Episode 71 – Grinding at Work

Episode 71, Grinding at Work was recorded Friday the 3rd of January 2014 — Happy New Year! Phaedra, Michael and Michael start the new year off with a bang, sharing the games that they’ve been playing over the holidays, discussing the Virtuix Omni 360 degree treadmill device, and exploring how grinding gaming experiences may lend themselves to improved customer and employee engagement. A very interesting gamification idea emerges for how Kinect-like devices could provide biofeedback to call center employees to help them stay “in the zone” and be as effective as possible. Have a listen! Selected show links: Games we’re … Continue reading

Episode 44 – Machine Games

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 … Continue reading

Episode 43 – Snakes on a Game

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 … Continue reading

Episode 22 – Play for Free on Free to Play

Phaedra and Michael M discuss free to play game economics — both from the game designer and the game player perspective as well as how this changes when the game is focused on individual paying players vs larger enterprises as the target market.  With micropayments for in-game purchases being the revenue source for free to play games, Phaedra mentions that at the recent Game Developers Conference that free to play games can be more profitable than $50 boxed games.  Michael shares that he likes to avoid such in-game purchases, hence the title of the show.  🙂   Cross genre gameplay … Continue reading