Episode 62 – Gamification Carrots & Sticks

Phaedra and Michael M hold down the fort for the podcast, discussing the treatment of video games in the media in the wake of the tragic Navy Yard shootings and drawing some interesting thoughts on the nature of serious games to assist with mental health. Gamifying Travel They continue with a discussion on gamifying travel, and explore an idea where the game is to crowdsource the best travel options & prices between city pairs, setting up a competition to find the best solution using humans instead of algorithms.  The suggestion for how to monetize this game brings up the experiment … Continue reading

Episode 61 – Future Workplace

Both Michaels listen with rapt attention as Phaedra brings us all up to speed on the Future Workplace 2020 Summit Symposium that she attended this week past week, while teasing two upcoming events: CDC Games for Health and Women Gaming. We then take a quick left turn (that our phones notice due to the new m7 chip) around gaming our health with various sensors and devices. And then spin totally out of control thanks to LinkedIn and it’s game on cheating spouses. We finally get back on track with a bit of tangible play examples based on the TechCrunch example. … Continue reading

Episode 60 – Bubbly Bubblers in Gamified Buildings

Phaedra, Michael and Michael were delighted to be accompanied by Ross Smith, Director of Test in the Skype division of Microsoft for this show, centered around games for employee engagement. Ross described the recent work that he and his team have done with giving personality to buildings and using the building itself as the ‘game master’, to orchestrate and facilitate employee engagement. Games for health One of the intriguing examples (also discussed in Episode 58, but without the benefit of Ross’s first hand experience) uses a water cooler with personality as the mechanism for gamifying health.  While drinking eight glasses … Continue reading

Episode 59 – Productivity and Pleasure

The gang’s all here and we continue our discussion from last week’s ethics episode. Do you believe that we have the right to be told all the usage of data gathered from any game we play? It it our right, even when the game is free? Is there any difference between games and free services such as Gmail or Facebook? Should the data collection be opt in or opt out? How often do you read the emails you get from your favorite games or services, where they may be changing the terms of service? We discuss all of this and … Continue reading