Gamification Nation

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. This week I want to start a bit of a series around inclusion and design. In fact, I want to name it inclusive by design, because it's scenario that we basically focus on quite a bit. And actually I as a woman in the gamification space specifically wanted to join the gamification space to make it more inclusive, because when I looked at the industry of gamification back in the mid 2000s, I saw a lot of young white men and the odd Asian man and they didn't necessarily relate to me. They didn't necessarily speak my language. And some of the designs that I saw also didn't quite appeal to me. At first I said, "Oh, this is maybe just me personally. Maybe it's just not my thing." But then I asked around. I also went looking for research and actually found that a lot of the time it was very one track focused, very much focused on their experience of life, their experience of the world and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just not 100% inclusive because you're on

Welcome to the first episode of the Gamification Nation podcast. It's an exciting new way for me to connect and share with you in audio format. We've been hard at work to get this launched and I'm thrilled that we are finally out with this first episode. In this episode, I share with you the most common question on what is gamification and why it's essential in this modern day. How you can use this to advance your business and more. So be sure to subscribe. You can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Don't forget to subscribe! Please don't forget to leave us a review or comment here or even on iTunes and Stitcher. Your thoughts, questions, and feedback are always welcome.

Welcome to this week's A Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the chief Gamechanger at Gamification Nation, and this week's question is a good one. How will VR, AR, MR, and what on earth is the difference between all those, and Gamification play nice? It's a question that comes up from time to time. Because in learning, and in HR, we find that a lot of people have no idea what all the buzz words and all of the... they have an idea, but maybe not a full understanding of what the buzz words stands for and how they can all work together or where they're all separate beasts that you should be treating differently. So, the purpose of today's podcast is to answer the questions of what are these different reality things? Does that combine well with Gamification? Does it not? Should you just do one and not engage with the other? Or, how do you best integrate it into your suite of learning related solutions for your workers, or HR related solutions for your workers? Or whichever way you see fit on usin

Welcome to this week's Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I am the Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation, and this week's question of gamification is one I have. I suppose it's in light of all the global politics that are going on everywhere. It made me question, are we just all part of one large strategy game by a certain amount of players? Before I go into that, I want to draw analogies to strategy games, and what's happening around this, both in the world of politics and the world of business, because that's how, A, I see business but also, B, I think there's a lot we can learn from it. It also encourages you, and that's my hope that I can inspire you to think critically. Okay, if you were in charge of that game, how would you play it? What cards would you play, and what would winning mean? What's the win condition? Is there a win condition, or are we just heading for a zero sum game where there are no winners, only losers? I guess it's probably out of I would say frustration or despera

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. On this question, I get asked a lot by parents, "What are my kids learning on video games, on computer games, on mobile games?" "Should I limit their time on it," is typically the second question. "I am worried about my kids playing too much." It's a very frequently asked question by managers in many organisations with children at home. They see that their children are playing and playing a lot, and I suppose with the World Health Organisation, you're marking gaming as a disorder as well. There's a need to explain why and what the case may be with games and what it brings or doesn't bring to your children or young people that you know. The first thing I will say is as a person growing up, my parents were quite protective and we were not allowed games at all in the house. So when I was growing up, I was always borrowing somebody else's games in school in order to play. In fact, I think at one stage my dad thought that Pong was going to blow up the television. A

Welcome to this week's Question of Gamification. I'm An Coppens, I'm your show host, and I'm also the CEO or Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. This week's question is asked to us from a variety of clients, and it typically goes something like this, is gamification or should gamification be part of a larger strategy? When we get asked that question, it's typically because people have heard that gamification is a thing. They like the concept, they like the fact that we can bring some of the game and play-like feeling into an organisation. But often it also means that they haven't thought through why they want to implement gamification in the first place. Start with why I would say or answer that question with, yes, gamification should always be part of a larger strategy. In fact, I would even say strategy comes first, as opposed to gamification comes first. Now, gamification can be the strategy. I mean, that's also possible. But in the end of the day, you need to have a reason why you are engaging in

Welcome to this week's a Question of Gamification. How to use our gamification card deck And this week's question is a question from Remco one of our clients who bought a gamification card deck. It's our physical card deck that we designed a while ago, to help us to explain what game design is all about. Why we made the card deck We use it internally but also when we work with people that don't like games, don't play games, don't understand the games or never had anything to do with game design. We also sell it to a lot of people who just basically want to level up their skills and practice their game design. So both audiences buy our gamification decks. For us, it was very much a solution to a need, because a lot of the time when I did HR workshops, and learning and development workshops, I had people in the room that actually admittedly said, I don't like games. And I've never played games, or only when I had to when I was younger, did I ever play games. In order to address that, and still bring them alon

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host of the Question of Gamification podcast and the CEO and founder of Gamification Nation or aka chief game changer. Today's question of gamification is: what makes gamification fail? Now, first thing, one of my mentors told me at one stage when I was saying, Oh, I don't want to talk about failure, I think failure is bad. And I do, I do have some hang ups talking about failure. I think they're private things I do in private. I don't necessarily want the world to know, he said, "Yeah, but failure is, your first attempt in learning" (First Attempt In Learning =FAIL) If we look at failure as finding ways of how something doesn't work. Then we are also accepting that, we are learning. We are not perfect as we come out, day one, which is also a good starting point, because most of us had to learn the hard way on how to do something right and how things have gone wrong. The podcast this week, therefore, focuses on what makes ga

Welcome to a question of gamification a podcast where gamification expert and competence answers your questions. Welcome to a Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host for this show and also the CEO and founder of Gamification Nation. Today's question of gamification is, what is hot in learning? And I guess we should also cover what is 'not' as a sort of balanced approach to answering questions. My interest in learning A lot of our work in gamification covers learning because my background has been in learning and development, instructional design, training. I've been an in house trainer and in house, L&D manager. I've also been an external provider and external trainer, a workshop host and instructional designer, both inside and outside of companies. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that I keep up to date with what's happening and that a lot of my connections are also in this space. It's also where we started Gamification Nation was with ultimately learning related gamification

Welcome to this week's episode of A Question of Gamification. And this week's episode is all about game addiction. In fact, I had a question this week, can gamification lead to game addiction? My name is An Coppens. I am the show host for The Question on Gamification, and also the chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. Now, I often receive the question, what about my kids, they are always playing Fortnite or they are always playing X-Game. At the time of Pokemon Go, it was Pokemon Go. Today its Fortnite, tomorrow, it may be a new game. And the thing is, game trends will come and go. The one measurable that you always need to look out for is do your kids do anything else but play video games or computer games or tablet games? If they do, then you're probably fine. Can gamification lead to addiction? I guess it could. So the honest answer is that anything where we're rewarding people and making them feel good, which is releasing positive chemical reactions in both the body and the brain can have the impa

Welcome to A Question of Gamification, a podcast where gamification expert An Coppens answers your questions. Welcome to a question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host and chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. And this week's question is a build on last week's question of what are the processes that we use? What are the deliverables that we have? And this week is what is the reality of a gamification project? Because last week, we went through the five steps in our process phases: business specifics, user research, gamification design, development and support. And this week, I want to delve deeper into what is the reality like in a gamification project. We just finished a major project which took us nine months to get to where we are today.  I'd love to say it was a smooth and easy process and everything worked according to plan. But hey, that's not reality! In fact, we had from day one, a delay of a number of months, thanks to lengthy terms and contract negotiations and setup neg

Welcome to this week's Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens and I'm the show host for a Question of Gamification. And this week's question is one that on occasion crops up more from our competitors if nothing else. Occasionally, also from clients, but it's something we do always answer for clients in proposals. And that is: what is involved in our gamification design process? How does it work? What are the components? What are the deliverables? It may be one question split into a few elements. And I want to tackle that from the ideal project perspective in an ideal world where everything runs smoothly, where you have unlimited resources and unlimited timeframes, etc. Because the reality of any given project may be different. And I'll come back to that next week. The official steps in our process are understanding the business specifics. Now in this business specifics phase, we want to know, why do you want to gamify this project or this process? Why do you want to do this now? What else have you

Welcome to a Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host, and also the chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. And today's question is: how does a gamification or serious game project stand up in cost, benefits and impact in comparison to a big name game like a World of Warcraft, FIFA,`Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite, you name it, any popular game that people are playing these days? The first answer to this question is that it is a question of budget and resources. Typically, the bigger name games have more budget available than most corporates are willing to pay us for a gamified process or gamification or a serious game, which is the first given. Most budgets in the corporate sector are relatively limited. And the second part is the resources available. So in gamification studios, the majority of us work in quite a lean production team, and we adopt quite a lean methodology to get to the end results. In the larger studios like Blizzard and EA who produced some of the fantastic games

Welcome to a Question of Gamification a podcast where gamification expert An Coppens answers your questions. Hi, and welcome to this week's a Question of Gamification. This is An Coppens your show host, and also the chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. This week's question is, how can you get started with gamification? Now, for me, that's a double question in one. For some people that means how can I get started for building a career in gamification? And on the other side is how can I get started and put gamification into practice for my organisation? So those are very frequently asked questions we come across. So to tackle the first one, how can we get started in a career in gamification? Well, the first thing I would say is to look to become an intern. Ask organisations like my own, and see if you can, first of all, translate an existing regular game into something that can be used for businesses. That's typically how I asked interns to apply for positions within Gamification Nation. The other thin

If you have been a regular listener of our podcast then you know we have been a bit radio silent… Show transcription: In this episode, I give you the honest truth of why it happened and how taking part in a challenge like this helped me get started again I should say, apologies for being away. Yes, I did go radio silent on you for some time. And I guess it was my own self-consciousness that sort of got the better of me. I intended to set out and do way more podcasts. And I did. So we have, I think five or six, listed on iTunes, under a question of gamification. And we're back. So the reason why I stopped: I was self-conscious, I had some negative comments, and people complained about the sound. Hence we've invested in a new sound system.  This is our first time trying it. So please be kind, I'm still learning to ropes.  I had already recorded four or five different things without any sound whatsoever. It's definitely a learning curve. But we're back. Now, one of the things that struck me and I suppose it's a

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.

Podcast 7: Where to find inspiration for gamification? In this podcast I share where you could find inspiration for gamification design. Feel free to share your ideas too.

Podcast 6: How much does gamification cost? This must be by far the most frequently asked question, but also the most difficult to give any straight answer to. Because there are so many dependencies and so many follow-on questions that need to be answered first. In this podcast we give some insight in what will be the key questions you need to find answers to and what to take into consideration.

Podcast 5: Does gamification have to be digital? Very often it has been assumed that gamification is by default a digital initiative, but we find that it doesn't have to be and in this podcast we give a number of examples of no-tech or low-tech options. We also discuss what to take into account when choosing a digital solution.

Podcast 4: Where to start with gamification? When companies decide they want to embark on a gamification strategy the next question is often, where should they start. In this podcast we answer the question and the considerations to take into account when starting a gamification project. Where and how did you start your gamification project? Don't forget to subscribe!