Gaming My Way to a BQ

In a previous post I described using some game mechanics to motivate myself to reduce my marathon PR by 40 minutes. I ended with a bold goal to drop nearly 20 more minutes off my marathon time in order to qualify for the Boston Marathon. This post is a description of the successes, failures, foolishness, and triumph of my 14 week quest to qualify for Boston, or as marathoners term it, to BQ.

First, none of this would be possible without an understanding wife and family. After some subtle hints and discussions I was able to persuade my angel of a wife to get on board with my plan to BQ and to even get excited about. I don't know if she had any idea of what she was in for.

Next, I needed a race to BQ at. Using the data at marathonguide.com I identified that a relatively close marathon, the Victoria Marathon on October 7 that had a reputation for qualifying runners for Boston. After a week of decompressing from the 2012 Seattle Rock and Roll Marathon I had 14 weeks to prepare.

As a true nerd I started my plans to BQ with a spreadsheet. I knew that to BQ I was going to have to run faster, longer, and stronger. After reading some articles and finding some training plans from Pete Pfitzinger I put together a simple table with milage targets to run each day for the 14 weeks leading up to the race. I also identified significant events and vacations that would impact my training plans and tried to schedule my lower milage weeks when I was going to be out of town or had a demanding week at work. This is the first training plan that I put together that included track work and tempo runs as a significant component of the training and both components were helpful in building speed and endurance.

Milage Plan with speed work and pace targets

I am blessed to live on a rather large hill that tops out at about 1,100 ft in Bellevue, WA and running the hills has definitely made me a lot faster as well. Plus the best views and trails are on the hills and keeping your runs interesting is core to ensuring the game stays fun.

In terms of game mechanics I had a grand plan that was on the second tab of my planning spreadsheet that was basically my training scoreboard. In it I had a countdown to the race with a row for each day. Each day I had several things to score myself on.

 

Scoreboard

The first was planned vs actual milage - I knew it was essential that I get the milage I needed into my runs.

The second was an effort score. One of the key things I learned about getting faster is that to do it you can't just take a leisurely morning jog. You have to run at the limits of your capabilities in order to increase them. The effort score is how I captured how hard I felt I ran that day. A 10 was pushing myself to the limit. A 9 was a very hard run. I gave myself a green if I got to a 8 and a red if I was 5 or below. I think this was the most important score for me in terms of getting faster.

I also had two other scores I tracked. Sleep points were based on if I was getting enough sleep. Basically I gave myself 10 points if I got 7 hours and took off points for less. Pit time is all about getting out the door in the morning. I gave myself some bonus points if I got out of bed quickly and out on the road.

I added a few more things to keep it fun. One was a list of achievements with a few prizes. I was tracking some of my times for common distances and for a trail loop around my neighborhood that I like to run. If I lowered my PR on the achievement I had some prizes. For example, on my trail loop I would get some new trail running shoes if I could lower my PR (which I did and got some sweet Solomon Wings). The ultimate achievement was the BQ which had a prize of an all expenses paid trip to Boston.

The other fun column is titled soundtrack. I would log the most inspiring song I listened to while running that day here. I had a plan to tweet all this stuff and build a massive following but life happened and I didn't get around to tweeting anything.

In fact, life got in the way of a lot of my game mechanic tracking. In reality I only kept up my spreadsheet for about five weeks before it just got to be too much work to fill in each day. I just got too ambitious with the amount of detail in the model and it became more of a chore than a game.

However, those five weeks were instrumental in getting my habits set for the rest of the long weeks of training.

One other tracking tool I did use religiously was my GPS run tracking app on my smartphone, RunKeeper. I have become totally dependent on it and can't start a run anymore without getting a GPS fix. It's a bit of a problem for me but I'm obsessed with collecting the data.

Where did all this lead? Well, I did meet my goal. I ran a Boston Qualifying time on October 7, 2012 at the Victoria Marathon in 3:09:38. You can see me in 84th place here. You can also watch a video of me finishing. I ran faster than I ever had before. It was touch and go at the end and I am still freaked out about finishing with only a 20 second margin of error. I was definitely at the limits of my capabilities though and the body would not go any faster during the last mile. At the finish line I was a jumble of emotions. I was screaming in triumph, crying, and laughing uncontrollably. It was a day I will always remember.

Did the gamification matter? As I've studied gamification trends I am convinced more and more that it only works in cases where the activity you are gamifying has intrinsic value. I wanted to do all the things in my training plan. They had intrinsic and personal value to me. However, they were also very hard. A lot of days I didn't want to wake up and run at 5:00 AM. In those cases I feel like gamification gave me the little push to get out the door.

I've now completed my registration for the 2013 Boston Marathon and I'm eagerly awaiting confirmation! Now I just need to find another goal to put together a spreadsheet for.

Reality Is Broken Review - Part 2

I finally finished Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal a few weeks ago. I reviewed the first 50 pages back in March. This focuses on the next 300 pages.

I continue to be very interested in McGongial's point of view on how games can change the world and I feel like there is a heart to her ideals about how to use games more in daily lives that is missing from a lot of the current gamification buzz.

I also find it interesting that it feels like McGonigal may be distancing herself from the gamification community or at least the term gamification. I think there is definite concern that as a gamification industry begins to grow and becomes more corporate it will be less like the type of games for change that McGonigal likes to engineer and write about and more about trying to get people to do things that they don't want to do.

I have mixed feelings about this since on one hand in my gamification research I'm coming to see gamification as less of a panacea for any problem - the initial buzz of thinking how cool it would be to gamify practically anything has worn off - and I'm starting to look for the ways that game mechanics can be applied to enhance activities that already have intrinsic value. However I still feel that the growing gamification industry will end up creating platforms and processes that will add value to employee engagement initiatives as well as change the way that companies engage with their consumers for the better.

Enough tangents! In terms of the book I liked the last 300 pages a bit less than the first 50. It was still a good read but what really captured my imagination was the core research around games and positive psychology. I did appreciate the feeling for the scale of game collaboration in the wikipedia examples and her Lydia example was a nice bookend story.

There was a nice section on Nike+ which appealed to me as a runner but unfortunately their Android app is too buggy so I'm continuing to alternate between RunKeeper and MapMyRun.

Gaming My Way to a 40 Minute PR Marathon

One of the things that has drawn me to the concept of gamification is the power of using game mechanics to enable personal transformation. I am fascinated by the process of leveling up and becoming better - of making things that used to be impossible possible. This is also one of the reasons that I love running.

Recently I've been making an effort to combine my nascent gamification research with my passion for running. I'd been training for the Seattle Rock and Roll Marathon which was run on June 23rd since January and as my understanding of gamification grew so did my desire to incorporate the concepts into my training plans.

I started by identifying a clear goal - I wanted to run the Marathon in less than 4 hours. I felt this was a much more respectable time than my previous best at the same race in 2010 of 4:09.

I put together a training plan with the help of some online resources - daily and weekly missions. Having the training plan gave me a way to keep track of "points" which were the miles in my training plan.

2012 RNR Marathon Training Plan

I used a GPS running app for my Android phone called RunKeeper to help me keep score. I got faster and I began to feel like maybe my goal wasn't challenging enough. I began to think about a 3:45 Marathon - which would be a huge PR of over 30 minutes. A giant leap for any runner.
 

My wife and I running the 2011 race

Along the way I added some missions - additional races that would help me gauge my fitness and progress toward my goal. I ran a half marathon on Cinco de Mayo in 1:33 and that was when it was clear that I was not only going to run a sub 3:45 marathon but I had the capacity to do even better. My training had transformed me from a below average marathoner to someone who had a shot at a time in the top 10% of marathoners. I considered that I might even finish in less than 3:30.

I also included some fun missions. While attending the GSummit I ran across the Golden Gate Bridge one morning. I love trail running and used the hills of the beautiful Issaquah Alps in the Puget Sound to make myself stronger. Waking up at 5:00 AM to run felt like less of a chore.

When race day came I ran a 3:27 on a challenging and hilly Seattle course. I took 118th place out of 3092 Marathoners (96th percentile), with a better time than the Ultramarathon man himself, Dean Karnazes - although I don't think he was trying his hardest.

What did I learn about gamification? Applying the mechanics of clear goals, a points system, and achievements I felt more motivated and engaged in my training than ever before.

One of the most cherished accomplishments for a distance runner is to qualify for the Boston Marathon. For my age group that means a 3:10 time. After dropping 40 minutes dropping another 17 may not seem a big deal but as I've gotten better incremental improvements are harder and harder to earn. So I have a plan to use even more game mechanics to supercharge my training in the next few months. In a coming blog post I'll outline my BQ plan with enhanced gamification.

GSummit Conference Report

Had a great time in San Francisco for the GSummit. The gamification crowd seems very big on twitter so I've put together a tweet for each of the sessions I attended that captured what the most important takeaway from the talk was for me. The slides are available here.

Here are my tweets:

Day 1 - June 20, 2012

• Krishnan Saranathan - United Airlines: Airlines have been doing gamification for 30 years - you need to find ways to differentiate.
• Nicole Lazzaro - XEO Design: Great background on what makes something gameful. Games must simplify, suspend consequences, amplify feedback, clarify goals.
• Tim Vandenberg - Teacher: Monopoly Academy, games as a teaching tool. Stunning amount of lessons that can be learned through Monopoly.
• Adeo Ressi - Founders Institute: Negative reinforcement can be a powerful motivating force in gamifying personal transformation.
• Dan Porter - Draw Something: Continually feed new content to your users and make the relationships very personal.
• Daniel Brusilovsky - Teens in Tech: Teenager who believes console games are dead starting with Nintendo. Not so amazing insights like mobile is going to be a big deal.
• Seth Cooper - University of Washington: Using games like #foldit to combine brain and computational power to solve cancer.
• Dave Cobb - Thinkwell: The Internet of things will create some revolutionary ways to engage theme park visitors.
• Wanda Meloni - M2 Research: Gamification is growing overall but particularly fast in the enterprise.
• Richard Bartle - University of Essex: Player type theory can provide models for engaging multiple types of users in your systems.
• Andrea Kuszewski - Researcher: Gamify your life to get smarter. Doing things the hard way was a surprising suggestion - don't use your GPS.
• Gabe Zichermann - Gamstorming techniques: Using a game is a great way to harvest a diverse array of ideas for solutions to tough problems.
• Jeff Ma - TenXer: What if employees knew there stats as clearly as professional athletes?
• Rajat Paraj - Bunchball: Use gamification to engage with employees, customers, and partners more effectively. Selling gamification in your company.

Day 2 - June 21, 2012

• JP Rangaswami - Salesforce: Get beyond the G word and use the principles to encourage flow. Google was once a goofy sounding G word.
• Charlie Kim - NextJump: Detailed explanation of the evolving process of using gamification to develop enterprise engagement.
• Jon Guerra - Blogger: Gamifying personal Goals: Start with your habits. Post it notes are better than mobile apps.
• Chamillionaire: Everything is better when you are a rapper - even your gamification. The power of an engaged fan base.
• Byron Reeves - Stanford University: Developing the academic case for gamification. It's working but the best is yet to come.
• Kes Sampanthar - Cynergy: Building models to understand the motives of your users and applying them will make gamified systems more powerful.
• Karsten Januszewski - Microsoft: The Visual Studio Achievements project began as a reddit post by a developer. The perils of negative achievements.
• Tricia Gellman - Data.com: Community #gamification. Define User Motivations, Apply Incentives, Create Expert Evangelists, Plan for problems. tinyurl.com/7rkxnc5
• Chris Duskin - Yammer and Badgeville: Combining the behavior layer (Badgeville) and social layer (Yammer). Good enterprise use case - Deloitte #Gsummit slidesha.re/LMbph2
• Jeff Atwood - Stack Overflow: Programming the programmer. Game elements should always exist in service of a higher purpose. #GSummitt.
• Keith Smith - Big Door: Focus on content consumption #gamification is compelling. Onboarding, yearn, rewards, and social = engagement and loyalty. @bigdoor #gsummit
• James Gardner - Spigot: Creating innovation games. Interesting lesson: monetary rewards ended making no difference. #gsummit #spigit
• Christ Makarsky - Klout: Reducing your online influence to a single score. Trying to find ways to make the little people feel special using #gamification. #Klout

Practical Gamification

I have been gaining some practical gamification experience recently in three different domains of my life.

1. Parenting Gamification - My wife and I continue to experiment with ways to motivate our 3 and 5 year old to get there chores done. We tried High Score House but that was too much overhead. Our most recent method utilizes small rocks as points and if our children get their morning chores done in time they get a certain amount of rocks. The tangible nature of the rocks has made it more real and exciting for the kids. The interesting twist my wife introduced is "bonus" rocks. If my 5 year old finishes his chores early he gets bonus rocks for helping out his sister. This has been great, both for getting the chores done and helping them learn to work better together. Similar concepts can be used when apply gamification to work or consumer situations. The benefits of gamification are amplified when a social pressures are also included.

2. Team Building Gamification - I introduced Chore Wars to my team at work as a way to encourage all of us to do a little better on some common tasks that we were finding it difficult to find the motivation to do. This is an interesting site that I ran into before I read about it in Reality is Broken. The use of the site has fizzled to a degree on our team but it did help spur some positive habits that continue to benefit our team. I plan on picking it up again soon.

3. Fitness Gamification - I have been using the smart phone app RunKeeper regularly as I train for a Marathon on June 23rd. As I've ramped up my training plan being able to track my progress and get feedback has helped me keep myself accountable and been very motivating. Recently I've broken my record for miles run in a week and a month and it fun to get notes from RunKeeper celebrating my achievement. Using the power of gamification and a degree of insanity I plan on reducing my PR in the marathon from 4:19 to 3:30 - which is an insane amount of time to take off a PR. Based on my recent training runs - recorded on RunKeeper - I'm feeling good about my changes.

There is room for gamification in many aspects of our lives and it can impact lives in many different ways. I'm excited to help innovate around how it is used.

Deep Gamification Research

When talking to some friends about gamification I learned that the Valve Steam video game delivery platform has a lot of achievements in it that my friend described as being addictive. So in the name of research I decided to install Steam and check it out. The CEO of my company also mentioned Civilization 5 to me as one of his favorite games when we discussed gamification in February. I had not played Civilization since probably Civ3 when I was a teenager and I just didn't get it back then. It didn't have enough action for me. But there was a sell on Civ5 so I picked it up on Steam and began to do some very intense gamification "research". Which is also why my blog posts have slowed down in the last month.

The Civ5 achievements are really well done and clever in Steam. I have not played any of the other games on Steam so I can comment if the achievement integration is just as deep on them.

My wife was not as impressed with my research as I may have liked her to be. Playing Civ5 until 2:00 AM Friday and then being tired and grumpy all day Saturday did not score me any points.

I did learn some things about gamification though. The engagement model in Civ5 is amazing. The feeling of productivity in the game is addictive. You get a very real sense of being blissfully productive making all the decisions to build your civilization and handle diplomacy and plan your military strategy. It was even engaging when I was not playing the game. I found myself pondering my next moves when I was running and sometimes when putting the kids to bed. I would catch myself on Civ5 strategy sties throughout the week.

The obvious lesson to me is how could we make our own jobs just as engrossing as Civ5? What can we learn from the mechanics to make each hour at work as interesting and productive as an hour playing this game? The tasks in Civ5 are not all that different then a lot of jobs. You make plans. You hit a bunch of keys on the keyboard to get something done. You get feedback on your performance. I think a lot of the Civ5 magic is the very short feedback cycle and the clearly defined metrics that allow you to see your progress. I also really like the feeling of complexity and depth to the game - to make a framework for doing a job that nuanced the metrics and types of action need to be more complicated than the simple points / leaderboards / badges types of solutions that are in the market today.

Anyway, my research with Civ5 was somewhat thought provoking and very engaging. However, in a concerted effort to spend more time learning and less time playing I think I need a break for it. I did manage to score a victory on King mode before I retired though!

Gamification Fails in the Hong Home

When I began investigating Gamification this site came up in my Google Alerts: High Score House. I thought - what better way to learn gamification then to apply this amazing technology to solve the really big problems in my life - getting my son to sleep through the night and potty training my daughter.

The site is pretty well designed. It is playful and the style was engaging for both me and my children. The mechanics of setting up goals and rewards was straitforward. I had high hopes that this was the silver bullet to solve my parenting woes with advanced technology.

That was about a month ago and the site has gone unused. We are making some progress on the goals but gamification has had little to do with it. What went wrong?
First, we were not consistent. We didn't really integrate the site into our lives. Part of that is that the most important stakeholder in the process wasn't completely on board. My wife stays at home and spends much more time with the kids than I do and I think she was skeptical of the system and wasn't excited about spending the overhead of managing achievements for the children.

Second, we had problems setting up our digital currency. It was hard to figure out how much prizes should cost in terms of points. My son was very interested in a large prize like a lego set but when I told him it would take 1000 points he basically gave up on the program. My daughter couldn't grasp the idea of delaying gratification and would immediately spend any points she earned on a piece of candy - which created other problems.

Third, refrigerator gamification is still easier. We have charts on our fridge that the kids get stickers when they progress toward their goals. They like the stickers more than the badges from the site. I think having it up all the time on the fridge is more motivating then going to the computer once a day.

I think we will take another crack at it sometime - but for now our family is not a high score house.

Gamification Gold 1

There is a lot of content being generated about gamification on the Internet right now I've decided to dub the things I find that are most interesting as Gamification Gold in honor of finding the gold nuggets after sorting out a lot of worthless ore...

So here are the inaugural Gamification Gold links:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/24/worlds-a-game/ - Cool post on gamification and quantified self.

http://realityisbroken.org/ - Still digging Jane McGonigal's stuff. More book review posts to come.

http://www.bunchball.com/sites/default/files/downloads/gamification101.pdf - Good basic intro to gamification.

http://www.redcrittertracker.com/home.aspx - I am going to try this out on my current software project. Gamification of Agile Software Development.

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/events/Getting+Started+with+Gamification - Good collection of Gamification Gold.

Reality Is Broken Review - Part 1

I've started reading Jane McGonigal's "Reality Is Broken" and I'm about 50 pages in. So far I'm very impressed. I'm sure this book review will span multiple posts.

Jane isn't really writing about Gamification so much as she is writing about how games in general can make us and our lives better. She is not so focused on more trivial things like badges, point systems, and leaderboards but rather on what makes us as humans respond to a good game and what it is about games that is so engaging.

She proposes a framework for what defines a game. The four traits she explores are goals, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation.

Her section on positive psychology and particularly the insights drawn from the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in regards to flow and how games can help people reach a flow state. The four intrinsic rewards essential to happiness that we can get from playing games listed in the book are: satisfying work, the experience of being successful, social connection, and meaning.

The book is extensively researched and the footnotes are a treasure trove for anyone who wants to understand the literature and theory around serious games. The statistics the book includes for the amount of time that is invested in playing games is mind boggling.
A quote that deserves more contemplation from the end of the first chapter:

"When we realize that this reorientation toward intrinsic reward is really behind the 3 billion hours a week we spend gaming globally, the mass exodus to game worlds is neither suprising nor particularly alarming. Instead it's overhelming confirmation of what positive psychologists have found in their scientific research: self-motivated, self-rewarding activity really does make us happier. More importnatly, it's evidence that gamers aren't escaping their real lives by playing games.
     They're actively making their real lives more rewarding."

Very Useful Bunchball Webcast

I just finished watching a webcast on Enterprise Gamification from Bunchball that was very impressive.

It provides a lot of good guidance around what it means to do gamification right and has some great examples of real world implementations that are impressive.

You can catch it on demand here: Enterprise Gamification.

Introduction

I love playing games. I love winning them even more. Some of my favorite games are Canasta (with my wife's parents), Settler's of Catan (with anyone who will play with me), Magic: The Gathering (when I was a teenager), and Tetris (any free moment I can on my cell phone).

After spending a couple of years writing software and managing projects for customer loyalty programs I've recently come into contact with the concept of gamification and have become interested in deepening my knowledge in this area. I've seen the patterns of games moving into business more and more. As I've paid more attention to this trend I've started to see how game mechanics are penetrating not only the business world but all aspects of our lives. I'm very interested in being a part of creating a future that uses games not only to make businesses more successful, but to make life more interesting. The reason I got into the technology field was because I was facinated by how technology changes what it means to be a human. I believe that technology has the power to make our world a better place to live in. I want to find out how I can use what I learn from gamification to make that happen.

At the company I work for, Parived Solutions, at this point in my career I'm asked to do a deep evaluation of a technology area and so I've decided to focus on gamification for a few months. I've done the typical things I like to do when digging into a technology.

I've purchased a few books - starting with "Reality is Broken" by Jane McGonigal and "Game Based Marketing" by Gabe Zichermann. I've set up a Google alert for the term "gamification". I've also added several gamification blogs to my iGoogle page.

I plan on using this blog to record the most interesting things I learn and anything novel that I come up with to add to the body of knowlege out there. As part of the proposal process for building intellectual capital at the company we are asked to come up with an abstract. I thought I'd attach the basic outline of what I'm digging into:

Summary
Gamification, the use of game mechanics in non-gaming applications, has been applied to various systems to encourage desired behaviors and engage users. In this study, the basics of gamification will be presented along with a framework for evaluating gamification opportunities as well as examples of how gamification could be used in relevant industries. Finally, the relationship between gamification and analytics and how principles of business intelligence may be applied to the measurements tracked through gamification to improve performance will be explained.

Opportunity
The role of gamification in the business world is growing in impact and in hype. In fact, Gartner says that by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes.
Companies are turning to gamification to engage a new generation of individuals that have grown up in a culture of video games and instant feedback and who are becoming a larger percentage of their customer base and work force. By providing game like mechanics to make purchasing products and completing tasks more engaging, companies can become more profitable and productive.
This opportunity is growing as emerging technologies enable rich, individually customized gamification experiences powered by big data platforms in the cloud and delivered to mobile devices that are always within arm’s reach. As employees and customers interact with gamified systems, they will generate valuable data that can be analyzed to enhance their value to the enterprise.
The majority of gamification initiatives are customer centric. Companies use gamification to increase their customers’ loyalty and provide incentives for them to purchase their products or build affinity with their brand. Examples of gamification range from simple progress bars that spur profile completion on LinkedIn to immersive interactive experiences in massively multiplayer games. Although the rewards for gamification often have no cash value, studies have found that their impact on customer engagement and loyalty can be significant.
An emerging trend in gamification is to gamify internal corporate processes to increase retention and engagement of employees. As companies look for ways to encourage employees to act on non-mandatory value generating opportunities, gamification will be a powerful tool.

Relevent Solution
There are several existing third party platforms that can be used to implement gamification initiatives. Companies like Bunchball, Badgeville, and Big Door are leaders in this space. These companies typically provide APIs and widgets for implementing gamification programs around a system of badges, leaderboards, and points that are becoming a common pattern in gamification. Companies need methods of identifying which frameworks are useful and if they should build their own. By providing a framework for evaluating gamification opportunities and guidelines on implementing gamification initiatives, Pariveda can help companies to meet this opportunity and respond to their competitors’ actions in this space. Many of the existing projects that Pariveda engages in can be enhanced by consulting with our clients around a gamified aspect to their project which could differentiate Pariveda from our competitors.

What's Next
I've been digging into Jane McGonigal's book and it is facinating. In my next post I'll share some of the bits that I find most interesting.