of people.
And either breaking up a task, into very small pieces, for example.
Trying to find a new star on very detailed, complex NASA star charts by
giving each person a little teeny piece of it to look over.
Or crowd sourcing involves situations where there's a challenge that's sent out
to many people and anyone who wants to can respond to the challenge.
For example, trying to win a prize that's put out as a general challenge to whoever
wants to respond. Crowdsourcing is not internal in the
sense that it's people who work for open company, but it's internal in the sense
of within a community. The organization that launches the
challenge needs to get lots of people. To actively participate, and crowd
sourcing either may involve no monetary reward at all or it may involve people
who aren't part of your company to begin with and therefore even fi there is a
reward finding them and getting them to submit and participate requires some
effort. Gamification can provide that motivation.
As in the other cases, gamification can encourage people to participate when they
otherwise might not. The third category for gamification is
behavior change. And here I'm talking about situations
where someone typically wants to do something.
Or at least appreciates the value of doing something, but can't get over the
hump. You know you should go to the gym more,
but it's hard. Motivation through gamification can
potentially change that behavior, make that practice into more of a habit.
So behavior change gamification is often, although as we'll see, not entirely
Social impact kinds of context. Things where, there's some either
personal or community benefit in the activity, but the problem is getting
people to engage in it, even though they know it's something they want to do.
Three broad categories of gamification, let's look at an example in each
category. The first one is an external case and
this is something called Club Psych. First question is, whether you can find
the game elements in Club Psych. Club Psych was set up by USA Network, a
U.S. cable channel.
For one of their popular shows called Psych.
They have a regular website for the show, but a few years ago, they set up a new
gamified website to get people more engaged with the show.
So, this website uses many of the game mechanics that we've already seen when we
introduced the concept. See how many you can find in the
screenshot here. As you can see, Club Psych uses many of
the game elements that we saw earlier, when I showed you Empires and Allies
and KEAS . So you can do various things that give
you points, and ultimately, the points earn you rewards.
Very common process, especially in these external marketing for focus gamification
examples. And you can even earn badges, and the
badges here this one looks something like a pineapple.
If you watch the show psych, that's a recurring motiff in the show.
One of the things that they've done with Club Psych is make sure to integrate what
they do with game mechanics with other aspects of the show.
It's not just a generic gamification. implementation.
It's tied in to motifs so that people feel like it's an extension of the show
experience. Here, down here we see the leaderboard,
here we see the player's avatar and here we see challenges or quests encouraging
you to do things. All the same kinds of mechanics that we
saw already. So USA network implemented this gamified
website for Psych. What were the results?
They were pretty successful. So overall visits to the USA network went
up 30%. Online merchandise sales, at a real
direct bottom line impact in terms of revenues went up 50%.
Page views on the Club Psych site or the, the Psych website overall went up 130%.
They more than doubled the number of views of the site around the show, and
they got people to share content on Facebook as part of the challenges in
this gameified service. 300,000 times people shared content,
which meant 40 million users were able to see that content.
The audience for Psych is only about four and a half million.
So this was a big marketing bump for them.
But at virtue of these relatively simple, relatively generic, although well
implemented game mechanics. A second example is an internal example
and this comes from Microsoft. Microsoft has a big challenge.
They put out software like Windows and Office to millions of people in hundreds
of different countries and dozens and dozens of different languages.
And it's a real challenge to make that software work well.
They have a large group of people involved in testing and quality
assurance. And the challenge that that test group
has, is there's so many people who use Microsoft software in so many places.
Even a company as big and well endowed as Microsoft can't necessarily get out there
and get people to look at everything thoroughly.
Think about it, Windows is in dozens of different languages, and there aren't
necessarily localization testing firms in all of those countries that Microsoft
could hire even if they wanted to to pour over the text and the dialog boxes and
the interface elements in an application like Windows to ensure that there weren't
some errors. So what Microsoft's test group did on
that case, dealing with localization of Windows was ingenious.
They gamified it. The test group lead by a guy named Ross
Smith in Microsoft developed a game. This is called the Language Quality Game,
which you see here. That was used for Microsoft internally to
test localization of Windows 7. So here's an example screen of language
quality game. And you see, in the middle here, on the
side, a dialogue box in some language. Probably some people viewing this know
what language it is, I'm not familiar with the alphabet, but it's certainly not
English. They would put this out to Microsoft
employees who worked in that country. Not an outside firm they paid, volunteer
Microsoft employees. They said look this is a chance to do
your part for you company and guess what it's also a chance to compete against
other Microsoft offices because as you see there's a leader board here about how
many bugs people found you click okay if the dialogue box looks okay but if you
see something that looks wrong a term that seems out of place.
You click that there's something wrong, and that gets recorded.
And what happened was Microsoft Offices started to compete.
They said gee, we're going to make our language localization of Windows the best
one in the company. And that game-like aspect of this
process, even though what it involved was very mind-numbing; sitting and reading
dialog boxes. The fact that it was put into a game like
framework, a competitive frame work led to very significant results.
Turns out that over 4000 Microsoft employees were willing to sit for free
and look at these dialogue boxes. They looked at over half a million
dialogue boxes Found close to 7,000 bugs. 7,000 times they found something out of
place. And several hundred of those turned out
to be actual bugs in localization that Microsoft was able to fix.
So the gamification was the mechanism. That encouraged people to take this
action. Now this again was internal.
So it wasn't for money, it wasn't necessarily for individual recognition.
It was part of their corporate citizenship around something outside of
their normal job responsibilities. But again, the game structure made it
fun, made it enjoyable. And help to get people to participate.
The third example is a behavior change example and maybe not one of the ones you
might expect. This example has to do with speeding so
how do the police get people not to speed?
Well the traditional way they do it is by putting a guy like this with a radar gun
and sitting there and watching and if you're caught speeding You get a ticket
and you have to pay a fine. Well, that works okay.
But it's incredibly imperfect. People only will slow down if they think
there's going to be a cop there. And there's no way there's going to be a
cop on every corner at every time. So what some police departments have done
is put in. Monitors put in devices that show you how
fast you're going as you're going by. And that has actually had some effect
even when they aren't tied to the police department.
They're just telling you your speed. That provides some feedback, seeing real
time feedback causes a behavior loop, it causes people to react.
So even though you know how fast you're going, or you could know how fast you're
going just by looking at the speedometer, seeing a sign up in front of you telling
you your speed in real time, Tends to have an effect and actually causes people
often to slow down. Now potentially though, we could go
further than this. Volkswagen had a contest called The Fun
Theory. It was a marketing program where they
encouraged people to submit great ideas for using games and fun to solve
real-world problems. The winner was something called the speed
camera lottery. It was submitted by a guy who works for
MTV in the United States. And his idea was this, instead of just
finding people who go too fast, what if we do the following?
Set up on of those monitoring devices, that tracks how people drive, and shows
them how fast they're going. And have a camera on it as well, that
takes a picture of people and their license plates.
So it knows who people are going by, and how fast they're going.
But, instead of having that being the way to catch people who are speeding, do
something different with it. Have the normal cops there, tracking
people with radar guns, and finding people that are speaking.
But also, any time that someone goes by the sign that tracks their speed and
they're not speeding, enter them into a lottery.
Give them effectively one ticket in a lottery.
Where does the money come from? Well the money comes from the fines from
the people who are caught speeding. Some of that money that would otherwise
go to the Government, goes into a pool. And at some point there's a lottery, and
the winner gets picked out of the people who aren't speeding So, Volkswagen
actually got the city of Stockholm in Sweden to try this.
And the results were actually pretty dramatic.
People slowed down. People slowed down over 20%, over a three
day period when they trialed this system. Even though all that was changed.
Was that they could win some money by not speeding.
The addition of the lottery, the addition of the game, or competition element to
this activity changed people's behavior. So that's an example of behavior change.
As I said many of the other ones we'll see will be behaviors.
That have some social benefit. I guess this one does in terms of people
not speeding. But it's a different approach taken by a
government agency that as we see, drives actual results.
So, what do we learn from these examples? Well, the first one is Motivation.
Gamification can motivate. It can get people to do things that
either they really want to do, or maybe they're not so sure they want to do, but
it's a good idea for them to do it. The second thing is that there are many
different areas where motivation is important and where gamification can
help. I've given you three different major
categories, external, internal or behavior change.
And the third one is gamification is not unitary.
These examples weren't all the same, they didn't all use the same elements.
Not all of them had points or levels or anything like that.
There's a broad range of techniques that could be used in gamification All tied
together by general principles of drawing on game elements and game design
techniques to solve non game problems.
