2013: The Year of Gamification

2013: A Gamified Year in 13 Pictures

The gamification year of and a bit more in pictures.

Papers, Books and much more

The year started as 2012 finished: I read more books, studied more papers and developed all the theories that would later on appear on Epic Win. 

Gamification and Coursera

One of 2013's great events was Prof. Werbach's MOOC. It was a really nice course and it inspired me to create a bit more advanced course on the topic with Iversity.org

Epic Win Blog

Some weeks before, I started publishing all the materials that I had on Epic Win Blog. Several blogposts have received more than 4000 views. 

Gamification World Congress, Madrid

Probably one of the biggest gamification events in Europe. The Congress took place on the 20th May, 2013 and it was a fantastic chance to meet great people.

PlayJugo

I started to work at PlayJugo in summer, and since then, we have developed two gamified systems and much more! We keep on working hard (and playing harder) every day.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship Business School

At the same time, I started to collaborate with the IEBS, as a gamification associate professor for two of their master degrees: Mobile Business and Entrepreneurship.

Gamification Spain Meetups

Gamification Spain Meetups (GSM) started (and keeps on being) as a small community based event. Today, more than 150 people have joined the group and 2014 will see many more of these meetups. You can check it out at http://www.meetup.com/Gamification-Spain/

EBE - Evento Blog España

It was my first experience at Europe's second biggest event of Social Media. I gave a gamification workshop for +75 people and met so many awesome people. Such a great time!

Social Raid

Social Raid was PlayJugo's first gamified platform, a gamelike experience for community managers and social media managers. You can check it out at socialraid.com

II GSM - Barcelona

With more than 75 people, free talks, workshops and many more activities, we had such a fantastic time at the II GSM in Barcelona. There will be more!

Family Team App

Family Team App is PlayJugo's second gamified experience, an app that makes your house chores more fun. It'll be available on the App Store in January 2014.

The 35 Mechanics Toolkit

After the huge success of the first version, and the amount of downloads of the second one, we decided to create our own design deck. It'll be available on Amazon in January 2014.

Iversity Gamification Design MOOC

2013 was an awesome year and we wanted 2014 to be as epic! So we created a new adventure on Iversity! Want to join us? 

Last but not least...

Thanks to all the great people that have helped us on the way! You're great guys! 2014 will be an epic year!

Go Go Go!

Sidney Lopez

 

Gamification and Social Media: Aristotle, Backgammon and MMORPGs

Gamification and Social Media: Aristotle, Backgammon and MMORPGs

This Blogpost was originally published on Gamifeye by Sidney Lopez. Check it out here

What do Aristotle, backgammon and World of Warcraft have in common? Why are MMORPGs so successful? And what happens when we combine games and social media?

What Backgammon has to teach us about games

Games have existed since ancient times. Some studies find the early origins of games in a small village called Shahr-e-Sookhteh (Iran), built in 3200 BC, where an old backgammon set, some dice and other game-related objects were found. What’s interesting about it is that researchers found that even in the very beginning, games were a social thing: backgammon was played in pairs, playing dice was a group thing, and pretty much all the ancient games involved some kind of social aspect. And there are many more examples. Just think of the Greek Olympics, the Roman Circus, or even the jousting of the Middle Ages; all of them were social games.
It’s at that point when you realise that social media games are nothing new, just a more technologically advanced version of something that has been there all along.


Why Aristotle and World of Warcraft have so much in common

Quite some years ago, the famous philosopher Aristotle said that we were the only social animals to be found, because we don’t just meet up with others for protection or feeding purposes, as many animals do, but because we feel like doing so. And that has changed everything, even games.

But let’s return to the present…

Have you checked out the most profitable game in the last few days? Do you know which games accumulate the most hours played per year? Any idea what the most successful and downloaded apps were of 2012?

If you were thinking about social games, you were spot on.

As it turns out, games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), League of Legends (LoL) or Team Fortress 2 (Tf2) were not only some of the most played games, but also some of the most profitable. And if we add Candy Crush, Hay Day or Clash of Clans - some of the most downloaded apps of 2012 - we immediately realise that Aristotle was right all along. Games were made to be social, and a very important milestone was hit when social media platforms implemented games within them.


Going Further: Social Media and Gamification

So what happened a few years ago when games came across the social media?

Well, as many social media experts have said, it all went mad. All of a sudden millions of people started playing on a daily basis with their friends, and the time spent on those platforms skyrocketed. At the same time, and some years later, the trend of gamification appeared and the phenomena of social gamification - as gameful design applied within social media platforms - started with an increasing number of these type of experiences every single year.

So are there any social gamification examples out there already? And is there any difference between trying to get your public more engaged and making your social media teams perform better?


CaptainUP and Social Raid: 2 Great Examples

Social Media Gamification is a very new thing, and there’s still a long way to go, but up until now, we can see some great beta versions that are worth reviewing.

The first one is CaptainUp, a plug-and-play platform that allows you to engage the readers of your blog and social media channels; the second is Social Raid, a web based platform that turns social media teams into a group of raiders in search of performing their tasks better while having lots of fun.

Let’s take a closer look.


CaptainUP: Game Mechanics Made Easy

CaptainUp is a very simple and fun concept: Your blog readers are not fully engaged with your blog, so through a simple PBL (points, badges and leaderboards) system, CaptainUp turns your blog into a gamelike experience where you can reward users, see which are the top players and make them try to unlock fun achievements.

The “game” starts off when the blogger signs up at captainup.com, and once that’s done, you have to adapt the system to your preferences, changing the points system if you feel like, modifying the badges’ storyline and text and customising the images shown. Whenever the system has been finally installed (after a little bit of coding on blogger, or a simple copy and paste with other blog platforms) you start receiving lots of interesting feedback and it’s up to you how the experience plays out on your site.

Finally, there are new gamification mechanics and more improvements coming out to the platform soon, so don’t miss out on them.


Social Raid: Gamify Your Communication

Social Raid, a platform developed by the Spanish start-up Play Jugo, is all about turning community management tasks into an epic adventure.
In Social Raid, a team of several raiders (community managers) work alongside their captain (social media manager) to improve their performance and develop a more impactful communication strategy for the accounts that they manage on Facebook and Twitter.

It’s essentially a SaaS platform where communication agencies, social media teams or community managers can publish, edit, and track the results of what they are doing while having fun. Besides, you can manage several social media accounts within the platform, making it easier for people who manage multiple social channels.

Right now the platform features a rich PBL system with an adventure theme, along with other gamification mechanics. More features are on the way over the next few months, such as power-ups, virtual rewards and a virtual economy. So stay tuned.

So games have never stopped being social, and in the next few years, more and more of them will embrace multiplayer modes and social mechanics. Meanwhile, the number of social gamification experiences will keep on growing until social mechanics become a new norm in game design.


Sidney Lopez

 
2013

The Right and Wrong of Game Mechanics in Gamification

The Right and Wrong of Game Mechanics in Gamification: A radio show with Monica Cornetti

This radio show was originally published on Monica's blogtalkradio space. You can check it out here.

The Right and Wrong of Game Mechanics in Gamification

With Special Guest Sidney Lopez - a Gamification designer ranked among the top gamification experts worldwide. In this episode of Gamification Talk Radio, we’ll be the rights and wrongs when adding game mechanics into your gamified project. Gamification and games are similar yet different, and one of the key points when designing gamified systems is that game mechanics have to be slightly revamped due to the lack of pure game play.

Monica and Victor will be discussing:

- Whether or not we can use game mechanics in Gamification

- The most effective game mechanics to use in corporate training and development

- The 3 most important factors to take into account before designing any mechanics

- Victor will give you real life case studies and examples of the rights and wrongs of game mechanics in gamification.

About Sidney Lopez:

Victor is a Gamification designer at PlayJugo, a spanish based startup focused on helping people to achieve their personal and professional goals by playing games. He teaches gamification at the IEBS School as an Associate Professor as well as being the author of epicwinblog.net, a gamification-oriented blog updated on a weekly basis.

Victor is one of the organizers of Gamification Spain Meetups (GSM), an independent event for gamification professionals that takes place all over Spain and has been ranked among the top gamification experts worldwide according to leaderboarded.com



Sidney Lopez