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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  Science & Technology

[Zx chen]

Finally, Google got HD cam.

[Sebastian Deterding]

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

[Omer Eldar]

WOW!!!! one of the best lectures of gamification, it is the first time that i hear such a profound knowledge and understanding of Gamification.

[nabin manandhar]

It would be a shame if you did not bulk up when normal people accomplish it easily using Slim Body Maximizer (Look it up on google).

[Jarno Virtanen]

An insightful and entertaining talk.

Minor quibble though: if you have a long quote on a slide and don't read it out, the listener has to decide whether to concentrate on the talk or to read the quote.

[Peter Thatcher]

Watch Dan Pink talk at TED about what motivates people (4M+ views) - Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose.....technology and supposed new ways of doing things always need to tie back to basic human drivers or a waste of time.

[DaVince21]

"Some [INDISTINCT] pops up"

Loot. Loot pops up.

[kirrua645]

The Tom Sawyer example is perfect and could have replaced this entire overlong video. The whole point of gamification as presented is to convince your users to do work for you while paying (one way or another) for the privilege. Your challenge as a "gamifier" is not to create content but rather to think up an effective scheme and then obscure it with slick visuals and Pavlovian reinforcement.

[crosbying]

Awesome, you are cool as fuck. How high was the guy when he invented the term Gamification?

[Noam Kostucki]

what's the example that he talks about at 6.20min? I can't understand the name...