#GWC14 - The games HR people should play

I was initially looking forward to this session because it’s got the word HR in the title.  But actually I didn’t learn that much about HR applications for gamification.  (Still, it was great to meet Isidro – ‘the HR gamer’).

However what I really took away from this session was a bit more, a new insight, actually a completely new insight into the connections between games and gamification (something which has once again been a little bit blurred here in Barcelona just as it was in Paris.)

If you’ve read my previous gamification posts you’ll have seen my suggestion for the gaming and gamification process shown above ie that we should start with a gamification process that may or may not end up with a game, and if appropriate with choosing and designing the type of game that’s going to be involved.

Isidro seems to see it differently.

I’ll explain:

For Isidro, gamification is an act of humility – as it’s difficult to be able to say product or service is not reaching its full potential.   Or that we need to increase engagement.

Gamification is useful as there’s a crisis of attention, engagement and meaning (this also applies to marketing and outside the organization)

Isidro plays Pizel Dungeon – where the monsters are more aggressive in the early morning.  This led him to think about whether you can apply the same sort of thinking to e-learning.

His work equivalent of this is Learning Dungeon – setting people challenges using higher level skills and higher requirements.

So the anser is yes, you can apply game mechanics to help engagement and learning.

However two types of obstacles which makes HR functions reluctant to apply gamification.  The first is budget and the second is risk – gamification changes people and the changes you achieve may clash with the corporate culture eg if you don’t really want to empower people.

However, what we really want to create are pervasive games / pervasive gamification which means there are certain features that allow players to go beyond the magic circle and apply the same ways of thinking to their real world.

The purpose of the game above was that Isidro wanted to use games to test the mechanics he wanted to apply in gamification.   They all involve simple mechanics – but how would he apply these mechanics in his own company? – in the business, not just in a game?

Take the Gift Trap game – a simple social empathy game. 

Isidro’s equivalent here is Gift Tasks – the opportunity to become a jedi using the mechanics of gifting.

But this type of mechanics can also be used to help people think about who might be the best person to support a particular customer, ie based upon supporting the drives of :

• Relatedness – group knowledge
• Competence – social certification
• Autonomy - accountability

Or Timeline which is a skill competition game involving a set of cards and you have to order the cards in time order.  The mechanic here is hidden rules.

This translates to Fuzzy Line which is about how people make strategic decisions – whether they want to improve technology, cut the staff, invest in talent programme etc.  And you need to order cards in a prioritized manner.

This builds collaboration skills, the ability to clarify priorities, and develop meaning and information.

Also it makes the rules clear enough to use in communication with the rest of the company.  If a manager knows what activities are priorities, they become part of the decision making process.

Another simple example is example is What If based on the mechanic of the quest.

So the key is that gamification is not game based learning.  But you can test strategies and mechanics at a smaller scale (in a serious game) before scaling up (to the business).

These approaches work because they are based on pull strategies – letting people approach the management rather than pushing things to them; simple implementation; visible results and risk.  And because they build relatedness and competence, trigger more autonomy among players, and help provide meaning.

However two types of obstables which makes HR functions reluctant to apply gamification.  The first is budget and the second is risk – gamification changes people and the changes you achieve may clash with the corporate culture eg if you don’t really want to break down managers’ power and empower all of your people.  Are companies ready?

Apparently there is a database of 1500 games – so review this and choose the best game to apply for your situation.  Focus on the user (although I liked the previous day’s suggestion we call them the player rather than the user)

Ie, my process can be used two ways – from left to right as a way to identify the game (if appropriate) but also right to left, identifying opportunities for gamification based upon all of the possible games.

Neat.  And I wouldn’t knock it’s postential.  But I’d still suggest the more strategic approach based on understanding your people and business needs is going to be the best way forward most of the time.

It does suggest however that we’d benefit from a better appreciation of gaming than most HR practitioners currently have.

See you in the MMORPG?

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#GWC14 Neuroscience of Gamification

We've been talking a lot about fun at Gamify HR and the World Gamification Congress.  But does gamification create fun and how does it impact people's emotional behaviour?

To answer this question Redbility, Gameonlab and Usenns have created Gamification Report.

Daniel Gonzales from Redability explained that they have been comparing projects using gamification and not using it and looking at the different impacts they have.  There's also an online questionnaires in an 'Evaluatron' (pictured above) which will try to involve thousand of users to identify how they believe.

But the most interesting aspect is a neuroscience laboratory where biometric parameters will be analysed - cardio rate, breathing rate and especially brain waves.  Wow! - neuroscience and gamification.  Add big data to this and you've got a perfect storm of hashtags which I just had to try out.

Here's me dressed in the newest if not sexiest wearable - an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap. 

Researchers will be measuring the emotional reaction that gamification triggers and how this is different to non-gamified experiences.  That's difficult because humans have very little idea about the emotions they are experiencing.  You can't just ask people what emotions someone is experiencing - rationlising this just creates a construct not the true emotion.

And you can evaluate it from a statistical perspective but you can't do this for a particular tool.  80 bbm can mean stress for one person and relaxed for another - this is the calibration issue when looking at brain activities in response to stimulus.

Javier Minguez from BitBrain (in a lab coat to make him look clever) explained how their
neuroscience lab will be taking a measure of emotional engagement of a person with a brand before they enter the lab.  People are divided into two groups - one has a gamified and the other a non gamified experience

The researchers then monitor emotional engagement in terms of the difference between these two groups and through the gamification experience as it progresses.

They repeat the initial test after the exercise and see what difference this means in terms of emotional engagement with the brand.

Here's my brain activity on the bottom of the slide - it's currently just averaged over the exercise (which is why it's a bit dull) compared to experiences of positive and negative emotional states at the top.

The research is then going to break this down into different brain states at each step in the gamification process through some pretty complex big data analysis.

Early results of the real research are impressive - showing 72% engagement after gamification vs 40% in the control group.

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#GWC14 Past and Future of Gamification

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I'm at the Gamification World Congress in Barcelona today.

We began the conference looking at ancient history (above) and the origination of gamification with Nick Pelling, inventor of the term in 2003.

This session wasn't that relevant for my normal HR audience but I found Nick quite charming (eg in terms of being the originator but not the oracle) and loved the start to the conference (protohumans and astronauts) and so still wanted to post.

Nick became interested in gamification when realising that games culture was taking over the world – changing the way people thought about and talked about things.  things like digital downloads, easy to use handsets, immersive interface design (UX), digital content platforms (Apple istore etc).

Also the way that people make games a persuasive business model as well.  Ie you can’t do everything yourself, you need to create a digital platform for people to do things for themselves.

(Personally, I don’t think this is what gamification is about, sorry Nick.)

The big thing since then is social media.  Today it’s the two things together.  Exploring the fuzzy social interface between psychology and programming.  Changing behavior is as much political as it is technological.  Building software to act in constructive social ways.

There’s sometimes a bit of a bad small about gamification – getting people to do things in a funny sort of, gimmicky way.

But there is a lot of happening too.  Things you never think off egKickstarter connecting people who want to give money and people who want to run social projects.  Not about social media but social activity.  AngelList, Alibaba, Match.com.

Don’t think about what it is but what it’s for – joining people together and getting them to do things.  Future opportunities include things like social assisted living – helping young people help older people.

There are till lots of places where people get together awkwardly.

(And that I do agree with – most business organisations come to mind!)

We're supposed to have a session with Brian Burke from Gartner taking us into the future (below) of gamification but he's been delayed - I might add on more here later.

Photo credits Boris Perilli and  BCN Stories (as I'm sitting at the back with the power leads.)

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#GamifyHR - Gamification Design

Here are my notes on day 2 of last week's HR Gamification Summit.  Day 2 was a workshop day involving a mix of game playing and interactive group work, following different if similar processes for gamifying HR / work or other things (we spent quite a bit of time - a bit too much time for me - gamifying avoidable blindness.)

Importance of Gamification

We heard quite a bit about why gamification is so important for engagement and learning.  For example Martina Mangelsdorf introduced Nicole Lazzaro's four different kinds of fun:

• Easy fun - casual, light, nice fun because it's easy
• Hard fun - representing mastery, accomplishments, overcoming challenges
• People fun - comes from social interaction
• Serious fun - doing things that are meaningful to the individual.

Difficulty seriousness often seen as antipode of play - we need to get round this.

Again, I'm not totally convinced - I'd have preferred to have talked about enjoyment.  And I can definitely relate to serious enjoyment.  Serious fun - less so.

But Martina also linked game playing to emotional learning.  When something is rewarding valuable or surprising the human brain releases dopamine and we feel pleasure and have fun.  The same dopamine system is activated when learning happens.  Ie our brains are wired to learn.

I think there's a big focus on being social too.   Eg Willy Kriz suggested that cats play to engage in a simulation for when they have to fight.  I think (I haven't seen the feline neuroscience results) it's also, or mainly, that they're learning how to connect and engage with each other.

So one of the other concepts we looked at is self determination theory - that I'll be engaged by something if it's coming from me - which is often down to competence, autonomy and relatedness (see Dan Pink's Drive).

Ie the key is flow rather than fun.

One further benefit of games in particular is that they can be very useful to help explain complex systems.

Game Mechanics - PBL and Beyond

Games help us play, and have fun / enjoyment through their features and mechanics.  At the most basic level there is PBL - Points ,Badges and Leader Boards:

• Points help keep score, provide feedback, display progress, connect to rewards, are fungabile (= they are all equal, providing a universal currency)
• Badges represent achievement, signal importance, can be stylish, offer credentials, can be collected, display social status, offer flexibility (you can represent anything in a badge)
• Leader boards provide ranking, and work well with ambitious players, plus can be personalised, but the risk is demotivation (people may choose to amandon the game because they don't find it fun or feel they can't win.   Whatever you do, don't break the feedback loop so that people want to keep on playing!

I can't say I'm a great fan of PB or L.  And I still don't believe that 'most of us want to earn points, gain badges, and move up levels' any more than I did before the conference.  In fact, even where they do work, it's only because they help us monitor our progress towards something else - PBL have little value on their own to most, or at least a lot of people.

I also thought it  interesting that even if this group of, or at least including, geeks and gamers, other than An Coppens I was the only person checking in to the hotel on Foursquare.  I use Foursquare quite a bit though until this conference I'd never shared any of my badges.  In fact I can't think of any badges which have been important to me since I left cub scouts.

I used to think the same about leader boards, however we had one of these to encourage tweeting at the conference.  And after tweeting that it meant absolutely no difference to my own twroductivity I noticed that as I started to fall out of the top six tweeters I did start to tweet a bit more to stay on the scoreboard.  That made sense for me - I don't get work by tweeting but all things being equal I'd rather be on a projector screen than not on there.  But it didn't really help the conference as most of my additional tweets were quick and easy actions to give me more points, not to engage in conversation, which is my normal purpose in tweeting.  So for example I tweeted a few links to other articles or previous tweets around gamification.  Ie I engaged in what we often call dsyfunctional behaviour (even though at an individual level it's totally functional, or gaming the system.

I think there's a lot of this with PBLs.  And even if it works, it works by encouraging competition.  And actually we've got far too much competition in most organisations already.  I liked the example of a leaderboard for cleaners at Disney - who were all trying to do a great job already but weren't slightly competitive - and referred to ait s the electronic whip instrument.

But I'm more convinced by some of the other mechanics which do foster collaboration.  These can include avatars, teams (social graphs), challenges (quests, missions), rewards, resource collection, feedback, progress and completion etc.

Having said that I wasn't that engaged by the various games we played during the conference eg gamification bingo.  I did quite enjoy Stephen Shapiro’s personality poker though.  And I loved Willy's use of thumb wrestling to show the benefit of collaborative vs competitive behaviour (people set goals to beat other player by one point rather than to co-operate and each make a higher number of points).

See Gamification Design Elements

And how they meet our engagement, relatedness and other drives

Gamification Process

So after having reviewed game mechanics we can move onto the gamification process.  Martina suggested that in simple terms this is:

• Strategy first, including measures (thought I thought Phaedra made a good point that if the game is good, you generally don't need to worry about proving it)
• Design thinking - understanding people their behavioural profiles, actions, experiences eg in onboarding what journies happen in 1st hour, 1st day, 2nd day, 1st week etc - how will we make them feel
• To help with this we were introduced to Bartle’s player types 
• And Andrzej Maczewski’s gamification user types 
• It's also important to conider things like the gender gap in gamification - differences in how males and females play games eg boys are more likely to like destruction games, competition etc.

• Use game mechanics before you build or buy the game
• Understand intrinsic and extrinsic motivation - gamification is 75% psychology and 25% technology
• Select a pilot - test it
• Communicate

An Coppens took us through other processes include Kevin Werbach's 6Ds:

• Design business objectives (vs games can be just for fun)
• Delineate target behaviour (positive / more of)
• Describe your players (who are they / what do they love / hate)
• Devise activity loops (game mechanics)
• Don't forget the fun (where does the buzz come from?)
• Deploy the appropriate tools (no / low / complex tech)

Or there's Gabe Zicherman's players' journey to mastery:

• Find what the target audience wants / needs - emotional triggers
• Design challenges based on these triggers
• Design rewards based on wants  / needs (not just badges)
• Design communication for platforms where your target group spends time
• Invite players to participate - implement communication plan and player registration

Rajiv Vaid Basalawmoit suggested using the Design Council's 4D / Double Diamond process:

• Discover (divergent - what do we know)
• Define (convergent - what's the problem)
• Develop (divergent - potential solutions)
• Deliver (convergent - what we're going to do)

Phaedra's Rule 1 is - if you aren't spending majority of your time understanding what motivates your audience you're doing it wrong - and will end up with 'chocolate covered broccoli' - something boring which doesn't stop being boring just because it's dressed up (eg World of Warcraft for database administration).  You should always be asking what is fun about what I'm trying to teach?  That also implies content gamification is going to work better than structural gamification:

• Structural gamification no change to content but motivate to go though content and engage in learning process
• Content gamification make the content itself more game like

Phaedra also introduced a further process for selecting games if this is needed to support the gamifcation process (it may not):

• ROI
• Learning / pain points
• Puzzles  experience to teach and motivate
• Technology genre
• Platform

I thought this was useful to connect gamification and gaming - ie that even if all you're trying to do is to development a recruitment or learning game you'll still do well to follow the full gamification process, ensuring you don't end up with brown vegetables.

The challenge with games can be in translating engagement and learning back into the workplace.  However Phaedra suggested that IBM try to create a 'social wrapper' to help people apply their learnings from games into work.

So what about if you decide that a game isn't required?  My slight worry then about all the above processes is that, with the slight if important exception of the mechanics and activity loops, they end up looking like a fairly typical / traditional process design process (eg compare them to the Social Business POST process).  So how else is gamification different to more traditional working?

Several of the speakers suggested one common attribute of a gamified approach is that it provides a safe environment in which to fail.  Another might be that it's about creating a level playing field (Rajiv talked about cricket in his sessions on social entrepreneurship.)  I also liked Tom Chatfield's suggestion that we should  turn 'failed' into ' not yet succeeded'.

To me, it is about starting with a traditional process design approach.  But then injecting extra elements around funology and game mechanics.  It's why I don't think Tom's tweeted suggestion that gamification is just a marketing buzzword for people to find ti difficult to accept that humans are inherently playful is helpful.  Gamification has to be different from normal process design to make it worth talking about (as not everything can be or needs to be gamified - we may be inherently playful but we're lots of other things as well, and not everyone may want their fun at work), and if it's different then we need a different name for it, and to understand what it is.

So this is how I'm currently seeing things...

However I'm attending the Gamification World Congress in Barcelona on Friday so I may change my mind around this soon.

Conference Summary

I was really pleased to attend the conference and thank Fleming as having me there to blog on it.

It was certainly an interesting three days, and there are always opportunities for improvement in any conference.  For me the main opportunities are about closing the gap between gaming and gamification.

We talked about the gamification process, we used it to think about opportunities in areas like onboarding and performance management (I'm definitely going to look out for GE replacing forced ranking with doodling!) and more fully (much more fully!) for avoidable blindness.  Personally I'd rather have used this time to consider gamification in HR.  And to have had some case studies on this, rather than just ones on serious gaming (other than IBM which is many miles ahead of where most organisations are looking.)

But this may just be me.  Most attendees didn't seem to see the distinction between gaming and gamification as so important, and to the extent that there is a difference seemed most interested in the gaming.  Eg at the end of the first day I suggested the chair change some of the roundtable sessions to create more time for discussion on gamification.  They ignored me - correctly - as the group split quite nicely into seven groups where six were on gaming and only one on gamification, and this wasn't even one of the biggest, though I do think it was the best.

However, I do accept that, as Tom suggested, digital and non digital both provide opportunities but digital allows us to learn from play like never before.  So online games are likely to be an increasingly common end result of the gamification process.

I've certainly increased my interest in both gaming and gamification through the conference.  One of the things I think will stick with me is the scoreboard from Boehringer Ingelheim's Professor Syrum game, which Andy Stafford referred to as a dicombobulator (I'm still not sure why, but I do like the term).  Well I monitored my own personal gamification discombobulator through the conference, and definitely feel 'levelled up' in terms of my understanding but confidence in all of this as well.

Also see:

• Learning gamification case studies
• Recruitment gamification case studies
• Gamifying IBM
• Gamification in HR

And:

• Work sucks, play games

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With HR Magazine and Thomas Wedell on Innovation

I’m taking a short break from my focus on gamification at a session organised by HR Magazine with some of its HR Excellence Awards judges, HR in the Boardroom alumni and a few others.

We’re being challenged and entertained by Thomas Wedell on innovation (so maybe it's not just a big break from gamification after all.)

Innovation shouldn’t just be out there, not just limited to innovation department, but must be business as usual through the business.

We talked about why it’s not:

• Enabling business ownership so not just ‘their job’
• Bringing groups together eg a day where teams work together rather than being siloed (innovation happens when you bring different insights together)
• Managing nervousness eg if come out with a great idea being asked for more to do.

What works is a very pragmatic approach, not necessarily very creative looking, and which can be integrated into reality where people have other jobs to do.  It’s not about a trip to brainstorm island.  Sustainability, top-down - limiting buy-in, not focused on a particular area.

We also need to focus on the implementation side - it’s not just about getting the good ideas.  This just leads to the Monday Morning approach - getting all the ideas on post-it notes but then nothing ever changes.

Consider leaders as innovation architects.  It’s not about a mindset, about inspiration etc.  Not that this is untrue but it’s very hard to make it happen.

Focus relentlessly on changing behaviour - understand what this looks like.  Ask what is stopping people from being more innovative?


Thomas suggested:

• Insufficient resources
• No formal / articulated strategy for innovation
• Lack of clear gols and priorities - focus beats freedom - where are the important problems?

Also don’t motivate by fear - find the opportunities.

I think I also heard Thomas say 'risk is bad' - what???

We also had some of the same debates that we'd had at the gamification summit eg:

• Celebrating failure - yes, but nobody wants to win the award!  We suggested focusing on the greatest learning from mistakes rather than the mistakes themselves though I still prefer the idea about most likely to succeed next time from last week.
• Not use the word innovation but the language that people understand eg 'making life easier' (like don't use the word gamification.)  I'm not too sold on this - I think if you can't talk about innovation it's going to significantly limit your opportunity to innovate.

Other suggestions included hackathons - make it easy for people - we can’t give them spare time - they don’t have the time just to focus on being innovative.

Most organisations look for innovation in new technology and future trends.  And these can be fertile grounds but it’s not the only and sometimes even the best source.  We get trapped in the future rather than focusing on what we should have developed three years ago using existing technology.  And we spend too much time creating solutions rather than identifying problems.  What do our employees do, where do they spend their time?

Thomas’ model focuses on 5+1 behaviours:

• Focus the search
• Connect people
• Tweak the process (begin with interactive steps)
• Select systematically
• Stealth storm (let people operate under the radar and break the rules - at least at the start of a project)
• Persist in the pursuit.

Thomas finished by asking where he’s got this wrong.  For me, it all makes sense, but I still think creating an innovative culture / environment is critical because it makes all the things above that much easier, simpler and organic.  It may be harder but it has a much bigger impact.  Thomas suggests culture is used as parking lot rather than to do anything serious - I agree with this, but if you talk about organisational capability instead then you've solved than problem fairly easily (a nice easy incremental innovation to make).

I talk about both of these sides of the challenge on my open workshops with Symposium Events: HR and Innovation (where we talk about HR helping organisations become more innovative, but also creating more innovation within HR.)

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#GamifyHR HR / Learning Gamification Case Studies

Day 3 of Fleming's Gamification in HR Summit focused on learning, particularly in this case study from Tuba Surucu from Yapi Kredi Bank in Turkey.  The bank has 18,000 employees, 40% generation Y and the rest mainly Z.  They're always on their ipads and 'what they want they want'.

The firm's use of serious gaming in learning dates back to 1998 when YKB City, similar to SIMS City, was introduced into their Learning Centre enabling employees to seek all the information they need.  The game's launch was supported by a teaser movie and was made accessible for two months.

The game was based on two scenarios - 2 phases simulating the real environment found in branches and departments.  In the first phase employees earned points to test their knowledge using wheels, horse races etc.

The game incorporate levels to help people see where they are at that point in the game - and they can do things like change their avatar etc.  Each level assigns specific missions to users ensuring theyinvestigate the environment and the applications in the game.

Scoring meters provide an external motivator running through the game.

4260 employees participated, 1000 different questions were solved and 30 different scenarios were played.  Cross sales increased 19%, 89,460 training hours were saved, pre/post scores increased from 63.5 to 82.5 and job waiting time decreased 25%.

Yapi Kredi were able to see which topics had been most successfully trained and where future efforts needed to go.

Version 2.0 of the game was introduced this year to meet a need to certificate 1500 people.  It was based on a virus attack and the need to solve scenarious to save the bank

The game as designed and implemented in 6 months and was supported by email and video teasing and brochures.  The branding focused on the highest score participant in each branch and encouraged other employees to try to beat them.

The rest was left to employees to learn throughout the game.  There were also rewards and visibility to the 10 winners.

3.0 is going to be for orientation - investigating the 7 wonders of the world.  At each wonder people will find puzzle pieces to complete the picture.  There's also a new mobile app which will include some games too.

So again, this is gaming rather than gamification - and quite similar to the recruitment case studies in fact.  But it's useful to see what a company is doing internally - most  recruitment gamification experiences can be reviewed externally anyway, but the learning stuff is all behind the firewall.

But I did get a chance to ask about proper gamification examples later on.  An suggested this LMS as an example, but this is still just a technology system which makes gamificating easier - it's not a case study of how a company has gamified their learning.

So I'd have still liked to have seen more, but maybe that's just me - more in my next couple of posts.

 

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#GamifyHR Gamifying IBM

I still need to post on most of day 2 of Fleming's Gamification in HR Summit, but while I'm still processing the information and my learnings from this (as well as day 3) here is a short summary of one of the most provocative sessions (in terms of what may be possible) from Phaedra Boinodiris at IBM.

We heard about a number of things they are doing including micro quests to challenge peoples' behaviours in different area for example around sales.

However to me the most interesting application was applying gamification to think more creatively about capability assessments.

So IBM have been usaing a game called Virtuoso provided by Gravitalent which tests personality and behaviours for problem solving, work attitude etc, and the multi player version also assesses cooperation vs competition.

The important point is that this is a using a serious game test to understand peoples' competencies rather than just asking people about them or testing them in a traditional way.  This allows people to retest and improve their behaviours rather than just providing a fixed view of personality.

IBM have developed a system that extracts data from the system populating a character sheet like dashboard allowing people to see how their competencies need to or have changed in response to shifting requirements or career opportunities.  For example they use the rotating leader model where they ask who might be the right leader for a particular role and where the role moves as a project or something develops (as in World of Warcraft Guild leaders).  But it should also provide something like an internal stock market for talent, linking assessment, meeting development needs and evolving potential.

You could also use it for a team to check whether you have the right combination and diversity of profiles within the team.

An interesting aspect of the dashboard is the idea that the system provides an avatar which changes as someone's competencies change.  So project managers or individuals can compare the differences between eg a green swan and a red dragon etc.

The slide shows Nick's Portal Experience (a customer curated experience fed by big data providing meaningful experience and rewards to Nick and to the broader business ecosystem.)

In the top left you've got his avatars - a diamond and a swan helping answer 'who am I today'.

On the top right, Nick can see his assessments (eg for problem solving and leadership style) and certificates as well as development options - here serious games that can support him.

Bottom left are traffic lights indicating skills matching in the sector and for particular jobs.

And bottom right are scores for how Nick ranks compared to others in the industry, how he is perceived by his peers and how the marketplace is valuing his skills.

We also had a look at some very funky serious games including one which was linked in to a client's real business processes (not HR though) so that learning in the game would have a direct impact on the business.  Ie you can teach a skill and optimise a process at the same time.

And we heard about some more complex game and gamified approaches.  In particular IBM run Grand Challenges to involve staff in learning about new technology challenges and wanted to use gamification to support their next grand challenge around their social business platform and came up with a virtual reality game and facilitated conversations on the platform to show the value of social collaboration and the platform.

I thought these examples were the best that we covered in terms of the full possibility of gamification, and the sort of process we'd been considering during day 2 and that I still need to post on.  And that also showed how a serious game can be the output of a gamification approach, linking these two things together more closely than we'd managed to before.

But it's also clearly well beyond the capability of most firms, and probably most vendors, for some time to come.  It'd have been good to have had more example of programmes like this from some more typical companies.  I know there are some...

 

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