June 2, 2012

Win a job!?!

Happy Hour is a new game, released on 29th May. In the game, you are a bartender who needs to tell which drink customers (many) want by the expressions on their faces, sell it to them and clean up, all in a short span of time.
Who should care about this game? Employers who want to hire bartenders, and potential candidates looking for this job.

The Economist just featured an article on the gamification of hiring. The article talks about how Knack, a start-up, is engaged in developing custom-made gaming solutions to improve hiring processes by testing cognitive skills and providing future performance indicators. They further test pattern recognition, emotional intelligence, risk appetite and adaptability to changing situations. Guess some clients who are on board with Knack to improve their hiring processes: Bain & Company and Shell.

Bas van de Haterd, a fellow blogger (much more accomplished) believes the use of gamification in recruitment is still in its infancy but has a huge future. He gives further examples of a game such as wordfeud could be used to sieve through candidates for journalist, media and PR roles.


Is it a coincidence that in this I find a creative combination of principles I have learnt in my life? Gamification is joining the dots between B. F. Skinner's reinforcement theory I studied in university and my work in recruitment.

These principles of reinforcement and inducing repeat behavior or stickiness have been successfully explored by gamification experts. Now it's up to employers, if they want to join the group of innovators who seek to apply it, and if they want to do that early enough or be boring and wait.

P.S. Tip for candidates, start looking for ways to beat this system. While you're at it, improve your visibility on LinkedIn by checking the 'completeness' of your profile. That's LinkedIn's gamified way of encouraging you to make the most exhaustive profile, for your and their benefit.

IE Business School Gamified!

Continuing our focus on education, we would like to provide you a great and succesful example of gamification applied in an academic environment. Specifically, IE Business School is one of the most active business school in the world in offering innovative and engaging teaching techniques to its MBA and Master's students. At IE, faculty members continuously ask themselves: how can we enhance the learning experience of our students in the most effective way?

The result of this constant research is that nowadays interactive tools, on-line gamified lectures and business cases are adopted daily in many classes at IE.


A key person who is investing great efforts in making this tecnique more and more popular is the economics professor Gayle Allard. Thanks to her contribution, the business school has developed two interesting games to teach the economics dynamics in the real world.

The latest game just released by IE is "10 Downing Street", an economic policy simulation game in which students adopt the role of the British prime minister.




Furthermore, "10 Downing Street" game provided IE with a wide coverage in the main international newspapers as recently written in an article in the New York Times and El Pais


Previously, Ms. Allard launched another very popular game "Making money on oil" that is currently used by many students. In this game, students are commodity traders betting on the evolution of the oil price consequently to certain events.


As current IE students, we had the opportunity to directly experience this game during the Managerial Economics class with Professor Allard. It has been absolutely a great way to understand the economics dynamics in a extremely funny, engaging and challenging way!

May 31, 2012

People who are Better People than Me



Alright, in our previous posts on education (such as this), we have focused on gamification around the world.  Now we are going to bring it back to my home country, the United States, where you can find a lot of new start-ups trying to integrate gamification into their products. Gamedesk, a non-profit out of California, is trying to do this on a much broader scale by targeting at-risk youth.  To quote Beth Shiroshi from AT&T (Hat tip Coexist and Mindflash)


"We decided we were going to aim for exponential change in education"

That is a huge statement, but yet again it just goes to show that gamification isn't simply a nice buzzword... it is actually a revolution in how we combine learning with psychology.  And while it is sure nice to make a buck or two off of this new technique, it is good to know that there are groups of people out there such as Gamedesk who are doing this for free.

May 29, 2012

ITS ABOUT TIME YOU ....

MEET NITRO! 

In previous blog postings, we have defined Gamification, shown statistical data on Gamification utilization in different businesses, and gave examples on different industries that use Gamification (Health & Education). Now comes the time to MEET NITRO!

Nitro, a product introduced by BunchBall [an industry leader in gamification, founded on 2005, based in silion valley] - is a cloud-based platform that promises to bring gamification to your doorstep! According to bunchball.com, “Nitro currently serves up to 70 million unique users and 2.3 billion actions each month”. These numbers are worth a pause!


What does Nitro do? 

Nitro basically employs game mechanics to any website or online service, in order to elevate/ push engagement and loyalty in your community to the next level. Think of it as spicing up your site or online service, in a smart way, that enables you to keep the reader/ participant coming over and over, Grow your audience, and Turn USERS into FANS, Increase sales & productivity…

MORE?

What are your viewers doing? Results of viewer’s behaviors? Rewards change without re-engineering? Users behavior analysis?
Utilizing NITRO & NITRO ANALYTICS in REAL-TIME, you will be able to manage all of the above mentioned.

The video below, titled "Nitro For Salesforce: Gamification app for Salesforce.com!" illustrates how to motivate and enhance your sales force team utilizing Gamification, through the NITRO platform. Manual incentive programs are obsolete .. Welcome to a gamified world!



(source: www.bunchball.com & www.youtube.com)


Gamification in the Workplace?

No, really... I'm working


Most of our posts thus far have been about how gamification relates to actual products.  This is for good reason, since there has been a great focus on how making mundane tasks fun can increase one's level of interest in said activity.  However, Forbes recently had a great article on how gamification can increase work production in three areas that people don't normally think about: 1) Recruiting 2) Learning and Development and 3) Health.  

Given that we have now moved into a knowledge-based economy, businesses have to have a renewed focus on making their employee's lives better.  Seeing that money alone is not a good motivator, businesses have turned to other methods to try to attract new employees and enliven those that they currently have.  While slides and swings in the office are a good start, perhaps gamifying the office is a better solution?

Is gamification BS?

While doing some research for our blog I ran into a very interesting posting by Ian Bogost who firmly believes gamification is an evil tool that serves no purpose but to comfort marketing folks about having a game strategy.

Bogosts describes gamification as a perversion to what once was the "mysterious , magical, powerful" world of videogames turning them into nothing more than another greedy media to hypnotize consumers.

As you know by now, here at Game On, we believe gamification is a lot more than low quality, empty videogames. For us this is one more tool to engage your consumers and if anything else, make their every day more fun (while keeping brand in mind). We are aware that there are a lot of empty applications out there, but hey! if there is something that can push us to help others, workout, be more productive and have fun at the same time, we are all for it!

What about you? Do you see a value in gamification or think it is just another marketing fad?