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Gamification Nation Podcast

Podcast 37: How we took a top grossing mobile game and are making it into a recruitment, onboarding and learning solution

Gamification Nation Podcast
Gamification Nation Podcast
Welcome to this week's a question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens, I'm the show host and the CEO of Gamification Nation. This week we will follow on from our podcast from last week where we discussed how you could use Monopoly or a board game of any kind as inspiration for your game design for work solution.
How to take inspiration from top-grossing games for serious purposes?
The question we're answering today is how can top-grossing games be the inspiration for your solution, for your game based solution, basically?

To give you an idea, the client that we're working with is operating in one of the Asian markets. We are under a strict NDA, so I cannot disclose the people or the kind of company it is, but I can give you some context.
Step 1: user research
It's an Asian facing client or audience that we're targeting and what they wanted to do was come up with something that would work for their recruitment, onboarding and learning, both learning for the first time as well as continuous development in the workplace. Now we did research and that's always the first port of call for us when we have a new client, is we do research in the target audience to find out, what motivates them? What motivated them to join the company? What motivates them to learn? What motivates them to think of improving their career? What motivates them to show up every day and do a good day's work? We basically ask a lot of questions around that. We also ask questions because we were looking at a game based solution of some sort, to solve all the problems of recruitment, on-boarding and learning in the organisation.

For that purpose we also want to know what are the types of games people were playing and the most topical game and also the top-grossing game at the time, it was a mobile online battle arena game. Now a mobile online battle arena game is like a multiplayer game, but played on mobile. You join a team, it's five against five, two teams against each other and you play different characters in the team. Out of a team of five there are some roles that each of the team members need to take. Some are much more driven towards, let's say fighting and attacking. Others are much more support positions and people with more devious attack strategies, et cetera. So in the game you have typically different characters. One of the things that you need to do is battle true to defense towers or your opponent's team. So two teams are attacking each other effectively and what you're trying to do is capture the other one's castle, so to speak, or the main tower.

Now the way to do that is to go into attack, but also to strategically use all the helpers in the field successfully, all your boosting power successfully and basically attack from the position of strength with your team. So it involves a lot of teamwork. It involves quite a bit of learning and it involves understanding what are the important parts for your character, but also the important things to learn in the game.

Because it was mobile and I would say this, if you are aiming at an Asian audience, you would also always have to consider mobile first pretty much because the networks in Asian markets are mobile first as opposed to in Europe and US where you have a lot of desktop first applications and desktop still being the main tool of communication in business. Now that's not to say that this is not the case in the Asian markets, but in Asia the use of mobile is much wider, much more accepted and much more prevalent and in your face than let's say in other markets in the world.
Step 2: Recognising requirements
We know we needed to come up with a mobile solution and we wanted to model it off a mobile game. Now a mobile brings in a quite an interesting piece of gameplay and translates well to the world of work. First of all, teamwork. One of the things that's important to the client is that people learn to work in teams and learn to behave in a manner that's helpful to the tea...
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