How to add a layer of gamification on top of the world?

As if he read our article on how game dynamics can create better products and services yesterday, Seth Priebatsch (top chef at SCVNGR) went back in the past and presented his vision of how to add a game layer on top of the world in a 12 minutes TED Talk.

Golden Rule: Everything is a game.

Let's start with a cliche: everything is a game. Your childhood. Your job. Your marriage. Your career. Your life.

Seth digs into the dynamics of games and how they can become so intoxicating that they end up altering our behavior.

4 gaming dynamics that you should learn by heart:

• The appointment dynamic (happy hour time).
• Levels and status as a motivator (Xbox Live gamer tags).
• Sense of progress (LinkedIn, for instance).
• Communal discovery: everyone has to work together to solve problems (Digg or the DARPA balloon challenge).

Watch the whole speech below:

How social mechanics can inspire a new kind of marketing

Raphael Koster is a multi-talented game designer and VP Creative Designer at Playdom who one day woke up and decided to produce something awesome: a compilation of 40 social mechanics (in societies and human networks) that apply to social gaming and can serve as interesting brain tease on how to reinvent how we approach marketing and advertising. They call it #Gamification, it's a trend on Twitter so it has to be true. We even wrote about it a few times already.

Raph dissects multiplayer mechanics and presents a through a structured, cross-disciplinary lens. If you are remotely interested in game theory, psychology, evolutionary biology, history, sociology, social networking or game design stuff; this is a must read.

40 Social Mechanics for Social Games (Raph Koster)

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For convenience purposes and for lazy ADD readers, we wrote a Cliff Notes' version of the deck. Think of it as the notes a bad intern would take during a great meeting of minds.

Section 1: 1 Versus Self / System

1 - Helping: advice and assistance

Section 2: 1 Versus Parallel

2 - Relative Status: quantifying a player's achievement against the opponent
3 - Races: first user to reach a given status level wins
4 - Leaderboards: compete with all historical attempts
5 - Tournaments

Section 3: 1 Versus 1 Opposed

6 - Flower-picking: compete to get stuff, but there is always more stuff (speed up arrows on a race track). Non-zero sum resource consumption
7 - Dot-eating: zero-sum resource consumption. Whatever I get, you can't have.
8 - Tug of war: I can take your stuff, you can take mine (the engine behind all combat games)
9 - Handicapping: artificially equalizing status in order to provide a tighter race
10 - Secrets: imperfect information (knowledge as a rivalrous good > fog of war in strategy games)

Section 4: 1 Versus 1 Versus 1 Versus...

11 - Last man standing
12 - Bidding
13 - Deception and bluffing: misinformation, when secrets are treated as goods
14 - 3rd party betting: I play a bidding game against others, based on the outcome of a multiplayer game
15 - Prisoner's dilemma: teammates with secrets who must choose independently to collaborate or both lose
16 - Gamesmaster pattern: third party directs the game (referee)

Section 5: N Versus N (Groups)

*17 - Roles: specialization into different games within one group
18 - Hot potato / ganging up: rotation of roles within multiplayer game
19 - Rituals: ceremonies marking significant transitions within a social structure (wall posts, gifts, for instance): birth, marriage, death, level up, holidays, etc.
20 - Gifts. Super important. (see Marcel Mauss below)
21 - Reciprocity: social expectation of a future return of a gift ("return gift" button?)
22 - Mentoring and twinking: "I get social obligation, you get value" (non-symmetrical exchange). (a car at graduation, Mickey ears when you go to Disney). Strengthens community ties.
23 - Identity: display of status and role via rivalrous goods (skins, shirts, class gear, etc.)
24 - Ostracism: grow removal via denial of common resources (exclusion)

Section 6: Networks

25 - Iterative interaction and Trust. Trust is stronger than reputation (mid-range) which is also stronger than faith (at distance, i.e. social contract).
26 - Guilds/tribes: subnetworks with their own social identity
27 - Exclusivity/ Velvet Rope: use of identity (or other mechanisms) to manipulate the value of goods (VIP clubs)
28 - Guild vs. Guild: competition between social entities
29 - Player-to-player economy = Trade and contract: mutually beneficial interactions between distant nodes on the network
30 - Elections (American Idol is the largest MMO in the world)
31 - Reputation, influence and fame
32 - Public goods: non-rivalrous goods, with temptation to enjoy the good with no contribution (air, public park, etc.)
33 - Tragedy of the commons: flip side of public goods. If they are rivalrous, they can get used up (spawns, territories in a village, etc.). For instance: the Facebook ad market.
34 - Community
35 - Strategy guides: transformation of rule-based secrets into a public good
36 - Teamwork MLSs (wisdom of crowds, DPS systems, Survivor TV show)
37 - Arbitrage: allowing unequal quantified valuations of the same good to arise within the system permits trade that exploits them
38 - Supply chains: cascading unequal valuations of goods arranged in sequence (get a house out of a bottle if you trade it with the right people)
39 - User generated content: forums, character art, role-play narratives, fan fiction, player conventions, weddings, game maps, etc.

Section 7: Deconstruction

40 - Griefing

Is gamification making us lab rats? The neurology of video games

Think you're just playing a game?

Think you're just innocently enjoying vicarious pleasures that include gun-shooting, puzzle-solving, mushroom-jumping or cow-milking? Turns out you are actively shaping your cortex into a "video game brain".

It has to be true, because I read it in an infographic.

Despite its loose references and unfortunate lack of data points, the infographic below does a cute and acute job at explaining which areas of the brain are triggered when human rat labs are exposed to video games and what positive or negative effects can result.

When you play with gamification, you're playing with power. And brain cells. Mostly brain cells.

Infographics: The U.S. consumers will spend $21.6 billion on video games in 2011.

Market research firm Newzoo is reporting that U.S. consumers are spending $21.6 billion on video games in 2011, just lower than that in 2010.

Key findings:

• $8.0 billion will be spent on console gaming (20% decline yoy).
• $4.6 billion will be spent on social networks and casual gaming (7% drop).
• $4.3 billion will be spent on PC/Mac over retail + digital.
• $2.6 billion will be spent on MMO games.
• $2.1 billion will be spent on mobile gaming.
• Social and mobile gaming is growing swiftly (+37% yoy).
• Digital distribution is up 11%.
• U.S. gamers play over 215 million hours of video games a day. A fourth of that time is spent on casual gaming.

The infographics from Newzoo:

Who are today's gamers?

Today's gamers are very different than the stereotype from the 90s of a nerdy, acne-packed boy named Kevin who behaves like a socially awkward penguin and sweats profusely whenever he takes the leap of faith to make extended eye contact with an object of lust.

Latitude Research just released a new study, asking 290 smartphone owners between the ages of 15-54 who self-identified as "gamers" (whether casual or enthusiasts).

A portrait of the new gamers, in stylish - but unnecessary - infographics.

Gamers are not just social creatures, they're also societal creatures.

One of the most interesting insights of this study comes from this very interesting nuance.

Games have been notorious for changing people's behaviors as they provide a high level of engagement and involvement from their audience.

The emergence of social platforms (whether through 'traditional' social networks like Facebook or social gaming via Xbox Live / PlayStation Network) and location-based technologies have provided opportunities for people to participate in shared experiences engraved with a deeper meaning than the pure thrill of playing.

This seems to resonate in the mind of participants, who also want to see games - and their unique storytelling capacity - do a better job of connecting people and leveraging the power of communities to make an impact in the real world.

If gaming mechanisms can change marketing and advertising, it can surely change lives, too.

Gaming as a self-improvement device.

This is quite a trite observation by now (like most of the study, to be perfectly honest), but games are now perceived as a medium for self-improvement: personal wellness, learning, etc. Brain Training was released in 2005 and WiiFit in 2008, after all.

The gamification of life inevitably means the gamification of daily, routine, boring activities: running errands, exercising, washing clothes, ironing your man, or guiltily masturbating at night.

This definitely resonates with initiatives like Fiat's brilliant "EcoDrive" initiative, trying to instill gaming mechanics, feedback and incentives when it comes to your driving style.

What is the core learning from this study?

Infographics are an absolutely delicious way of presenting information. It's been done with great talent and bravado by companies like Wired, GOOD Magazine and many more.

Blogs - like us - love this format because it's visual and it fits within the 5 minutes attention span that we expect our visitors to have (hopefully).

The problem is that it can also over-complexify very straightforward data. And when this data is collected in a very biased way (even though it is being acknowledged a few times in the presentation), the extrapolations that are being made throughout definitely lose their impact.

The implications drawn from the study are shamelessly obvious and only point to the banality of the questions that were asked in the first place.

It's really such a shame that the sense of discovery and elevation that you get while reading this deck vanishes after the first diagram.

The Future of Gaming (Study from Latitude)

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