The Plus 4 Gamification method

Lately I have been pretty busy. Not complaining because I love what I do. To be more specific I am doing some projects and writing a practical e-book about Gamification in Dutch at the same time. Not much time left to spend on my Gamification blog. Today I found a solution for that. I am giving you’ll a sneak preview of stuff I am writing for my e-book. Today it’s about the essence of the Plus 4 Gamification method.

There is a need for a Gamification method that reaches further than Gamifying a certain entity. Extensive documentation is something of the past. A compact description of the concept in which the framework is defined is sufficient. The sooner developers can start developing, the better it is. In the past several developing methods passed by. Most of them neglected one important: the human factor. The creation of a Gamification concept and developing the software is the work of humans. We learn them the basic skills, that’s not too hard. The success of a project however depends on the talent and the passion of the developers. A drive we often recognize in people that have creative functions. Take for instance a movie director. He has played the movie he wants to realize thousands of times inside his head. His challenge is to translate it to the white screen. Those people have passion written all over them.

A lot of human energy is needed to create something new. People get more energy when they work on something with passion. Passionate people achieve more than people who consider work as a daily obligation. Extensive, complicated documentation has a negative impact on them. If you look at it from a different perspective, it’s nothing more than a huge set of restrictions. What they actually is need is a clear guideline that leaves room for new insights. The use of prototyping within a step by step develop process limits the possible risks involved. Additional documentation will be provided at every step. To take away all the risk at forehand by describing every single detail isn’t realistic. It just doesn’t work! Many large ICT projects failed taking this approach. Plus 4 is about creating the right attitude towards any project by using a flexible pragmatic approach that provides the biggest chance of success! A method needs to support the developers and not the other way around.

Plus 4 is about getting the job done!