1. GAMIFICATION
Leveraging Towards Differentiated
Creative Engagement
Should Executives Invest?
Ralph Dobbertin August 2012

2. WHAT IS GAMIFICATION?
 The application of game thinking and mechanics to business process and
goals .
Or more broadly
 The leveraging of creativity and the gaming disposition to drive delight
into commercial products.
 A catalyst for differentiated creativity
 What would enterprise applications or cars look like if Steve Jobs were
heading those types of companies.

3. THE FACTS ARE:
 Consumers spent $24.75 billion on video games, hardware and
accessories in 2011.
 The average game player is 30 years old and has been playing games
for 12 years.
 The average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 35 years old.
 Forty-seven percent (47%) of all game players are women.
 Currently gamers play well over 3 billion hours a week playing online
games.
 There are currently over 500 million gamers worldwide who play at least
an hour a day on line…the vast majority in North America, Europe, China
and Japan.
ESA, E. S. (2012). Industry Fact

4. PREMISE
 Gaming culture is coming to the enterprise
 Employees and Consumers are affected by gaming culture
 Gaming culture is:
 constant change
 seeking environments with engaging creative fun
 reward expectant employees and consumers
 Epic
 Joy
 Organizations will need to adapt in order to attract the new consumer and
employee

5. PREMISE CONTINUED…
To operational excellence, customer centricity, and product innovation, let
us add an umbrella of creativity to all three. Creativity will re-surface as a
primary supplemental direct competitive advantage to recruit as well as to
compete. Harnessing and releasing that creativity will require tools,
environment and process honed in new directions. Gamification is a catalyst
for generating this creativity and realizing wins in a quickly changing
economy.

6. GAMIFICATION
"In the tortured posture of a creature that has raised itself erect for
the first time I stood leaning against the glass." (Sebald, 1998)

7. GAMIFICATION
 Gamification is not gaming in its traditional sense but it derives from
gaming.
 It is a deliberate attempt to exploit the benefits of gaming but within a
work environment to generate improved results through engagement.
 Be careful with the exploit part, as it may be a very fine balancing act.
The shift is a little more profound than that.
 Gaming while essentially a hopeful movement, often has a base of
discontent underlying it that will likely be quick to backlash: more on that
“exodus” later.

8. “HOMO EVOLUTIS”
 Juan Enriquez "Will our kids be a different species"
 The brain is evolving in a hyper-reactive and or hyper-plastic way
 Hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory
 Brain plasticity in action or an evolution in real time.

9. “HOMO EVOLUTIS”
 Online games have trained gamers, of which there are many, towards a
changed expectation set and these expectations are carried into
everyday life as well as the work environment.
You are rewarded constantly You join in with like-minded friends
You socialize You are given status
You are recognized as an achiever You feel extremely good about
yourself
Fun is a new power metric

10. ALAS THE BABY BOOMERS DID IT
AGAIN
“His works on synthetic worlds and their economies, and on EverQuest in
particular, have attracted considerable attention. His paper on Norrath, a
fictional planet in the EverQuest universe, Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand
Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier (2001) is available
on SSRN. It claims, for example, that Norrath has a GNP per capita
somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria, higher than that of China
and India, and that a unit of EverQuest currency is worth more than the Yen
or Lira.”
From the Wikipedia page of Edward Castronova, Professor Economics, Indiana University Bloomington.

11. EXODUS
 Gaming culture can be seen as an exodus from the real world
 The real world has let us down
 The virtual world is better
 Existential crisis in society
 Gaming is like Retail Consulting
 Make me feel
 Good
 Special
 Unique
 Genocide, the ruination of continental economies, and the almost absolute
disrespect for media, leadership, authority and government with their own versions
of “Newspeak”.
 Gaming culture is a harbinger of an expectation for a new fun and tasteful aesthetic

12. BULLSHIT! IAN BOGOST
 Facebook IPO seems suboptimal
 Zynga’s (Farmville) latest quarter was suboptimal
 Marketing bullshit
 Mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features
like interactions with behavioral complexity
 Changing the very operation of most businesses
 That mediocrity's lips are seductive
 Consider that games can offer something different

13. DISPOSITION
 The key is that gamification efforts must be guided by an “all carrot no
stick”, purposeful and achieving disposition.
 The second key, interchangeable with the order of the first, is creativity
that drives a joy of use.

14. GAMIFY THE ENTERPRISE
“If I look at how my kids are consuming software, if it's not desirable
immediately, they throw it away. Can you imagine what happens to your IT
landscape when these people come into business? I don't know how you
want to keep your IT strategy going so we'd better make our software
delightful as well.”
"They have one rule - if they don't see visible joy in seven minutes the game
will be a flop, so I told that to our developers: visible joy in seven minutes.
We're still working on that. That obviously does matter a lot and we are
doing a lot [around that]".
Co SAP CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe

15. FUN, MOTIVATION & CREATIVITY
 In competitive environments where differentiation fades over time and
where consumers have a choice, at least one way to evolve and compete
is through creative gamification.
 Nurturing Creativity
 Ken Robinson
 Math, science and language
 Humanities, philosophies, etc.
 Arts

16. FUN, MOTIVATION & CREATIVITY
 Given the rapid rate of change in our world we can't readily predict what
next year will look like let alone the next ten.
 Creativity must play a more important role to differentiate along with the
usual educational/business categories, in order for us as a species to
respond to rapid unknown change.
 Creativity is generally introverted, shy, and extremely vulnerable.
 It is not well suited to the average corporate head quarters.
 It is the opposite of what many hire for, i.e. tall, loud and strong.

17. FUN, MOTIVATION & CREATIVITY
 "Vulnerability is the birth place of innovation, creativity and
change”.
Dr. Brene Brown
 New ideas are often bad, often look and feel terrible under
development…until they don’t.
 New ideas crave other new ideas and combine with them to create ideas
that stick.
 New ideas are easy targets,
 New ideas can disappear quickly.
 Think of the HR, and (innovation) process implications.
 New ideas (creativity) need an environment.

18. FUN, MOTIVATION & CREATIVITY
 If you want your teams to create new environments with "visible joy" then
you need to foster a creative culture supportive of innovation and change,
one supportive of vulnerability. If your people are not prepared to be
wrong, and protected when they are, then they will likely not come up
with anything original.

19. CONCLUSION
 Gamification is about evolving from developing for games to developing for
business in order to be more competitive and sustainable.
 “Creative joy” derives from many important sources, i.e. “Autonomy, Mastery,
Purpose Dan
Pink
 Put another way: “Urgent optimism, Social Fabric, Blissful Productivity or Epic
Meaning” Jane
Mcgonigal
 Fun or joy in use.
 Imagine your applications as not simply functional but as fun to use.
 What might an enterprise application look like if Steve Jobs designed it?
 What might a cereal?

20. CONCLUSION
Innovation in a rapidly changing and a more and more undifferentiated
world requires creativity, which requires vulnerability, which requires
innovation process change, which requires different HR considerations.
Awkward, cynical attempts to exploit will be punished quickly in social
media. The requirement to adapt to the new worker and consumer is real.
I would consider working with the gaming development community for
advice on corporate gamification as well as the “Design” community. Their
dispositions are different and if managed properly, with a “bridge” from
functional to creative, complementary to the usual IT consultant community.

21. CONCLUSION
 Gamification is a leveraging process to shift the way we think about IT
delivery, business delivery, and social delivery,
 We have something to learn from the gaming community. They are a
harbinger of a demand for a new fun and tasteful aesthetic in the day to
day.
 Today it is becoming more important to bring creative to any user
experience and if one wants to attract the best creative minds then we as
leaders must foster an environment that they delight in and this
environment must draw out and reward vulnerability since vulnerability is
the “birthplace of creativity, innovation and change”.

22. CONCLUSION
 The “gamified” person will be a driver for “SAP rewrites”.
 Gamers are a driver and gamification is a disposition towards realizing
change.
 Gamification is a catalyst for differentiated creativity

23. CONTACT
 @Rad3Rad4
 http://gamification.ralphdobbertin.com
 Enjoy and I hope to hear back from you. 