Gamification Book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond PBLs

I’ve been following Yu-kai’s work on gamification for years and have enjoyed his deep insights and actionable recommendations. Octalysis is a powerful and pragmatic framework to understand human nature and positive motivators that encourage people to do their best work. It should be required reading for anyone building, managing, or collaborating with a team, community, or ecosystem.

Yu-kai’s Insights were instrumental in helping Lucky Diem supercharge our client La Quinta’s bookings per user by 206% and incremental revenue per user by $157 (132% Lift) against the control group. Being able to achieve a viral coefficient of 530%, I would recommend any business to work with Yu-kai and learn his Octalysis Framework.

I’ve been tracking the development of Octalysis for over 2 years now, and It’s become a comprehensive framework for enterprise gamification. Psychology is at the core of every activity, and game designers are masters at it. Yu-kai’s framework has mapped out the various dimensions for reasoning about and optimizing a gamified enterprise process. I have no doubt that it will make its way into business school text books soon.

Yu-kai is the real deal. His experience, expertise and passion make this a “must read” for those looking to grasp the possibilities available through applied gamification.

Yu-kai’s reputation precedes him in the field of gamification. HIs Octalysis framework is both elegantly simple and intricately complex. His book is not only extrinsically rewarding to read, but intrinsically motivating to apply; it’s wickedly effective, and yet divinely true. Octalysis brilliantly unified all these seemingly conflicting aspects of gamification into a single cohesive framework with a hidden twist in the middle of it – it’s sensational.

This book is probably the most important and well researched guide to Gamification that is on the market today. If you think Gamification is about gaming stuff them you are dead wrong. It’s about how your brain works and is motivated. I interviewed Yu-kai for the Business Book Talk Podcast and his understanding and depth of knowledge kept me on the edge of my studio seat for over 45 minutes. This is probably one of the best values on Amazon today if you are a business manager, marketing expert or entrepreneur. I can’t wait for his next book.

Yu-kai’s book makes gamification practical. It is chock full of specific examples, suggestions for implementations, and pitfalls to avoid. Actionable Gamification is a gold mine of insights, and those who study and practice what it offers will have a powerful toolkit of incentives for business and personal contexts. Run, don’t walk, to get your copy – I highly recommend it.

Yu-kai shows us that gamification is about customer centric thinking, and certainly much more than adding game pieces to our customer experience designs. His Octalysis framework is a guide by which we can construct our services to resonate naturally with our customers. This way of thinking will lead us to design products and services that engage our customers, and motivate them to interact with us more frequently and over a longer period of time. The end result is greater value for the organization.

Yu-kai’s Octalysis framework brilliantly explains the intricate relationships between human behaviors and their inner drives. Accompanied by numerous application examples, Octalysis is the turn key for gamification in any product and service design.

Don’t waste your time with other books that only scratch the surface or include information without any practical application. Yu-Kai is master of the craft and has written a book that is fun to read as it is pragmatic. If you are looking for an out of the box book where you can simply add a “game” to some element of “work” you will be disappointed (but not as disappointed as finding a book like that, only to see the outcome failing). The key here is the Octalysis framework – an easy way to audit any process, class, or element of your life for game elements, and then take action to boost on include more, driving better results. Order two copies of the book, since you will want to share it as soon as you read it!”