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