Welcome to today's Question of Gamification, the podcast by An Coppens. And today we have a guest, Andy Robertson, who also goes by the Twitter handle @GeekDadGamer, and he's a video game journalist and the author of the book Taming Gaming. I'm delighted to have Andy with us today because we're going to address the question of: is gaming safe for my child? And it's a funny story how we actually met and how it came about, with me tweeting and re-tweeting some information that I sent out around #GetSetGo, a campaign by UKIE, who is the organization supporting the games and digital entertainments industry.  I was basically quoting that, "Is gaming safe for my child?" Is probably the most frequently asked question I receive at the end of seminars or webinars when I speak about gamification because my audience tends to be adults. Andy, welcome to the podcast. Andy Robertson : Hello. Thanks for having me. An Coppens : Yes, delighted to have you. So, let's delve straight in. Is gaming safe for children these days? Andy Robertson : Yeah, it's a hot topic, isn't it? And particularly during this period where the amount of games that children are playing is on the increase, and the amount of screen use. And so, often that comes with a bit of baggage, and so usually I'll start to try and unpick it. There are various places we could start. Gaming classed as a disorder An Coppens: Yes, exactly. And I suppose the one place that triggered the conversation for a lot of parents in my view is when the World Health Organization classed gaming as a disorder, and definitely, that's when I saw the increase of questions in this regard, "What should I be watching out for? Is my kid going to be addicted? Should I stop them?" So, do you see that the same way as the World Health Organization? What's your take on that? Andy Robertson : I think it is a complex topic. And I'm not against having a gaming disorder clarified so we can talk about it. But I think the challenge is that some of how it's reported was just like, "Now, finally, kids who game too much can get a diagnosis from a doctor and can be sent to clinics and can be fixed, and can be labelled", rather than actually looking at an individual child and thinking, "Okay, what's working for them and what isn't?" I think the downside was that the danger is that it granted permission to us as parents sometimes to just label an issue that a child might have had, rather than actually taking a step forwards into the games they play and asking them questions, and spending time with them playing to understand what it was and why they were playing. But that said, if you look at the detail of that gaming disorder criteria that the World Health Organization has specified, I don't really know anyone with a child who would fall into that. We'll often say at the school gate, "My son's addicted to Fortnite", but we don't really mean addiction as the World Health Organization means it, because they talk about if a child is playing games so much it's detrimental to other parts of their life, so they wouldn't be going to school, they wouldn't be eating properly, they probably would be washing properly or taking part in family activities. And not only that, but once they noticed that and had been told about that, they would then carry on doing it, they would be unable to stop in spite of those negative consequences, and then that would continue for around about 12 months, and then only then do you start falling into this clinical criteria. So, it's a really extreme end of the spectrum, which I think is actually quite helpful to help us reserve that language of addiction to clinically addicted children, which is in the minority, rather than a label we can apply widely. Gaming as a passing fad An Coppens: I think it's a great explanation, some children, and myself included as a child, I used to love playing a specific game, and I would play it until I fell asleep.

Welcome to a Question of Gamification, a podcast where gamification expert An Coppens answers your questions. Today's question is How can we compete in an unlevel playing field? Today's question was triggered based on a number of conversations, I was having online and offline with different people and also across different sectors. So I don't think it is actually limited to the gamification world. In fact, I think as side hustlers, unlevel playing fields happen and exist in every walk of life, whether you're a builder and you're coming up against the little man in a van and rogue builders without certification, etc., or whether you're in learning design and you come up against people who just basically talk to video or add their PowerPoint deck into a rapid authoring tool and sell it off as amazingly fantastic courses. You will have all of those. In gamification, we have quite a lot of Indies, a lot of small design houses, and I think everyone has to start somewhere. So I applaud them for starting their business, its where I started too. But we also have a lot of people who are in day jobs by reputable institutes, reputable organisations, often researchers, professors, or people working for in jobs that they don't like or which they are holding on to, for the security of the wage package. So it's interesting that we come up against them. It's also interesting to find an approach on how to compete with it. For me as a female founder, for some time, this really annoyed me. It was like, why are they not just sticking to their day job? I was focusing on the fact that in my eyes they already had a main stream of income so why do they want more? I had to find a way of, I guess, rationalising and finding a strategy on how to deal and compete with or against them. Or make peace in my mind that they are there, and they are there to stay. They're not going to go away. For every one that then becomes a real business. There are a hundred who will never reappear and should never make it. I knew I had to find a way of dealing with it and it had to be a positive way of dealing with it, instead of getting angry all the time, which with social media in the picture, is not always easy. Know what you stand for and what you don't stand for What I will say is that when you were competing against many side hustlers, is that you need to be clear on what you are and what you're not. That needs to be very clear to your target market. I would also encourage you to challenge side hustlers or rogue traders and pull them up on things that they are spreading about your industry that you do not find are so savoury or sustainable in the long run. For those of you in a side hustle, appreciate that for people that do pay fair wages and don't have unlimited access to free software tools that there are different realities out there. Keep that in mind when you make predictions about pricing and what should, and shouldn't be done. Pricing, when you have access to cheap or free resources is a whole different ball game than when you pay market rates. As a customer, if you are researching who to do business with, look out for whether they are full time working on this work only, or do they have a day job? And if that's okay with you, then absolutely go for it. B what are their values like? And then when you are shopping around, if you want the cheapest price, the indie will always win the quality and the range and the scalability that they can offer may not be there. You choose and you buy what you choose for as well. How can you deal with competition in a healthy way? Value-based positioning Well, first of all, it's coming up with your values. And for me, I always wanted to make a name for myself and encourage other women too, to join the gamification industry. I mean, for me, the reason to set up Gamification Nation was to bring a female and feminine voice to the industry. When, as I started in 2012,

Welcome to a Question of Gamification! Today's question is, "what have your people been doing in lockdown?" We will take a look at how much they've been spending their time on various tools and media, based on the global web index. We will look at where have your people hung out and you know, we'll use a few statistical research tools that have given us different insights. Generations at work But, we also look at it from a generational perspective. First things first, and… what have they been doing on mass? Well, in April, they were mainly still searching for Coronavirus updates. People were looking for, rule changes, etc. The biggest group active in doing that were the millennials, followed closely by Generation X. Generation X are those aged in the mid-thirties to mid-forties, some even end of the forties. And then, boomers are the generation that follows in age group the 55 plussers.  Millennials are aged between 25 to 35 more or less and Gen Z are classed those younger than 25 better. The generation as defined by Global Web Index in their research: Gen Z – 16-23 years-old Gen Y (Millennials) – 24-37 years-old Gen X – 38-56 years-old Baby boomers – 57-64 years-old If we look at, the various generations, they had one consistency, all of those actively in work were looking for Coronavirus updates and following the statistics and probably reading some of the news. Then, after that, actually, the divide becomes more interesting. Listening to music online was very much a Gen Z sport, as in, the youngest of the generations in work would have spent 70% of their time engaging with music. Then, you know, for millennials that drops down to about 60% for Gen X 50% and for the baby boomers down to about 40%. It had a gliding scale backwards. Watching movies was the highest for millennials, watching funny videos, the highest for GenZ, so the younger ones.  And then playing games actually came in a solid fourth place across ALL age groups.  Now give it 10 years ago, that was not the case, so playing games on mobile playing games on laptops, if you combine the two, they were actually one of the top activities for Generation Z, a generation of millennials, and even 30% of Gen X and baby boomers are 30/35% of those were engaged in playing games, either online, or mobile or on a PC or laptops. Top online consumption (based on figures from April 2020 from Global Web Index) Coronavirus news and updates (68%) listening to music (58%), watching movies/shows (49%), watching funny videos (42%), playing games on mobile (40%), and looking at memes (32%) Unless you are a Gen Z native in which case the list was something more like this: Listening to music (71%) Looking for memes (54%) Looking at funny videos (52%) So, there's quite an interesting divide. Now. Some of the other things people have done is reading business articles, looking for cooking recipes, looking for discounts, healthy eating, sports news, celebrity news. And then it goes all the way down to, well, beyond 10th place before people actually engage in learning activities like podcasts, live blogs and webinars are way down. They weren't consuming educational content If you were thinking, and a lot of my audience is in the learning space, so I would have expected it to be higher. If you're thinking that your people have been diligently learning and consuming content, think again! Most likely there will have been listening to music or listening to something, watching movies or videos, looking at memes or playing games. I'm thrilled to say that games are up there. Games enable connection and achievement Now, this was a global web index report dating back to April. Haven't yet seen the figures for May and June, but my thinking is that, this may not be vastly different. When I look at, the increase in consumer behaviour, even in just the UK, analysed by, Statista and others, we see a,

Welcome to a Question of Gamification. I'm An Coppens the show host for the show and today's question is one of mine. Are you all zoomed out? Yes. I mean the Zoom online meeting system or in fact, any online webinar, meeting or conferencing tool. In this lockdown, and thankfully for many of us, we are coming to the end of the lockdown. Or at least the end of remote working for some of you. For organizations like ours that have been remote from the start, we'll continue to do what you have been doing for the last number of weeks. As in work remotely and we probably see many more companies doing this. What I see is there's an awful lot of debate on how great it is that more things are moving online and how great it is. I champion that. I would be the first to say, yes, I think it's good that we are exploring all opportunities and all ways of communicating, I am definitely all for it. One-way traffic or Talking heads syndrome What I also increasingly see, and this is what I feel a bit more opinionated about, because of our gamification work where we try to encourage engagement, and this is the talking heads syndrome. I think in most of the meetings that I've been in online, whether they were conferences, learning events, et cetera, the trend is towards more talking heads, video heads. People talking at you with very limited interaction. In fact, in some online conferences, they are even going so far as saying, please do not post questions on the sidebar whilst people are speaking. Or the other example where they are at least trying I guess, where there is a sidebar in the software, where you do get encouraged to ask questions but then nobody answers anything and you are left with to nothing, no interaction or no questions answered. The people that are actually speaking rather than just ramble on about whatever hobby horse topic, they are on. Some of them are very informational. Don't get me wrong. But it's very much an information one-way street and very little about the two-way interactive experience that most learners need for them to make sense out of information. The side or backchannel matters I'm also part of other networks where I actually feel, you can have a great sideshow going whilst still listening to the speaker. I think that is more true to reality. In most situations, if you're training in the classroom, primarily,  you'll always have side chat, side conversations and sometimes these side conversations will make the mainstream. Sometimes they don't. I think that's natural. So for people to be asked to shut these natural responses down, I think is going against human nature. What is worse and more likely to happen is that they will join each other on Slack and start slagging each other off, or the speaker off or worse again, tune out altogether and leave the meeting or conference run in the background. I have definitely done that on a lot of online events and conferences in recent months. Making your online meeting or conference more interactive? What can you do to make your Zoom or whichever webinar tool that you use more interactive? The first thing is to actually look for questions and to engage people, to comment on specific topics. You can include polls. Most of the webinar or online meeting software, these days have polls as a functionality, where you can get like a temperature check. As a rough guide, I would say every five to 10 minutes, you should schedule in some activity in order to keep people engaged, whether that is a Q and A, whether that is a quiz, whether that is a poll, whether that is a question what are your thoughts. Ideally, go further and get people to work together on something. People work together in the real world. I would go even further than that and set them a challenge where they can break out into breakout rooms, work on it together, and then have per group feedback very much like you would do in a, in a seminar setting.

What does loyalty mean in times of crisis Welcome to a Question of Gamification. I am An Coppens, the show host for this show and the CEO and chief game changer at Gamification Nation. Today, I want to answer the question,  what does loyalty mean in times of crisis? I will give a bit of a health warning to start with, that this will be a very personal and probably a very honest podcast episode in the sense that what we see all around us is probably the same for most of us. How we see and how we experience what is going on with Covid-19, business, family, friends, is what's different based on all of our own previous experiences.   The topic of loyalty is interesting because in gamification, we often design for loyalty, for consistency, for continuous support for either a company, a product or even a service offering. We often get asked to make learning sticky, which is effectively a request to train people to be loyal to training itself, but also loyal to specific pieces of content. Now, what I'm noticing, and I wonder if it's the same for you, is that loyalty during this time also has many more meanings. Or maybe it's just the same, only experienced much more in your face now, than it used to be before. I think as a small business loyalty from your customers, loyalty from your suppliers and loyalty from the leaders towards the people that work for you.  Loyalty in times of crisis? Well, I have to say what was striking in the early weeks of this COVID19 lockdown, is that our pipeline went from a healthy pipeline of many potential projects to nearly completely gone in the space of two weeks. The biggest companies were the first to drop the enquiry and to close the ranks. The smaller ones led us a little bit on the long finger and you know, eventually also had to park or pause. From the existing clients, it was also interesting to see who's being loyal and who we could turn to because as soon as we started losing pipeline, one of the steps I took was to reach out to our client base and say, look, is there anything else we can do for you? Is there a project that you've been thinking about that you now have time to execute? The response to that was also interesting. Those that we worked well with, and you know, although they didn't have immediate projects, we're able to reach out and say, Hey, why don't we do this? Why don't we look at that? And a few others rang me personally to say, "Hey, we'll keep an eye out for something. You know, we don't have anything right now that we can move on with but, you're first on the list when we do." You know, those are heartening things when everyone is feeling the pinch of lockdowns and potential closures. We are no way near as bad as a retail store or a bar or restaurant who have to completely lockdown and many won't make it out of this crisis. Saying that, we didn't actually expect to be hit as much as we are, because in reality, our business has been functioning remotely since its inception. That's how we structured it. That's how I wanted it to be, to have, let's say, a digital nomad lifestyle. And you know, most of my team is the same. You know, we meet when we can in person, but we don't have to meet on a regular basis to be effective and to deliver the services we do. So it was interesting to see that even though we are structured that way, that we are still significantly hit. Reality check We had eight live projects, out of the eight only two are still alive. We had, as I said, a healthy pipeline. That one completely evaporated within the space of two weeks, and we have not, so far been able to generate new business. The team, on my side, I've been honest with from the start. My guys, we have a small team of seven people. Most of them are on long term freelance arrangements with us. So we're very much tapping into the gig economy. What I could have done is say to everyone, looks like, we're closing, closing projects and therefore thank you very ...

Today I wanted to give you an update of what we are doing in light of all of the lockdowns internationally. As well as all of the loss of business or contraction of business worldwide.  Thanks to the same virus. I hope at the same time that you are staying safe, keeping your distance and doing whatever the World Health Organisation or your local governments or both are telling you to do. The business impact From our business perspective, it has been, to be perfectly honest, a bit of a scary moment because when the lockdown started to take hold of Europe, a lot of our projects were put on hold. Meetings that were arranged were obviously no longer possible because of travel restrictions and even meeting restrictions. So from a business perspective, this has had a major impact. Now, a few weeks into this, we are seeing things stabilise. So we are hopeful that things will ease off. And from our corporate client perspectives, we see actually things progressing as normal or as much as normal can be, which, people now established in remote offices, et cetera. Now, our business has been remote from the start. So, for us, it's just business as usual in, in some sense. So we were quite bizarrely taken aback by how much time it took, some of our client organisations to adopt and approach that we have been living day to day for years and years. Team actions: inspiration posts I wanted to share with you some of the things we have done and some of the things we are still doing and how maybe they could be useful to you. The first thing I did when the lockdown happened was to get the team together and asked the question, what do we want to do? Can we do something to cheer people up? Because in the end of the day, in the serious games business, just like in the games business where you are in the business of motivating people, engaging people, and helping people to feel good, empowered and better than they did before they engaged with us or met with us. So from our perspective, it was important to keep people in that tone and share that message. The whole team actually agreed with me. That's not the most usual thing to happen at Gamification Nation. We all said, let's do something nice. And because a lot of us were affected and impacted quite directly, quite quickly, we started sharing the feel good inspiration of the day. If you followed us on social media, then you have probably seen the messages. But every single one of our team contributed to the feel-good messages. Now in the feel good inspiration of the day you had a feel good game. A game that our team members used to cheer themselves up of feel-good songs we listened to, to feel better and a feel-good thing to do. Then I put together some cartoons to go with it too. To spread a message of joy, lightheartedness, because I'm sure there's plenty of heavy stuff going on. Free resources What we've also done is created a trivia quiz and some fun polls, which could be a bit of fun. If you're isolated on your own, you can play alone, but if you're isolated and you're connected with people, you can play together or even if you're isolated alone and you have the internet working, you can still play with friends. We created a trivia quiz, a poll and COVID-19 myth busters quiz. They're all available on our COVID19 free resources page. Test your knowledge, have some fun. We've also created a 31 day learning inspiration calendar, so basically 31 learning resources that you could tap into because we're very much about learning and learning games. It is a list of resources where you can find inspiration and new things to try and learn.You may have heard of some, you may not have heard of others. Then we also grouped all of the games that the whole team came up with as feel-good suggestions. So we have 42 games that we play to chill and feel better. If you were short of game, game inspiration, there's loads there. I've also asked our guys to create a space on this...

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host for this podcast and the CEO and founder of Gamification Nation. A question we get always or regularly asked, maybe not always, is what is a gamification strategy and why should I have one? Well. It's one of the first things we will embark on with most of our clients. Whether you design a serious game or design a gamified process. In effect, we always start with a strategy and some of the key questions we want answered in the strategy is why did you choose gamification? Now, strategies typically sits as a direction setting tool. Something that shows what's the roadmap. What's the thinking? Where are we going with this and why does it matter? So gamification strategy is no different. So if you are for the first time going to be using games or, gamified processes, then the question is, why did you choose that tool of communication as opposed to other tools of communication? Why did you eliminate the other tools? And. You know, what's your thinking behind that? So we want to know what drove you to the up decision and why do you want to do that? Very often we hear or we want to appeal to the younger audiences, so therefore we need to include games and gamification. It's a good enough reason to include games and gamification if your audience is indeed of that generation, and if they are the kinds that actually do play games because believe it or not, although games are played by nearly 80% of the population these days and that's including board games, sports, etc. As well as the digital video games, computer games, that we probably think of when we talk gaming, we also know that the average gamer is about 35, is probably male in some countries, female, but the split is, is 52-48 either side of the gender fence. So it's not something that is that much geared towards the younger generations. When we are saying, games are sort of the language young people speak, we do know that a young person today is likely to have played more games than they have actually done homework or studied for their courses. So there is a pinch of salt be with that. Why is that? Because it's much more accessible than let's say, when I was a kid.  I'm a generation X'er so if anyone wants to know. So in my days the games I played were competitive sports. A lot of games at parties, which could have been board games but also physical games. I remember my birthday parties being very much driven around crossing obstacles in the garden. And if you wanted to be safe to the other side, you went through a little puddle pool or other obstacle for that matter much to the enjoyment of some of the parents of older children that attended my parties. So you know why, why using a game is an important question to answer as part of your strategy. I would also say, how does it then fit with the other strategies you have for your business? And if it is to attract younger audiences, yes, games can work. If it is to engage or retain more of the right people, whether that's the right customers, the right clients, or the right employees. Games can be a good differentiator on that because you can basically build challenges into games and gamified processes that you wouldn't necessarily find in traditional onboarding of a new client or onboarding of a new employee. Games can work on multiple levels too. Give you insights that you wouldn't get from regular communication patterns that exist in the market today. So, and it can be in a neat little test of how willing is your person to engage in play and does that fit with your culture. And that brings us onto to an important point. Culture is important. So if this is your first venture into games or anything gamified, then I would say where does it fit in the longer term view strategy? Is it the start of more games and more gamification, or is it a once-off. It's important to know  which it is. If it is a once-off,

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...

How games inspire us in gamification? We want to pick a game that you all know to illustrate how we work and how it inspires what we do. I often tell our game designers that you can make any game into something that we can use either for learning, for HR, for recruitment, onboarding, marketing, lead generation, etc. Sometimes they frown their eyebrows at me to sort of say, "Well, that actually doesn't work." Or, "We don't know how that could work." Then we tease it out a little bit further. My thinking is always if there is some commonality in the game and in the business problem that we're trying to solve, then we have a chance that it could fit. If it appeals to the people that are in that organisation, then obviously we can look at how can that game applies. Or how can we take the game elements that work for that game and apply it to the processes that they have? Whether that's marketing, HR, sales, you name it. Whatever is a process in business we can add game elements to it. Board games are social in nature Let's pick on an example that you probably all know, the game of Monopoly. The game of Monopoly is a board game. By default, the game genre or the game type is social in nature. Why? Because people have to sit around a table to play it. It's not something that you do on your own. I mean, maybe some people can, maybe there are online versions that you can play on your own, typically against a bot which pretends to be another player. Monopoly is a good example of a social setting game that can be quite complex and where you can have up to five or six people playing at the same time. Where could a board game be useful in the world of work? Well, actually any time where you have a conference, anytime where you have learning taking place in groups or even at leadership events where you want to address a specific, rather complex situation, board games can be very useful. I would even argue that often board games trigger more conversation than let's say any digital type of game or digital type learning or even structured classroom learning. Because what you're basically asking people to do is apply their limited knowledge to solve a problem, AKA the game. Games ask you to solve problems What problem does Monopoly solve? Well, it basically gets you to think about the supply and demand of real estate, the supply and demand of your money, and how far it stretches. It also makes you think about, "Okay. Strategically, which types of streets do I want? What kind of buildings can I afford to put on them? And how lucky am I in rolling the dice?" Because there is an element of luck attached to the Monopoly game as well. Whatever game genre you pick, it needs to be fitting to your audience, but also fitting to the problem you're trying to solve. If you want people to be able to access your game remotely, then obviously it needs to be in some shape or form digital or able to be posted to them. Imagine how the losers feel and experience the game (as well as the winners) In Monopoly, each player plays for themselves and plays against the other players and ultimately there is a winner and a whole bunch of losers at the end. Some of the losers will feel the pain as they go through the game. Some of the losers just have been playing all along but just didn't end up with all of the money in the end of the day. To compete or to collaborate that is a purpose driven question The thing to consider is what you wanted the game to do. Do you want it to be competitive? If you have competitive people, we often ask the question is that the best strategy for your game? Because often when you have really competitive spirits, then I would suggest look at a collaborative board game. If you want to make it a social event-related ... because you still want people to talk to each other after, you still want people to work together. And for a workplace setting, often collaboration is something that's desired by many employers that...

Welcome to this week's, a question of gamification. This week, I'm talking about what makes a great learning game. My name is An Coppens. I'm the chief game changer at Gamification Nation, and also the show host for this show. Serious games must still be fun We are working a lot on learning related games, HR related games, and games for all kinds of marketing related business purposes. One of the key things we focus in is both gamification and serious games for business usage. We don't just make games for fun, we want to make games that are fun, but also have a serious objective. The definition of a serious game is a game designed with a serious objective in mind, in our case that is typically a business related scenario. I want to make clear, when we say serious games, usually people think, they're boring. To be honest, a learning game should still be fun to play. If it's not fun to play, you are immediately causing a barrier for someone to make the most out of their learning experience. First things first, learning games should still be fun. How do you make a game fun? There are many ways of doing that. Interaction is definitely a requirement. It differs very much from a training setup for eLearning, for example, where you just click next. A learning game should be making you think, making you realize that maybe I don't know everything here and I need to explore, I need to find out, I need to discover what else there is to learn. Encouraging curiosity to delve deeper into the topic. Learning by experiencing What makes a great learning game? In my view, there are a couple of things. I believe a good learning game creates an experience where you are learning by doing, whether that's the doing of whatever it is you need them to learn mimicked in a digital space or in a board game space where you go through the same motions and emotions of what a real scenario would be like. For example, we made a cybersecurity board game where the players have to defend the company when a cyber attack happens. The game was created to help salespeople to sell more cybersecurity insurance and understand why a business owner should have such insurance. It's a very specific objective. We created an experience, there was emotion in the game because people could lose their business, they could be fined a lot of money, they could lose a lot of money based on cyber attacks that happened. You couldn't control the attack, but you could control your chosen response as a team sitting around the board trying to collaboratively defend the business. We mimicked real life scenarios. Life like experiences work best for adults With adult learners, in my opinion, the more closely it is linked to real life experiences, the more chance you have of it being a great learning game. Because you immediately provide the context that they need in order to have the ability to make sense of learning. If you think of our brain as a sense-making device, making sense of something is linking it to things that we can relate to, things that we understand. Complex topics for example, cybersecurity to a laymans person could result in responses like: I don't know nothing about cyber and it may make them run the other way. No matter how well you explain it in your learning. Experiencing what happens, experiencing what can be done is one thing. Actually going through the emotions and experiencing an attack in a game from the same perspective as the prospective client. Also gives the same kind of feedback as if you would, have expereinced it first hand in reality. It may not be as extreme as what would happen in real life in case you were the owner of a business under cyber attack. Creating an experience that resembles real life, with similar choices and consequences, is one of the key ingredients in my view for a good learning game. Appeal to the intrinsic motivation of the learner The other aspects of good learning game,

Welcome to A Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the chief game changer at Gamification Nation, and the show host for this program. Today I'll give you a health warning. It's a bit of a ranty post or a ranty show, because I read up a lot and I follow a lot of technology newsletters, and funding newsletters, et cetera. A few days ago, one of the newsletters came in and the title read How to Move Beyond Gamification. There was yet another top CEO of a technology company saying how gamification completely stinks and is the world's worst gift to the planet, and you should use game design instead. Intrinsic motivation is essential I found that fascinating, because obviously gamification is drafted and distilled from game design. If you're a game designer or gamification designer who has not studied game design, then I would question what do they base their foundations on? One of the things, and one of the points he went on to make, is that gamification was extrinsically motivated confetti that you put on top of something, and basically game design was intrinsically motivated. Actually I would argue that for good gamification to happen, it needs to be intrinsically motivated all of the time. No negotiation. Whether you're using gamification to aid with a process, or whether you're using it to create a serious game, both with the purpose of improving something to do with work. Ironically, the system that they have designed and the tool that they use is very much a gamified a solution. In some sense it is exactly what we would do for our clients. One thing then that came strongly from the post, is he described what I would describe as good gamification practice. Namely, understanding the motivations of your users. Understanding they can be encouraged one way or another, how they will improve based on what you're offering them. Answer the question: What is in it for me? You have to always answer the biggest question, the, "What's in it for me?" question. Because otherwise, no matter how cool your system is, people are not going to use it. The same goes for games. Where I think games and gamification often diverge is, the level of emotional intensity that they create in their experiences. In most games, the emotional draw is high, the commitment is high, and the risk of losing that is also high. If you drop out of the game in mid play, you lose out. Typically, that's what keeps people playing until the end. In work, you don't always have the freedom to continue working on what you are working on until the end. Sometimes people interrupt you. These things happen. When we look at gamification design, I still believe it's good practice to tap into the emotional experience as well. More and more, we see tools from UX around empathy mapping coming into the gamification space and into the game design space, which I believe is a good thing. Superficial gamification, where you are purely rewarding and punishing based on superficial things, like extra bonuses, badges, points, et cetera. They are good mechanics to use, but if they're not part of a bigger package and if they don't mean anything to the end user, they're bloody well useless.It doesn't take a technical rocket scientist to figure that one out. I do feel that in the industry in general, that people often slam gamification because it suits them. It's good click bait for their articles or titles, but really they're also hurting an industry. Even from within the gamification industry, I see a lot of people knocking what we're all trying to achieve. I think most of the people I know and have worked with are definitely out to deliver something of value, rather than just delivering something that makes them profit or is the next big thing or has been. Because if we look at it objectively, the gamification big buzz has definitely passed, and thank goodness for that! I feel it means that more serious players are still around.

Welcome to a Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the Chief Gamechanger at Gamification Nation. And first of all we with our first episode of 2020, I would like to say Happy New Year to all of our listeners and followers. And if you watch this or listen to this later in the year, not to worry, we still wish you a Happy New Year and I hope it's going great for you. Trends We want to kick off 2020 with our glass bowl in front of us and a bit of predictions, trends, what we were expecting for this year in the space of Gamification and everything has to do with game design that's applied to business purposes. First thing that we think or I think personally is going to happen is that we'll see more market consolidation. In the past year and in the past number of years we've seen bigger business systems buying up smaller players in the Gamification space. ERP's and gamification, continued market consolidation Some of the big enterprise resource planning systems, which you may have come across the likes of SAP, Oracle, those named companies have been probably around for some time in buying Gamification platforms and how they apply to learning and development. We have seen a few of those acquisitions in the past year. I think that trend will continue. I also believe that on the other side we'll also have more startups entering the market, which is something we've seen last year. I think every month we've heard at least of two or three or four new platforms, new applications, sometimes very specifically zoning in on, for example, lead generation. Another one focusing in on just purely educational technology and Gamification. No matter where you look, there's new players entering the market and in some sense that's a good thing because that means that there's still a market and the market is still growing. On the other side, it makes it also more crowded and a bit more aggressive. People fighting for their slice of the pie. We think that's going to increase and continue to increase in 2020. I don't think it's going to stop anytime soon. In some of the market segments like marketing, like business efficiency, like supply chain, we still have plenty of scope for a new platform so if you're still looking to enter into that space. And some market segments are quite hard to break into or to upset the existing big name platforms that have been traditionally in place and the ERP systems are a case in point. That's why they're buying the other systems. What I always found fascinating about the enterprise resource planning systems is that they were built to support business processes mainly for industrial style companies. They came from the accounting function, typically speaking and then audit in typically engineering, manufacturing, etcetera, and they have since evolved to force fit a little bit into the service space, which is probably the biggest space for most businesses and most countries. Where most money is made, at least in Europe, that's definitely very much the case. I questioned how useful and reflective of work practices these systems are for real because some of the time, my question is when a client comes to us and asks us, "Oh well I want to add the Gamification on top of my X big name system." I often ask why. And typically the answer is, "My people aren't using it." And then the question really should be why?  It's also my first question, why are they not using it? Typically the answer is a combination of factors. Some don't see the purpose for it, some think it's too slow, some feel it's not up to the job. Let's not forget that a lot of these systems were designed in the 50s to serve businesses in the 50s. Business has moved on, systems have been developed, but are expensive and often the contracts in place are not easy to break. That's why people don't move on. And the bigger the organization, the less easy it is to just jump into another system. There are many reasons for that.

Welcome to a Question of Gamification. This is An Coppens. I'm your show host and also the CEO of Gamification Nation. This week's question of the week is, "How can you keep your gamification design or your game design fresh? It's a question we've had several times. It's a question I also ask my clients, how are they going to keep people engaged over the long haul? Sometimes we build gamification campaigns that are short, snappy and just for 45 days, a season, a launch, something like that. In that case, the longevity is not necessarily a question, but a lot of the times we're asked to build a gamification design for let's say a learning portal, for a marketing year of. For a product that needs to attract new people all of the time. Now the hint is in it, I suppose in some sense, and it always made sense in my mind, but when I say it to people, especially in the operational side of a business, I usually get greeted with, "Oh, that's how you do it", kind of response. So if you're in learning, if you're in HR, if you're in anything employee facing, you've got to think like a marketeer. You've got to think like the seasons of fashion, the seasons of nature in effect, because most of the time your business, if it's like any bit like ours, it has cyclical moves, some periods are really busy, other periods they may go a bit quieter. And how you motivate your people in the up days and in the low days are slightly different so they should be. Now in periods like January, we've done campaigns for telecoms organisation to beat the January blues, for example. In another company we've built in four seasons into their learning portal and each season brought new quests, new challenges, new interesting things to explore. So you give the impression there's always something to aim for. Now in recruitment, it's probably not the same role that's open all of the time. So varying that so that your message changes to the marketplace because people looking at your company will also look at is there variation? Is it the same all the time? So one thing that we took away from that is that a lot of companies don't think about that at the outset of, you know, Oh, I want to do gamification, or Oh, I'm going to play a game. We're going to need a game for X purpose. And then they don't think any further. So what's after the first rollout? So we make them, we asked them to think about that and say, okay, so that's great, you're going to invest X amount of money into building this new way of doing it, motivational way of encouraging your learners to come into your learning portal. What are you going to do to, to make it sticky, to make them come back? No, in last week's call or last week's podcast, I spoke about building habits. Habits are a good thing, but again, if you know yourself, and if you're any bit like me, you have good habits and bad habits and one of my bad habits is that I stop and start an awful lot of things and I may not always finish everything. Like, for example, you know, I have these great intentions of losing weight and I'm still working on it and I keep stopping and starting the whole chain of losing weights, eating right, exercising more, and drinking more water. So yeah, so it's, it's a constant reminder of good habits and we don't always keep the good ones up forever. So we have to make sure that in any game design, but also any gamification design that we build in for those moments where people are just not sticking to what they said they were going to do. I mean, think about your new year's resolution. It's, you know, something that most of us do in the beginning of the year and usually three weeks in they're all down some dark hole over your memory and you've forgotten all about it. Or if you're good, you're still going. Give it another three weeks and maybe it starts to ease off a little. So you know, habits are good thing, but again, on their own, just having game mechanics stimulates positive reinforcements and...

Welcome to this week's A Question of Gamification. Welcome to this show. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host, and also the CEO of Gamification Nation, and I first of all have to apologise for my absence. We wanted to make this a weekly show and guess what happened? I lost my voice, so it's taken a while to get back on track, and it's still not 100%, but it's good enough so that I can record a new episode for the podcast. I missed talking to you, but I also was glad to let the body heal, and do what it needs to do to get better. This week's question of the week is an interesting one. It's one that we had to deal with recently, so how can you extract information out of learning teams that are useful for game designers, and then how do you use that information to make it into a game? So it's maybe a double edged question. So on one side, how do you get the information out of learning teams inside a corporate sector? And then how do you make sense of it so that it actually makes sense to make a game with? Recently we won a project and it very much involves a lot of game design around new content. So it's learning based games but around new content for the organization. And in order to get to a base level, we obviously need the organization to tell us what kind of topics they want to cover, what kind of subjects their people need to learn, et cetera. So that was sort of a given a baseline. So then we went looking and I said to my guys, I said, "Look, what would work well from our perspective is if we followed a very basic learning design model, which I learned way early in my training career, and it's called the KASH model, you see it for people talking about performance related training, et cetera." And typically it's used in the context of making training linked to actually translating it into day-to-day on the job work habits. So KASH stands for knowledge, attitudes, skills and habits. And the whole theory behind it from a learning thinking perspective is first of all you need knowledge. Then you need the attitude to want to learn and absorb that knowledge, and then the attitude to apply it and also practice the skills that relate to the same knowledge. Because knowledge without implementation might as well, I think there is a saying, not mine but somebody else's, that says to know and not to do is not to know. Something along those lines. In any case, I heard it several times in my career of training in the NLP sector, the Neuro-linguistics. So KASH, easy to understand, easy to remember, but also actually very useful from a game design perspective. Because when we're thinking about learning related games, the first thing that always comes up, oh we need to quiz. Now a quiz, whilst it has its purpose and it's really good and very effective, it's also one of the most overused game types for knowledge testing. The other way of spreading knowledge is to make people curious and to have hidden elements that you have to unlock or crack a code or solve a more difficult scenario in order to unlock the knowledge that they need to learn, the knowledge that they need to use for whatever new skill it is. So knowledge tests are easily translated into games, whether that is finding stuff, whether that is creative repurposing of let's say an arcade game or traditional games that you played when you were younger. Even simple games like Mario Runner, crosswords, different types of puzzles, they can all be made into knowledge related games and knowledge related tests, so to speak. Attitude is something not in a game and in a reality is something how you show up. Now from a game design perspective, that's really interesting. Your character can always have a positive and a negative side and depending on the circumstance it can choose to play either way. So if you're thinking in the role playing game style of game, you have the option to choose the rebel who doesn't do anything they're being told or know to do or know that'...

Why is game design so expensive? Hi, this is An Coppens. I'm the chief Game Changer and show host of a Question of Gamification. And today I want to draw your attention to costs because it's a frequently recurring theme for our company for sure and also to draw some comparisons because, when people in business are shopping for a game most of them have not looked at what it takes to make a game. They consider it the same as for example a website or any kind of business application. Now when you think about a game. Even some of the basic casual games that we play on our mobile phones may require several team members several pieces of software and several different lengths of time of development. So I wanted to sort of address the question. Why is it so expensive to design a game or what constitutes the cost of designing a game? Because, more and more frequently people come to gamification and would actually like a serious game. And because both of them have a serious purpose and usually a business objective, it's not unsurprising that this happens. The challenge for us is that they usually come as I say it with a bicycle budget, but would like to buy a Ferrari. And that would be similar in game terminology having the budget for a very simple game like Pac-Man or Flappy Bird and actually wanting let's say a AAA game similar to a World of Warcraft or and ideally compressed for mobile. I mean not unusual as a request to be honest in our world, so. What constitutes the cost? I mean and I wanted too to paint a picture as large as possible. If you're looking for something to the style of a Flappy Bird a simple quiz, one person can develop that. Design it develop it and you probably need only a couple of weeks to do it and then maybe a week or two for testing. If you are aiming to build something much more engaging much more graphically interesting you end up already needing different tools so different softwares to get you started. So that's the first thing. So you need different software licenses, different graphic design tools, game development tools, hosting etc. Now for a big Triple A game and a triple A game. I would want you to think about it along the lines of a Grand Theft Auto, a World of Warcraft and OverWatch. Games that have typically a development team of minimum, five to ten people on them. So in a development team for these kinds of big big name games, you typically have lead game designer who sets the overarching concept. You have level designers you have which are all responsible for one level and that needs to be consistent with the main story arc and the main storyline and fit into the overall vision of the lead game designer, then a narrative designer. You may also find in the larger organizations where the actual narrative is worked out based on levels, based on characters. You may even have character designers who work out a whole story board as story Bible so to speak for each character in the game nearly as developed as let's say a script for a movie if you will and then you usually have several programmers. Programmers tend to program games of that nature in either Unity or Unreal, the two big engines for game design and they will typically Master skills like C# or C plus. So both Unity and Unreal allow you then to push it through to different platforms whether or not it's Android, iOS, PlayStation, web apps, Nintendo's you name it. Most of the development tools allow you to do that. Then on those games you also have graphic designers and animation designers. So the graphic designers may have specialties some are background designer some are character designers. And then the animation designer basically makes sure that the characters can animate the anything that needs to move also moves. Those Graphics can be 2D, 3D. So you may have specialists in 2D graphics or 3D graphics and basically, visual effects need to happen so you could even have a visual effects artist working on ...

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the chief game changer at Gamification Nation and also the show host for this show. This week's question is what are the Learning and Development opportunities that gamification can unlock in the workplace? A big question and it was one that I was asked by a journalist recently who was writing about gamification and other new technologies in the workplace and gamification is obviously considered as one of those So my answer was, first of all to say it's a big question. What are the opportunities? Well the opportunities are quite large. If you think about it most young people will have played games at some point. They may not all be lets say Esports Gamers or really into the big multiplayer online games, but most people have used regularly social media regular games like things you play on your mobile the casual variety and in the wider spectrum of games like multiplayer online games, role-playing games. I would even consider Sports board Games Etc as part of the larger gaming picture. So most young people know that and most young people have on their devices things that are gamified from the get-go. Then they end up in the workplace and they come across often very archaic looking systems or boring interfaces of the things that we use every day. I mean, you know, there's nothing wrong with your Word and Excel and Office products, absolutely, nothing wrong, very functional very, you know very much fit for purpose. So you wouldn't expect there to be game mechanics on top of it. But what gamification can unlock is productivity to use those tools, productivity to complete. So if we look out workplace productivity most managers would love to know how long are my people working on things? What does it take for them to complete an item Etc who's in trouble? Who needs my help? Who's actually doing very well and you know happy to keep plodding along without any hand-holding or anything else? So those kinds of things are really vital for a manager to know and vital for a person to understand. And often for the individual we don't get feedback on our productivity or performance until it's too late or the person either quits or you as a manager have to have a word with the fact that you know, it's not as good as you wanted it to be but if people knew as and when they went how things were progressing and what was good about it, you know, they would already be at a better starting point. So that's the first thing I would say. So what kind it unlock? More productivity, more feedback without having to be there in person. I only think there's still a place for the person face-to-face conversation too, I so wouldn't rule out one over the other but we work with a number of systems where you can have dashboards to see about your performance to look at completion to see how you're doing within the team, to get basically completion rewards, completion unlocking either rewards in the shape of little items or something that you can eventually trade in for real-world items. So whether that is a badge or real-world item, it's a reward for something you've done or simply a dashboard that gives you the impression. Okay. This is where I'm at. This is where I need to go. This is how we're doing. This is how my work is actually having an impact on the larger company because most of us, especially -- and I remember when I was in large organizations, would love to know how our work actually makes a difference to anyone because even the smallest item or smallest thing can have an impact but you don't always know. So knowing the bigger picture goals and how your personal goals play into that can be very interesting very rewarding and actually make people feel good about what they do. I truly believe in workplace productivity and gamification. I think that the two kind of work quite well together. I'm also a big fan of Health trackers and fitness trackers,

Welcome to a question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host of this show and the chief game changer at Gamification Nation. Today we are bringing to you the question, how can I design for people with disabilities? And first thing I was going to say, this is part of the series of inclusion by design. So I promise to share my thoughts, my philosophy, but also the things we do to actively include people and watch out for people in our designs so that they are the most successful as possible. Oh, I also explained in one of the previous podcasts that I see all of the different leaders of inclusion that we should look at. So gender, age, culture and ability as a spectrum. So the spectrum of disabilities and abilities is vast and wide to some disabilities are visible, some disabilities are not, mental health is often considered, under disabilities and you can't see it. Colorblindness is, you know, can be very disabling. And again, it's not visible to us, but the person experiencing it experiences it a lot. Some chronic diseases cause pain. But may not make the person look different on the outside. So from a design perspective that brings with it a whole range of different challenges and, and different interesting points. The first point for people with varying level of abilities, and I'm calling people with abilities because even if you can't see, you can't touch, you have not all the limbs available to you or in use or in working order, you still have abilities. They may be limited, they may be the same. So a person in a wheelchair could just be as mentally able as the next person. We're just not physically able to do the sport. So, you know, you have to see it from a spectrum perspective. And I think even with the analogy with autism and is being quite relevant, which you know, the autistic girl Gretta Turnberg being in the news so much. I find it fascinating how many people are slating her for standing up for something she believes in. Whilst if this was a grown white man, would we have the same impact and the same, I suppose, nastiness towards him. And maybe, you know, this day and age you probably would judging by our current day politicians, but Hey, that's a completely different story and a completely different mindset of all I was wanted to, to bring without analogy is that autism has been recognized as a spectrum. So there's so many degrees and various variations of it manifesting. People have grades of being normally able to do everything and very different in the way that they do and process different things. So the first thing for inclusion for differences of abilities is accessibility and acceptance. Now, accessibility and acceptance. If you think about it, try navigating the world as a blind person. Try navigating the world as a person in a wheelchair to understand what I mean with that. I did an experiment at an event not too long ago where I used monopoly paper money. And asked, you know, can you pick that up with a hand? And of course that was not a problem for the person. Now pick it up with, you know, your hand in your sleeves so that your fingers have knots, the same touch. The person managed to do it but it required a different skills. And then I asked them to pick it up without hands and that then became a lot more challenging. Some people reach for their feet, some people took it with their teeth. So you know, it's, you know, it poses a whole different range of things. And the first thing we often see when we're designing systems for inclusion is that access is the first point. Even from a building perspective where most organizations fail is that person with the wheelchair or the person that is blind, the person with all sorts of physical ailments is just not able to make it through the door. So they fail at point of access. In video software that can be the same and abilities here could range from the physical variety to actually cognitively can they actually easily play and...

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. My name is An Coppens, I'm the show host and the CEO or chief game changer at Gamification Nation. And this week's question is an interesting one which was asked at a conference of people who make a simulations. Primarily question was is gamification just simply manipulation? And I didn't have a chance to answer the question there. And then so I also had it in my mind and sort of play with my mind what is manipulation really. So if we think about it, how and what do we consider manipulation? So I went on a bit of a fact finding mission to get the sorts of dictionary explanation of manipulation before sort of jumping in and giving my opinion on, you know, is gamification manipulation. Yes. No. Or, you know, is it as black and white as that and in the dictionary, when we look at manipulation, it says, "it's the skilful handling, controlling or using of something or someone, whether it's a sculpture you made in an art class or how you convince your friends to do your homework. Both are considered manipulation in the negative sense. It's also explained as exerting shrewd or devious influence, especially for one's own advantage. And so it sort of shows even in, I suppose just pure dictionary terms where you're trying to explain a concept. It's not that straightforward. It's not always negative. It's also not always positive because if we look at is from making a sculpture perspective, because money pinata, it comes from the Latin handful. It's, you know, it could be handling something and skilful handling can be positive. If it is, let's say a sculpture handling a piece of wood or a piece of clay or a piece of stone to sculpt a beautiful piece of art out of it. Yes, it's manipulating the brick to become something different and you wanted to be, and you know, for some people that's probably why did you waste a really good break or really good piece of wood. But for others it's, it's an amazing piece of art and I think it's not that far removed from, you know, when we actually give or exert influence over an individual or someone to do something. Manipulation can be, you know, something good and something bad. And I see it as, you know, a potential of having two faces, both positive and negative. And I actually see gamification in very much the same light. Any good tool used for bad reasons or bad purposes will have bad outcomes. And you know, that's the same with great technology to world over. Even games on simulations can be used to influence people to make decisions that really you want them to consider twice or maybe not make at all. So it's, it's not as clear as black and white. It's more of a gray scale. And then it's kind of how many shades of gray do you need to go to before? For you. It's a, it's a no, no. So if we look at gamification, so gamification in my view is a contains nudges. It contains game elements. It contains an element of understanding human behavior and what are we tending to do and tending not to do and how can we then come to an outcome that is best for the individual for whatever older purpose the gamification was designed for. So let's look at it from a coaching perspective and that smile original background. So I come I suppose to, to world of gamification through the lens of, Oh, a former coach, I was first a sports coach. I coached basketball for years and years and also played basketball for years and years. So for me, coaching always was about understanding where the individual is out with their skills level and then trying to, you know, nudge them forward into their next level of ability. I think back to the team, I coach two of the longest, which were in basketball and in Belgium we had the microbes, the microbes were the youngest possible kids that could take up basketball. You had to be five and a five years old on that category. I think around even all the way to nine if I'm not wrong, I'll be wrong on that.

Welcome to this week's a question or gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host for this episode. And I'm also the chief game changer at gamification nation or also known as CEO. And this week we are continuing down the line of the inclusion by design series. And the question that we want to attack or answer is what are the implications of trying to be inclusive by design and the design choices I need to make. So this week I want to start with an example namely to be a sports watch. Now, It's an example that I've blogged about a number of years ago and it's also a product that I think showcases how inclusion is not always there from the outset and then allows for niche products to appear. And this is a very niche product but actually created out of a need that was real for the target audience. So the BS sports watch was designed for by, designed for and by female triathletes. So those are the ladies that swim, cycle, and run a mega long distances for fun or for achievement. And many of them train very long distances to prepare for competition days. And one of the things that they found is that the sports watches on the market weren't necessarily suited for a female wrists or for their sport because you know, it needs to be waterproof, it needs to be a long lasting battery. It also needs to still be visible so that you can see the various statistics that you may want to see in this situation. So what the ladies did first before designing the watch, they say, well, let's explore if we're the only ones with this problem. And they started asking their fellow colleagues, around and said, look, you know, what would you like in a sports watch that you would take as part of your training? And what came out was people were looking for something slim and ergonomic something that was lightweight to wear. And both those things came up because the traditional watches that were made for women were just smaller versions of what was made for a man and that often then obscured the face and made all the letters smaller. For those of you that are users of smart watches or FitBits, trying to fiddle with lots of things that are tiny means that you often have to repeat some things several times. And if you're like me trying to hit the right application that I want to launch from the Apple Watch is a bit of a trial and error situation. And again, when it's so basically, they say, well, want something slim, ergonomic lightweight to wear, but also a one button to start something really user friendly design. So the user experience needs to be one click we're on, we're off. And you know, easy to do while you're running, while you're swimming, when you're cycling without losing your speed. And obviously because of their long distances and duration of training, that could actually be quite extensive and, for most of us, way beyond our reach. They also needed long battery life, but I mean battery life for those of us that use smart devices, we know how important it is. So when your battery drains without even having lasted the whole day. So, especially then when it's a productivity and a training tool, you do want it to last the distance of wherever you're going, swimming, cycling or running. They also wanted, and this was a feature that had never been included before, was an SOS button. So they could discreetly launch an SOS, to let's say a family member or relative that could checkup where they were on their route or where their GPS location was in the case that they hit an unsavory situation and, you know, way back, I used to train for marathons and often on the long runs I used to do them in the mornings early on a Sunday or Saturday, typically speaking. And sometimes you meet some strange characters, not you sort as I've been, I better keep running fast here because I'm not so sure which way this is gonna go or you know, worse. Again, you end up injured and you need somebody to help and come and collect you,

Feminine gamification viewpoint: Interview with Margaret Burnett Podcast 8: Where to find inspiration for gamification? In a question of gamification this week we are honoured to have the company of Margaret Burnett distinguished professor in Computer Science at Oregon State University. She has carried out research in relation to gender inclusiveness in software use and developed a research methodology to test for potential stumbling blocks your users may face.   An Coppens: Hi, I’m An Coppens from Gamification Nation and I’m delighted today to have with me Margaret Burnett who is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University in the USA. Now, I’m so delighted to have her on board because her research focuses on end user programming, end user software engineering and gender issues in this type of context. Welcome to Gamification Nation today Margaret.   Margaret Burnett: Thank you, I’m delighted to be here.   An Coppens: Thank you. Now, I noticed you have Distinguished Professor as your title, how does that happen?   Margaret Burnett: Well, it’s quite an honour and I just received it this last spring so I’m still just immensely delighted about the whole thing. The university passes this honour out to 2 professors per year so I got it this last spring. The criteria have to do with the quality and the reputation of your research and your teaching and mentoring and whether you’ve really made a difference in some way. I have some awards on some of those fronts and a long history I guess that … A really long history. Anyway, so I won.   An Coppens: Fantastic, it’s a great honour to have you so shortly afterwards, we’re not just talking to a professor but a distinguished professor. I love that and congratulations also.   Margaret Burnett: Thank you.   An Coppens: Now, the reason that I came across you and the research you have done is because as my listeners and readers know is we work a lot on the feminine view of gamification and I look for research that’s been done in that field. When I came across GenderMag, I got really excited, I said, “I want to know what this is, how does this happen, how did this come about?” First of all, what is GenderMag?   Margaret Burnett: GenderMag is a method. It’s a process for software developers or UX people or anybody really with some say into how software is turning out. Anyway, they can use this method to spot aspects of their software—the software itself—that might not be as gender inclusive as they liked. GenderMag stands for Gender Inclusiveness Magnifier, so that’s what it’s all about.   An Coppens: Fantastic. How did it come about initially, is there a background story to it?   Margaret Burnett: Yes, there is, there’s quite a background story. It all started with my PhD student, Laura Beckwith who was seeking a PhD topic to work on in about 2002 or 2003. We came up together with the idea of possibly looking at how gender differences might come together with software itself. At that time, there was starting to be a fair amount of understanding in the academic community—not in industry yet—the academic community that there were gender differences that were starting to play out in the workforce and in higher education. But nobody had thought about software itself yet.   An Coppens: That’s really amazing that it actually is recognized first in the university world and then further down the line becomes of interest. I think a lot of businesses and software developers still are only starting to recognize this field.   Margaret Burnett: That’s right. Laura started reading from 5 different fields and in every case what she was trying to do is ask herself the question, “What does this tell me about software?” As you mentioned earlier, I do human aspects of software development, some of it end user programming and some of it professional programming but...