Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right

Google Tech Talk
January 24, 2011

Presented by Sebastian Deterding

ABSTRACT

Foursquare, GetGlue, Nike+, Badgeville: From reading news to fulfilling your hearts' desires, more and more "gameified" applications and "gamification" vendors doll out points and badges to users, promising anything from increased user engagement and retention to plain mind control. While some hold that adding such game elements to non-game applications opens a new decade of design, others criticize current implementations as shallow "pointsification" and overselling of a new digital snake oil. What lessons do games really offer for user experience design? Which criticisms are valid? And what can designers interested in "gameifying" an application do to steer clear of the worst pitfalls? In this talk, researcher and designer Sebastian Deterding provides an overview of the current gamification movement, its most troubling blind spots, the motivational powers of games, and how to design for a playful experience that is truly meaningful to its users.

Sebastian Deterding - Sebastian Deterding is a user experience designer and game researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he currently pursues a PhD on the motivational psychology of gameified applications. He speaks and publishes internationally on gamification, social games, and the social contexts of video games at events such as the Gamification Summit, Gamescom, reboot, Playful, or DiGRA. His work has been covered by The Guardian, the LA Times, The New Scientist, EDGE Magazine, and Fast Company's Co.Design. He co-hosts the Gamification Workshop at this year's CHI conference in Vancouver. Web: codingconduct.cc Twitter: @dingstweets

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Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google tech talk
• games
• gamification
• computer games
• educational games

[chenzard]

Finally, Google got HD cam.

[sebastiandeterding]

An extended slidedeck with links is available on Slideshare (can't post the link here, got to slideshare and search for "meaningful play").

[GamificationForum]

Fascinating presentation with lots of interesting examples on how companies are applying game mechanics.

[NimDod]

axis & allies FTW!

[ThisisAliFareedshow]

Google Nerds awesome

[adammustoe]

amazing presenation.

[socialnerdia]

great presentation

[eyebidem]

Just reviewed the presentation again (after the a few months), and I still like the clear message and structure of the presentation. Great!

[shockeyk]

Thanks Sebastian, You gave a great overview to a very complicated concept. On mastery, he identifies key things to provide players:

- Interesting challenges

- Clear goals, scaffolded, paced, and varied

- Juicy feedback (I love the sound of that...)

#transmedia #storytelling #gameDesign

[Grandmaster789]

Nice presentation, clearly stated and very informative. Even game designers may learn a lot from this :)

[Buckiller]

Battlefield2 (and associated sites like bf2s) wrote the book on good game design in regards to some of these points. Everyone was influenced by them.

Viewing the data and being able to drilldown ia a great thing. "Oh, I am 20% better if I play at 5pm than I am at lunch." Or "I use 50% of my gasoline in 5% of the total time I spend in my car"