My notes from attending the gamification summit Jan 20,21

1. Top Things I learned about the Gsummit:
1. You need to have skin in the game. Adeo of Founder Institute found that users who
were given a scholarship to attend the program performed worse than users who paid
for it.
2. Mass Customization. Talked to or heard companies such as United, Amex, Nike, looking
for a way to provide customized experience via technology for their population
3. Mothers are naturally great gamers, because getting a kid to school requires a bunch of
mechanics.
4. Similarly, we treat a lot of real-world events like games. We just don’t think about it…
Like cleaning is an game around organizing and logistics.
5. 55% of social gamers are women, and 53% of Zynga gamers are women between the
ages of 25 and 44. The likelihood of becoming a social gamer increases once you have a
kid.
6. Negative Achievements. A little risky, but can also convey that a humorous tone.
7. 16 Practical design patterns from Nadya around User Engagement
8. Variable rewards are successful because we seek to create order when there is chaos.
It’s not so much about the rewards, but the search (Skinner)
9. Phases of Commitment: Should I "spend" on this? Only an idiot would spend on
something that’s no good. Since I spent $ on it, it must be good. Therefore I will continue
to commit.
10. You can call it bribery. I don’t think of it that way. Its GENIUS. -Chamillionaire

2. Reinventing Loyalty: How Gamification Reshapes Consumer Marketing
Krishnan Saranathan, Managing Director of MileagePlus at United Airlines Awesome Threesome
UAL is proud of these three elements:
Notes
Tiered achievements, progress bars, and
United Likes to think of themselves as a Loyalty Network with over
100+ Partners. Key elements of Gamification are in play to actively Rewards/Recognition
engage customers:
• Tiered Achievement Levels: Very important for UAL
• Progress bars and goal pursuits:
• Rewards & Recognition We need to go to there
Go to where the users talk about
How do you measure the success of a loyalty program? What is the mileage to learn more and find UAL’s
ROI? most passionate users
Quant: Measuring ROI accurately is hard to do in the Airline
industry. (did not answer, but noted that measuring ROI is
important). This is a pressing issue for UAL as the company has
been doing it for a while.
Qual: Members share their wisdom, discuss issues and offer
constructive criticisms through online forums
UAL has created games for their product marketing campaign. For
example, in the Optathlon game, playing the game re-inforced
concepts like more legroom in Economy + . Users were part of a
leaderboard, earned rewards, and participated in sweepstakes.
Results (shown on the right)
How does UAL view the value of a mile?
From an accounting point of view. When a customer redeems a
mile, UAL recognizes the revenue. There is a cost associated with Results
the miles, and each redemption draws down on the account. 2x Pop. They measure
performance. Our
Biggest challenge: opportunity is to
Success has turned into a challenge for UA (and most likely other
large loyalty firms like AMEX), how does UAL stay relevant with such
define what ROI is.
a diverse and big user base? Especially to those who barely fly at all.
Why relevant to frequent travelers. How do we be relevant to UAL wants to be a Virtual
travelers who don't fly at all?
Currency
UAL wants to drive currency consolidation by expanding partner
network, thereby increasing engagement UAL wants to sign as many
deals as possible to hit
Like Canada and much of Europe. It seems as if UAL is trying to be
the platform and use it’s points as a currency item.
Key Challenge: How can we engage with the user to create a
personalized experience?

3. KEYNOTE: Engage Employees and Drive Innovation with Game On: 16 Design Patterns for User Engagement
Gamification Nadya Direkova, Senior UX Designer at Google
JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist of Salesforce.com
The theory behind Gamification has been around since the 1990s. First put
forth by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He discusses what it’s like to be in the
Zone (he called it flow)
Gamification is a buzz word. Game mechanics are truisms. If you want
performance to be high, you need
* Clear goals
* Match between skill required, skill
What are game mechanics? Design patterns that promote play and play-like
* The focus, the concentration engagement.
WE’LL DISCUSS HOW THEY APPLY TO 3 ASPECTS OF THE USER JOURNEY:
COME AND TRY IT (OnBoarding)
Visual storytelling
Visual Cues
Tutorials
Responsive Objects
Reward Schedule
Disc
BRING FRIEND (Social)
Gated trial – form a team
Social feedback
Repuation
Sharing Milestones
Mischief
Come Back (Retention)
Advanced user paths
content unlocks
quests queue
Time pressure
Scarcity
http://www.slideshare.net/nadyadirekova/game-on-16-design-patterns-for-user-
engagement

4. The Future of Gamification is Emotion
Nicole Lazzaro, President XEO Design, Inc.
Session: Games are a combination of
goals, actions, motivations, and emotions. More than a quest for
points and badges, games create their legendary engagement with
specific emotional responses from player actions. In this talk I will
share how game designers craft emotions from
novelty, challenge, friendship, and meaning to create
engagement, retention, and monetization. Free white paper and
models on how to use emotion to create games with the Four Keys
to Fun.
Gamification can change traffic
• Get people to slow down (Lakeshore Drive)
• Cause traffic jams (people stopping to wait for the Bay Bridge to go from $6
to $4 (laughs from crowd)
Four types of fun:
1. Easy Fun > exploration, fantasy, creativity
2. Serious Fun > repetition, rhythm, collection
An example: Swiffer, Bejeweled Blitz, and iPhones (all the same)
1. People Fun > communicate, cooperate, compete
2. Hard Fun > goals, obstacles, strategy
How do you balance between a message (product branding) and a game?
* Fun first
* It's easy to embed message after it is fun.
Real Life Example of Gamification:
Japanese stepping stones. Together, it’s a sidewalk. Separate them and it force
people to engage and thereby draw people in.
4 Keys to Fun
How Player Experience create emotion
Serious Fun Example: Collection
Swiffer, Bejeweled Blitz, and iPhone apps.

5. Better Entrepeneurship with Gamification
Adeo Ressi, CEO of Founder Institute
Session: Educating adults, and helping them achieve their full potential is the mission of The Founder Institute. It’s the world’s largest
incubator/accelerator of startups, operating in dozens of cities around the world and giving thousands of aspiring founders the chance to birth their
companies every year. Through the use of metrics and gamification, the Founder Institute has been able to increase performance, participation and
outcomes – both among individuals and teams. Find out how these engagement techniques were pioneered and tested, and learn how to use
gamification in your organization to drive autonomy, innovation, team performance and success.
Goal: Take 2% of pop that can be entrepreneurs, and turn them into entrepreneurs
Gamification Elements:
Raw Material > Penalties > Rewards > Social > Measurement > Enforcement > Results Insight: You need to
have skin in the game
The internal dashboards are better than what is shown to the external user. Found that users who
were given a
Raw Material: Created a test (for: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, commitment) during the application process scholarship to attend
Penalties performed worse than
Ask to Pay to Play: Ensures that people coming in are serious and commitment to the process. users who paid for it.
Make it Hard: They kick out 60% of the enrolling class
Rewards: While they gave out prizes, Adeo mentioned that it did not have a material effect on the outcomes of student performance.
Give out prizes. Dinner, scholarships, etc.
Social: Ratings in the open
Measurement: Leaderboards. Individuals rated, working groups rated. It's transparent.
Enforcement: Willing to kick people out. Did not bend the rules.
Results
91% of the graduates launched companies.
75% operating ahead of plans
42% of the companies, worldwide, have received 500 in funding.
5,000 jobs created
Empirical Evidence: The harder the better. The program became increasingly negative over time. People were gaming the system, lead to
the harder structure.

6. Come for the Game, Stay for the Community: Building Visual Studio Achievements: Bringing Gamification To Software
Developers
and Sustaining Lasting Engagement Online Karsten Januszewski, Microsoft
Dan Porter, CEO of OMGPOP
Session: How do you build progress, achievements and fun into one of the
Session: OMGPOP is one of the most successful online game world’s most widely-used technical platforms? That was the question
portals, bridging the gap between classic gamers and non-gamers, action facing the Microsoft Visual Studio team when they set out to Gamify their
players and casual, flirty friends. But turning short-interval play into long- IDE. Their experience was controversial from the start and the lessons they
term engagement isn’t a given, even for a brilliant team of game-loving learned were startling. From anti-cheating to managing community
developers. Find out how OMGPOP used the lessons of community and expectations, the lessons of the Visual Studio team are applicable to
gamification to build an enduring community, break records for anyone looking to gamify an environment with high user autonomy. In this
engagement and time-on-site, and still keep the fun, light and social exciting, no stone-unturned post mortem, learn the do’s and don’ts from
atmosphere so crucial to their audience. one of the most interesting examples of gamification in recent years.
Real-time playing is important: 2/3 of turns took place within 5 minutes. This is Three Lessons Learned:
because on a fundamental level, users want to connect with others. Asynchronous 1. Listen to Communities
doesn’t fulfill that void. 2. Pros and Cons of "negative AChievements:
3. on Cheating
People who create want to share. In the beginning had no sharing tools. But ppl still
shared. Ppl who were jaded, wanted to share the work they created.
Sample achievements:
Incentivise & Reward "Fun Achievements" –
Lonely: Coding on a Friday or Saturday night.
By giving out the virtual currency, Draw, rewards users for Potty Mouth: use 5 curse words in a file.
engagement, exploration, retention.
Truly co-operative game. Play Catch. The point of catch. how many times can you do it "Negative" Achievements
in a row, there is no winner/loser. It’s cooperative. Pros
* Adds humor to the game
Create Long-Term Goals: Taken from the LinkedIn with a bar to complete. * Zero points means no incentive
Importance of Content Cadence - New material constantly, at a cadence. Cons
* There is a maintenance cost * Could backfire
* Feeding the beast is hard – • Encourages "bad behavior“
live ops is hard
On Cheating

7. Gamification in 2012: Trends in Consumer and Enterprise Markets
Wanda Meloni, Founder of M2 Research
Notes
Trends in 2012.
Enterprise Gamificaton
Loyalty Metrics
Repeat Visit 150-200% Drivers towards Enterprise Gamification
Referrals 250% increase
Virality
250+%
Social shares: 250%
Growth of
Commerce Metrics Gamification (GG) in
Purchase 2012
Virtual Goods ~150 M consumer
100% increase. market

8. What Bartle thinks about how his partition of
killers, socializers, achievers, and explorers has been
bastardized
Game designers find gamification weird.
Game designers be appalled if a games were so bad
we had to bribe people to play them
RICHARD BARTLE

9. Big Brands and Gamification: Winning the Marathon Gaming for Good: Millennial Moms and Competitive
Irfan Kamal, SVP, Digital/Social of Ogilvy Collaboration
Samantha Skey, CRO of RecycleBank
Ford Fusion: Added leader boards and points later on. Lead to a 20%
boost. The visibility added tremendously to the excitement and program. Session: Moms control more than the purse strings in most homes (5
(nothing new here) trillion in annual spending) they also control the good works
and, often, the gaming. Many a millennial mom relies upon gaming
All other cases were fluff. dynamics in manging their families’ behavior. They are also active gamers
themselves, and enjoy gaming the bottom line in their houshold
investments. Get into the mom psyche with proprietary research from
Recyclebank on moms as chief gaming officer of the household.
Gamer Moms
Mothers are naturally great gamers, because
getting a kid to school requires a bunch of
mechanics.
Rewarding people for making positive changes in everybody lives
Initially, didn't focus on millennial moms. Head of household females. Give them the
Good Story: tools, the millennial mom will seek to drive goals.
The Titanic: Leo dies. Not because the door can’t fit two people, but because of a lack
of creativity. 55% of social gamers are female. The likelihood of being a social gamer increases
once you have a kid
Shoes videos of kids crying.
* Using gaming dynamics shifting from having the cattle prod to the game master.
* Mothers are naturally great gamers, because getting a kid to school requires a
bunch of mechanics.
Moms: 86% on FB, 17% on Twitter
Mom use social games to validate themselves.
Most active members feel like they are contributing,
Feeling of validation makes them feel more comfortable.

10. Enterprise Gamification of Fitness: From 10% to over 75% Regular Workouts
Charlie Kim, CEO of Next Jump Inc. 5 Initiatives at NextJump
Notes
Gamification, at NextJump, we use the word motivation
Result: Motivated the company to go from 5% to 80% exercising
regularly.
Employed an E&S approach (Experiment to scale)
1. Onsite gym:
2. TeamPlay + Leaderboard (a little lift): Initial bump, it lies
down. What works: team competition + leader boar. teams
motivate each other. Teamplay stronger w/ people you know. Best
helped worst w/in each team. Live scoreboard to track progress.
Jumped to 50% participation. Stuck at 50%. what didn't work.
perception became reality, norm became accepted ceiling, pep talks
didn't work, impossibility bar got set. what works: recognition
awards: inspire new norms, celebrate it publicly, the flea that
jumped higher.
3. Recognition programs (jump):
4. Use data for fatigue: Use data to level the playing field. Losing
team kept giving up. what didn't work: losing teams never won.
Losing teams blamed inequality, believed they could not win, they
give up. What worked: equally balanced team.
5. top people focus: what didn't work: prioritized work over
exercise. top performers went the least. Always had more work to
do. Exercise fell off priority list. what works: scheduled workouts:
appointments w/trainers. hired top personal trainers. accessible
first to top performers, schedule: create routine behavior
#4: Use Data when there is Fatigue #2: Create Teams

12. The Investment Case for Gamification: Opportunities The Automatic Customer: How to Design User Behavior
Nir Eyal, Man Behind the Curtain at Automatic Customer
and Threats in the Next Five Years
Tim Chang, Managing Director at Mayfield Fund
In an age of increasing online distractions, companies need to form habits
Need to be able to score the system and measure ROI to stay relevant in users’ lives. Nir Eyal discusses the latest in Behavior
Engineering to explain how businesses create indispensable products. Nir
will walk through his innovative framework, which he calls the “Desire
There is always an ROI issue at nascent stages. Engine” to explain the fundamental elements of habit formation.
Ppl used to be skeptical, CRM, like salesforce.com used to be
Don't offer self-service tools for nascent industry.
The key is to provid e service and then tell the partners why they are not capturing the
Read up on: BJ Fogg. B = m.a.t (Motiviation, ability, and a trigger)
entire potential of the platform. Tim used Omniture, as an example. Omniture client
services tell the client that they are capturing < 50% of value
Variable Reward: BS Skinner
Gamification: * Variable rewards drive us nuts
The services, consulting, and managed services groups, implement and run is just as * Compulsion to make sense of cause and effect
critical. * Dopamine system drives the search
Next steps: integrators of verticals for gamification. Sees a lot of lightweight
gamification tests. It's not a silver bullet. it's built into the core/mission of the product. How do we create variable rewards?
We seek to create order where there is chaos.
Gamification design shops, advisories, analytics, consultancies. It drives us nuts. Dopamine is not about rewards, it's about the search.
* Gamification is a toolkit. Relies on know-how and ideas.
Search rewards fall into three types: Tribe, self, hunt
Gamification as a service: Every company is trying to hire for quant jocks and analytics Rewards of the Tribe: Acceptance, sex power
Tim believes that there will be think tank or analytics shops that sell gamification as a Hunt: Food, money, info
service. * Analytics Self: Sensation: mastery, consistency, competency, purpose
Business model disruption: Idea that a user can Buy it or Earn it
Commitment Phase
Should i "spend" on this?
Back to Numbers:
only an idiot would paned on something not good
For companies to succeed, successful ones will need to tie performance back into
since I spent on it, it must be good
metrics. Which metric they operate under, use the gamification system to back into
the system. Create engagement rates. I will commit
e.g. like social re-marketing. “I can get you 32 Likes. which converts to XYZ $. Trying
things down to an operational number.” Commitments make the next action more likely
Paying or subscribing is not an action, it's a result of engagement in the system.

13. Direct to Fan Engagement
Chamillionaire, CEO of Chamillitary, Inc.
You can call it bribery. I don’t think
of it that way. Its GENIUS.