Over 95% of our youth plays videogames. This huge wave (the next generation) can be mastered through gamification, because they understand games and therefore game mechanics. They live it, eat it, breath it and will embrace gamification! Roughly 50% of the current internet population plays social games. The rest? Well I am certain they play other games. It is fair to say that everybody plays. That’s why gamification is a very powerful tool! Gamifier.com gains knowledge about this phenomenon and shares it with the world. Feel free to explore Gamifier.com and find out if it fits your needs!
There are lots of definitions about Gamification The one from Oxford Dictionaries explains best: “The application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service: gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun.“
Gamifier.com uses its own simple definition: Make things FUN by adding game-elements.
A short and understandable definition. To put this in the right perspective it is very important to understand what fun implies. The formal definition from Johan Huizinga on Wikipedia is: FUN is the enjoyment of pleasure and an absolutely primary category of life, familiar to everybody at a glance right down to the animal level.
Fun can be found in many things. Reading a good book is fun, accomplishing something difficult is fun, exploring new stuff is fun, achieving your goals is fun, socializing is fun, etc, etc.
Gamification brings fun into our daily routine and therefore is a very powerful tool!! A gamifier can make that happen. Using the plus 4 method a gamifier will find the game-factor of any given entity and create pure fun with it. As a result the entity (websit, school, organization, etc) will perform better. Throught this blog I want to inform you about Gamification trends and give my opinion about important matters. Please read the latest posts:
It becomes interesting when the real and virtual world meet
My main interest is obviously Gamification. Augmented reality, applied games, social media are in my field of interest as well. I see them as complementary to Gamification. Innovations in which the real world meets the virtual world have my special interest. That’s where our future lies. I am certain of that. For a lot of people hard to understand what the potential is, but if I would invest in something, it would be in these kind of projects. It is the next big thing in the field of technology. Take for instance Google Glass. A new...
read moreThe 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...
read moreGamification: play is pure fun!
When you turn your daily activity into a playful experience, you don’t need extra motivation to enjoy the ride. Just a couple of days ago a video was brought to my attention by my brother. Not long after it was shared by many people. This video makes me laugh out loud! When I watched it again I noticed some things. First of all the guy on the treadmill on the foreground is very skilled. Secondly you see somebody at the background doing the same thing, but there is a very important difference: “it looks like he’s working his pants...
read more7 advantages for organizations that apply Gamification
Gamification adds fun to any given entity. For me personally this would be enough to apply it. For everyone who still has doubts, it’s my pleasure to explain some advantages in more detail. Take a look at the software we use every day: websites, mobile apps, software we use at work, to name a few. We have reached a stage in which everything works just fine. It’s a craft we pretty much mastered over the years. Smart organizations even make the software work fluently, with a sophisticated user interface. We call such functionality: “user...
read moreGamify the registration of working hours!
Since I made a career switch into a Gamifier and have my focus on Gamification, I see things differently. “How can I make something more fun?”, is a question that often pops into my mind. This is also the case with the time registration process for employees. A nightmare to most of us. Sometimes it puts pressure on people that really don’t need it and it just is a very boring task, that people hate. In bigger companies people are hired to chase the employees that don’t register their worksheets properly. Waste of time and money in my...
read moreIt’s time to unleash the real power of Gamification!
I like professor Scott Nicholson’s thoughts about Gamification. He is one of the few that looks beyond the current solutions that are being offered. Today it’s all about applying reward systems on a non game environment. Why? Because if done right, it simply does the job. I also use that mechanism, because it is easy to apply and combined with meaningful rewards it can help reach business goals. A useful tool that proofs that game mechanisms work in the real world! There are a lot of games that depend on reward systems. Think about Angry...
read moreGamification and Society 3.0
The book Society 3.0 written by Ronald van den Hoff, grabbed me. The book matched my thinking about our society, it intrigued me from the first page to the last one. The co-working organization Seats2meet, founded by Mariëlle Sijgers and Ronald van den Hoff, brings the theory of society 3.0 to life! You have to read the book and experience the atmosphere at Seats2meet to fully understand what it’s all about. I did and it just makes me happy to witness that it works. People with passion are co-creating beautiful things, generating new...
read moreGamification: the natural evolution of ICT
After IBM build its first commercial scientific computer in 1952, it took about 25 years before computers entered our homes. Only a lucky few could afford those. Although the internet was invented in 1969 a decade was needed before it became really popular. At first the computer was nothing more than a calculator and not similar to the ones we hold in our hands nowadays. Not even close! Having the size of a small building, those calculators couldn’t even match up to the power of the simplest versions we use today. Soon after people used...
read moreMinecraft, my son’s habitat. Education or play?
Recently I took a short virtual journey with my son. Afterwards I wrote a post about it: “Exploring my son’s habitat together; Minecraft!” The days after he kept asking me if I wanted to take a look at the world he created in Minecraft together with a friend. I was done with the subject, saw what the game could do, it was a nice experience. That’s it!! To be honest, I wasn’t in the mood to take another journey. Boy, was I wrong! With me he took a boring journey. This journey was different, it felt if he was really home again. I...
read moreGamification: use the F-word in your concepts!
I am worried, I see Gamification as the next big thing. The moment I got involved, learned what it implies, how it can improve our lives (yes, really improve our lives) and what the potential is, I was completely hooked! To me it all comes down to one simple word: “fun”. However, every time I use the F-word, people seem to doubt the story. Enough reason to write a second post about this subject. Fun is an ugly word in the minds of many serious business people, or heads of organizations. I am 100% sure this is the reason why people are...
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