When I was a kid, I was always liked to play - like most children. I used to make up games with my action figures, set up scenarios around the house and garden and then act them out. I would set little rules up to dictate how the action figures could move and interact with each other and their environments. I never knew how each scenario would play out, but I always knew who would win. It was always the good guys, or Storm Shadow. In that respect, the rules made no real difference, unless they Read more [...] Play, Games, Fun, Imagination and Grown Ups
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When I was a kid, I was always liked to play - like most children. I used to make up games with my action figures, set up scenarios around the house and garden and then act them out. I would set little rules up to dictate how the action figures could move and interact with each other and their environments. I never knew how each scenario would play out, but I always knew who would win. It was always the good guys, or Storm Shadow. In that respect, the rules made no real difference, unless they Read more [...] 
There is rather an important update at the end after Richard Bartle offered me some advice!
It had to happen eventually. I had to look at some kind of “player type” theory. Many people have one, Richard Bartle probably having the most famous and most abused of the player type theories out there.
What’s it all about Richard?
For those that don’t know, Richard Bartle labelled players as one of four types to help him understand how they interacted with each other and their environments 
Anyone who has read a few of my blogs will, by now, be under the impression that I am not the biggest fan of rewards. Well, that is not entirely how I feel. Those that have read earlier blogs may remember something I said - "Rewards should recognise achievement, not be the achievement". I also found myself saying in an email "Gamification at the moment is often nothing more than an attempt to illicit Pavlovian responses to external stimuli". I know, how up myself does that sound - but it’s 
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 
I have written about this whole thing quite a lot already, but I have some new insights based on things I have witnessed recently.
We know that extrinsic rewards are meant to demotivate people when doing anything that is even slightly creative. So why do we keep seeing them being used in gamification and marketing. On the face of it, that kind of thing works well. Offer a reward and ask people to do something simple. Like this, follow that, +1 the other and you can win a book. Low and behold you 
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. 
Let me expand on this.
A discussion started on twitter when I mentioned in passing to a couple of gamification people, that really gamification is often a benign form of manipulation. It became an interesting chat, fast. I suppose I expected that! However, when you look at the definition of manipulation in the Oxford English Dictionary you get these two definitions
handle or control (a tool, mechanism, information, etc.) in a skilful manner
control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly 
First of all, thanks to everyone who has viewed or downloaded my Gamification presentation. It has had over 600 views on Slideshare, which is fantastic! Looking forward to my next chance to do the talk (hint hint people!!!)
Also, check out this short interview I did with the Association for Interactive Media & Entertainment 5Qs Gamificaiton
A little while ago, I did a piece called "What the Experts Think" where I invited industry experts in gamification to give their opinions. We, I opened 
Well, this week was going to be some thoughts around a conversation with Ian Bogost. However, that will have to wait until I have more time to actually formulate a decent set of arguments :)
In the mean time, I wanted to put out the little "framework" I proposed in the presentation so many of you lovely people have viewed (over 500 on slideshare at last count - so massive thanks!!)
Basically this is a take on many other peoples attempts at defining a simple framework (I read about Kevin Werbach’s