Extrinsic Rewards and the User Journey
A couple of small bits this week whilst I pull together more substantial work (I'm not a machine!!) First a small revisit of my Flow and User Journey work. In various conversations I have had about the use of rewards in a gamified systems the general question is always "do you need rewards at all". My answer is that it can't hurt if it is done properly. One thing that occurred is that during the on-boarding phase and into the habit forming phase of a user Read more [...] More on Gamification and Careers
2
Extrinsic Rewards and the User Journey
A couple of small bits this week whilst I pull together more substantial work (I'm not a machine!!) First a small revisit of my Flow and User Journey work. In various conversations I have had about the use of rewards in a gamified systems the general question is always "do you need rewards at all". My answer is that it can't hurt if it is done properly. One thing that occurred is that during the on-boarding phase and into the habit forming phase of a user Read more [...] 
To anyone involved in game design, feedback loops will be a well known concept. To those in gamification, they are often talked about, but not everyone will know what they actually are and how they can be used.
Feedback loops come in two main flavors; positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops. Which ever you are looking at they are constructed in a similar way, with two or more phases.
User performs an action
Something happens
User experience is modified
Repeat
Basic Feedback 
A thought that spawned from the back of a great Quora discussion about the role games designers in the world of gamification.
You can program a computer to play the most stunning works of classical music. You can create vast orchastras who never miss a not, or simple and flawless solo piano performances.
So why is it that people still go to see live performances, or buy cds of real people playing the music?
Heart, soul, the x-factor if you will. That somthing that separates each of us and 
2012 draws to and end and so I present a summary of my blogs for the year!
2012 was a heck of a year for my self discovery. I had not realised until now just how many blogs I had written, covering subjects from video games to social media to gamificaiton and Harry Potter. I was also interesting to see that my switch from heavily blogging about Social Media in 2011 to blogging about Gamificaiton was almost total! Not all of it was good, some was plain wrong, but this synopsis of 2012 really shows 
When I was a kid a school (long before Harry Potter had been thought of - and gamification for that matter...), teaching methods generally sucked. A teach stood at the front of the class, dictated out ancient notes and you had to write them down in your exercise book. If you didn't pay attention or did something the teacher did not like, you got a board rubber thrown at your head. There was no intrinsic enjoyment to be had from the learning process; it was all drained by the way we were taught. This 
What follows is an exploration of what happens when you start to map player journeys in games onto Flow theory and then try to bring that into the workplace. Just for fun! It was inspired by Mr Scott Golas after seeing last weeks post on relatedness. It may or may not have any worth, but it has been fun to develop. Click images to see the bigger versions or you can see the presentation at SlideShare
What is Flow and what is the Player Journey?
Mihayi Csikszentmihalyi suggested the concept after 
Another quick one, prompted by an interesting behaviour exhibited by my daughter today that taught me rather a lot about extrinsic rewards.
I have mentioned before the research that has been done on motivation in the past by the likes of Edward Deci and the writing of Dan Pink and more. All of them point to the same thing, extrinsic rewards are bad for intrinsic motivation. The basic reasoning is that at some point, no matter how careful you are, the reward will become the reason to do the task. 
Hello all and a very happy Monday to you. As ever, I am blown away by your reactions to my blogs. The Gamification Framework and Resources posts seemed to go down very well. As such, I have added them as menu options with the Evangelist page! I would really plead with you to get into the gamification forums. I would love to be a bit of a place to go to get answers from the community to questions the Gamification world may ask!
On to today's post though. I was in a toy store with my daughter 
As we begin to enter the world of the next gen of games consoles, I was reminded of a post I wrote for my games site Yet Another Review Site in November last year and thought it was worth a repost!
People often ask where the innovation has gone in the games industry. I have been guilty of it on the past. In fact, this article was going to be titled with that exact question.
Innovation is alive and kicking - but where is the courage?
However, the more I drafted the piece and the more I thought