Games At Work dot Biz Blog

Michael R talks about listening to last week’s show while on a plane, and he liked the “Mother fudging snakes, on the Mother fudging plane.” And all the cool things he’s been up to lately, including how machines can be social when they all start talking to each other. While you may have had M2M communications for 40 years now, we are living in interesting times as all the machines are starting to get more social and integrations are driving cool new solutions which will start changing human behavior. Imagine the game that many people play with Usage Based Insurance and trying to drive down their car insurance rates. Michael M, however will only entertain the idea of the social machines but is it really here?

We then look at Mind Meld, a cool new social way of pulling things together by listening to your chat and conversations to pull together a mind barf of all the related thoughts. This get’s us to talking about the drinking game – Everything is related. Which takes us to drinking games at work! Check out the keggorator story!

Finally, we get to talk about last week’s episode on snake reciprocity! We’d love to get your ideas about how reciprocity and incentives could be used to drive more collaboration across a development team. Drop us a tweet or a note.

Show Links:
Connexion 2013
Augmented Reality car repair
Peter Coffee
WarpStock 1999
Facebook making an offer for Waze
Mind Meld App
Beer drives civilization

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:20 — 15.9MB)

Michael M and Phaedra discuss San Francisco Gamification Summit, the ModSim conference in Virginia and touch on gamification, loyalty, collaboration, wearable computing, ethics and much more.

Rajat Paharia’s keynote from the Gamification Summit sparks some interesting thoughts on Loyalty 3.0 — not just to products and services, but also to missions and organizations.  Harley Davidson is often cited as an example of customer loyalty and the ecosystem/community that surrounds a product, service, or in the case of HD, the lifestyle.  It will be interesting to see how games build loyalty.

Michael and Phadera riff on the idea for how gamification and business analytics could help by envisioning how a mobile device salesforce could be encouraged to take action based on what is selling when certain team members are on the floor and how to handle stock out situations in one location with available supply in another, driving a collaborative win for the company using big data and real time feedback.

The Simpsons: Tapped Out is used as the jump off point for this salesforce riff, given the April-May game within a game where players collect snakes to win virtual prizes and eggs, which have no value to the player collecting them, but have high value to friends of the player, who may ‘hatch’ those eggs to collect the snakes within them.  By giving away eggs, a player may receive eggs from her friends to continue the gameplay.  Consider how a serious game designer leverage this principle for business use, where an asset for one player has no value to that individual, but to another player, that asset does have value.

Simpsons Tapped Out: Lots of Eggs

Google’s “a Google a day” game is an intriguing game to make you a more adept searcher, or perhaps Google a more responsive search engine, or maybe something much, much more…

Looking forward to next week’s show where we will be back at full co-host power!

Selected show links

San Francisco Gamification Summit — http://gsummit.com/sf13/speakers/

Will Wright — http://www.stupidfunclub.com

Nolan Bushnell — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell

Rajat Paharia — http://www.bunchball.com/about/management

Rajat Paharia’s new book:  Loyalty 3.0: How Big Data and Gamification are Revolutionizing Customer and Employee Engagement –  http://www.amazon.com/Loyalty-3-0-Revolutionize-Engagement-Gamification/dp/0071813373

ModSim World 2013 — http://www.modsimworldconference.com

A Google A Day — http://agoogleaday.com/#game=started 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:39 — 20.9MB)

The Michael’s have special guests Marilyne Lopes and Alexis Biller on this week. Marilyne is a French Physiotherapist working in the United Arab Emirates, using games and technology to help children improve balance, recovery from injuries, and cerebral palsy. Alexis, a long time listener to the show and husband of Marilyne, also brings a history of technology to the show and provides us with a sanity check on many of the medical terms. Between the two of them, we also get a great lesson in Latin!

We discuss various technologies and how they are used in therapy and speculate on what the future may hold as more and more technology goes from being high end, custom developed solutions, to more off the shelf but significantly more engaging.

Show Links:
KUUR Rehabilitation – twitter
Wii Balance Board
Google Glass
Leap Motion
Flexible Sensors
Moves App
Garmin Swim
Self Quantification
Cool Tech from London 2012 Olympic Games
Blood Oxygen Levels
Jawbone Up
Kinesio Taping
Jane McGonigal

Audio Only Games – Thank you WideawakeWesley
The Pit
Papa Sangre
Blind Side

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:35 — 25.6MB)

The Michael’s are on together and get to talk about some incredible architecture, the long tail, and generational change before we jump in deep on some cool and fun games to help change the way you do things. Both Habit RPG and Chore Wars are great ways of leveraging your love of Dungeons & Dragons to help you game your way to new behaviors. We even talk a bit about how we can leverage this to improve our attendance for the show! We also include a great listener link on gamefication. We wrap it up with a bit of Nimble Quest: Go check out a video we’ve posted here and .

We are a including a ton of link references this week for your benefit.

Show Links
Sagrada Fam The Pillars of the Earth – by Ken Follett
Pompeii
Habit RPG
Chore Wars
Dungeons and Dragons
White Box Set and Reprint notification
Vile in a Vial
More Pixel People
Cialdini
Dr. Dolittle
Super Stickman Golf – iOS
Super Stickman Golf – Android
Midway Arcade – iOS
NCAA Leg Break – don’t watch if you are squeamish
Gauntlet Video
Nimble Quest

Listener Link:
Gameification by Deloitte

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:30 — 19.6MB)