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.