Top 10 Beyond Engagement in Gamification

TOP 10 BEYOND ENGAGEMENT IN GAMIFICATION

TECHNOLOGY

Issue 13 Winter 2018

Steve Bocska CEO PugPharm

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A World-class Software Expert Top 5 Key Principles of Gamifica on P.46

Gamifica on Dynamics in User Experience P.50

How Compe on and Gamifica on Can Spur Innova on P.62

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EDITOR’S CORNER

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n this era of digital influence, keeping one’s attention and ensuring engagement is quickly becoming a distinct reality. Companies or institutions, irrespective of their size and shape, are consistently facing the need to adopt new and cost-effective solutions that can ensure employee or student productivity and keep them motivated. One methodology that has strikingly gained popularity is gamification. This practice leverages game-like elements and strategies to use in real-world applications. With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, gamification solution providers are coming up with innovative solutions that are ensuring customer engagement, loyalty and active participation. Here at Beyond Exclamation, we realize the importance of gamification solutions and have thus come forward with this issue titled “Top 10 Beyond Engagement in Gamification.”

Through this issue, we aim at highlighting some of the key companies that are exhibiting competence in delivering engagement in gamification and beyond!

Featuring as the Cover Story of this issue, we have Pug Pharm which is one of the few companies in the gamification landscape that delivers impactful engagement solutions that are actually fun.

Editor in Chief CHRISTINE [editor@beyondexclamation.com]

Managing Editor JACK [jack@beyondexclamation.com]

Art Director VIJAYKUMAR [design@beyondexclamation.com]

Graphic Artist NICK [nick@beyondexclamation.com]

Project Manager JENNIFER Aside from this, we also have featured companies like Allen Interaction, Trivie, The Game Agency, and Virtual Heroes. In addition to these, we have some of the most thought-provoking articles from leading industry experts.

[jennifer@beyondexclamation.com]

Development Manager JUSTIN [info@beyondexclamation.com]

CONNECT!

Jack London www.beyondexclamation.com BeyondExclamation @BeyondEx Beyond Exclamation beyondexclamation

In addition to our print magazine, we also provide relevant industry news and updates, as well as some thoughtprovoking articles and blogs on our website. Make sure to follow the same as we at Beyond Exclamation are looking forward to interact with our readers. Let’s connect on the web!

What’s Inside...

Business Boulevard

B E O N 12

Delivering Fun through Engagement

Omniscient Voyage

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GamiďŹ cation Dynamics in User Experience

Excellence Causeway

22 The Surprising Relationship Between Gamification And Modern Persuasion

36 25 Years of Learning Innovation

Newsmakers Locale

56 Bringing Interaction and Engagement Closer Together

Younick Corner

Y D

40 Making Learning Fun through Games

46 Top 5 Key Principles of Gamification

Definitive Destination

62 How Competition and Gamification Can Spur Innovation

68 Making the Learning Process Better than Ever

Steve Bocska CEO Pug Pharm

Delivering Fun through Engagement We boldly engage the online world

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oday, customers have an endless array of choices; whether it be the brands they specifically want to purchase products from, the channels they wish to tune-into or engage in, and the loyalty programs they want to be part of. Consumers now expect and demand more than just value, efficiency, and convenience, making businesses to take note and bring forward new ideas to set themselves apart from their crowd of competition.

Enters gamification, a proven and tested methodology of influencing, motivating, and, most importantly, engaging customers. The gamification process involves the use of gaming elements and integrates the same into real-world or productive activities. It taps into human behavior and triggers emotions that are linked to positive user experience and engagement.

Over the last few years, the gamification market has blossomed in a massive fashion causing a plethora of engagement solutions to enter the market across different sectors. However, amidst all these engagement solutions, the gamification industry lacked a key attribute – fun!

Putting the fun in engagement, Pug Pharm is one of the few companies in the gamification landscape that delivers impactful engagement solutions that are actually fun.

A One of a Kind Platform Pug Pharm’s functioning and approach is the most current stuff in the world, according to the company, and for all the right reasons. Pug Pharm’s approach and its platform is one of a kind as it uses the principles of actual video gameplay design to create great retention, loyalty, and motivation for companies. It presents mechanics and interfaces that exploit the motivational psychology that makes those games successful. These motivational traits include collaboration, competition, prestige, vanity, collection, completion, and so on.

Steve claims “Thinking about the problem this way is natural for us.

But in most other industries, it’s next level thinking.”

“In a world gone mad over quickfix silver-bullet solutions, Pug Pharm is your sober safe harbor.”

The Thought that Seeded the Vision Building a community of customer or employees is hard enough task, retaining and motivating them is even harder, to say the least. If they are not fully engaged with your company brand, goals, or cause, then you are on the brink of losing them. This would then resultantly cause the business to suffer, sales to plummet, and productivity to go down.

Speaking about the online world, Steve quickly points out “People are constantly online because it provides a channel for validation, connection, recognition; feedback loops are almost instant; so if you’re not supporting your community with highly personalized instantaneous feedback, you’re missing the mark.”

To ensure engagement and build loyalty, everyone loves the idea of a silver bullet or a one-size-fits-all solution; whether it be plug-ins with points schemes, leaderboards, badges. Truth being, Pug Pharm has seen it all. “If you’ve tried any of these, you’ll know that at best, they sometimes will give your community a boost for a short period of time. At worst, they can backfire completely. The reason is: the problem’s complicated. Your community is sophisticated and demanding. What used to keep people loyal, motivated, and

“We are a super-cool design and technology company full of gameplay and customer loyalty experts (and pugs!).�

engaged doesn’t work anymore.

Try these old or simple approaches today and you risk a community mutiny.”

Pug Pharm’s team boasts the requisite experience and knowledge to deliver industry-leading solutions that make sense and work.

A Unique and Flexible Picnic Platform Pug Pharm has its own Picnic platform. The platform is simple enough to be used by customers and can be operated by themselves.

Additionally, it is flexible and powerful enough for its team to configure it expertly and specifically to create industryleading loyalty and engagement programs.

“We’ve been refining Picnic for the past 8 years with many awards and

“We are experts in community engagement and game design.”

industry-leading engagement metrics behind it. It’s a loyalty/engagement designer’s dream come true, with everything thing from basic badges, points and levels all the way up to adaptive questing, virtual goods, collaborative challenges, minigame support, team challenges, content challenges, and more,” mentions Steve.

The platform provides everything needed to drive results and leapfrog over everyone else in your industry.

Its features are centralized serverside, making it even more flexible.

“That means we can deliver solutions seamlessly through any touchpoint -- website, mobile web, native mobile app, social media, real-world actions, and check-ins.

We also have a full integration hub for connecting to enterprise systems. So, if you need something white-label that works invisibly alongside an existing system or platform, we can do it. But if you need a fully branded, colorful stand-alone experience with lots of sounds, bells, and whistles, we can do that too.”

The Industry and Competition The main competitors of Pug Pharm are extremely skilled at what they do i.e. basic gamification features in enterprise integrations.

As long as your requirements are in-line, they’ll get you set-up in no time, hand you the keys and detailed instruction, and their

platform will pump out all the badges, points, and leaderboards you could ask for.

Fortunately, Pug Pharm doesn’t operate like that. “We’re completely hands-on. We have a

process that uncovers the important community motivational factors. We match those with the most suitable engagement mechanics drawn from decades of best practices from the video game design industry. We then simply conďŹ gure our platform to deliver a user experience that is perfectly suited to motivate the goals for the community. It’s like custom development but without any of the trial-and-error, R&D cost, or technical risk,â€? mentions Steve in an assertive manner.

If one is looking for the best and the most precise community engagement solution for your challenging business

issues? Pug Pharm is the best option to unleash the true Power of Play. Unlike other platforms and approaches that primarily rely on simple points-andbadges gamification models for motivating the online community, Pug Pharm is the one and only company that helps deliver impactful engagement solutions that are, according to the company, nothing but fun. The company explains “We help you find the perfect interaction models, creating a tailored experience that will nurture and support your ideal user narrative by using proven gameplay design principles like socialization, exploration, competition and building.

Experience Matters!

Steve Bocska is the only CEO of a gamification company with any meaningful experience in the video game industry. Prior to Pug Pharm, Steve was the Producer on Simpsons Hit & Run for Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo consoles; the Producer and Gameplay Designer of CSI; the Producer of EA Games’ Need for Speed across Xbox and PlayStation platforms; and was the founding CEO of Hothead Games, which holds a great mobile games success story.

While speaking about his experience, Steve answered an important question on why experience truly

matters, “Think about this: most companies today approach engagement by laying out simple challenges and offering incentives, prizes, and benefits if their community behaves. They’re basically bribing their community for good behavior. Here’s my world -millions of people paid their own money to play the games I made. I never had to pay them a cent to play.

They participated because it was enjoyable and intrinsically motivating.”

A Look Ahead “When we rub our crystal ball, the trend we see for the next 5 years is the most successful companies will be making their top priority finding affordable, costeffective technologies and proven designs to engage online with communities in order to maximize engagement, performance, loyalty, and motivation.

They will also need to collect insights in order to develop a more personalized and relevant experience.

That’s where we think the future is, and we’ll be ready for it,” concludes a motivated Steve.

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The Surprising Relationship Between Gamification and Modern Persuasion

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f you’re like me, then being persuaded requires a scientific approach and concrete examples. And that’s exactly what this article does. It explains how gamification can work by showing the relationship between gamification, UX design, and BJ Fogg’s modern persuasion phenomenon, “mass interpersonal persuasion.” And it has a lot of practical gamification examples that you can apply to your own products for more engaging experiences.

Today, virtually all companies (except for special ones like Basecamp) have to grow nonstop. Why? Well, that’s simply how the capitalist engine works. Investors pour money into startups, banks loan money to entrepreneurs, employees accept stock options instead of cash, all in the hope of the company growing much bigger. That’s why there is so much emphasis on growth. Otherwise, the whole system would collapse. It’s kind of crazy when you think a bit more deeply about it, but I’ll leave that part to you for now.

What we call “growth” in the tech world is called “persuasion” in academia. With this article, I want to show why gamification is a great tool for growth and how persuasion science (more precisely, the “mass interpersonal

persuasion” phenomenon) proves that. I’ll do that with examples and facts. Let’s get going.

Two Misnomers: “User Experience Design” And “Gamification” I think a lot about words, their meanings and how they shape our perception. This is of special importance to us UX and product people because we’re flooded with jargon. Let’s look at the following example to better understand the importance of words.

“UX is not UI” is a common reproach, and it is correct. Thanks to this famous photograph above, we now better understand that UX is not UI. But UX — or, more precisely, user experience design — is not usability either, as implied in the photograph. It requires an understanding of business goals as well as user needs and satisfaction of both, in a coherent fashion. But because the term “user experience design” does not imply anything about business, nobody talks about business. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, has a term for this phenomenon: What you see is all there is. We do not see “business” in user experience design, so it becomes all about users.

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Akar Sumset Founder Invertiv

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Gamification is another victim of misnaming. Contrary to popular belief, it does not entail users playing or giving them points. Yes, those are useful components, but not the whole thing. The purpose of gamification is not to make people have fun, either.

The purpose is to use fun to motivate people towards certain behaviors.

Motivation is the key here. As shown above by Michael Wu, motivation and game components are in parallel.

That’s why we use gamification to motivate users. If that parallel were provided by something else — say, biology — then we’d use biologification to motivate users.

So, what is gamification? One of my favorite definitions comes from Juho Hamari of Tampere University of Technology: Gamification is a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences in order to support user’s overall value creation.

My other favorite definition comes from Kevin Werbach of the University of Pennsylvania: Gamification is the process of making activities more game-like. In other words, it covers coordinated practices that objectively manifest the intent to produce more of the kinds of experiences that typify games.

As much as I like the definitions above, I still miss the emphasis on motivation and behaviors. So, here goes my definition of gamification: Gamification is about using game-like setups to increase user motivation for behaviors that businesses target.

Naturally, my definition resembles user experience design. It does that by mixing the first two definitions. I’ve tried to convey how gamification satisfies users and businesses at the same time. I am not sure which definition is the most accurate, but I know this for sure: We have been

playing games since we lived in caves, and we enjoy them for some reason.

It’s only sensible to get inspiration from games, be it for business, education or something else.

Persuasion If we want to understand persuasion, then we should understand, before anything else, that people are predictably irrational. Predictably irrational means that, even though people do not behave rationally most of the time, there are still patterns in this irrationality that help us predict future behaviors. This is why logic alone is not enough to persuade people.

If people were consistently rational beings, then we would be living in a completely different world. For example, TV ads would merely consist of logical statements instead of gorgeous video productions. CocaCola ads would be like, “Coca Cola > Pepsi,” and Sony’s famous “Like no other” slogan would turn into “Sony! anything else.”

Persuasion requires understanding neurology, psychology, biology, technology… a lot of “-ologies”. But arguably, the most important of all these ologies is technology, thanks to the unprecedented advancements in Internet and mobile in the last decade.

If only persuasion were that easy.

So much so that BJ Fogg said the following: This phenomenon (Mass Interpersonal Persuasion) brings together the power of interpersonal persuasion with the reach of mass media. I believe this new way to change attitudes and behavior is the most significant advance in persuasion since radio was invented in the 1890s.

Bear in mind that, from a scientific point of view, persuasion is an umbrella term for affecting people’s attitudes, behaviors, intentions or beliefs. It does not necessarily require

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changing people’s beliefs or ideas.

Let me give you an example.

My father, 62 years old, has always been critical of iPhones because he finds the prices unreasonable — not because he cannot afford one, but because an iPhone 7 Plus (256 GB) costs almost four times the minimum wage in Turkey, where we live. But he bought an iPhone 7 for himself last month. How come? Well, for a year or so, he has been telling me how his friends have these big-screen phones and show him pictures of their grandchildren. Eventually, he got fed up with not being able to do the same and bought an iPhone 7. (All he needs now is a grandchild… sigh!) He still finds it expensive, but he bought it anyway. His idea did not change, but his behavior did. That’s what we call persuading without changing beliefs.

Mass Interpersonal Persuasion And Gamification In 2007 a new form of persuasion emerged: mass interpersonal persuasion (MIP). The advances in online social networks now allow individuals to change attitudes and behaviors on a mass scale.

This is how BJ Fogg defines MIP. The advances he mentions in the definition start with the launch of Facebook Platform in 2007. Facebook Platform is an aggregation of services and products available to third-party developers so that they can create games, applications and other services using Facebook data. Facebook’s success triggered other platforms to provide similar services. Fast-forward to today: We are living in an era when we type passwords no more, thanks to sign-in with Facebook, Google and Twitter. Or, if we want something more advanced, we can get a personality analysis just by providing our Twitter handle. For an example that’s even more advanced — and scary — we can look at the debates on Facebook’s alleged influence on the latest US elections. This is how powerful social platforms are today.

Gamification is using game-like setups to increase user motivation for behaviors that businesses target.

Similar to MIP, gamification is quite intentional about changing behaviors. It does that by focusing on the entirety of the users’ experience to find the relevant spots where it can blend in the experience and do its magic. A great example of this is Sweden’s Speed Camera Lottery. The Speed Camera Lottery is a simple solution. If you do not drive over the speed limit, then you instantly get a chance to participate in a lottery. Even funnier is that the winnings comes from the fines paid by speeders.

MIP consist of six components. To better understand MIP and its connection to gamification, let’s look at what they are, one by one, with examples.

1. Persuasive Experience The following quote (and the remaining ones in this article) is taken from BJ Fogg: An experience that is created to change attitudes, behaviors, or both.

The key here is the intentionality to change behaviors or attitudes by providing experiences, as opposed to just stating facts and expecting people to be reasonable enough to change their behaviors or attitudes accordingly.

To better understand the intentionality behind behavior change, let’s compare the Speed Camera Lottery with the campaign of New York City’s Department of Transportation (NYC DOT).

Now, let’s remember our definition of gamification:

1New York City’s Department of Transporta on

25 Sweden’s Speed Camera Lo ery

NYC DOT’s campaign is quite impressive, with its powerful visual and message. “Hit at 40 mph: There’s a 70% chance I’ll die. Hit at 30 mph: There’s an 80% chance I’ll live.” It’s hard to compare these two campaigns because the cultures in these two countries differ quite a lot, and NYC DOT’s campaign encompasses a lot of different initiatives, such as new traffic signals, speed bumps, and pedestrian walkways. However, when viewed from a purely behavioral science point of view, the Speed Camera Lottery is more likely to influence the behavior of obeying the speed limit. Why?

We could easily add more examples to the list. Obviously, these are very simple examples, but the point is that gamification is inherently based on rules. That’s why it is very easy to build an automated structure to create a persuasive experience using gamification.

Example: Nike Fuel Nike+ Fuel app Fuel presents a lot of examples of automated structure here. Ÿ The daily average feedback is simply provided by averaging daily fuel points. Ÿ The “way to go” feedback is simply generated by comparing the total number of Nike Fuel points earned in the last two days. Ÿ The “Earn more active hours” call to action is generated simply by tracking the user’s active hours and comparing it to the daily goal.

The NYC campaign favors an indirect way of influencing behavior. It’s very influential when we see it, but it is not there when we actually need to slow down.

Unlike the NYC DOT ad, the lottery solution is implemented right when and where speeding happens. Ÿ NYC DOT’s campaign does not create an experience.

It’s an example of a classic one-way communication.

You see it and it’s gone. With the Speed Camera Lottery, we get a chance to participate and, thus, have an experience. Ÿ The Speed Camera Lottery is more fun than the NYC DOT’s campaign because the former is a well-gamified campaign and the latter is basically an informative ad. Ÿ

Example: FitWell

That being said, though highly successful (reducing the average speed by 22%), the Speed Camera Lottery had one downside. Some geniuses started circling around to increase their likelihood of winning the lottery. Well, that did not quite work out for them, but we should always be wary of cheaters.

2. Automated Structure Digital technology structures the persuasive experience.

We saw how the core of gamification is to create persuasive experiences with the first component of MIP. Now let’s look at the link between gamification and automated structures.

By design, gamification produces well-structured processes.

Regardless of what product we are building, we need a tool to quantify behaviors to even start with gamification. Think of something similar to Google Analytics or MixPanel. For behavior tracking to be useful, we do not just count how many people perform a certain behavior, but rather define rules like, “If a user clicks five help links in a session, then open the chat window.” Gamification, by nature, is built on top of these kinds of rules: Ÿ Automated feedback: “If a user logs in for five consecutive days, then show them a message to congratulate them on their consistency.” Ÿ Points: “If a user invites a friend, then reward them with 5 points.” Ÿ Levels: “If a user collects 1000 points and receives 5 likes, then bump them up to level 3.”

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FitWell app I did gamification design for FitWell, an app that tailors meal plans and workout regimens according to the app’s assessment.

Our research showed that the most important problem people encounter during their fitness journey is that they lack feedback after a while. At the beginning, we feel energized, see changes in our posture and, thus, feel motivated. After a while, though, progress slows, and we start worrying that our efforts are accomplishing nothing. That’s where gamification comes into play.

With a lot of automated feedback loops, users get various encouraging feedback when their body fails to provide any.

Example: Duolingo

Duolingo “Words Learned” and “Shop” Duolingo takes the automated experience a step further with “Shop.” Thanks to the shop, not only do I get feedback on my progress, but I also get to reward myself with Lingots (the in-app currency) all by myself.

Yes, we do not have to gamify our products to provide these kinds of experiences, but it is much easier if we do. Gamification forces us to think of actions and feedbacks that, by nature, produce an automated structure.

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3. Social Distribution The persuasive experience is shared from one friend to another.

Example: Flipkart

We just saw how gamification helps us with automating persuasive experiences. Now let's see how gamification fuels social distribution.

Just four words: “Invite friends, earn money!” Money here is a variable. It could be anything from free disk space to an invitation to that new cool app. The key here is that it always involves friends and some kind of reward.

Example: Dropbox The pattern is obvious by now: invite → sign up → earn money → perform extra behavior → earn even more money.

But that is not necessarily the only way. Look at what Gmail does with Inbox.

Example: Inbox

Dropbox rewards both you and your friend.

Notice how Dropbox not only offers rewards but also makes it extremely easy to share.

Example: Airbnb

Do you remember the days when Inbox came out?

Did you too harass your friends for an invitation, like my friends did to me?

Gmail had more than 500 million users when Inbox was released as an invitation-only product. So, obviously, Inbox was not after acquisition. But what was it after?

Adoption. This is why it turned the social distribution scheme upside down. Instead of rewarding people with money or free disk space, it rewarded people with the privilege of having invitations. Those privileged people (the innovators and early adopters) were already going to try Inbox. By giving innovators and early adopters a higher status, Google turned them into a distribution tool. Limited access made the early majority crave for Inbox, which in turn both accelerated adoption and increased the satisfaction of those lucky enough to use Inbox.

Airbnb does everything Dropbox does and take it a step further: If your friend travels using Airbnb, then you get $75 more.

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Has it worked for Google? I don’t know the exact numbers, but the screenshot above, along with insights from an ex-Google product manager, are key signals that it worked out very well for Google.

Speaking of the “Invite people and earn X” tactic, I have this friend who subscribed to a healthy-eating service that gives free meals in exchange for invitations. Following this tactic, he eventually had to cancel his subscription because he brought on too many people and ended up gaining more weight!

4. Rapid Cycle What this means is that the time between invitation, acceptance, and a subsequent invitation needs to be small.

On a more abstract level, rapid cycle can be restated as follows: What this means is that the time between action, feedback, and a subsequent action needs to be small.

When viewed like this, Nir Eyal’s hook model, the most important tool in my gamification toolbox, perfectly matches rapid cycle. ‘Hook’ is Nir’s explanation for why some products are so habit forming. Simply put, we get motivated if we get positive and instant feedback for our behaviors. Even better, if we get a chance to take a further step, we get even more motivated.

I won’t explain the whole hook model here, but here is the gist: Ÿ

Hook has its roots — surprise, surprise — in BJ Fogg’s behavior model, which explains how behavior occurs. BJ Fogg shows that we need a trigger, motivation, and ability to perform a behavior.

Ÿ

On top of Fogg’s behavior model, Nir Eyal adds a variable reward, so that people keep coming for more.

Ÿ

And Eyal asks for an investment behavior, which increases the user’s expectation of even more rewards in the future.

Let’s see a couple of examples of the hook model.

Examples

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3RJ Metrics Blog, Janessa Lantz leverage your users’ networks on those platforms. But that is not the only way. Suppose you have a SaaS analytics product. How can you reach millions? Provide Google Analytics integration and voilà! Now you're relevant to millions of people.

5. Huge Social Graph The persuasive experience can potentially reach millions of people connected through social ties or structured interactions.

Having millions of users is not enough for MIP to happen.

What you need is millions of connected people, and the nice part is that they do not have to be your users either.

You need the potential to reach millions. How? Well, for one, there are social networks. Use social log-in and

Let’s look at how gamification helps connect people.

Example: Quora

Quora’s “Ask to Answer”

Ÿ

Quora suggests people with related expertise when we ask a question. This is an amazing solution. Why?

The combination of points 1 and 2 increases highquality content, engagement and connectedness on Quora.

And this is all possible thanks to a very simple game mechanic: mastery. None of this would work if Quora did not have those domain experts.

It helps us get answers much faster and from reliable sources. Ÿ It honors people who get asked to answer, which gets them motivated and engaged. (A common phrase on Quora is, “Thank you for A2A.”) Ÿ

Example: Yemeksepeti

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Yemeksepeti is Turkey’s Delivery Hero, acquired by the actual Delivery Hero for $589 million.

introduce its own version of A2A. I don’t know if they plan to do this (although it’s one of the ideas we presented to them four years ago), but they could surface experts who help others answer the toughest of all questions: “What should I eat?”

This example is from my hometown — hence, the language in the photo. Yemeksepeti is the Turkish version of Delivery Hero. They recently introduced a “muhtar” feature. Muhtar means “headman” in Turkish. A muhtar knows everyone and every detail about a neighborhood. So, the one with the most points in a neighborhood becomes the muhtar. As you can see, Alper G. is the muhtar in my neighborhood (the list on the right is the leaderboard).

That’s the power of gamification. By introducing competition (or collaboration, as we saw with Quora), it makes socialization possible on a very large scale without people actually having to know each other.

6. Measurable Impact The effect of the persuasive experience is observable by users and creators.

I’ve been using Yemeksepeti for more than five years, and this is the first time I’ve been more curious about the people using it than about the restaurants on Yemeksepeti. The reason is the muhtars. Not only does it show who a neighbourhood’s muhtar is, but it also shows their recent orders and what other participants are doing on Yemeksepeti. The muhtar feature provides the basic socialproof mechanism that Yemeksepeti needed. It helps greatly with making faster decisions and increases the credibility of the restaurants’ scores. (People score a restaurant after a delivery, similar to scoring an Uber driver.)

One of the core components of gamification is quantification of what users do and of the things happening around them. This way, gamification makes everything measurable by nature. Even the tiniest of behaviors are quantified and presented in various ways, sometimes as raw data, other times as points, levels or progress bars. Let’s look at some examples.

Example: Twitter

The Muhtar feature also paves the way for Yemeksepeti to

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Everything, including followers, moments, likes and retweets, is quantified and put front and center.

Example: Quora and Medium

Medium and Quora are very different in how people create content, but in the end, it is content they create. That’s why it is not surprising to see that almost identical statistics are provided.

Summary Ÿ Similar to MIP’s persuasive experience component, good gamification always directly targets behaviors and blends in the experience. Ÿ MIP relies on automated structures, and gamification relies on behavior-based rules, which makes it extremely easy to build automated structures. Ÿ MIP requires social distribution, and gamification responds to this with a killer feature: Invite friends and earn money,

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disk space, beta participation etc. This is an old gamification practice and a powerful social-distribution tool. And you do not always have to give away “stuff.”

Giving away status works, too. Ÿ Rapid cycles are at the heart of MIP. They are at the core of gamification, too, as shown by Nir Eyal’s hook model. People get motivated when the feedback for their behavior is instant. To take it a step further, try to make the feedback variable and the next step obvious. Ÿ Another important component of MIP is a huge social graph. Collaboration and competition mechanics make it easy to connect people to each other, even on the least likely of platforms. Ÿ Lastly, MIP requires people to be able to measure the impact of their behaviors. Gamification inherently requires measuring almost everything, which makes it extremely easy to make visible at all times. Ÿ

Ÿ

Gamification aims to use fun in order to motivate users towards behaviors that businesses target. This approach satisfies both the user and the behavior, which is essential to good user experience design.

Conclusion One by one, we saw how the six components of mass interpersonal persuasion relate to gamification, with examples. I chose well-known examples so that they would be easier to understand and relate to. However, I realize that this makes gamification design intimidating. You might be thinking, “Of course, Quora would do that — they have all of these great designers,” or, “Obviously, Nike would succeed — they have all of those technologies and tools”.

Perhaps also, “What does MIP have to do with growth?”.

Take a look at this:

Let’s go back to the fall of 2007 — a time when there was no WhatsApp, Instagram or Snapchat, when Twitter was a oneyear-old baby, when Facebook announced its Platform. When BJ Fogg heard about Platform, he decided to start a new course to apply MIP principles to Facebook and measure the impact of the application of those principles. Grading was based on metrics on the Platform. There was no homework or quizzes. Students were graded based on the number of users they’ve reached and engaged through the apps they’ve built.

The numbers shown in the image above are the results of that course. The students, some of whom had no experience in coding, design or digital marketing, reached 16 million users in 10 weeks. And this happened in 2007. 2007 is the year when the first iPhone was unveiled. Think about it: Some of those apps generated so much revenue (more than $1 million in three months) that even the teaching assistant, Dan Ackerman, dropped out of school. Five of those apps made it to the top100 apps on Facebook and reached more than 1 million users each.

So, if those students were able to design such successful experiences, why couldn’t you?

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25 Years of Learning Innovation

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Dr. Michael Allen Chairman & CEO Allen Interactions

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T

he most expensive training is the one that doesn’t work. As a learner, no one wants to sit through hours of slides or discussion without context and relevance to their role. Dr. Michael Allen, Scott Colehour and Steve Lee realized the same and founded Allen Interactions in October of 1993 to define unique methods of instructional design and development to provide Meaningful and Memorable learning experiences through “true” cognitive interactivity. They believed that creating training that was developed using advanced design and development approaches for iterative, collaborative development. 25 years later, the vision of Allen Interactions is still the same: to build great learning that helps to affect performance change.

Challenging activity within training content allows learners to internalize the topics of study in order to effect the needed change through visceral learning.

A pioneer in the learning games space Allen Interactions has been a pioneer in the serious learning games space for many years. The company’s learning solutions often combine instructional design with gamified sequencing to captivate learners and encourage a stimulating learning experience. The company’s client list includes some of the most exciting fortune 100 companies in the country and continues to grow.

“We have been given top honors in the form of Brandon Hall,

Communication, Summit, Davey, Omni, and Stevie awards year after year. And Training Industry has included us in the Top 20 Gamification list for the past six years. Our hard work pays off four our clients every year in the form of increased revenue, better employee retention and stronger safety results,” Dr. Allen asserts.

Driven by the best instructional design and latest technologies Allen Interactions provides a wide range of learning services driven by the best instructional design and latest technologies to meet clients’ training and business goals. Some of them are as follows: Custom ELearning: Allen Interactions’s award-winning custom elearning solutions are all about the learner and driven by the absolute best instructional design.

Clients’ final instructional products will be Meaningful, Memorable, and Motivational experiences that solve their specific business challenges and result in seriously elevated performance!

mechanics and elearning instructional design elements to improve employee engagement, motivation and, ultimately, performance. Because at Allen Interactions, the team believes that learning should be fun, engaging, and contagious—just like games!

Blended Learning: Depending on clients’ organization’s needs, sometimes elearning alone won’t cut it. Therefore, Allen Interactions creates comprehensive blended learning curriculums that combine the best of both online learning and in-person learning, enabling them to get the performance results and behavior changes they need.

Micro-learning: Technology is changing the way many organizations offer learning content.

Instead of long courses delivered in one extended sitting, micro-learning delivers learning activities in “bitesized” portions. Allen Interactions helps clients design their microlearning strategy so they can meet modern learners where they are.

ELearning Games & Simulations: Allen Interactions marries game

Together Everyone Achieves More

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objectives. “We build our solutions using the CCAF design methodology that Dr. Allen developed. With Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback based solutions, learners are able to internalize learning directly by interacting within scenarios that replicate their everyday experiences.

The learning is self-paced and challenging to encourage learners to make mistakes in a safe space and the lessons can be as individualized as the learners themselves,” Dr. Allen adds.

Allen Interactions brings 25 years of experience to its clients. Not only is Dr. Allen a pioneer of the e-learning industry, he continues to innovate and drive the company to new heights of learning. The industry is evolving as new technologies are developed and Allen Interactions meets that challenge head on with solutions developed using Artificial Intelligence, Virtual reality and real time analytics. The Allen Interactions team is comprised of highly skilled and experienced media artists, instructional designers, developers, project managers, strategists all of whom share a passion for creating contextual learning and creative training solutions that effect performance change to help organizations achieve their

Continues to create new learning platforms and go beyond industry Recently, Allen Interactions has partnered with The Game Agency to collaboratively build out some exciting new gamified learning offerings with even more new to come in the next few months. Allen Interactions has also launched The Game Lab an innovation division of Allen Interactions. “In the coming years, we anticipates significant growth in both size and scope. We are creating new learning platforms and broadening our reach both within and beyond the industry,” Dr. Allen concludes.

Meet the pioneer Dr. Allen is a prolific writer with nine published books on designing effective elearning solutions, including his latest second edition: Michael Allen’s Guide to ELearning. He is a sought-after conference speaker and recognized industry leader in the learning and training industry. In 2011, he received ATD’s Distinguished

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Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance Award. Dr. Allen was selected by The National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations (NECO) Advisory Committee as a recipient of the 2012 Ellis Island Medal of Honor. The eLearning Guild presented Dr. Allen with its Guild Masters Award which recognizes an individual for consistently contributing to the elearning community in both quantity and quality of content. Dr. Allen holds M.A and Ph.D. degrees in educational psychology from The Ohio State University and is an adjunct associate professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health.

Michael Allen was also the director of advanced educational systems research and development of Control Data Corporation’s famous PLATO computer-based education system used around the world. He was the founder, and former chairman of Authorware, Inc. and also the primary architect of Authorware Professional, which was based on Allen’s extensive research on creativity and creative problem-solving. It became a groundbreaking authoring tool combining power and ease of use, and ultimately the industry standard.

Authorware, Inc. merged with Macromind/Paracomp to become Macromedia, which was later acquired by Adobe.

Making Learning Fun through Games

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Stephen Bear Managing Partner & Head of Creative The Game Agency

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oday, people spend more time online through smartphone, tablet and computer than ever before. The average person today consumes digital media for nearly 11 hours each day and diverts their attention between their tablet, smartphone or computer almost 21 times every hour. Simply put, people now do not consider what they are looking at, but rather “what else they should be looking at?” The way we communicate has fundamentally transformed in day-to-day life. And it becomes difficult for companies to get audience’s attention through conventional techniques. The simple answer, however, is games.

Games engage people with social and competitive elements which result in heighten attention, sustain focus, and drive action.

Solving Engagement, Retention and Budget needs With the vision of developing games to make education, corporate training, and consumer marketing more fun and effective, The Game Agency solves your engagement, retention and budget needs. At the very heart, Game Agency is a software development company focused on building game-based solutions that complement company’s eLearning, mLearning, instructor led training, and large events. And the company does this by providing a practice playground for your learners to connect better with your content,

and offers trainers rich data to measure effectiveness.

The Game Agency is made up of 50+ employees from all walks of life but all united behind the common goal of making K-College and corporate training more fun and effective with game-based solutions. By using games to educate learners (kids and adults alike), schools and companies can meet them where they are with something they already like (games). The result you ask? Active learning, higher engagement, and improved retention. The company has two offices (Stamford, CT and Seattle, WA) and its clients include Amazon, Comcast, PayPal, Philips, Siemens, Wells Fargo, and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies.

Custom Game Development: The Game Agency makes engaging training games that improve comprehension and change behavior. Each game is designed to marry smart instructional design and polished game play. The games are used for new-employee onboarding, sales and product training, leadership development, safety, security, compliance, systems & processes, customer service, and many other training topics.

The Training Arcade: The Game Agency has created a game authoring tool that allows anyone to create training and reinforcement games in minutes. It’s easy to use,

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fun to play, and extremely rich with analytics. The company’s library of games provide a variety of different mechanics that train your brain to improve learning outcomes.

Motivate Cloud: The company also has a gamified, social, rewardbased learning platform that keeps employees more engaged by letting them earn coins, unlock badges, level up, and climb the leaderboard for completing training and sharing helpful content.

The Driving Forces behind the Innovation The Managing Partner and Head of Creative, Stephen Bear oversees the creative strategy and execution for campaign rollouts. In addition, Stephen writes a monthly column for Forbes.com and is a regular speaker at EdTech conferences. For the past 15 years, he has been creating games to educate and activate audiences. Since launching The Game Agency 12 years ago, Stephen has developed awardwinning games for new-employee on-boarding, sales and product training, leadership development, safety, security, compliance, systems & processes, customer service, and many other training topics. Stephen has also helped shape the education industry and disrupt traditional learning methods

with the creation of interactive games such a S.T.E.M, Financial Literacy and Social Skills which have been deployed in thousands of schools. Prior to starting The Game Agency, Stephen was the director of marketing at Atari Inc where he oversaw marketing for several of their brands and started a new division focused on custom marketing games for non-gaming companies.

Joseph Mcdonald is the Managing Partner & Head of Production.

Joseph oversees strategy and production. Joe works with clients and staff to identify, shape and deliver solutions that drive results and grow relationships. Prior to founding The Game Agency, Joe was head of Business Affairs for Atari Inc. and oversaw the growth of licensing and revenue from new channels. Joe formed a division within the company designed to bring the power of gaming to nongaming clients and this served as the incubator for what eventually become The Game Agency. Earlier in his career, Joe was Manager of Licensing for Disney Music Publishing and EMI Music.

heads-up Business Services. Along with lots of interesting war stories, he brings to the fore over 25 years of game development, publishing, and training experience. Richard has had the good fortune of working on training games with such companies as Intel, Microsoft, Merck, and Pfizer and educational games with National Geographic, Sesame Workshop, Disney, and The Learning Company. He’s also negotiated licensing deals for world-class brands including Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Monopoly, Scrabble, Bicycle Cards, Sesame Street, Crayola, and National Geographic. After computer punchcards went the way of the Dodo bird but before the first cellphone, Richard graduated with high honors from the University of Texas in Austin with a B.S. in Aerospace engineering and earned the school’s prestigious Presidential Scholarship. Yes, he’s a rocket scientist. His tombstone will read: “He Helped People Do Their Jobs Better”.

Achievements and Vision According to Stephen, it is difficult to pin point one moment when they felt their hard work has paid off.

However, he shared, “Our average employee has been with the company for 5+ years. I believe this is a testament to our culture.

Richard Lowenthal is the Managing Partner & Head of Business Operations. Richard

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Over the past few years we have won dozens of industry and business awards based on the quality of our work and our rapid growth. Once a client starts working with The Game Agency, most come back again and again.

These are a few things that tell me all of our hard work is paying off.”

The Training Arcade is the company’s big focus right now. It plugs into PowerPoint, the most popular authoring tools, and just about any LMS. In a recent study of >700 games from Training Arcade, they identified a few key stats: 4 minutes - average game session; 2.5x - average number of times people played each game and 64% improvement in knowledge retention. “We believe our games are delivering 10 minutes of highly engaging training reinforcement since learners are proactively returning for more and we’re excited to see a significant lift in knowledge across all of our players,” Stephen said. Adding games and features, integrating with more products, and customizing for existing and future subscribers is The Game Agency’s main focus in 2019. The company’s goal is for 100% of the Fortune 500 to be using its platform and to begin an aggressive rollout into KCollege.

Top 5 Key Principles of Gamification

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amification is a buzzword that was relatively salient a few years ago, but has since dropped out of the vernacular of modern userexperience design. However, the fundamentals of gamification — adding game mechanics to non-gaming apps — is still an important philosophy that designers should incorporate.

In this article we will talk about the most up-to-date takeaways you’ll need to consider when designing engagement loops for your app.

Principle #1: The App Experience Evolves with the User

It’s important to think about your product as multiple experiences. In gaming, players generally go through a tutorial first, and then for days or weeks after, are given basic missions and slowly ramped to more difficult ones. Similarly, highly engaged and elder players are generally using the app in more complex ways. It’s important to treate users differently depending on where they are in their lifecycle, and to build features and experiences tailored to a specific segment of that lifecycle.

An example of this is LinkedIn — where the user is guided through completing their profile in the most efficient way possible, and “progression” is shown by the percent of profile completeness. In the early stage of LinkedIn use, users are focused on building out an enticing profile and making those first connections. A LinkedIn user several months later may be using the groups feature, applying for jobs, and reaching out re-connect with previous colleagues.

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Peter Knudson Product Manager Unity

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Principle #2: Identify the “Core Loop”

Principle #4: Instill a Sense of Ownership

What is the main user behavior that your app is trying to create?

Incentivize those key actions (called the “core loop” in gaming) and reward consistently to make sure the user feels they are progressing. This is the heart of gamification — building systems that reward and incentivize player, so they feel some accomplishment for engaging in these main actions.

Whether it is a Tamogachi, a Farmville Farm, or an in-game avatar, if players are able to personalize something, then they will have a greater affinity for the product as a whole. The switching costs are higher, as by customizing something in-game is an investment as well as an emotional tie. Give the user something that they can love and cherish, so that will be more likely to stay with your product rather than move to a competitor. Empower their creativity with avatars, and give them something to feel invested in so that the switching costs to a competitor are high. Gamification examples include player avatars in the popular app Bitmoji or the Mayor status in Foursquare.

Principle #3: Limited Resources Users crave to be smart, and by constraining or limiting actions based on resources available, players will naturally try to maximize their experience. Many mobile games have currencies or resources, where players try to build the best base, town, or village. By letting users decide how to spend these limited resources, they get a sense of autonomy and achievement.

To see an example of a non-gaming app that uses Limited resources, consider the dating app Tinder, where players get a limited number of Super Likes per day. These Super Likes are single-use, where the user denotes “extra” interest in someone in their stack of potential dates. Not only does this increase retention by letting players log in every day to claim their super likes, but also drives revenue through users purchasing additional super likes via in-app purchasing.

In the productivity app Forest, every time the user focuses on work for the selected amount of time (called the Pomodoro technique), the player plants a virtual tree in the app’s Forest. The more trees, the more personalized the person’s collection becomes and the more likely they are to continue using the app.

Principle #5: Integrate Social to your Experience For your most engaged users, social is hyper important instill a sense of belonging to your app, website, or service. It’s more than simply

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adding a social feature to the app, but rather making it a core part of the greater experience. Clash of Clans is one of the most successful mobile games to date, and relies heavily on users self-organizing into Clans to discuss game strategy, as well as compete against rival clans.

Similarly, apps like MyFitnessPal and Strava area non-gaming apps that have implemented social into their app experiences. By sharing runs, personal records, and competing for the top run time in various tracks around the world, Strava has emerged as one of the most successful fitness-related

applications to date. Thanks, gamification!

Everything is a game, if you think about it.

From creating good eating habits, to cleaning your room, to hitting the gym — there are many things

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that we know we should do, but may have trouble building consistency. That’s where gamification comes into play; by creating in-app incentives to completing the desired action, users will be more likely to do the action in the future. In 2017, the concepts of gamification are alive and well.

Gamification Dynamics in User Experience

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amification features are one way to increase engage with your mobile app.

Reward systems are widely used in games, but there are certain game dynamics that be integrated into the overall mobile app user experience. Well-designed gamification features contribute to increased revenue for app owners, and can be included in your mobile app development sprints. Why do game dynamics work?

Gamification in mobile apps appeals to human desires, for reward, self-expression, achievement, competition, and status.

The most common examples of physical goods that might be offered are frequent flier miles (Turkish Airlines app), cash rewards used by credit card companies, food and drinks (Starbucks loyalty program), and gift cards (location-based shopping apps Punchcard or Shopkick). Reward systems used in gamified mobile apps can sometimes be synonymous with loyalty programs.

Digital rewards have no value outside of an app. But all the same, they can sometimes satisfy users even more than physical goods. Stickers in a messaging app, a song from iTunes in your music streaming application, a custom background, or just some virtual currency to unlock specific app features can go over quite well with users.

Reward Encouraging people to earn rewards for using your app can be beneficial for both parties. People are more inclined to complete actions if they know that their efforts will be rewarded. Increased user engagement also brings an additional source of revenue.

Peter Vogel, an entrepreneur who tried using virtual rewards in his business model, admits that virtual rewards pack a stronger emotional punch than frequent flier miles, cash rewards, and other traditional offers. $1 or $2 in virtual currency is more powerful than $5 in cash, because if someone puts $5 into your bank account it disappears into a pile of money and you forget about it, as you don’t need it right now. A $2 virtual reward, however, provides an immediate benefit and can be spent in-app to buy virtual essentials or premium features.

There are many possible types of app-based rewards.

Some can be earned by spending time in an app, while some might be earned by making in-app purchases. But no matter what kind of reward system you choose, rewards should hold some intrinsic value for users.

Empty points and meaningless badges are not sustainable, and should be crossed out from your app development schedule. Come up with some reward ideas that can actually bring value to your users.

If we transfer virtual rewards into the professional context, we observe a similar effect. According to research by employee motivation firm Make Their Day and gamification platform Badgeville, 70 percent of workers said rewards that were meaningful to them didn’t have a specific dollar value.

One way to motivate users and add gamification to your app is to offer points that can be used as in-app currency.

In this way, users earn points that can be exchanges for physical or digital goods.

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Kate Abrosimova CEO & Co-founder Kaiiax

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designing other types of mobile applications. Users can express themselves with avatars, badges (Foursquare), and through any other virtual goods. Knowing your product and your customers will help you come up with a winning idea.

Offering digital gifts is another great strategy for retaining users and encouraging social interactions.

Digital gifts strengthen relationships between the gifter and giftee, and pull the recipient into an app to redeem the gift.

Such examples of gamification are being used by Traces, a messaging service. Users of the app can leave digital gifts using any combination of text, images, video, tickets and vouchers at physical locations for their friends to pick up when they get to those locations.

Drop Messages, another locationbased messaging startup, had a great marketing campaign that revolved around hiding gifts from different brands all over New York. The scavenger hunt proved successful in terms of user acquisition, and opened new opportunities for Drop Messages to establish brand partnerships. I did an interview with the co-founder of the startup — a very interesting and useful read.

Sometimes digital rewards can satisfy people’s need for selfexpression. In particular digital goods that help users express their creativity are often highly sought after. Examples of mobile app gamification techniques that appeal to self-expression include allowing a

user to change the color or theme on their profile page in your app.

Self-expression The human desire for self-expression is the cornerstone of social networking apps, but we can also pay attention to this desire when

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Achievements Rewards can be combined with achievements in gamified mobile apps. While big achievements are rewarded with something special, like digital badges or trophies, unlocking a new level, points or a new status, small achievements should also be recognized, especially

when your user has just started engaging with your app.

want to be ‘recognized’ — you want to win!

Some examples of achievement recognition are sending an email or a push notification when a user gets their first follower or first story recommendation. By sending an email with the sentence “Fun fact: Shakespeare only got 2 recommends on his first Medium story,” Mediumencourages you to continue using their publishing service and also shows they are cool and supportive. People like feeling supported and being encouraged.

Points can be used to denote achievements, whereas leaderboards can actually rank users and theiraccomplishments. Leaderboards motivate users to become players, which encourages competitiveness and can be especially useful for driving a desired user behavior.

People like to share their achievements, especially if they weren’t easy to achieve. Remind users to share right when they receive an award. Sharing achievements helps an app acquire more users.

Challenges in mobile apps are generally represented by goals. Users like to feel as if they have a mission when using an app. For example, you may challenge your customers to check in at five retail stores that your mobile commerce application supports. When this is accomplished, the achievements you provide act as a visual proof of completing a challenge and can be illustrated on the leaderboard. Digital trophies don’t have monetary value, but they can effectively be shared via social media. Achievements, after all, are a fun way to engage users..

Competition Sometimes mere recognition is not enough. People are social creatures, and like to compare themselves to others. Sometimes you don’t just

TwoFit is a workout app we developed that has a competitive element. Users can challenge their friends to do a workout routine. They can then view each other’s scores and compete against each other. The results of the competition are displayed on a challenge board.

Gamifying a mobile app with competitions and leaderboards is not a problem for an app developer. By offering your users a chance to compete with their friends, you get them engaged with your mobile application and grow your app’s network.

Competition especially complements the functionality of fitness apps. Just keep in mind that competitive features shouldn’t be required, or at the core of your app, as not everybody is inspired by competition. In fact, some people are more inspired by mutual support and affirmation.

Status People like to be proud of themselves and to prove their status. Levels or ratings are the digital equivalent of a rank in the army or a title on a business card. Of course, earned statuses deserve to be highlighted.

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In Twitter your status is emphasized by the number of followers you have, in Facebook the number of likes or subscribers to your page. LinkedIn has a profile strength and connections. The profile strength is designed to encourage LinkedIn users to add as much self-curated data as possible. You achieve ‘All Star’ status by completing all sections of your Profile and by having recommendations, connections and endorsements. More on that here.

Levels, user ratings, or statuses — no matter what you call them, they can drive user engagement and provide opportunities for monetization.

Gamification tools Most developers use Google Game Services, ’Apples Game Center, and Amazon GameCircle, but you don’t have to rely on these tools when developing your own app. These services exist mostly for game development, but all mobile apps can use some features these libraries provide. Generally speaking, it’s easy to add rewards, virtual goods, badges, leaderboards and more gamification elements to you app.

Gamifying a mobile app doesn’t turn the app into a game, but can greatly enhance user experience, making your app more engaging.

Engagement results in your app’s increased visibility, discoverability, retention rate, and revenue generation. Gamification is a powerful way to get users engaging with your app.

Bringing Interaction and Engagement Closer Together

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Randy Brown VP & Divisional Manager Virtual Heroes

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ounded in 2004 by a team of developers, Virtual Heroes applies simulation and gamebased learning to increase proficiency for commercial, government, and medical customers. Initially, the developers were from the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, along with other game industry veterans.

The company was originally approached by the US Army’s America’s Army game development leadership to create a “government applications” group to support AA game development and repurpose that existing game content for a wide range of Army training customers who needed immersive single-player and team-based training.

Virtual Heroes remained a small business until it was acquired by Applied Research Associates, Inc. back in 2009.

The initial spark Randy Brown, the VP & the Divisional Manager of Virtual Heroes, had an educational background in computer science, more specifically in computer graphics. From a very early stage, Randy was interested in working to create real-time, interactive immersive experiences, as opposed to fully-rendered passive entertainment.

Back in high school, Randy used to create graphics applications on

Radio Shack TRS-80 computers, and I was impressed by the possibilities of the graphics created for the first Tron movie in 1982.

Once he began studying the various potential approaches to applying these technologies to solve training and simulation problems in realtime, Randy became hooked and has never looked back ever since.

Randy was the CTO of Virtual Heroes when it was still a small business. Today, the Virtual Heroes Division of ARA consists of a fairly standard game studio configuration, with producers, programmers, technical artists, artists, animators, game designers, and quality assurance personnel. Additionally, the company has an entire team of top flight synthetic environment development experts in Orlando led

by Jeff Lyons and Dr. Wes Milks.

“We work with a wide range of disparate world and terrain data sources to create relevant virtual training environments for many branches of the US military,” mentions Randy.

The first big realization “The key moment when we realized our approach to applying fully immersive game technology towards solving the hardest educational and training problems was the best had to be in 2008, when we were supporting the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program.”

The company worked with Warner Brothers Studios to create an educational game for AIDS awareness in Kenya. The game

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entitled Pamoja Mtaani (meaning “together in the hood,” a name actually provided by the kids during our focus group testing in Nairobi, Kenya), provided positive gameplay on the topic of AIDS. “We realized, “We really have created a game about AIDS that kids at youth centers, faith-based organizations, and military installations are playing together and are actually having fun while learning positive habits!” While I was there with our lead game designer Brad Willson during one of our focus tests, one of the kids playing the game actually texted to others in-game at one point (jokingly), “Look out Grand Theft Auto!” mentions an upbeat Randy Brown.

The game went on to be introduced at the World AIDS Day festival in Nairobi in December 2008 Making a mark in the Gamification industry The key differentiator of Virtual Heroes is its application of AAAquality game engine technology and environments to the training and educational markets.

Combining the intelligence of a fully instrumented back-end for its gaming platforms creates the ability to provide in-game hinting, procedural feedback, and intelligent tutoring capabilities to customize and tailor the immersive learning experiences for each user.

Speaking about the Gamification industry Randy asserts, “The key disruptions are coming from a

greatly expanded range of hardware platforms to apply to education and training, as our use of the Unreal Engine provides us direct access to all mobile, phone-based VR (Oculus Go, etc.), un-tethered VR (Lenovo Mirage Solo, etc.), and tethered VR (HTC Vive Pro) systems along with augmented reality systems like the Magic Leap.”

Having the ability to rapidly and affordably re-purpose its massive “back lot” of virtual world environments, avatars, and equipment to solve specific customer needs at an incomparable price point is one of the key benefits offered by Virtual Heroes, along with its significant longevity in this ever-changing market, coming up on 15 years at this point.

A leader with unmatched experience After becoming the Division Manager of the Virtual Heroes Division of ARA, Randy Brown has spearheaded the company towards success and established its footing in the Gamification landscape. Randy has developed interactive 3D graphics software at Amoco, Digital Equipment, Ex Machina, Data General, SAS Institute, Southpeak Interactive, and the Research Triangle Institute of North Carolina. He has directed the development for oil exploration, graphics libraries, visualization, training, education, simulation, and gaming for a wide range of commercial, government, and private organizations over the past 30 years.

During his graduate school program at UNC in the late 80s, Randy worked on interactive virtual building walkthrough development, using very earlystage head-mounted displays, walking on a treadmill, using a bicycle handlebar mount to “steer” through the virtual environment to gain a sense of the virtual spaces.

He worked abroad on graphics research at Digital Equipment’s Paris Research Lab and worked for Thompson Digital Image (TDI) in their Paris Ex Machina production company, creating a Distributed Rendering Server System (DRSS) to improve their throughput of graphics frame rendering for all the simultaneous production programs.

In the early 90s at Data General, he worked on graphics chip, graphics card, and graphics library (PEX) hardware and software layers to support the DG minicomputer program. At the SAS Institute, he worked on graphics resource management systems and SAS/Spectraview multivariate visualization software. Randy then moved to the Southpeak Interactive game studio of SAS in the late 90s working with Phil Abbott to repurpose their “Video Reality” game technology and apply it to virtual driver training software development for highway patrol and school bus drivers.

In the early 2000s, he moved to the Research Triangle Institute and began creating immersive, interactive training content for the US military in earnest, working

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with the US Army Signal Corps to support training a wide range of military vehicles and equipment.

This led to plans with the US Army to start Virtual Heroes in 2004, when Randy and team begin applying Epic Games Unreal Engine technologies to virtual worlds, simulation, and training problems.

Walking down the path of expansion “As lower-end (we often call it “trailing-edge”) technology platforms continue to evolve and improve, we are finding more and more organizations are able to deploy immersive, interactive, realtime training content to their endusers and trainees in a much broader way than in the past, on much more affordable delivery platforms than were even required 5 years ago,” Randy points out about the changing industry scenario.

Virtual Heroes will continue to expand its deliveries of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality solutions, and its technology innovations on top of AAA game engines like Unreal will distinguish its deliverables and capabilities from others in the field.

Phil McKinney President & CEO CableLabs

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How Competition and Gamification Can Spur Innovation

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he concept of gamification is increasingly popular as a means of motivating employees, increasing productivity, and moving ideas forward. This trend is one driving force behind the proliferation of innovation competitions around the world, but it’s also true that these kinds of competitions aren’t anything new.

The concept dates back to the 1700s when governments and leaders were known to offer prizes in exchange for solutions to problems. For instance, Napoleon is believed to have given a substantial financial prize to the person who could come up with the best idea for food preservation. That isn’t much different from some of the innovation prizes offered today. Our problems have just become more complicated. Can competitions really spur world-changing innovation in the 21st century?

What Is an Innovation Competition?

These competitions take many forms, from small challenges within companies or even departments, to international idea contests to solve pressing global issues. There must be a set of rules or parameters, and also some kind of reward for the winner or winners. It may be a cash prize, seed money to advance a startup, or simply industry recognition or attention from consumers.

There are competitions of this nature bringing new ideas to life in every industry imaginable right now. Some of the more prominent innovation competitions in 2015 included: Ÿ

Insight Innovation Competition — Driving innovation in the marketing research field

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Ÿ

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Extreme Tech Challenge — Giving startups a boost through vendor sponsorship and other lucrative rewards Imagine Cup — Sponsored by Microsoft, this competition challenged students aged 16 and up to create new, innovative software

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European Social Innovation Competition — The European Commission’s attempt to find new ideas to help Europe grow sustainably

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NOVA Innovation Competition — Rewarding innovative startup companies in the fields of renewable energy, high-efficiency products, sustainable products, and habitats

But there are also plenty of smaller competitions that happen within organizations and communities that can be just as effective (if not more so) in solving specific problems and spurring innovation and progress.

There’s also gamification, another side of the same coin: while there may not be a prize for the best idea, g amification turns innovation into a game, setting many minds to the same task and transforming a group of disparate people into a“swarm” that is focused on a common goal.

One example of this is the online

game called Foldit created by AIDS researchers, whose players solved a puzzle about the structure of an enzyme involved in the production of HIV. A problem that had scientists stumped was solved by the gamers within three weeks.

How Competitions and Games Can Spur Innovation A competition that is well designed and thoughtfully executed can both prompt new ideas and accelerate good ones that are already out there. At its core, it is an excellent way to bring attention and resources — both monetary and intellectual — to problems and spaces that might not draw those resources without some kind of external force to help. Innovations that don’t necessarily have immediate or lucrative market value, for instance, might may have trouble getting off the ground without the extra push and reward that a competition or game provides.

Innovation competitions and games can set many creative minds to the task of solving a tough problem, a prob lem that the competitors may not have even heard of before they heard about the challenge. It can also bring together creative thinkers who may not have met or collaborated otherwise. Essentially, competitions and games can artificially create the conditions that have fostered some of the greatest innovations in history. When many

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great thinkers come together to attack a problem, good things tend to happen.

Within organizations, competitions open to third parties are often designed tochallenge the status quoin order to think beyond structures that have always existed.

Many executives hold tight to the way things have always been done, and innovative ideas are often shut down if they challenge the current system or approach new market needs rather than focusing solely on current customers. When companies are really ready to change, allowing creative thinkers to compete with the intention of embracing winning ideas is a great way to stimulate that change.

It really comes down to identifying problems or opportunities for progress and setting many minds to the task of coming up with solutions and ideas.

While most competitions only award one prize, many of the creative ideas and products featured along the way will receive media attention, increased consumer awareness, and investment propositions due to their participation.

How Innovation Competitions and Games Can Be Most Effective You don’t need thousands of

entrants from around the world, tons of media attention, and $50,000 in the prize bank to create a successful challenge that highlights creative solutions to a problem. What you need is all of the following: Ÿ

A problem that is difficult to solve or an area in need of improvement and growth: openended competitions will likely produce vague results, so it’s important to make the challenge or question as specific as possible

Ÿ

An identified group of people with the expertise and creative powers to come up with new ideas in that identified space

Ÿ

Some kind of incentive that encourages innovators to bring their best ideas forward

Ÿ

A system for advertising the competition and getting the

word out to the right communities Ÿ

Plans for pushing the winning ideas forward to implement solutions to your problem or bring world-changing concepts to life

Competition between your employees to solve internal problems can be just as rewarding as massive competitions open to entrants from around the world.

Allstate, for instance, has “innovation blitzes” that invite all employees to submit ideas for how to solve pressing business problems, and the best ideas are chosen for follow-through by the innovation lab. That’s an important key: to make sure the competition is just the start of the innovation process, not the end in itself.

The prize package or goal should be more than just an incentive to get participants interested in the

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contest. It’s also a strategy for turning the ideas reality. Innovative ideas are great, but that followthrough to implementation is critical. Ideas themselves don’t change the world — people working hard to implement those ideas do.

If you can successfully bring creative entrepreneurs or innovative minds to the table and connect them with investors and industry professionals, you can create new relationships that take ideas from the drawing board into the real world. Since innovators don’t always have the ability to fully implement and market their creations effectively, networking is one of the biggest advantages to participating in this type of competition. This not only means that entrepreneurs are connected with other thinkers that can help them accomplish their goals, but also that a swarm of creative minds is connected to a problem they might not have otherwise used their skills to address.

Making the Learning Process Better Than Ever

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Lawrence Schwartz CEO & Co-founder Trivie

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T

raditional learning is flawed because people forget. It’s natural, and decades of research shows that the forgetting happens extremely fast.

Furthermore, just taking a test at the end of a training event only measures a person’s comprehension and retention of information at that moment in time—but what does that same person remember on the topic three months later?

Back in 2012, Trivie was incepted as an answer to this question. The application-based company was a simple idea with a clear vision – to develop a trivia game that is fun, fast-paced, and social.

With its original game launch, the team at Trivie realized that it was helping people learn and remember a wide-variety of topics and the analytics showed that they were remembering the information for longer and longer periods of time.

This made the vision clear for the company, “We wanted to help people engage and remember information longer while also enjoying the process of learning.

Our focus [as a company] became to help businesses do the same, so they could dramatically improve employee performance,” mentions the CEO and Co-founder of Trivie, Lawrence Schwartz.

Continuous Expansion Soon after the company had launched, it started getting great feedback from millions of people that downloaded the quiz-based

game. By 2013, Trivie’s consumer Focused game, Battle of Wits, was one of the fastest growing apps of all time and became the #1 game on the Apple App Store. During this time, the analytics helped the company recognize that people were actually learning and building their skills over time on a wide variety of topics. “We knew we were onto something.”

In 2015, the company introduced Trivie for Business and focused on giving companies the visibility on what their employees know and don’t know, and helping them remember training longer. Today, Trivie offers its platform, algorithms, and tools to help companies better engage with their employees through fun quiz games in order to remember important training so they can have better impact on the business. However, Trivie truly realized that it was onto something when one of its clients, a Fortune 200 corporation, reported that their divisions using Trivie showed 93% knowledge retention gain and a 22% decrease in training time. Speaking about this achievement, Lawrence recalls “This was great news to our team!

Our mission is to help companies strengthen long-term knowledge retention from their training programs. This was the first time a company reported back to us on the value of Trivie and how we were helping them have more effective training results.”

Hiring the ‘Right’ People “I know it’s cliché, but businesses

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truly succeed or fail because of the people,” Lawrence exclaims. When an organization hires great people, all one needs to do is make the goals clear and rewards meaningful. Smart people are resourceful; whereas, smart and committed people are unstoppable.

The team members at Trivie fall into the latter category.

Lawrence dives deep to explain the building blocks of Trivie: Lead with empathy – The day your employees stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. Whether it’s questions related to their jobs or issues outside of work, Trivie always makes it a company philosophy to have empathy for each and every person—not sitting around a campfire and holding hands per se, but just being compassionate human beings.

Be transparent – If you trust the people you work with and are completely transparent, anxiety in the workplace is greatly reduced. and People focus on their tasks, rather than the workplace politics and security of their jobs.

entrepreneur—and I love it.

Fortunately, my wife and children know that about me and realize that the unpredictability of being an entrepreneur keeps me focused and happy,” he adds.

“DID YOU TRIVIE?”

An Entrepreneur at Heart As a kid, Lawrence did the typical jobs like selling lemonade and old toys. As he entered into his teens he worked in a grocery store, a clothing store, and a few restaurants in high school. He then started his own T-shirt company in college before getting his first real job at a large ad agency in Dallas.

Be a problem-solver – If leadership is always involved in the solution, it will never foster greatness or job satisfaction in your people. If there is a problem, solve it. Take risks. If the solution fails, that’s okay—we can go a different direction and try to solve the problem another way.

As Mark Cuban once said, “You only have to be right once.” Trivie tries to get something right every day.

Be a conflict crusader – In today’s workplace, many employees downplay their ideas, their thoughts, and their passions for fear of being labeled as too assertive at work. At Trivie, this is thought of as being passionate. Lawrence wants and expects every team member to be extremely passionate about the company, challenge the status quo, and never fear conflict in order to make the company better.

“That first real job was a great learning experience. I got fired after six months because “I had too many ideas and needed to know my place.” Humbled, I licked my wounds and ended up working at a couple different large companies for the next 10 years learning about sales, operations, management, and how to work in a team environment. But, in the end, I always have been somewhat uninspired by rote tasks and playing it safe, so back in 1996, I cut the cord and decided to follow my passions as an entrepreneur.”

Lawrence’s world centers around his family, his company, and his health. “Being an entrepreneur means that you’re never “off the clock” and that every conversation has a potential connection to your business. I realize that sounds a little neurotic, but it appears to be in the DNA of any

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According to leading industry research, moving forward there is going to be a seismic shift in learning, from standard prescribed training methods, to always on, 100% personalized and continually reinforced learning. It won’t be about training per se, but more about understanding what people actually know and how to increase and sustain that knowledge.

Following the footsteps of the company’s mission of helping people to better engage with learning and remembering information longer, if the training is not reinforced, a company shouldn’t train at all. “That’s where we fit in and where we will stay focused in the upcoming years—making the training stick, the learning long-lasting, while enabling companies to achieve greater impact and effectiveness from their training programs.

Basically, after a training event the important question will be, “Did you Trivie? [Did you make sure the employees will remember it.] If you don’t remember it, there is no benefit to the business.” Lawrence concludes.

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