It may come as no surprise that people working in the gamification space like a challenge. And what other industry than that one needs to apply the very same game design components to have a little fun? This is what Toby Beresford does with his monthly updated gamification guru list, and which he uses to showcase his Leaderboarded gamification technology.

In the two years that Toby has compiled the list, using different criteria to rank the gamification gurus, mostly Gabe Zichermann – the man behind the GSummit and Gamification.co – has been dominating (with a short early stint by Jane McGonigal, who anyways considers herself a game-, but not a gamification-designer).

Anyways, April 2013 is the first time that I unseated Gabe Zichermann from the top spot. What a day! I had aimed for #2, but #1 is a sensation. Now of course, this is a little competition, and we need to understand what competition means, what types of competition are there, when it works, and how winners and losers react.

The Wikipedia defines competition as follows:

Competition in ecology and sociology is a contest between individuals and entities for territory, a niche, or a location of resources, for resources and goods, for prestige, recognition, awards, mates, or group or social status, for leadership. It is the opposite of cooperation.

Abstract

Enterprise gamification, a popular trend in the business world right now, refers to the application of game mechanics to the workplace. Gamification practitioners believe that the goals of games – to create motivation, retention, loyalty, and satisfaction – are the same as the goals of employee engagement initiatives. Though a widely cited 2011 Gartner study predicts the widespread use of enterprise gamification, it is too early to conclude whether gamification will be a lasting new standard of workplace engagement. Therefore, the goal of this study is to increase understanding of how enterprise gamification is being implemented on a practical level in organizations.

Keywords

Gamification - the application of game mechanics and game thinking to any non-game environment, like customer engagement, education, training, and business
 
Enterprise Gamification - applying gamification elements like badges, levels, and leaderboards specifically to the workplace environment
 
Employee Engagement - employee involvement, satisfaction with work, and emotional commitment to their organizations

Game Mechanics - building blocks like leaderboards, badges, and progress bars, that can be used for gamification

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
Enterprise Gamification Paper by Zoë Epstein / Ithaca College		248 Kb

The Japanese word Kaizen means “Good Change”. Kaizen is a practical philosophy and methodology that focus upon continuous improvement of business processes.

Enterprise Gamification aims for behavior modification in business processes using gaming dynamics and mechanisms. The Kaizen model is based on the assumption that people resist extreme changes.
Instead, gradual changes usually are much more effective.

So how will we combine those two approaches together?

PDCA model enables the implementation of small changes in the process.

For example, one of our clients wanted to improve its sales process, after some analysis they reached a conclusion that instead of office work, more field work would improve the performances of their sales workforce. So the KPIs were set to more meetings with the potential customers and lead generation. This small change was implemented using Gamification.

Aaah, the good, old times … never were. And "ye good olde" Gamification Summit? Never existed! I can say that, because I have attended all four of them. With the first one in January 2011 and the most recent one just last week in San Francisco. From 300 attendees with 12 agenda items to 77(!) talks, panels, workshops vying for the attention of 600+ attendees, the GSummit has come a long way.

In the first year, Gabe Zichermann, "grey-eminence" and gamification guru #1 had to beg people to fill the slots and a full day of conference, with a then still mind-bending roster of speakers (including Jane McGonigal for the keynote) and topics. For me at least, it was the revelation that I had come to the right place and met the very people that I could talk to without feeling odd or out-of-place. What a relief to speak to people who could relate to the challenges that I faced at work. The only thing that I missed back then were the enterprise gamification speakers – of which there was not really anyone that Gabe could ask. This discipline and the speakers who could cover that topic were non-exist.