Category: Gamification News

Captain Up is not afraid to use quirky humor and make some fun out of itself

If you haven’t noticed, I have a widget on the right side of my site that adds some fun game elements to the experience. It’s powered by Captain Up. Initially, I put it up as an experiment for PBL tools, but my readers loved it so much that they no longer wanted me to experiment me on other platforms, haha….

As you can see, you get dozens of points for various actions, but there are other Core Drives like Mystery, Meaningful Choices, Social in it, and the top users have over 400,000 points!!

Captain Up has this really quirky culture. It’s energetic, fun, and not afraid to make fun of itself. This is in big contrast to most platforms out there that must pretend to be overly professional and dull/boring. I respect that of them.

They released a new video that really emphasizes on their strong suite, which is how plug-and-play they are in improving engagement for games and websites. It literally took me about 5-10 minutes to setup my system, and another 30-60 min to customize the way I want – since I am a control freak for my experiences.

Anyhow, enjoy the laugh!

The Biggest Gamification in Europe

Every year, the biggest gamification conference in the US is the GSummit, hosted by Gabe Zichermann. In Europe, the biggest event is the World Gamification Congress, hosted in Barcelona Spain and had 1300 attendees this year.

I was invited to do a Keynote and Workshop at the Gamification World Congress this year regarding Octalysis Gamification, along with my Managing Director and Partner Joris Beerda who also did a Keynote.

My main focus was to teach the attendees at the workshop a deeper level of Octalysis Gamification Design, and to teach the Keynote attendees how the gamification industry needs to mature in order to not reach a crash.

I was delightfully surprised that, on a show of hands, over 60% of the audience had learned about my Octalysis Framework before. Many people also wanted to take selfies with me and have me autograph random items, as well as my book Actionable Gamification.

High interests with my book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

For my book, I shipped 100 books to Europe, thinking that it would be enough for the audience at the conference with many left to disperse to the other countries I visited.

Shockingly, all 100 books were sold at the Gamification World Congress, with many people deciding to order the book on Amazon instead.

Many people walked up to me and told me they have already finished my book and loved it. All extremely flattering and I could only humbly thank them for enjoying my work.

Deeply surprised and honored to win the Gamification Guru of the Year Award

Continue reading Woot!! Won “Gamification Guru of the Year” Award at the Gamification World Congress

So some of you might know that I recently started to get involved with Captain Up as their Behavioral Scientist, which is mostly a fancy title for an Advisory position to help them become more successful.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain why I decided to take on this role.

Why Captain Up

Many of you know that I have been using Captain Up’s platform on my own site for a long time now. At the beginning I was looking for a variety of Gamification platforms to experiment and research on, and most of them either required too much setup know-how (I am not a programmer), or is very limited in what can be customized.

My friend Andrzej Marczewski recommended Captain Up to me and since I respect his opinion I decided to give it a try.

The setup only took a few minutes, and then I spent a couple hours customizing it to create challenges and language that fits my site. I even documented my thinking process in this blogpost (as well as my upcoming book).

Too friendly and enjoyable to quit

The team at Captain Up then reached out to me and asked if I needed more support. They proactively helped me on all my questions and needs, and it actually created a lasting impression: “Wow, I would love to work with these guys at one point.”

After a while, I was ready to move on and study other Gamification platforms, but then I realized that my readers loved the current Captain Up one so much, they kept on asking for more challenges and tried to level up more. Many would say they were trying very hard to level up or reach the top of that week.

That was to some extent expected, since the design is meant for people to fall in love and stay engaged with the experience, but it nevertheless gave me great emotional encouragement, so I decided to just stick with it and use it for my blog.

Making videos for Captain Up

Eventually Captain Up asked me to make some videos to explain to people how to use their platform better, so I made a short series of Gamification Videos called the Engaging Website Design series for them.

They were made in similar style to my Beginner’s Guide to Gamification Videos, but with a strong focus on HOW to do these things via Captain Up.

It was useful because I regularly get questions from my own readers on how to use Captain Up better, so now I have a great place to refer them to.

Taking Captain Up to New Heights

Even though Captain Up is a great platform, they are still very young and still trying to cover all the amazing features that people want. Since I am using their platform and my readers all depend on Captain Up to create more enjoyable experiences, I thought I should get involved with how the product evolves and how they incorporate sound principles of my Octalysis Framework.

Because of that, when they reached out again to talk to me, we quickly reached an agreement where I would try my best to help them become a great platform and something that can implement all the Core Drives via unpredictability, meaningful choices, and social platforms.

This is an exciting journey. As my own company The Octalysis Group is growing substantially, I don’t know how long I will be able to stay committed to Captain Up, but as of now I’m looking forward to make them as successful of a company they can be. Hopefully my involvement will help turn them from a great product/platform to a great company.

TA Expert Interview Series featuring Yu-kai Chou, author of the Gamification Book Actionable Gamification

Yu-kai Chou, gamification pioneer and international keynote speaker at San Francisco CA, was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series to share his insight on gamification. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice’s Clark Buckner, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders.

Yu-kai joined Buckner to discuss his book, how he ensures his team is on the same page, gamification implementation, and how gamification and B2B technologies connect.

Here are a few of the highlights from our conversation:

TechnologyAdvice: There are some CRM solutions that have an 80 percent failure rate, either because it’s not implemented correctly, or because the goals were never mapped out to begin with. How do you get your team on the same page at the very beginning to get their goals and their strategy in place?

Yu-kai: At the beginning of every gamification campaign, I always let clients to define five things— what I call the strategy dashboard.

The first one is business metrics, which lead to the game objective. What are the metrics you actually want to improve? What’s your most important metrics? What’s your number two? What’s your number three? It’s amazing how, when you change the order of these business metrics the entire experience design completely changes.

That leads to the game objectives. This is why you’re gamifying something. If those numbers go up, it’s successful, if they don’t go up, the campaign’s a failure. And then you want to define who the users are and their player types.

And then the third one is desired actions that lead to win states. Those are all the little steps the user needs to do for you to be successful. And every time they do the desired action, it needs to be a win state.

The fourth one is feedback mechanics that lead to triggers. So feedback mechanics are things people can see, in terms of communicating those core drives; each of these feedback mechanics needs to trigger the desired actions defined earlier.

And finally, its the rewards and incentives. Basically, if users hit the win state, what are the rewards that you can give them. This is a very precise and tight-knit process, but once those things are defined, the whole team is together. There’s clear language about what’s a priority.

And I don’t think I need any more than that. Usually within a few days we can get this flushed out. And then the rest is just designing a great experience.

TA: Gamification implementation with different technologies starts out very simple, and then builds. Once you understand what motivates somebody, you can use that in a way that ensures you’re going to get the desired action. What connections do you see between gamification and B2B technologies like CRM or marketing automation software?

Yu-kai: The core of gamification is delivery experience, where people will take the desired action. And we know every time they take an action is because of the 8 Core Drives.

But you need to be able to send them feedback mechanics to trigger these desired actions. So marketing automation software is very useful in this case because it provides triggers. BJ Fogg says that every behavior is because of motivation, ability, and a trigger.

So marketing automation software makes sure it’s constantly sending users the right triggers at the right time. It’s intelligent, it says, ‘Hey, it’s been two weeks!” or “This just happened!” or if something just appeared in the news, ‘Hey, don’t forget about us.’

And then the content of that email message will be the motivation part. That’s when you think about, am I motivating them to take the next desired action? ‘Hey, look, 80 percent of fortune 500s are using us.’ That, or scarcity or exclusivity— like there’s only three spaces left.

You want to think about what goes into that automated email. But as long as the user can see the email, that’s the trigger, there’s the motivation, and hopefully every email has an action item, a link or something the user can do. That’s when behavior happens.

And you can craft that experience to be fun, engaging, emotional. Woo.com for instance, is famous for using fun and exciting, and kind of unrandom, unpredictable language to sell really serious things and they make the experience playful. I recommend companies who do that a lot.

How do you add a little bit more of unpredictability to your automated marketing messages? How do you add social influence, how do you add scarcity?

To learn more about Yu-kai Chou visit Yukaichou.com.  His LinkedIn account is Yu-kai Chou while his Twitter account is @Yukaichou.

Listen to the entire show above in order to hear our full conversation, or download here to listen later. You can subscribe to the TA Expert Interview Series via Soundcloud, in order to get alerts about new episodes. You can also subscribe to just the gamification category.

This podcast was created and published by TechnologyAdvice. Interview conducted by Clark Buckner.

Utilizing the 8 Core Drives within Captain Up

As you guys know, I have been a proponent of the engagement platform Captain Up for quite some time now. I have been using their platform and they have convincingly increased my website engagement metrics in many tangible ways – to the extent that I decided to get involved with them as their Behavioral Scientist. Recently, I helped them create a video tutorial series that is now branded as the Captain Up Gamification Academy.

While every platform has limitations – and in the past few months they have been focusing on making their product more ubiquitous by making implementation seamless on platforms like WordPress, Shopify and many others – there are still many ways to incorporate the 8 Core Drives into the experience.

Let’s review the different ways to accomplish this:

Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling

Core Drive 1 is mostly implemented by having a “theme” within the Captain Up program. Since you can customize all the levels and badges (even upload your own customized images), as well as the language you use on each interface.

If you have a gamified coupon site with a money saving-theme targeting stay-home wives, you could use the theme of being a “Family Hero.” All the levels and badges could be in the form of “penny saver,” “treasure hunter,” “bacon maximize” and get users to feel that every action they take on the site helps them save money and contribute tangibly to the family while having fun.

Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment

This is the easiest to implement with a platform like Captain Up. As long as the users consistently feels a sense of progress, and whenever they hit certain milestones they actually feel accomplished, you have accomplished your Core Drive 2 Objectives.

When you design your points in Captain Up, make sure that points are given from meaningful activities. Those should accumulate into meaningful achievement symbols – badges that are obtained not from blatant activities but ones that users actually can feel proud of. Also, beginning levels should be easy to level up to, but it gets proportionally harder as time goes by.

Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback

Continue reading How to use Captain Up to implement the 8 Core Drives of Octalysis

A guest blog from our friends at TechnologyAdvice exploring cutting edge innovation in the gamification market.

People love games.

This isn’t a new revelation. People have loved games for a long time. And when someone really loves a game, they dedicate hours to mastering it.

In fact, as of 2011, over 5.93 million years of total time had been spent playing World of Warcraft alone. When a game is that good, people spend hours at a time engaged with the platform.

This is the same type of engagement companies are experiencing with their gamification systems (albeit a little less extreme than World of Warcraft). The idea of implementing gaming techniques in the workplace was originally met with heavy skepticism, and often criticism. Now, there are dozens of case studies outlining how companies large and small have used gamification to increase profits, decrease expenses, and increase competitive advantage.

A recent study performed by M2 revealed that the gamification market, currently valued at around $100 million, will grow to more than $2.8 billion by 2016. As more companies begin to realize the massive potential of gamification in the workplace, and as vendors create new and inventive ways to gamify everyday processes, the biggest movers and shakers will seek to stake their claim on what’s trending in the industry.

A few trends in particular have risen from the crowd as powerful and interesting changes within the gamification industry. Companies who have taken advantage of these trends have seen successful results, and other organizations are jumping on board. Continue reading New Trends in Gamification