You might notice some extra stuff on mygamification.com that you haven’t seen before. That’s because mygamification.com is now using BigDoor’s Lite program to reward you for your actions on our blog. One of the biggest criticisms you’ll see about gamification focuses on how many gamification platforms do not incorporate game mechanics onto their own sites. We’ve always found this fascinating that other platforms haven’t made their programs more widely available. Our simple, lightweight implementation, the BigDoor MiniBar was available on our site.

Today we’re proud to feature the next iteration of our product, BigDoor Lite. This is one of three of our offerings that we’ll be announcing more very soon.

This program is a free, pre-designed plugin designed as a simple tool to improve loyalty, engage users and power rewards for publishers who want to see what gamification is all about. If you want more information about the program, or want to sign up, you can on www.bigdoor.com.

Earn coins for doing the things you already do:

- Checking in to our site

- Watching videos

- Liking blog posts

- Sharing links with friends via Facebook and Twitter

- Exploring MyGamification.com through Quests

You can also earn coins when your friends join the BigDoor Rewards Program from the links you share.

It’s that easy!

We’d love to hear your feedback, so feel free to leave us a comment below!

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Improvements, Loyalty

Happy Monday! Here is the weekly recap of gamification news.

Best bits: Gamification for charities Guardian 3/23/2012 If you work for a charity or non-profit, experts weigh in on how gamification can help raise money, awareness and reach goals for charities. Charlotte Beckett of The Good Agency says of gamification, “[it’s] a way of thinking. Think about how you can reward people for the behavior you want from them.” Even if you don’t work for a charity, the advice here is applicable to most gamification implementations.

Ford launches gamification campaign Direct Marketing News 3/23/2012 Ford Motor Co. has launched a new campaign to promote their new show “Escape Routes” premiering Marc h 31^st. The campaign is designed to engage show watchers online. Users will support a specific team and are given the opportunity to earn prizes as the show progresses. The show will be interactive, with cast-members each having social networks to communicate directly with fans.

Gamification gets a test with Walmart and Angry Birds deal Mobile Payments Today 3/23/2012 It seems we can expect to see more of Rovio’s Angry Birds merchandise in Walmart soon. The two companies have announced a partnership to sell Angry Birds merchandise that will give buyers an opportunity to unlock secret levels within the game. Apparel, food, mobile phones and toys will be stuffed with “golden eggsteroids” and clues to bonus content.

Boehringer Ingelheim brings gamification to clinical research PMLive  3/20/2012 Kaggle, an online community of almost 31,000 data scientists has created a competition for German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim called “Predicting a Biological Response Competition”. The competition seeks to harness the brain power of the Kaggle community and incentivize users to help solve scientific problems. The competition offers a $20,000 dollar prize and appears to be attracting quite a few entries since its launch last week.

How to Design Behavior Forbes 3/20/2012 Nir Eyal put together a comprehensive look at what alters and motivates behavior. If you are interested in gamification and their role in how behavior is shaped, this is a must read. Eyal outlines different techniques and how they can be effective of each type of behavior change.

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gamification Tips

The wildly successful novel Hunger Games will premiere its adapted film version tonight at midnight. While the novel is written for young adults it has gained quite the cult following amongst all ages resulting in a Harry Potter-like following. We are fans of the books and thought we’d highlight a few things that we can learn about gamification, from the fictional world of Panem and the characters that exist within it.

The book  follows protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, a 16 year old girl living in District 12 of Panem. After a brutal revolution against the Capitol of Panem the districts are forced each year to provide one boy and one girl to compete in the televised “Hunger Games” as a reminder of their complete obedience to the Capitol. The Capitol-organized games take place in various terrains and force the teens to fight to the death, until only one remains and is crowned winner.

So what does any of this have to do with gamification?

Cooperation over Competition

In his SXSW talk, Bing Gordon brought up the idea that gamification should be more than just competition. Using WoW, he pointed out that in groups, users were 20% more productive. In an arena fight to the death, the idea that cooperation can be successful over competition seems silly, but as Hunger Games demonstrates, an interesting dynamic emerges among the players. These are not skilled players, but randomly selected teenagers, some of whom have no real applicable skills. Players, who believed they had no chance alone, became more effective and ultimately survived longer in cooperative teams. The element of competition still exists, it always must on some level, but the cooperation prolongs, intensifies and maximizes the engagement, especially when some users lack specific skills that may be useful to complete certain tasks. While gamification should rely on some elements of competition, it’s also important to remember that social aspects drive users more readily than any other metric. Gamification should encourage collaboration amongst users.

Rewarding Actions

If users are going to spend their time on your site, they are much more willing to do so if they receive some kind of reward. However, rewards that are too easy to receive mean nothing and rewards that are too difficult are demotivating. In the Hunger Games arena, players have sponsors that send gifts to their player (often food or medicine). The sponsors often ‘reward’ their players with these gifts when the players complete an action that the sponsor finds desirable or entertaining. In the first book, Katniss receives much needed medicine when she makes her first kill. While she quickly realizes what she is being rewarded for, she also realizes that repeating the same action she won’t earn the same gift over and over. Instead, she must escalate her entertainment value in order to receive future and possibly better rewards. Players who don’t know exactly when or what they will be rewarded for, are more likely to spend more time exploring  actions and participating in more challenging campaigns.

Loyalty

Gamification is all about creating loyalty to your brand or website by engaging and rewarding users. By harnessing the power of each user’s social network, brands can multiply their user base quickly. In The Hunger Games, the intense loyalty of each district towards their player is a great representation (albeit extreme) of the loyalty a social media network feels towards its members. When one member participates in something, the entire network behind them becomes on some level, engaged. The Hunger Games forces Districts’ engagement and support because of the brutal circumstances of the games, but encouraging users to engage their own network through incentives and collaboration can be a great way to increase users on your site.

Gamification is definitely not anything close to the brutal Hunger Games arena, but as with any game mechanics, we can look at the success of certain elements and apply them towards gamification solutions. Cooperation, sporadic increasingly challenging rewards and asking users to engage their social networks are all important elements to think about when implementing gamification.

We cannot wait for this movie to come out tonight! If you are curious and haven’t seen the trailer yet, you can watch it here.

May the odds be ever in your favor!

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gamification Tips

Happy Monday and belated St. Patty’s Day! If you are still recovering from a very lucky weekend and fell behind on your news, you can catch up on some gamification highlights below.

You’re hired, now let’s kill Onyxia The Verge 3/12/2012 We mentioned Bing Gordon’s talk on gamification at SXSW last week, but this article focuses in depth on his talk and his theory about gamification as cooperation over competition. Using MMO games, including WoW, Gordon says, “that the most powerful part of gaming isn’t the competition, it’s cooperation. So you develop a structure where cooperation is rewarding. In MMO parties, it turns out with a party of five, even if it’s strangers in what’s called a ‘pick-up group,’ what you come to expect is that each individual is around 20 percent more productive, using overlapping skills.”

McCain’s looks to gamification with ‘Lucky Spuds’ competition The Drum  3/16/2012 McCain’s Foods known for producing nearly 1/3 of the French fried potatoes in the world, is launching a gamification campaign March 19^th in the UK. The campaign will use online game concepts, social media and on-pack promotions to engage potato fans to win a potential grand prize of £ 100,000 as well as daily prizes of £1,000.

Concur’s Steve Singh, DocuSign, Founder’s Co-op Among WTIA Winners Xconomy 3/16/2012 We posted about this last week, but had to include it again. We are very thankful and excited to have won the WTIA’s IAA “Best Early Stage Company” 2012. Other winners included DocuSign, Founder’s Co-op, Zipline Games and Concur CEO Steve Singh. We are really excited that the work we are doing with gamification was recognized by such an influential organization in the tech community!

FanCake Gamify’s Sports Co-Viewing with iPhone App PC Mag 3/14/2012 FanCake is launching an app that will hopefully change the ways users watch sports. The app allows users to chat about games with others as well as compete against other fans during live games. Linking social aspects with game mechanics for TV viewers has been a trend lately, and it’s great to see it swing over to sports as well.

Posted in: BigDoor news, Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gaming, Loyalty

On Friday, March 9th a small team from BigDoor braved the crazy Austin weather (rain, cold, wind, flooding) to have fun with 290 of our closest friends courtesy of Bing Booster. The BigDoor Happy Hour party was held in the #binglot at 4th and Congress in the heart of all the action during SXSW. With the theme of Pacific Northwest meets Austin, TX. we invited many of our current BigDoor partners, some great influencers, a handful of startup enthusiasts and a few cool people we know to hang out with us, have a few drinks, warm up from the rain and enjoy some of Austin’s best food trucks, including treats from Coolhaus; specialty tacos from Coreanos and mmmpanadas, Yum!

Our event would not have been possible except for the generous support from Bing Booster. If you haven’t heard about it, Bing Booster is an incredible program that helps support the startup ecosystem by providing  access to people, places and, as was the case with BigDoor, events. They gave us a venue for our party, host bar and delicious food to make everyone happy. We can’t say enough great things about this program or the team that pulls it all in to place. Enjoy some of the photos from the event!

Posted in: Blog, Startups

Last night the Seattle Tech Community celebrated the WTIA Industry Achievement Awards. BigDoor took home the award for “Best Early Stage Company of the Year.” It was an honor to be nominated and even more exciting to win! We are so lucky to have such a great team that works tirelessly everyday, we couldn’t have won without all of them. More important than the awards is the work that the WTIA does for the tech industry in the state of Washington, they are truly a great asset to the tech community. Thanks again to everyone who was involved in the awards, as well as everyone who attended last night and made it a great event.

Winners included:

·      Best Seed Stage Company: Zipline Games
·      Consumer Product or Service of the Year: DocuSign
·      Commercial Product or Service of the Year: (tie) SEOMoz, Skytap
·      Technology Accelerator Award: Founder’s Co-Op
·      CEO of the Year: Steve Singh (Concur)

For a complete recap of the event and winners click here.

Posted in: Awards, Blog

We love having the opportunity to send our developers off to conferences to learn more, as well as come back with some new ideas. Last week, we sent developer Lee McFadden down to Santa Clara, CA for Pycon 2012. He was kind enough to give us an update on the conference for today’s blog post. 

“Last week I attended my very first PyCon, where BigDoor was a Silver sponsor.  The conference was the biggest PyCon ever, with an initial target of 1500 attendees and an actual attendance of over 2500 Python hackers from around the world. Lots of records were broken, and the introduction to the conference was very cool with some NAO robots kicking things off: http://pyvideo.org/video/624/introduction-and-welcome

I learned a hell of a lot and met some awesome people. Even better, Pycon made most of the talks available online, so even if you weren’t there, you can still experience many of the talks. You can see a database of all the available videos here but I have listed some of my favorites below:

• I really enjoyed Paul Graham’s keynote, it’s worth a watch for the entertainment aspect.
• I attended DevOps for Python: Doing more with less.  Aside from the fact that I was enjoying the Ruby bashing during the tutorial, this was very helpful for me to get my hands dirty with Chef and I learned how Fabric complements Chef extremely well.  In Noah’s words, “Fabric is the yang to Chef’s yin”.
• Throwing together distributed services with gevent was a great talk which gave example usages of the gservice framework for creating services.  It’s fun to see how people solve these scalability issues using technologies we’re using in house or have a decent familiarity with.
• In a similar vein, the “Build reliable, traceable, distributed systems with ZeroMQ” session was also fairly cool and highlights the power of ZeroMQ – unfortunately the examples were few and far between, but it gave good insight into the decision making process in putting together distributed services.
• Practicing Continuous Deployment confirmed to me that we’re on the right track with our efforts in this direction. Disqus have about the same number of engineers as us and they seem to hold very similar philosophies on testing and deployment in general.  There are things to be learned here for sure.
• This talk also highlighted Phabricator, which I could see BigDoor working with.  It’s self-hosted, free, integrates with Git, has (what seems to be) good issue/task tracking, great code reviews and allows developers to do almost anything which can be done from the web interface from the command line so there’s much less of a context switch when setting up reviews etc.
• Scalability at YouTube is one to watch. I met Mike wandering around later that day and we had a great talk about BigDoor, gamification and our product as a whole. He has some great insight about the decisions they made and things they might have done differently.
• Make sure your programs crash - Most of this is fairly obvious, but I still found this really interesting and worth the time to watch.

Some talks which I didn’t see, but are in my queue to watch as I think they’ll apply to us or are just interesting:

• Stop Mocking, Start Testing - Test, test, test. It’s what we do.
• Testing and Django - MOAR TESTS!
• Advanced Celery - Celery is a distributed task queue.
• Flexing SQLAlchemy’s Relational Power - While we don’t currently use SQLAlchemy much, we’ve talked about using it in the past.  I love SA and used it for a few years before coming to BigDoor, and I’m hoping this will make you love SA too .  SA is, without a doubt, the best-of-breed SQL toolkit available for Python (and potentially any language).
• Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes - Who doesn’t want to watch this talk!?
• Storm: the Hadoop of Realtime Stream Processing - This just looks plain cool.
• Web Server Bottlenecks And Performance Tuning - A talk by Graham Dumpleton, the guy behind the Python portion of New Relic’s app monitoring system.
• IPython: Python at your fingertips - I have never used the full power of ipython….  yet.

Of special note was TiP BoF (Testing in Python – Birds of a Feather).  The BoF sessions are run by anyone with a subject they think will be of interest to others, but TiP BoF has become infamous.  It’s generally tangentially related to testing, there is pizza and booze, and not being sober is almost a prerequisite for standing up and doing a talk.  Lots of laughter is involved and every so often you learn something too - I highly recommend it.

Finally, the event was a HUGE SUCCESS.  I had a blast and will be going again next year for sure. A big thanks to the organizers of Pycon, who were great to work with and put on a fantastic event, as well as all the attendees and speakers who had so much great information to share.”

Posted in: Blog, Conferences, Technology

Last week Geekwire, Seattle’s own independent technology news website celebrated their first birthday. In true Geekwire style they threw a great birthday party and networking event at the eekwire Summit. The theme for the event was “How to stay innovative in a world of technological change.” BigDoor’s own Director of Analytics, Sean Zhong, attended the event and gives us today’s blog post recap: 

“I found the conversations at the Geekwire Summit to be the most interesting.  Ray Ozzie kicked things off with a discussion about his fascination with the multitude of new technologies available today. Ozzie proposes that these new technologies lowered the barriers of entry and made it much easier for startups to compete against established companies.

In addition to Ozzie, there was a panel discussion about the future of mobile.  The panel included executives from T-mobile, Rhapsody, Swype, Z2live. There was also a panel about creating sustained innovation that included Ed Lazowska of UW, MS FUSE, Facebook, Venture (Hadi Partovi), Farecast. Facebook’s Engineering Director, Jocelyn Goldfein, talked more about their culture: the word “process” is dirty; how they maintain a startup culture in a large company with small and highly effective teams; 1 person was responsible for the development of Facebook voice chat; less specs and more iteration. Hadi predicted that in the next 10 to 15 years, medicare has the greatest potential for innovation.

Overall, I’d say the event was very well organized.  The informal format worked very well to give us a wide perspective on some hot topics.”

-Sean Zhong

Posted in: Blog, Conferences, Technology

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an article about Gamification, “With SXSW Buzzing About Gamification, Venture Investors Weigh In.” The article mentions that gamification was a big theme during SXSW and asked gamification-specific questions to six different investors. The same three questions, What is gamification; Is gamification a standalone industry; and is it (gamification) as big as social media, mobile apps or the cloud were posed to each investor. We found the answers fascinating and it’s no surprise that the answers were in some ways very similar (yes, it’s a trend that will be used by many different industries to no it’s an approach to solving a problem and it’s a tool). Read the entire article here.

Posted in: Blog, Gamification

When we talk about gamification, we inevitably also talk about motivation. The question of what motivates people is a huge question, one that can’t and likely won’t be answered in a blog post (though I’d love to say I could). But if we narrow down the question from one broad question on human psychology, to one focused on the internet  and ask “What motivates the average web user, to stay and interact in a useful manner on a popular website?” then BigDoor can provide some answers.

Before we can even look at what motivates users on websites, it seems like it is important to note that a website must have relevant, useful or interesting content. No matter how good gamification on a website might be, the website has to first provide value to users. If you’re coming to mygamification.com you want to read content that is relevant and interesting on the topics of gamification, social media, marketing, loyalty and engagement. We’d love to post about breaded cats but refrain since the content isn’t relevant (for the most part) to our blog!

A website that has relevant content can maximize the engagement of its users by motivating them in different ways. There are 4 key pillars to motivate a web user to become the kind of contributor and consumer that most websites desire. In short, users want to feel a sense of status amongst other users, an ability to access exclusive content and features, power within that online community, and the extrinsic reward we are all so familiar with; stuff.

Status

From an early age, we are taught the concept of status. Whether we like it or not, even those little gold stars on a chore-board at preschool were instilling the idea of status, or rank in relation to our peers. People like to compare themselves to others and establishing a way for users to compare themselves to other users on a site is a great way to motivate them to join, engage and interact. Whether you are competing against a worldwide network or co-opting your friends in pursuit of a common goal, quantifying status of users is a great way to encourage them to spend a little extra time and effort engaging. This is especially useful when that status leads users to other motivators such as access.

Access

While the idea of beating your friends on a leaderboard might be satisfying for a few moments, the idea of being the first of your friends to see the newest clips from your favorite show, is even better. Websites are beginning to see that there is real value in exclusive content and rewarding users with exclusive content if and when they reach a certain status or level. Not only will it encourage users with status to continue to engage, it will also encourage new users to join, engage, compete and cooperate with others for access.

Power

The concept of power as a motivator can be as simple as making users feel as though they matter. Campaigns driven by user actions are a great way to involve an online community and give them a sense of power. Recently, TeenNick did an awesome job of implementing the Halo Awards, which allowed users to engage with their website and earn points which could be used to buy donations to charities. Users were in control of how much was raised, providing incentive to share, co-op friends, and actively participate on the TeenNick website. Gamification doesn’t always have to be about competition, but also about harnessing the power of communities and social sharing.

Stuff

Who can honestly say that they don’t like free stuff? I do! The online world has become savvy to this and frequently trades Facebook Likes, Tweets and other actions for opportunities to get free stuff. While this tactic works, gamification can quantify a user’s path to ‘stuff’ significantly better than “Like this page for a chance to win X.” When a user knows what actions lead to rewards, it’s a lot harder to lose interest and become demotivated. How many of us would play a game with no idea what the objective, desired actions, or chance at success was?

For gamification to be successful, there are a lot of things that need to be considered including content, audience and desired goals. No matter what website, product or service is looking at gamification, understanding the way people are motivated online is crucial to the success of any program. The good news BigDoor’s done most of the leg-work for you and we’re able to create dynamic solutions for our partners!

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gamification Tips, Loyalty