Don’t panic – it’s just a video game. Welcome to Neuro-Ludus, a game designed by Montreal researchers to test the effectiveness of gamification in IT training. Its dramatic opening scene is meant to draw players into the game, where they solve various puzzles to win points and advance through 30 levels.
Clearly, this is not traditional tech skills training. And that’s exactly the point.
“This game is very engaging. We wanted it to be accessible for a wide range of people,” says Dr. France Boutin, a professor at the Université du Québec a Montréal (UQAM).
France Boutin, UQUAM
Boutin developed the Neuro-Ludus game with a team that includes Dr. Chris Chinien, president of Compétences/Skills R&D Inc. They cite research suggesting video gamers fare better than non-gamers at multitasking, short-term memory, spatial cognition and information processing – all essential to learning new IT skills. The same research also shows video games help people ‘learn how to learn.’ It’s a transferable cognitive skill that many schools and IT courses ignore, says Chinien.
“They don’t teach people to learn how to learn. They teach subjects,” he says.
The Neuro-Ludus project is underpinned by new research on neuroplasticity as well.
“People thought our brain was fixed or hard-wired, that you’re born and you die with the same kind of cognitive skills and they can’t be changed. Now with recent neuroscience research, we discovered the brain is soft-wired. With training and experience you can alter the way the brain is wired,” says Chinien.
Can video games effectively teach IT skills? Can gamified training rewire the brains of non-techies to help them acquire IT skills faster? Boutin and Chinien’s team built the Neuro-Ludus game to find out.
They’ve put out a worldwide call for volunteers aged 18 and older to test Neuro-Ludus. (Ludus is Latin for ‘game’ or ‘learning’.) The game will be available for test play in French and English for computers, tablets and smartphones from May until December.
Gamified IT training has already been put into play at Launchfire Interactive Inc. The Ottawa firm gamifies consumer promotions and corporate training for clients such as Telus, Costco and Sobeys.
“Probably the coolest (IT training game) we did was for Dell, Intel and Microsoft. All three of them were collaborating to train Dell staff on the value proposition of Dell computers in combination with Intel chips and Microsoft server-side software,” says John Findlay, Launchfire’s chief technology officer.
Each Dell employee was given a virtual budget to build their own data centre by choosing server, chip and software components. If their data centre stayed on budget and successfully completed various tasks (like handling email traffic or shooting down viruses), players earned ‘money’ to upgrade their data centre and move to the next round. (They had a chance to win real prizes as well.)
“The people it was targeted at were both IT folks and salespeople because Dell wanted them to understand some of the complexities and value propositions of these products,” says Findlay. “And the average person played for almost an hour. So in terms of engagement it was one of the more successful (training programs) that Dell had done.”
“The whole process of learning by game is just considerably more fun,” Findlay adds. “And I think it speaks to a realization that people are gradually coming to, that there are better ways to teach people.”
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I imagine for many firms, the success metrics for gamification come down to: “Did this change behaviour (better than any other way)?” Although that may do the job in principle, it also means that it could be harder to figure out why some gamification projects fail to deliver. What we need are better metrics, and a few days ago I stumbled across a pretty good attempt to define some.
Cognizant, a technology consulting firm based in Teaneck, N.J., published a research paper by Rohan Mahadar, who manages its social business unit, called ‘Optimizing Gamification Design.’ I’ve embedded it in its entirety below, but skip ahead to page four, when it talks about “activity value ratings.”
As you can see, Mahadar is suggesting a breakdown within each gamification activity — perhaps starting a game, reaching a certain level, changing the way they do something — and looking at it from several different angles. These include how important it is to the organization (business criticality), the time it took, the difficulty and costs (either those to the user or what the organization might have saved).
Of course, in some organizations these might be phrased a little differently, and would certainly be weighted differently. The Cognizant paper walks through an example within the financial services sector, but in health-care, for example, time to perform a task and difficulty to the user might be a higher priority than costs (because it could contribute greatly to the cost of care). In other sectors, like retail, cost savings might reign supreme if gamification allows a a company to spend less on other forms of marketing, staff training or boosts the use of an online channel.
Although I’ve seen many researchers discuss these factors to one degree or another, Mahadar’s use of activity value ratings strikes me as an effective way to standardize such measurements in a way many business decision-makers could readily understand. If they are articulated correctly, activity value ratings might mean the difference between a gamification project that gets funded or not. Best of all, activity value ratings might also mean that if a gamfication project isn’t immediately successful, it might be possible to hone on one of the ratings (difficulty to the user, for instance) and adjust something rather than abandon a project entirely. That’s what we really need: a way to ensure gamification is seen as something you work on and develop, not just a win-or-lose proposition.
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The turnout was better than I expected. At least three dozen families must have shown up in the ballroom of the Americana Hotel in Niagara Falls that night to watch Charlie Tuna, who performs there every week. His repertoire included all the classics: juggling, card-guessing, multiplying handkerchiefs and, most dramatically, levitation. It wasn’t until about half-way through, however, that I realized that all of us in the audience were not merely watching. We were playing a game — the kind of game that could be instructive to researchers and businesses working with gamification.
Though Tuna’s onstage patter and instructions were obviously the key element, everyone in the room was contributing something vital to his magic act. First there was the suspension of disbelief. He forced us to pretend, for example, that a ball he threw in the air was “invisible,” and asked one of the other dads to catch it. People laughed and played along in ways that sometimes seem challenging in gamification, where employees struggle to believe their organizations are trying to engage, rather than manipulate them. Tuna reinforced this notion by reminding us that the key to magic was imagination, cutting off any hecklers before they could begin.
Whereas many gamification initiatives also seem based on point systems or other forms of achievement, Tuna’s magic act reminded me that playing a game can be driven by something more nuanced, like wondering how things work. I’m pretty sure all the kids (and most of the adults) were silently playing each trick backwards to figure out how he got a Loonie to mysteriously pass through the bottom of that bottle, or how he made that little kid seemingly float in the air after removing the board and a chair that was supporting his body. You don’t need to “score” in a situation like this to feel intellectually stimulated and relaxed at the same time.
Finally, just as some experiments in gamification seem to hand users an app or a Web site and ask them to get busy, Tuna’s magic act reinforced the need for effective leadership throughout the process. He made sure things were interactive and got volunteers to take part, but at every stage he was showing, joking and encouraging. No wonder he got so much applause.
Perhaps some elements of a magic act wouldn’t transfer to a gamification project, but Tuna made one other comment that stayed with me. Magic, he told us, was about making people pay attention to one thing while something else was going on behind the scenes. That could be a way to measure success in gamification: If what they’re playing is genuinely enjoyable, users won’t be so quick to try and look at what may be up their employers’ sleeves.
photo credit: kennymatic via photopin cc
]]>After a three-year winless streak at the Strategy Magazine awards, the marketing and communications agency picked up silver in the 2013 media agency of the year category. PHD was also the only Canadian firm to win gold at the 2013 Internationalist Awards for Innovative Digital Solutions in New York. Topping it off, industry bible Adweek named PHD Worldwide its 2013 agency of the year. (Based in Toronto and Montreal, PHD Canada is a division of UK-based PHD Worldwide.)
The kudos come less than 18 months after PHD’s parent company, Omnicom Media Group, got gamified. After a two-year development process (documented in the new book Game Change), Omnicom launched Source. It’s an internal platform used by all Omnicom media planners – including those at PHD Canada – to create media strategy and content for clients. Source is unique from other media planning platforms because it’s gamified, according to company executives.
“It’s kind of like a planning platform on steroids,” PHD Canada’s CEO Fred Forster told us in an interview at the recent DX3 conference in Toronto. “All we’ve done is taken that platform and upped the game, so to speak, by gamifying it.”
As PHD Canada’s senior VP Rob Young explained in a DX3 presentation, all 2,500 employees throughout Omincom’s 76 divisions worldwide are rewarded with points for every new idea they post on Source.
“If you create an in-depth (media) plan very well, you move up the game ladder. And if you contribute to the work others are doing on their plans, you move up the game ladder,” said Young, who is also PHD Canada’s director of insights and analytics.
Point totals and rankings for each office and employee are posted on a global company-wide leader board. Since staff can post ideas for any Omnicom campaign worldwide, it’s an opportunity for cross-border collaboration – and friendly competition – that didn’t exist before.
“There’s the ability to compete on a country by country level, almost like the Olympics,” said Young. (PHD’s Canadian contingent ended 2013 in a respectable third place overall.)
Although staff can’t score extrinsic rewards like cash or Caribbean trips, there “are intrinsic rewards,” said Young. “(It’s) the fact that people are receiving recognition from around the world from their peers and their employers.”
Are there any tangible metrics that demonstrate the ROI impact of Source at Omnicom, like revenue, contract wins or client and sta retention? Forster says it’s still too early to drill for hard evidence of Source’s impact less than 18 months after the platform’s launch.
But top Omnicom executives did credit Source with helping PHD Worldwide land a mega-contract at Unilever in late 2012. Plus, the raft of awards mentioned at the start of this story also flowed PHD’s way after Source was launched. (No word yet on whether Source played a role in Omnicom’s rumoured new $40-$100 million deal with Instagram.)
One thing’s for sure: Canadians have ‘got game’ in Omnicom’s global gamification effort. For 2013, the individual points winner among all 2,500 employees worldwide was Tammy Gardner, group account director at the Toronto office of PHD Canada’s Touche division.
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In the post, Kevin Hartnett discusses a recent research paper from a pair of Wharton School professors that more or less debunked the value of gamification in corporate settings. In an experiment at a tech startup, a basketball-themed game seemed to have a middling effect on sales performance and was detrimental for those who weren’t up for playing.
“There’s . . . something especially depressing about being told by your higher-ups to regard something as fun when obviously fun isn’t the point, for anyone involved,” Hartnett wrote. “If we’ve got to trudge through the sludge, we might as well be real about it.”
When I dug a little deeper, however, I discovered there was more to this research than the Boston Globe was letting on. Harnett’s post was not based on the Wharton research paper itself but a much more balanced article on the Knowledge@Wharton website which interviewed the paper’s authors, among several other sources. The professors say that even if their gamification experiment didn’t yield universally good results, they described it as a “first pass” at measuring the impact in the workplace. They also say what most Canadian researchers have also learned: “If you give people choices, and they get the choices they want, that helps increase buy-in,” one of them notes, and that buy-in, of course, is key to making gamification less an act of parental desperation than a tool for real engagement.
The research paper, by the way, is not really that new, having been published last June. Rather than merely go with what was mentioned in the Wharton article, I downloaded and read it through. ‘Mandatory Fun: Gamification and the Impact of Games at Work’ is really good, and contains as many valuable insights about how to pursue gamification successfully as it acknowledges the potential pitfalls. It’s really a study about the need for consent, and thoughtful ways to achieve that consent. Here’s the part that stood out to me:
“We found that the most powerful predictor of consent came from employees who were immersed in non-work worlds where gameplay was common. Those employees who regularly played the type of games used in gamification were much more likely to consent to the use of games in the workplace.”
And later:
“Fun essentially is in the eye of the beholder, and requires either selecting individuals who have a uniform view of what is ‘fun’ (likely a difficult task) or else working hard to implement the initiative in a way that engenders greater consent. One way to do this could be for managers to be very clear about the rules of the game. Another way might be to solicit ideas from employees about what games might be fun and to be clear that the game structure emerged organically from the ideas of co-workers.”
Beyond the reminder that gamification can’t be generic and is not an off-the-shelf solution, the point of all this is that superficial coverage does a disservice to the discussion. Anyone who reads and shares that Boston Globe post may believe they have evidence for the naysayers. A deep read suggests otherwise. In a media culture that increasingly relies on curation, aggregation and traffic-baiting headlines, researchers and business people need to realize that when they hear generalized conclusions about gamification, they may be getting played.
photo credit: Eldkvast via photopin cc
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The former chief data scientist of URL shortening service Bit.ly and data scientist in residence at Accel Partners is the keynote speaker at this Friday’s CODE 2014 Inspiration Day at the University of Waterloo’s campus in Stratford, Ont. CODE, or the Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE) event, is a three-day hackathon for students, entrepreneurs and innovators. Mason will be discussing the visualization of big data, or unstructured information that is presenting new opportunities for companies and researchers to find valuable insights. Open data, meanwhile, refers to the release of digitized public sector information that could redefine the user experience of citizens.
In an interview with the University published Tuesday, Mason offered her take on how to achieve success with big data:
Mason says the startup community needs people who can solve problems and create and work without a step-by-step plan. “You also need the ability to play – to know how to go from the data you have to an interesting question that is relevant,” says Mason . . . “when we start to play with it and think about it we can learn about things we never would have had the opportunity to learn. There are applications in both business and science.”
Get more information on the CODE Inspiration Day program on Feb. 28 and watch the clip below to learn more about Mason’s approach to data science.
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That’s the basic premise of a PowerPoint presentation created by a social media team at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) that recently surfaced on the PostMedia News network. After being roundly criticized for shutting down Service Canada youth centers last year, ESDC is apparently considering new ways to get more people under 25 making use of its vast job-related data. If they go ahead with the idea that’s outlined here, it could become a case study for gamification researchers across the country.
This story was highlighted in our weekly CommerceLab Review a few weeks ago, but I’ve now had a chance to look the whole thing over more carefully myself (there’s a link in the PostMedia story to download the presentation). In just 20 slides, the ESDC deck explains how the agency has so much information at its disposal — including details on student loans, training, and labour market stats — that young people could apply to shaping the career of their dreams. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to enter search terms on Google than it is to browse through Government of Canada Web pages. That’s why the notion of a gamification project may make sense for this demographic.
“A serious game would allow youth to try careers, fail and succeed, to get as real a sense as possible of what their lives would be like for a chosen career,” the notes on one of the slides says. “For example, youth could try out life as a doctor with life-like simulation, and using real-world data on admissions, tuition, rent, part-time jobs, and available jobs upon graduation etc…but with NO negative impact on real life.”
Besides including a lot of details about how young people tend to play games already and several prominent examples of where gamification has worked elsewhere, the ESDC deck points out that the government took a similar tactic many years ago, creating a “Real Games Series” of board games. It’s one of the few times I’ve seen anyone frame gamification as less of a gimmick than a best practice that can be improved upon with current digital and mobile technologies.
There’s also a pragmatic tone to the overall presentation, with the suggestion of a one-year pilot and multiple alternatives for approaching the design. Some slides focus on how gamification can accomplish many things, from teaching to changing behaviour. The potential described here is obvious and compelling.
Even if this proposed initiative never leads a single young person to a new job (which is doubtful), and even if ESDC doesn’t end up pursuing it, this is the kind of pitch that more researchers should be making. If you want to commercialize you’re doing with gamification, you have to show how you can get the job done.
]]>Nolan is autistic. A high school dropout, he didn’t learn to read properly until his late teens or write properly until his twenties. Following what he calls “a string of dead end jobs,” Nolan returned to high school after finding an inclusive learning environment – one that encouraged him to discover his own unique interests and strengths.
Jason Nolan,
Ryerson EDGE Lab
Nolan became a man of letters: B.A., B. Ed., M.A. and Ph. D. He got his first full-time job at 43. He was diagnosed as autistic at 45. Today he researches play, privacy, gaming, virtual worlds, informal learning environments and adaptive design for children with disabilities.
The Project: Nolan co-authored the 2013 research paper ‘Beyond gamification: reconceptualizing game-based learning in early childhood learning environments.’ It challenges the idea that digital game-based learning (DGBL) will revolutionize education in schools. In fact, DGBL may become just another way of standardizing the data-driven, top-down education models that “continue to transform learning and play into joyless performance and productivity outcomes,” he writes.
“The important aspects of learning that occur when children and adults play are exactly what gets filtered out through gamification,” Nolan says. “That leaves only the ‘game layer’, surface-level game features such as badges, achievements or rewards and other ‘incentives’ for consumer loyalty.”
The Progress: Now that he’s finished and released the aforementioned research paper, Nolan is focused on completing a study he began in 2010 on informal learning.
“My research suggests that the value of games and play – for both children and adults – isn’t found in the rhetorics of competition, winning and achievement. It’s actually found in the very elements that gamification leaves behind: the choice of how and when we play, the privacy and autonomy to not be observed and judged while playing, and opportunities to explore experiences that are of intrinsic interest to us,” Nolan says.
The Prospects: “Our work would be of greatest use to the commercial and educational sectors that are interested in moving beyond gamification,” Nolan says. “This next level involves creating environments and contexts where all the elements of informal learning can be accommodated in formal learning environments. Those elements include a choice of what we play, who we play with, how we play, and particularly the contexts in which we play.”
The Passion: As someone who discovered his own particular learning style later in life, Nolan pushes back against educational models that herd all students into the same enclosed box.
“I’m motivated by a desire to help people understand there are ways to successfully bring game-based learning and experiences to students and the public in general,” says Nolan, “ways that don’t seek a one-size-fits-all ‘solution’ to the problem of engaging students, clients and customers.”
After finally finding his own way of learning, Nolan has also found a way to teach others about inclusive education in his own unique voice. As he declared in one self-penned online biography, “I am very happy with who I am and would never want to be anyone else.”
photo credit: One Laptop per Child via photopin cc
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Wright is the co-founder of Empatico, a startup based in Stratford, Ont. He is also a graduate of the Master of Digital Experience Innovation program at the University of Waterloo, where he attended the Gamification 2013 coference late last year.
For Wright, gamification can be a revealing tool for discovering the nuances of human relationships. That may be why Empatico, which was among the first firms to be taken through the Stratford Accelerator Centre, will be applying what he’s learned about game design to creating human resources (HR) software based on behavioural econometrics.
In this clip, Wright makes the point that while gamification can be fun, what matters most is what you do with the connections that playing with others can make.
The Project: Spongelab Interactive provides game-based learning tools and consulting – both open-source and commercial – for public and private sector clients. Since 2007 it’s delivered over two million pieces of educational content to users in over 160 countries. In Spongelab’s Transcription Hero game, you get to rock out while racing to transcribe DNA sequences on a Guitar Hero console. “Games are engaging and exciting. From our side, games are the most sophisticated learning tools we’ve ever advanced to,” says Friedberg.
Behind all the fun and games is some serious scientific research, he adds: “All the design of it has been research driven. Research is in everything we do and approach.” Friedberg is particularly interested in researching how games can be used to tailor learning experiences for each unique person. “It’s to understand how you, as an individual, learn. It’s stripping off content and process and looking at who you are as a user and thinking of you as a person. You’re an intelligent, emotional person driven by all sorts of things. Those other one-size-fits-all approaches usually fail completely – not just in education but in all areas.”
The Progress: “We have lots of (research) projects on the go,” says Friedberg. “We have a game-based learning project in collaboration with Centennial College funded partially through NSERC (National Science and Engineering Research Council). That project’s geared to the general public, to make tangible, personal connections to your learning.”
Friedberg has also submitted new research proposals to York University and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). It’s an ongoing process of uncovering how game-based technology helps us learn, he says. “We have research applications in process. We publish (findings) but the research never ends.”
The Prospects: Friedberg’s own personal website states that he currently has two patents pending but provides no other details. Though we poked around for ways his research might take a specific commercial spin somewhere down the road, he’s staying mum for now. “Any sort of commercialized venture you’re in, you can’t talk about publicly until it’s released,” he says.
The Passion: “I’ve always liked research as a whole,” says Friedberg. “It’s being able to discover some very complex things that are very tangible to people around you and very personal to yourself.”
For Friedberg, part of that personal discovery process was deeply painful. He floundered throughout school until finally discovering in third-year university that he learns best through visual and spatial means, not printed words.
“I grew up and struggled with that,” he says. “If my work can help other kids not feel like they’re dumb simply because they’re not getting an ‘A’ on a multiple choice test, that’s worth it.”
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