Brighton Gamification Meetup – Gamification By The Sea

The speakers had 5-10 minutes to talk about an app they liked, either something they had made themselves or they have used and has an interesting element of gamification in it. 

Our purpose was to run a community led event that would encourage all participants to take place and offer us their own insight and opinion on gamified applications they have used. 

 I think we achieved that as after each presentations there were quite a lot of questions that ended up being really interesting conversation on gamified apps on their own. 

Our first speaker was Shane Fumagall, Gamified Marketer at GAMIFICATION+ who talked about an environmental app called Ecosia.

Ecosia is a search engine which plants trees every time you search. It's the kind of gamification that players tackle an epic call to action to save the planet. The perfect fit for philanthropists.

In his presentation Shane also explored the idea, if Ecosia could use gamification elements to compete with multinationals like Google which dominates the market. Shane believed that gamification is one of the only viable ways that Ecosia could differentiate itself from Google enough to give it a USP.

Coming up after Shane was Sabrina Bruehwiler talking about gamification and narrative.

She spoke about Erase All Kittens, a gamified tool to help people learn the basics of coding. She emphasised on how narrative is powerful even in cases that it's not really serious like in Erase All Kittens. Very interesting application as we got to play a bit. We hope the developers will be able to further develop it. 

Third presenter of the evening was Vasilis Gkogkidis, Gamification Consultant at GAMIFICATION+ talked about an app he has been working on called "The Manager's Path".

He talked about how gamification and learning are a natural match and being able to learn in stress free environments without the fear of failing is what gamification can help learning and training with. The aim of "The Manager's Path" is to help new managers across all industries, develop positive managerial skills that will aid them in their everyday tasks.

The part that stood out to me about Vasilis' presentation is how well the app combines a common theme to make the user feel like they are on a single and complete journey. It is a powerful storytelling technique which will surely be apt in teaching managers how to manage.

Dan Atkins, Principal Consultant at JFDI Consulting talked about JFDI's gamified Sharepoint on-boarding app. JFDI are a Microsoft Gold Partner and we partnered up with them to design this on-boarding system. With this knowledge, they created a gamified Sharepoint app which guides users through the on-boarding process. Onboarding is the crucial first step in gamification, and this app is a useful example of an interactive and real life example of gamification in the workplace.

Dan gave us some examples of the gamification techniques they have been using through a very interesting video that demonstrated the different levels and achievements that players can reach while learning more about Sharepoint. 

Last speaker of the day was Max Eaglen, director at Platform Group, where the event was hosted.

Given the chance we need to thank Platform Group for the great hospitality they offered us. Their huge 4K touch screen was impressive to say the least. 

Max talked about Co:Lab which is a suite of applications designed specifically for use in Customer Experience Centres. The apps gamify the process of work shopping. The apps cover everything from simple show and tell interactives to discovery tools that help you sort, prioritise and ideate, and include data visualisation that harvest information from the net to help inform decision making.