a penny for my thoughts

According to Wordpress's Daily Post (I know I'm running pretty late on the zero to hero challenge!), my thoughts are worth at least a penny so... let's get to putting them out there!

Seeing as the idea of this blog, or at least it's main focus, is to get my ideas about gamification on the public ear (kind of a journal about my learning process on all that is gamification), I think I should probably start by defining what it is. At least for me.

So, after careful consideration and some shame-faced copy/paste, I came to this definition:

"gamification is the use of game design elements and techniques in non-gaming contexts to drive user engagement"

Basically this definition extends on Kevin Werbach's, as given in his highly successful MOOC "Gamification", with a particular focus on the "what for?", and that is to driving user engagement.
What this means is that a lot of people have looked at games, and more recently at video games, and analysed them in order to understand what design elements and techniques turned them into such powerful drivers for user engagement. I think Jane McGonigal explains that analysis like no other, you should definitely take the time and watch the 4 minutes below.



After this it's hard to deny that games are a force that could and should be leveraged in other contexts. Stripping them down to their basics, you have elements like experience points and milestone achievements that translate to progression to mastery and feedback/reward mechanisms, as well as several forms of activity loops, or engagement loops, that can be abstracted out of the gaming context and applied to a non-game context in order to get results similar to those they'd have in the games themselves.

So, back to the definition I proposed in the beginning of this post, is it generic enough? Or is for example Gabe Zichermann's focus on problem solving the right approach to targeting the "why"? Is user engagement too narrow a focus?
What I've found out by discussing this in community forums, is that the main goal of any gamification effort is indeed to get users more engaged and to get them to achieve a given set of objectives. No matter what train of thought each opinion took, that aspect was almost always present.

One could argue that objectives such as learning a trade, particularly when enterprises are the case, are the true goals of the gamified process. And that's true, regarding the targeted process. However what gamification itself does is to make the achievement of such objectives more appealing, more engaging. It keeps users on the path to achieve those objectives by keeping them motivated, evolving along with user progression and shortening the time-cost for the process in question. Even if that cost is just psychological.


In fact, what user engagement does is precisely that: it shortens the psychological time-cost of the gamified process. This is akin to the state of flow developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, where for example a writer forgets the world around him when he is this "productivity heightened state", aka "in the zone".

So, in conclusion, one might say that gamification's goal is to get users "in the zone". How? By using proven elements and design techniques taken from games in order to drive user engagement.

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state your name and purpose...

I've always felt that boring stuff would be easier to get done if I thought of them as a game.
On the rare occasions when my mother got me to tidy up my room, I'd be all talking to myself "come on, throw that paper ball that you just crumpled while putting away into that basket! Ok, just one more! Now from further away! Now with your back to the basket! Wow! You sure are sexy!". I think that's why it always took forever...

So, without further ado, I'd like to present myselfit, and myself since we're on it, and state what's the deal with this blog.

Hi! My name is Manuel! 
I'm a portuguese dude from Lisbon, just wrapping up my twenties and finding myself wondering what I've done so far and what I should've been doing. Or what I could have been doing if I wasn't always wondering what I should be doing. You see the problem...

So, my evil plan is this: to be so darn interesting and funny that people won't be able to resist reading my posts and following my blog and laughing their arses off. 

What will I talk about? Well, I plan to focus on gamification (hence the until-now-seemingly-random introductory paragraph), but since I tend to digress, I'll just say "gamification and music and other stuff".

Why gamificaiont? gamifctianon?!... you know, it's the funniest thing: I've been reading articles and watching videos and taking online courses about this thing for two years now, and my fingers still trip over themselves while tiping it!
So... ga-mi-fi-ca-tion. Why this? Well, to me gamification is not only epically logical as it fits almost perfectly with my way of thinking. That and it naturally seams two of my biggest topics of interest. They're three actually: games, people and technology.

Tech comes in last on purpose: first because unlike Gartner, I don't think it should be a defining trait of gamification, despite being, alongside the "engagement crisis", one of its hypers (not sure if this word exists...). Second, it comes in third also on my "love it" scale - I'm a programmer 60% by necessity and 40% by choice. I like to think about the technological solutions and to participate in their development, but only up to a point. I'm more about the brainstorming and the high-level definitions, both in taste and in talent. Also, not one for details.

Now onto my goals: am I gonna be a star in the gamification community? Not sure. Will I be average? Not sure either, but it sounds kinda meh.
What I do know is that I think I have a natural knack (is it redundant to say it like that?) for it, both from my past as a gamer - I'm still a gamer but it sounds better if I look distant and insightful - and my scouting background (badges plus non-formal learning... seems familiar?). And of course, it's about the people. For the people, by the people, with some people and so on. That is, I want to get to know everyone that gamifies. In the world.

So on a final note: I aim to misbehave... and if I talk about gamification and create a cool network of people in the process it'll be great I guess!

Catcha later Space Cowboys!

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