Phaedra is out on a well deserved vacation, and the Michael’s spend time thinking about cyber punk novels and current technology. We fight thru a few audio hiccups, but still come in with some deep thoughts. Hanging out and talking about how William Gibson’s Neuormancer is starting to be a reality with some of today’s tech, including Oculus Rift, Google Glass, and smart phones.
But first we have to ask:
Can you teach yourself Kung Fu with augmented reality?
Are you ready for the Tree house of Horror!!!???!!!
Comments Off on 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 in Sweden with the speed camera lottery, where abiders (those who observe the posted speed limit) are entered into a lottery to win the fines of those that speed. As is their nature, Phaedra and Michael explore ways to game the game, and come up with some interesting solutions, including having an option in Waze to optimize travel routing to maximize entry into such contests and methods to avoid creating situations such as in Benson NC where people might cruise up and down the road in hopes of getting more entries in the lottery.
Gamifying work processes
Strava is a geolocation-based exercise game for runners and bikers that reward the fastest times on a stretch of road with a crown to be defended and won back, should someone best your time. Strava is used as a base to consider whether there’s a way to find a process that we want people to comply with, want them to execute as quickly as possible, minimize escapes by reinforcing abiders are put into a lottery to win something of value to them. The additional randomness of the reward – the carrot – may get more people to opt in and play. Figuring out what is meaningful to the player is key. How can gamification and serious games help people to adopt a new process with carrots and sticks? There is a game in there, we just need to tease it out. We would love to hear your ideas!
Phaedra will be a panelist on October 28th, at TransOvation (http://www.transovation.org) in San Jose, California, focusing on the theme of “New Technologies and Workplace Practices That Can Help Organizations Become More Innovative”
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.
Comments Off on 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 of water a day is a pretty well known health tip (I’m drinking my 4th big glass as I’m writing this!), it is easily forgotten in the hectic business day. The team at Microsoft gave their water cooler a bubbly user interface and 4 emotional modes (sad, happy, attract/flirt and party) to experiment with increasing the amount of water consumed by the building’s people. The results: more water for more people, and a wealth of data, feedback and ideas to continue the innovation. The picture above was inspired by Ross’ story and is my low-tech example of giving the water cooler in my apartment some personality as well!
Another example is classifying the food choices in the cafeteria as green, yellow and red, and then using that data to guide behavior. If less healthy food choices are selected, the building might suggest using the stairs or a longer route for a meeting later in the day. This has helped the team learn more about what people are willing to share, and what they are not, and inform future game design on what should have individual vs team collective goals to maximize participation while respecting privacy.
Games for social / business interaction
The game ISHI was used as the buildings were being opened to help the team come together in an open office, connected community. Ross described how people may respond to some survey questions indicating preference between skiing and snowboarding, or cat / dog fandom, and then how that kind of data can be used to create groups and teams with common interests and help people to get to know one another even better. The building invited people to come to a central space, then you have met a number of people with common interest across job roles and functions, with the goal of beating the clock to figure out what do they have in common. This method of dynamic team creation could be leveraged to bring a creative team together to brainstorm how to solve a client’s problem just as easily.
Windows Language Quality Game was another game with similar tremendous results, this game wound up attracting more than 4,000 people play and review over half a million screens, separating actionable feedback from non-actionable feedback received from public beta testers of Windows software. Ross noted that rigorous data collection is key, and his experience of 4x – 16x increased participation and results because of the game mechanics can demonstrate even to the skeptics the business impact and win them over.
We were delighted to have Ross on the show with us today, and if you would like to learn more about him and the projects he’s involved in, you can find him on the following links:
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