Category: Gamification Video Course

Gamification Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity

Hey guys,  I’ve finally released the new episode of the Beginner’s Guide to Gamification. We’re very close to finishing up the 8 Core Drives series. Phew, took some work! Now that I have a great helper to edit and complete the videos, I think we will be improving our momentum of these video releases.

I’m pretty excited, because as you may have noticed, I have been repeating the basic foundational materials on many mediums so far. Many of you may begin to think that this is the only stuff there is in my framework (Don’t forget there are 5 levels!). It’s just that you really need to understand the foundation before moving on to more advanced levels.

During speeches and workshops, most of my audiences don’t have knowledge of Octalysis, so I can’t cover the more advanced stuff in a shorter time-span. The advantage of the Beginner’s Guide to Gamification is that, with 90 Episodes, I can truly dive into the deep and advanced stuff of Octalysis Gamification and teach a lot of things that you wouldn’t be able to learn in a short period of time.

After we finish the 8 Core Drives, I’ll have one episode dedicated to just talking about the course and what we’re looking at ahead.

Then we’ll also cover some other basics such as White Hat vs Black Hat, Right Brain vs Left Brain, possibly the process of good Gamification Design, and then dedicate some episodes in Gamification in the Education Space.

Have fun!

Gamification Video Guide #15!

Hey guys! Finally made the 15th episode. Woot!

It probably won’t take long to notice that the video is done in a different style and done by someone else! That’s right. We have our good old pal Nikita, whom I met on Twitter, to gracefully put together this new video with techno music and better graphics of my face.

There’s been a lot of transitional learning, basically me figuring out how to get something so intimate as me talking straight for 10 minutes (which is me really talking for 1 hour cut down into 10 minutes) and hand that to someone else. Would he make me look fatter? Would I sound dumber? What if he put in a scene where I was using the bathroom??

All those are difficult questions to answer in life and fortunately the video turned out good (besides my usual shakiness…grr, must walk better…or walk the talk!)

Nikita is Russian (studying in London) so he can take some harsh comments (I already emptied my magazine on him and he is still standing strong like a terminator). If you see how things can improve (or if you like the techno music a lot less than the mysterious suspenseful ambience that I previously put in), let us know!

Work’s been busy (still procrastinating on hiring me to be your consultant?), so I figured I had to transition it to someone so that I can actually realistically finish my amazing series one day.

Nothing else is that new….speaking in Florida, speaking in China (best hospitality I ever received from a company – thank you Huawei!), speaking in India (lots of drama with getting a visa), speaking in Europe, launched the Octalysis Tool so people in Barcelona don’t have to make the Octalysis chart with string, trying to figure out how to make money for my blog so I can at least pay for it’s own operations, got accepted to speak at SxSW (thank you HelloBar and all my awesome readers!), book coming out hopefully early next year, said sweet things to my wife…yea really nothing that new or special is going on these days. It’s the usual boring stuff any Gamification Gosu faces. I wished there was something that made my life awesome.

Gamification Video Outline (Because SEO is important!)

Oh yea, this video covers:

• Scarcity & Impatience as the 6th Core Drive of Octalysis Gamification
• Facebook uses this to make things exclusive and drives up demand
• Games use this core drive to monetize: dangling works!
• Torture Breaks will make people think about the experience all their time
• Scarcity & Impatience is a lot of Black Hat Gamification. You want to balance them out with White Hat Game Techniques.
• The demand curve for traditional economics theory often becomes a C-Curve
• A super secret key point about Scarcity & Impatience that I’m not going to tell you about, just so you can understand Scarcity & Impatience 😉

Core Drive #5: Social Influence & Relatedness (or Social Pressure & Envy)

This is the 14th episode of the Beginner’s Guide to Gamification.

In this episode, we’ll cover:

1. Brief explanation of Social Influence & Relatedness (Social Pressure & Envy within the Video)
2. Mentorship with an example from the game Parralel Kindom
3. Group Questing
4. Social Treasure
5. Social Proding
6. Leaderboard
7. Correction from Social Pressure & Envy to Social Influence & Relatedness
8. Brief explanation of Relatedness as well as nostalgia

Enjoy, and feedback welcomed!

Ownership & Possession again!

This is the 13th episode of the Beginner’s Guide to Gamification. We’re half way through the 8 Core Drives, and after that I’ll do an episode on some administrative updates (content, in-video games, rewards, big picture, future plans and the like), then apply Octalysis to a few more things, and then move on to details of the 4 Experience Phases (which I have been writing about soon).

In this episode, we’ll cover:

1. Game Technique: Build From Scratch
2. Virtual Goods and Virtual Currencies
3. Abundance vs Scarcity
4. Intercession with non-sponsored commercials
5. Game Technique: Monitoring
6. Game Technique: Protection
7. Game Technique: Recruitment

Enjoy, and feedback welcomed!

Check out all the videos for the Beginner’s Guide to Gamification

Game Mechanics within Ownership & Possession

In this Episode, Gamification Gosu Yu-kai Chou talks about the great gamification case studies relating to this Left Brain Core Drive while he enjoys some big meals and birds!

*New to Gamification? Check out my post What is Gamification & the Gamification Framework: Octalysis*

Click here to see all videos in this Series

Yu-kai Chou introduces the 8 Core Drives in Gamification

Before we can explore how to use games to make productive things fun, we must first understand why are games fun.

Games are not fun because they have points, badges and leaderboards, but because they appeal to our Core Drives.

The 8 Core Drives are:

1. Epic Meaning & Calling
2. Development & Accomplishment
3. Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback
4. Ownership & Possession
5. Social Influence & Relatedness
6. Scarcity & Impatience
7. Curiosity & Unpredictability
8. Loss & Avoidance

(Click here to view all the Video Gamification Episodes)

Video Tutorial for Gamification

Empowerment of Creativity is the 3rd Core Drive in Octalysis.

• It is the the ability to utilize your own creativity and immediately see the outcome, allowing you to try again and again to see the final outcome.
• A basic example is Lego: you give people the basic blocks, and there are infinite ways to put together the pieces and can entertain people for an indefinite amount of time without the content getting old.
• People are by nature creative beings. We like to imagination, invent, and create, and both the process and outcome of the process brings happiness.
• Think about games like Minecraft and Second Life.
• Games like that are engaging because it allows you to create your own world, your shelter, and even your own looks.
• Other social games like Draw Something (at least in the early scaffolding phase) as well as plants vs zombie.
• Draw Something was fun for a long time because it allowed both sides to utilize their creativity and see immediate results.
• The reason why it eventually dropped out was because of lack of fresh content (or challenges) and how people could just start to game the system by writing in the correct word.
• That’s another good lesson in Gamification: when a system is “gamable” it devalues the experience of those who are doing honest play and demoralizes the players.
• Plants vs Zombies, like any other “tower-defense” game, is about utilizing current resources and “plants” to solve a puzzle of zombie attacks. This allows people to utilize their creativity to create different solutions to solve the same problem, making it fun for each player to engage in the longterm.
• I mentioned that in Farmville, one of the best evergreen mechanics they have is the ability to allow users to make art with their farms.
• Even in the RPG game Diablo III, during the Onboarding and Scaffolding Phase, there’s a lot of Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning & Calling), Core Drive 2 (Development & Accomplishment), Core Drive 5 (Social Pressure & Envy), Core Drive 6 (Scarcity & Impatience), but during the EndGame stage, Core Drive 3 (as well as Core Drive 4 and Core Drive 8) become dominant.  Continue reading Beginner’s Guide to Gamification (10 of 90): Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback