Driving behavior with game dynamics

Ga*mi*fi*ca*tion = integrating game dynamics into a digital platform, service, community, content or campaign, in order to engage individuals while simultaneously driving meaningful value for doing business (read: monetization).

Every individual is hungry for reward, status, achievement, competition and self-expression. Gamification uses proven techniques to satisfy each individual's needs & desires and to engage each individual with personal relevant transmedia experiences (content, communities, brands, services or other valued solutions).

Each individual has fundamental needs & desires: for reward, status, achievement, self-expression, competition, and altruism. These needs & desires are universal (cross generations, demographics, cultures and genders).

Is the transmedia experience you are trying to built doing anything to address these universal needs & desires?

Game designers have known for years how to address these needs & desires. In the table above, green is the sweet spot for a particular mechanics, while blue is other needs that it hits. So LEVELS (f.i. belts in Karate, job titles, levels in a Frequent Flyer program), are primarily about status in a community, but also hit on individual achievement because it feels good to get to the next level, and competition because it feels good to be a higher level than all your friends (source: Bunchball.com).

Successful brands will be the ones that:

1. Curate a context to self organize and learn how to master the reward schedule for driving participation and building continuous transmedia experiences
2. Capture statistics about individual experiences and persist them (competition, comparison, status, achievement).

As the list of cognitive biases shows, mastering the reward schedule isn't easy to learn.

Watch these videos to learn:
1. What is the business value of gamification?
2. How and why motivates gamification user behavior?
3. What are the building blocks of gamification?





The neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine. We are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain.

This means that:
A. We can predict learning
B. We can predict enhanced engagement
C. We can identify the windows of time in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level.

The biggest neurological 'engagement turn-on' for people is other people. It's not money, it's not being given cash, it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us.

Individual engagement can be transformed to collective engagement, by applying the five psychological and neurological lessons learnt from measuring & observing people that play online games:
1. Allow people to set targets by setting calibrated targets, by using elements of uncertainty, by using these multiple targets, by using a grand, underlying reward and incentive system, by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups, in terms of streets to collaborate and compete, to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see.
2.Offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment.
3. Break things down into highly-calibrated small tasks. Use calculated randomness.
4. Reward effort consistently as everything fields together. Rewards could be calibrated precisely. Use the vast expertise of gaming systems.
5. Use the kind of group behaviors that evolve when people are at play together, these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms.

Conslusion: Media companies that will survive are the ones that create and facilitate arenas for brands to connect with their customers on; companies that curate a context to self-organize and master the reward schedule by using their observations of millions of human hours and plowing that feedback into increasing engagement.

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