Gaminomics 2015 – Adventures in games and gamification

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I attended, and spoke, at the Gaminomics 2015 conference in London. This was a really interesting day with some great speakers, organised by Kam Star of PlayGen.

My own talk was on the subject of whether a CRM can be gamified and actually be fun to use. More on this later. First I thought I’d just mention some of the highlights from the day for me. There were multiple tracks so I didn’t get to hear every talk.

The morning started with a talk from Sebastian Deterding who reminded us of the two competing gamification methodologies used by Mary Poppins:

  1. That ‘a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down’, and
  2. ‘In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun – and snap, the job’s a game.’

His overall point, which I completely agree with, is that ‘good gamification needs to be designed’.

After that we heard from Tim Hall of Cognify and had a play on the HR app they built for The Body Shop.

Then we heard from 3 speakers in a row bigging up physical games, particularly board games as useful for various aspects of business. They did differ on whether a board game needed a facilitator, and from an audience perspective this looked to be down to how well designed the board game was, simple or complex to play.

We heard from Leslie Harris of Cancer Research UK who told us about their latest and upcoming crowd sourced games for research. From ‘Play to Cure’ and ‘Genes in Space’, through ‘Reverse the Odds’ (which had 1 million classifications in just 2 weeks) to ‘The Impossible Line’ which is coming soon.

One of the more interesting talks of the morning was from Al Jazeera who had built an app to train investigative reporters built around content from a real investigation into Pirate Fishing. Very pretty app, and I was left thinking that you could use it to crowd source real future investigations, though I’m sure there were be some legal and health & safety implications that would really need to be looked into first.

My own talk was titled: Can a gamified CRM really be fun to use?

I gave a brief overview of the built in game mechanics of CRM.me and then looked at some real gamification data from our CRM.me users in the UK from the last 2 years. So, which game mechanics have really worked?

In the table of the top 10 users in the UK (I only came 18th overall, outrageous!) by monthly average of total points in the slides shown below I found some interesting facts:

  • The top two users work in the same company.
  • Laura in 3rd has the most badges, which means she’s explored and used the most features throughout the CRM.
  • Emily in 4th is a new starter who is obviously highly engaged and adopting the system really well.
  • If you want lots of Coins then it pays to complete the Collections of Virtual Goods.
  • From our analysis of the stats any user who is achieving an average of 10,000 points or more per month is an engaged and successful CRM user.
  • Above 5,000 points per month marks out a competent user.

Here are the slides from my presentation at the 2015 Gaminomics conference:

About the author 

Pete Baikins

Pete Baikins is an international authority on gamification, a lifelong gamer, successful entrepreneur and a lecturer. As CEO of Gamification+ Ltd he mentors and trains companies world-wide on the use of gamification to solve business challenges. Gamification+ won the Board of Trade Award from the UK's Department of International Trade in January 2019.

Pete is co-host of the health gamification podcast Health Points and is also Chair of Gamification Europe, the annual conference for Gamification practitioners.

Pete is an Honorary Ambassador for GamFed (International Gamification Confederation), having previously been the Chair from 2014 to February 2019, whose aim is to spread best practices within and support the gamification industry.

After 15 years as a Lecturer on gamification and entrepreneurship at the University of Brighton he now guest lectures on Gamification at King’s College London and at ESCP Europe at post-graduate and under-graduate levels.

Over the past 20 years Pete has built and sold two businesses. One was in security software and the more recent one was a telecoms and internet connectivity business. He is also an Ambassador for Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce in the UK.

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