Awards

being the first Middle East Gamification Guru in the top 5 Global Gurus presenting Gamification in 7 summits across the middle east in different countries and different fields creation of the first Gamification community in Egypt designing Gamification for multiple fortune companies “hp, oracle, dell” designing one of the best Gamified experiences for recruitment in the region “www.hirehunt.com”

Delivered talks, training and workshop at 18 events in 11 countries.

Conference hosts and workshop hosts keep asking me back because of feedback received from participants that I provided tangible information that they could implement for their organisation. Value add is the main reason for re-booking.

Continued to champion inclusive gamification design with spreading light on gender and age and the design implications these bring.

Published my 3 level learning gamification framework officially, which was built from practise in the field and not just theory.

At the same time the company continued to grow in revenue for the fourth year in a row, we delivered 10 projects some with awards won internally and shortlisted for the TIGA educational game awards.

This year also saw the publication of my 4th book, Tapping into the crowd, which is focused on creating competitive advantage from the inside out through gamification.

I kept up blogging 3 times per week every week for the 4th year in a row.
Delivered talks, training and workshops at 18 events in 11 countries. Often repeat booking based on participant feedback.

Published my 4th book: Tapping into the crowd – creating competitive advantage from the inside out

Continued to champion inclusive gamification design with spreading light on gender and age and the design implications these bring.

Published my 3 level learning gamification framework officially, which was built from practise in the field and not just theory.

Grew Gamification Nation turnover for the 4th year in a row.

Our projects have won internal company awards and one is shortlisted for the TIGA educational games awards.

I kept up blogging 3 times per week every week for the 4th year in a row.

Michiel designed and organized several gamification designs contributing to team performance, innovation, cooperation and improvement of work. For example:

> Mobile Escape Room as part of Executive Leadership Training program

> The Nature Game

> The Hunt

* Authored or co-authored seven research papers on topics related to gamification, such as personalization, user types, classification of gameful design elements, recommender systems, and learning systems (https://blog.gamefulbits.com/publications/).

* Organized the Positive Gaming Workshop on Gamification and Games for Wellbeing (http://positivegaming.hcigames.com/) at CHI PLAY 2017 (October/2017), co-organized the Workshop on Personalization in Serious and Persuasive Games and Gameful Interactions (http://personalizedgames2017.tech-experience.at/) at UMAP 2017 (July/2017), and co-presented the course Applying the Gameful Design Heuristics (http://gamefuldesign.hcigames.com/) at CHI 2017 (May/2017).

* Co-edited the Fall issue of XRDS (the ACM magazine for students), which was focused on Incentives and Gamification (http://xrds.acm.org/current-issue.cfm).

* Constantly shared relevant gamification content on the Gameful Bits blog (https://blog.gamefulbits.com/), SlideShare (https://www.slideshare.net/GustavoTondello), and Twitter (https://twitter.com/GustavoTondello), including original content and reviews of recent scientific publications.

* These actions have contributed on one hand, to advance the theoretical and empirical scientific knowledge on gamification, particularly related to personalized gamification and applications of gamification to wellbeing and learning; and on the other hand, to disseminate this knowledge openly to the gamification community, specially focusing on bridging the gap between the academic and the practitioner communities.
Gustavo Tondello is a research scientist, gamification consultant, and PhD student at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is affiliated to the Games Institute and the HCI Games Group at the University of Waterloo and to the International Gamification Federation (GamFed).

Gustavo’s research is mainly focused on personalized gamification and gamification for promoting wellbeing and education. In 2016, working together with Andrzej Marczewski and fellow researchers from the HCI Games Group and the Austrian Institute of Technology, Gustavo helped develop a new user types test based on Marczewski’s Hexad user types framework. In 2017, Gustavo conducted a large-scale scientific validation of the new questionnaire, which is currently under review for publication in a Journal. Also aimed at understanding user preferences in gameful applications, Gustavo conducted a new research project this year focused on classifying design elements according to user preferences. The resulting paper, “Elements of Gameful Design Emerging from User Preferences” (http://hcigames.com/download/elements-gameful-design-emerging-from-user-preferences/), was first published and presented at CHI PLAY 2017 and is also now summarized at the Gameful Bits blog (https://blog.gamefulbits.com/2017/10/30/elements-gameful-design-classified-user-preferences/).

Furthermore, working together with fellow researchers of the HCI Games Group, the University of Guelph, and the partner organization FlourishiQ Inc., Gustavo has proposed a new way to explain gamification using the well-established goal-setting theory, in work that was submitted in 2017 and is scheduled to be officially published and presented in January at the HICSS 2018 conference (http://hcigames.com/download/theory-gamification-goal-setting/).

Gustavo has also organized the Positive Gaming Workshop on Gamification and Games for Wellbeing, a full-day workshop at CHI PLAY 2017 (October), which aimed to form a community, discuss theoretical and practical considerations, and promote the development of research projects focused on “Positive Gaming” – the use of gamification and games as tools for realizing Positive Computing objectives. Moreover, Gustavo also helped co-organize the Workshop on Personalization in Serious and Persuasive Games and Gameful Interactions, a full-day workshop at UMAP 2017 (July), which investigated complementary approaches to personalization of persuasive systems. Finally, Gustavo also co-delivered the course “Applying Gameful Design Heuristics” at CHI 2017 (May), together with Dr. Lennart Nacke, which taught participants how to use the Gameful Design Heuristics (http://gamefuldesign.hcigames.com/), the tool developed at the HCI Games Group to evaluate and find improvement opportunities in a gameful application’s design.

During this year, Gustavo has also kept a constant activity publishing on his blog, Gameful Bits (https://blog.gamefulbits.com/) and on SlideShare (https://www.slideshare.net/GustavoTondello), with the goal of disseminating scientific knowledge about gamification and gameful design. One of his goals is to bridge the gap between academic research and gamification practice, by reviewing and summarizing important published scientific research (both his own and from other researchers) in a way that is more readily accessible to the gamification community.

Moreover, Gustavo is currently a member of the Steering Committee for GamFed, and has contributed over the year to promote discussion on selected gamification topics through GamFed’s Twitter and Facebook discussion hours.

Continued support of the gamification community with blogging, writing and innovating.

Support of academic research into player types and personalisation in gamification.

Speaking at events and lecturing to continue to educate the next generation of gamification gurus

Driving the conversation around ethics in gamification
I have been a constant voice in the gamification world since 2011/2012. Since then I have published several books am working on a new one and publish weekly blogs and regular slideshares. I have strived to be at the forefront of innovation around how we view and work with gamification, publishing several new design frameworks this year as well as supporting new research into player types and personalisation, continuing from last year.

Here is a list of publications around player types as well as ethics that I have either been named as a co-author in or have personally written.

Ethics in Gamification: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3123756&CFID=999210985&CFTOKEN=71141232 (Sept 2017)

Fifty Shades of Personalisation: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3099109&CFID=999210985&CFTOKEN=71141232 (July 2017)

The gamification user types hexad scale: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2968082&CFID=999210985&CFTOKEN=71141232 (Oct 2016)

1. I have given / give free lectures to promote gamification and good practice (7 in 10 months, with 20 participants on average)

2. I have given / give free training to promote gamification and good practice (6 in 10 months, with 10 participants on average)

3. I help free startups to integrate, from the beginning, the practices best adapted to their needs in gamification. (3 startups for 2017)

4. I was particularly active in the first forum (October 2017) “culture-numérique” (Québec), to promote gamification as a solution to certain challenges faced by artisans and actors of the cultural scene in Quebec. (Several beautiful meetings followed the event that took place on October 12)

5. I launched an initiative, the first of which will take place in the month of November 2017, which will meet the various local gamification actors who are passionate about innovation in order to exchange around a social challenge and propose a (or solutions), which will be offered free of charge to NPOs and other non-profit organizations. (the best is to come ;), we work hard for that)

I discovered gamification in 2015 and the many benefits, as well as the related challenges immediately convinced me. I began to study and put it into practice in 2016, first as part of my startup (Moo Box Studio) specializing in mobile applications, closed in April 2017, as an independent consultant today. Being most active in the Francophonie, be it in North America or in Europe, I have at heart to share my passion for Gamification and to make it known. In fact, the Francophonie is lagging behind, and I spend a lot of my time promoting Gamification in French, mainly in Quebec, France and Switzerland. Indeed, all too often, the majority of actors do not know what it is and / or have a poor understanding of it. So I humbly try to change the mentality in a healthy and sustainable way. I also, as a personal challenge, to stimulate the Quebec ecosystem of players in the gamification, to better know each other and stimulate each other, while inviting other specialties to propose innovative solutions common to the world challenges of our time.

In any case, thank you for considering my application. I am keen to be a new player and not to (yet) have great achievement to my credit, but it would be a great honor to be part of the 2017 selection of the “Gamification Europe Awards”.

Best Regards,

Zyad

– we rolled out an employee engagement online platform for WORTEN, the largest tech retailer in Portugal, across over 200 stores and for more than 3000 employees, creating a shift in the company culture towards celebrating everyday activities;

– we created an online platform for the portuguese gaming community called WORTEN GAME RING, connecting over 30 000 gamers of all ages, challenging them and rewarding their efforts with powerful gear;

– we overhauled the operations of the DELTA Sales Team (one of the biggest coffee retailers in the world), by creating a gamified sales adventure in a mythical kingdom where the sales of every regional team contributed to an overall goal and earned them a seat at the Round Table;

– we hosted the second edition of Gamify, a gamified gamification conference, for more than 300 people from the top companies in Portugal, as well as 3 workshops for a total of 100 enthusiasts, with overwhelmingly positive feedback;

– we won two awards for WORTEN Winners, the Portugal Digital Award for Best Digital Workplace and the Sonae Innovation Award, and partnered up with some of the top innovation events and innovative companies in Portugal like Pixels Camp, EDP Distribution, SONAE Group and Young & Rubicam.
At Fractal Mind we believe in using gamification to create a positive impact on society.

We are the most experienced company in Portugal on the gamification spectrum, with a team of special individuals from different backgrounds. People that have designed games for Activision/Blizzard and Gameloft, coordinated marketing departments for ADIDAS, designed gamification solutions for the biggest companies in Portugal and are regular speakers on topics of engagement, design thinking and gamification on top events in the industry.

We’ve gamified retail, HR, sports and gaming and we are just starting out.

This year, Fractal Mind went into overdrive and we were lucky to have partners that allowed us to challenge the status quo and break the rules to create engaging solutions and power up their people.

With WORTEN, the largest tech retailer in Portugal, we created an employee engagement solution for more than 3000 people that celebrated their everyday activities, introduced transparency and revamped their rewarding programs. With over 80% of positive feedback and an increase in sales of 6%, our impact was felt in the overwhelming engagement of the WORTEN employess.

Still with WORTEN, we created WORTEN GAME RING, the biggest gaming community in Portugal. With more than 30 000 people, and 400 regular hardcore gamers, we brought gaming and esports into mainstream media. The latest gaming content, quizzes, quests and esports tournaments are just the beginning – we are already designing WGR 2.0 alongside the gamers. And they’re loving the chance to be a part of this.

With DELTA, one of the largest coffee retailers in the world, we were able to transform the operations of an old school sales team by providing them with a mythical background for their sales objectives. By creating a compelling narrative, challenging quests and a lot of entertaining content, we triggered levels of tech engagement never before seen at DELTA.

With the GAMIFY brand, we’ve created a yearly event around the topic of gamification, where decision makers from the top companies in Portugal are able to discuss the oncoming tide of innovation that gamification brings and how they can use it to level up their companies. In 2017 we introduced our training format, where we host full-day workshops for gamification enthusiasts and provide them with the tools to go out into the world and make gamification happen.

At the end of the day, we are firm believers that gamification should be mainstream in order to change the world. And we believe we are doing our part.

– Advised major organizations on how to use Gamification: LEGO, TESLA, Google, AIG, FWD, VINDA, Aperam, the UK Government.

– Groundbreaking projects in 4 continents: Gamification of Corporate Management Meetings; High ROI Employee Gamification Projects; Gamified Safety Training; Novel Gamified Programs for banks, insurance companies, telecoms. Novel Blockchain gamification efforts underway.

– Established an Octalysis Gamification education program with universities (e.g. Oslo) and presented as such in EduTech 2017

– ROIs achieved: Sales Increased 21 – 170%; KPIs 50 – 300%; Team communication: up to 300%
2017 was a good year for The Octalysis Group. With the increasing and global expansion and adoption of the Octalysis Gamification worldwide, we have experienced high demand for Octalysis services in Americas, Asia, Europe, and Africa.

After the adoption of the Octalysis Framework by the Italian Association for teachers and principals (ADI) we have also seen increased interest by universities and governments. Examples are the establishment of an Octalysis Gamification course in an Oslo University and consulting efforts to use gamification to entice millennials to save for pensions (UK Government).

The Octalysis Group has been active in novel gamified projects. In 2017 we gamified for a Management Meeting of a large Chinese Corporation (Vinda), even though its members were mostly 60+. We are currently gamifying safety training in high risk, industrial environments. Finally, we have actively entered the blockchain arena and are working with one of the leading blockchain companies to gamify their full offerings, including their whole corporate set up.

We are increasingly able to show high ROIs from our projects and in areas that have never been gamified before (e.g. VINDA Ltd Management Meetings). 12 month ROI figures range from 21% – 300% on key business metrics.

We are continuing our efforts to provide thought leadership through Octalysis Prime, the Octalysis Explorers Facebook group (close to 5,000 members), keynote presentations at major conferences and our workshops that are held worldwide. In terms of gamification direction

we continue to emphasize the importance of moving away from strict PBL approaches and to more intrinsic, white hat design. This strive is of upmost importance for long term success of gamification projects and our sector as a whole.

Our mission is to establish Octalysis as a force of Good in the world. Therefore we continue to refuse (also in 2017) to work with companies that are detrimental to health and mental health as well as the environment. We do not work with cigarette manufacturers, gambling sites or oil companies (even though we have had many requests to do so).

We do actively seek out projects that have a positive social and environmental impact, and have worked with NGOs in areas like: Amazon Rainforest conservation; Coral Triangle Conservation; Anti-depression organizations and mental support institutions. Our goal is to spend 20% of our time on projects and activities for the Common Good in the world.

1) Our founder Pete Jenkins travels all around the world speaking in bug conferences about gamification and spreading the word! A recent example would be Game Thinking Asia in Kuala Lumpur.

2) Both Vasiliis Gkogkidis and Pete Jenkins deliver training on gamification to companiew and organisations all around the globe spreading best practises and knowledge on gamificatiton. In 2017 we have delivered training to Egypt, Dubai, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Thailand, England, Malaysia, Norway and more. Pete has also been teaching at the University of Brighton spreading knowledge and research at an academic level.

3) We have been designing solutions and gave consulting to companies and organisations so they can better use gamification. We have also developed a few games and prototypes that we want to improve and sell in the future.

4) We have been heavily involved with non profit organisations related to gamification like GamFed and the Thessaloniki and Brighton Gamification Meetup where we spread best practises, organised talks and workshops about gamification.

5) We are organising the Gamification Europe Conference, the biggest conference about gamification this year. We have curated a schedule filled with great talks and workshops to spread knowledge and create a space where people interested in gamification can meet and talk.

GAMIFICATION+ is a gamification agency based in Brighton England. We do consulting, speaking and training on gamification and try to help companies and organisations to use gamification.

1. 3radical’s Voco 3.0 was launched in late 2016 – the latest version of the platform allows business users to quickly and easily creating gamified interactive experience that can now be deployed simultaneously across multiple channels including web, mobile app and social.

2. The Software-as-a-Service platform incorporates a number of ‘off the shelf’ core game mechanics, such as board games, instant win mechanics and surveys/quizzes, that can be quickly implemented and re-branded without IT assistance.

3. Organisations can surround these ‘core mechanics’ with a range of customisable ‘next actions’ (view content, share content, find a product, refer a friend, follow on social) that typically allow consumers to earn further symbolic, real-world rewards and in-game bonuses.

4. The platform contains a full loyalty points system that also allows consumers to earn flexible points or coins for each action completed along with a customisable ‘rewards shop’ feature to allow brands to create a range of self-selectable rewards.

5. The platform harvests details of all user interactions with both the ‘core game mechanics’ and ‘next actions’ and includes a range of powerful reports to analyse behaviour, as well as the ability to re-use this audience insight to segment audiences and trigger follow-up gamified challenges.
The Voco 3.0 platform enables business users to quickly and easily deploy gamified interactive experiences that drive a range of positive outcomes through enhanced engagement with both B2C (consumer) and B2B (employee) audiences.

This latest version of the platform has now been deployed to over 30 clients across three continents and has driven innovative gamified engagement with hundreds of thousands of end users across a wide range of verticals including:

* Finance

* Casual Dining

* Retail

* Utilities

* Online Gaming

* Fitness

* Travel & Hospitality

Voco continues to deliver exceptional engagement rates that outstrip those achieved by traditional marketing and employee engagement platforms.

Highlights delivered by the Voco platform during the last year have included:

* a 3x increase in email engagement rates for gamified campaigns promoted by Zizzi

* an amazing 87,000 consumers engaging within Matalan’s first ‘Spin & Win’ campaign in the first four hours of the campaign (with over 200,000 players in total)

* start to finish roll-out of employee engagement experiences for NAB (National Australia Bank) within a period of only six weeks

* Plus many more!

“- Launched gamified sales motivation platform into our first client

– Helped client grow a core KPI by 66% in their second month of use

– Resulted in a 72% increase in revenue in the following month

In April 2017 we launched our product, OneUp Sales, into Sheridan Maine, a small recruitment company based in Birmingham, UK.

Three times a year SM offer their staff the opportunity to win back one of the day’s holiday they have to take over the Christmas period. They decided to launch this incentive alongside the completion of a new feature on our platform, Missions.

Missions are collaborative incentives sales managers can run on the OneUp platform. The idea is that a manager sets several goals for an individual or team to beat together.

In this instance there was only 1 prize; hit 47 interviews booked and they’d get their days holiday. The mission was thrown up on a TV at the end of their desk so everyone was aware where the team were at at any time in the month (attached).

Come the end of the month the team had hit 49 interviews, an all-time record for the business. In the following month the company billed 72% additional revenue as a result of these bookings.

Whilst the team would never want to claim we were the sole reason, we firmly believe the transparency and visualisation of a key goal heavily contributed to the results of that month and we’re very proud of our ongoing relationship with Sheridan Maine.”

– Classquest is a free mobile platform to help teachers gamify their classes.

– Development mainly took place between February and June, by teachers and students of 6 educational institutions across Europe.

– It was done as Intellectual Output for an Erasmus+ project, so the final beneficiaries will be teachers and their students.

– The project firstly raised awareness of gamification uses in education in different levels.

– The app “forces” teachers to think their gamification model through before actually putting into practice and, then, allows continuous monitoring of students’ performance within said model.
Classquest is a platform that specifically allows teachers to implement their own gamification project, keep track of student development within the system and send automatic and relevant feedback to students on their progress, in the form of messages, achievements, badges, levels. Students can check their progress in real time and have precise information of what is expected from them, and can interact within the system by using the points they obtain to get rewards or advantages to help their progress.

The framewrk was design with flexibility and transferability in mind: The Learning Games is a multi-level partnership and that is reflected on the software. It is a key feature, and one that sets it apart from other educational gamification apps like Class Dojo (whose penetration in the USA reaches almost 80% of primary schools) or ClassCraft (which has a core RPG look-and-feel mainly aimed at secondary schools). Classquest allows teachers in any level to use the software in infinite ways, from very light use as a communication tool to heavy use as a tool to gamify whole courses. Because of the flexible design and approach, the tool can be adapted to any system, any level, any curriculum and experiences transferred to one school to another and adapted to particular circumstances.

Since current tendencies in education tend to make extensive use of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), it was decided that they had to be the main target, over computers. This also allows a continuum between classroom and real life while taking little time on the users’ part.

Classquest’s main objective is providing teachers with a tool to add a meta-layer of gamification over their choice of methodological approach in the class as a means of increasing student engagement, as it can be as shallow or deep as the teacher decides, or depending on what features are best adapted to a specific class. The tool, which requires signing up and logging in has the following main functions:

– Create a class where students are added either by the teacher or by register with the classroom’s unique hashcode.

– Group students in teams for different purposes.

– Create rules for the class: rules can be evaluation items, behaviours, indicators, competences, whatever the teacher wants to keep track of. Students can see what is expected from them in each rule in their app.

– Rules can have their own achievements.

– (Optionally) Create a levelling system.

– (Optionally) Create obtainable rewards within the classroom’s Reward Shop, as a way to create a layer of interaction and extrinsic motivation which can also trigger initial (engagement with the system.

– Create missions, a combination of rules which must be fulfilled by a certain deadline, and have their own rewards.

– Take attendance, evaluate items for individual students or for teams.

– Message students or teams.

Social interaction was cut down to avoid possible misuse of the feature resulting in bullying. Also no competition features nor “punishment” are explicit, because we believe in a positive teaching environment.

Designing an incredible experience of recruitment in hirehunt

increase engagement of applying on the website by 92% within 10 min. only!

340% in engaging people to fill for a job appilcation from outside the website using the chatbot!

2 different Gamification Experiences, 1- for applicants engagement, 2-for employer engagement

boosting the employer engagement through using AI in the Gamification experience
HireHunt is a Gamified Recruitment platform which help people apply for their job, the platform contains a couple of application, 2 of them are gamified, 1- the applicants platform, 2- the employer platform

each of them have a different design to engage its target user

the platform won a couple of awards on local and regional basis in Egypt and the middle east

the platform was supported by chat bots and AI to increase the engagements of the Gamified experiences

HireHunt chatbot was one of the top bots awarded in the facebook regional competition

–Gamehill – a next generation Gamified learning platform

–On-line and off-line tasks, challenges and quizzes

–20+ learning formats and 25+ game mechanics in use

–Strong narrative with tailor made worlds, and likeable characters in 3D graphics and video scenes

–Tailor-made implementations, suited to match client’s brand and target group

Westhill Consulting is a team of dedicated Training & Development consultants from Poland. We have always strived to make corporate learning more effective, meaningful and convenient. We started testing various uses of gamification in learning for several years now, building scenario based training seminars as well as using game concepts in on-line learning solutions. In 2017 we have built a next generation Gamified learning platform named Gamehill that received an outstanding reception among players as well as clients (it is dedicated for corporations at this stage).

We have learnt from our and others’ mistakes and focused on an interesting narrative and a single player path. It proved to be working for small (15) and large (1600) target groups of very mixed demographics. We have experience with white collars managers from finance sector, millennials in coffee shops and car mechanics and we get equally good engagement rates. We utilize a broad mix of game mechanics (ca. 30 ) rather than relying on (in)famous PBL’s only. We cross platforms and connect worlds combining on-line and offline tasks, and even bringing online characters to real-life scenarios. Communication with users goes beyond the platform, with e-mails, in-character text messages, live chat support and even post cards included!

We are proud to make each implementation tailor-made to our clients adding new worlds, tasks and functionalities so to better satisfy our players/learners. This approach has it’s downsides, as it limits our business model – we don’t offer off-the-shelf inexpensive solutions, so we can’t scale easily. It also means, that each client needs to trust us with significant investment, in return they feel very much part of the solution and can directly impact final result.

Web based responsive design that allows for PC and mobile use anytime, anywhere gets great results.

We are currently working hard on an intuitive admin panel that will allow for a comfortable management of the platform by Client, so they could rely less on our support. Our biggest design challenge is to bring community section to life by engaging more and more player-to-player communication. It is going quite well, but we are striving for more!

Some of our implementations don’t offer players any material awards. And since they can always decide whether to participate – any engagement proves that we have managed to successfully make learning fun and useful. In smaller groups we get 100% participation rate and in large (1000k+) it is 50-60% of active players for 6-12 months. In other cases awards are merit based (books related to learning content). The most special though, are Social cause awards, where players can exchange their points for a cash contribution that the company will make in their name to a charity (a CSR partner of the employer).

Our previous solutions won HR Innovator awards 2015&2016 as most innovative projects in Poland. With the new platform we are getting excellent reactions from learning managers around the world (Berlin, Luxembourg, Singapore, Moscow), but need stronger credentials, and winning this award would help us tremendously!

Introduction to Gamification: talk about what gamification is and how to use it on the 24th of January 2017. 60 people interested in gamification joined and participated in the conversation.

Game Prototyping Workshop: workshop on how to prototype games on April 26 2017. 10 attendees learned more about games!

How to design your gamification solution: workshop on how to design a gamification project. 32 attendees on the 21st of March. Gamification designer Sabrina Bruehwiler joined us.

Gamification in education: talk about how to use gamification in education. 60 people attended and talked about the subject on 28th of February 2017.

Treasure hunt in old town of Thessaloniki: treasure hunt where we invited refugees living in Thessaloniki to meet the locals and learn more about the city together while playing. Happened on the 3rd of October 2017 and 30 people attended.

Thessaloniki Gamification Meetup is a community of gamifiers started by Vasilis Gkogkidis in 2017.

We organise talks and workshops to expand our knowledge on gamification and explore different aspects of it.

Lately we decided to use the power of games for good causes and we started putting up events to try and solve serious everyday problems. Out latest meetup was a treasure hunt that we designed using Actionbound. We designed a game that showed people around the old city of Thessaloniki. Then we worked with organisations and NGOs that work with refugees and invited refugees and workers from these NGOs to take part in our game. That way refugees and citizens of Thessaloniki came together and got to know each and their city through a fun game.

– Reached the milestone number of 500 members in our meetup platform (currently at 550)

– Held our first Gamification workshop in Athens, collaborating with Greek Gamification Network and Thessaloniki Gamification meetup

– Focused on more specific gamification topics such as: the future of gamification, newly applied frameworks, gamification in forecasting, gamification in mobile applications

– Reaching out for new collaborations and social gamification projects

– Connecting the Greek ecosystem with gamification, analyzing use cases and providing networking opportunities
Athens Gamification meetup, is a meetup held in Αthens since June 2014. It was created by two Gamification professionals and attracted attention of the Greek ecosystem.

In 2017 the group renew itself with some changes in the organizing team, and the organization of more frequent meetups. The goal though, always remains the same: starting from people of various degrees of experience in Gamification, and with main tool our monthly Meetups, to create a community of Greek Gamification experts. Watch lectures, study material, discuss and brainstorm together on Gamification use cases and proposals to Greek companies, all to try to raise our collective expertise level, and raise awareness on Gamification within the Greek ecosystem.

“- created a community for portuguese gamers and game enthusiasts in september 2017

– developed active engagement with youtubers, streamers and their fans with campaigns and competitions around user generated content

– created a League of Legends tournament based on the platform where teams are rewarded for consistency and performance

– achieved 30 000 members by the end of october with an average of 400 registered LoL players returning each week

– received positive feedback from gamers (from the enthusiast to the hardcore) regarding the potential of the platform and their willingness to help in making it better
The portuguese gaming universe is still pretty infant, with one or two companies battling for the premiere spot, but just focusing on the elite players. On the other hand, gaming streamers and youtubers have difficulty in reaching broader audiences.

With this in mind, our dream was to create a place where every gamer in Portugal could go and hang out with his peers, get the latest news, address the most epic challenges and get rewards for the time spent doing what he loves the most: playing. We wanted that place to belong to everyone, and our focus groups of gamers of every age told us the same: everyone should have a chance to belong.

So we created Worten Game Ring (wortengamering.pt).

WGR is an online platform where each gamer creates his own profile, with its own avatar, connects it to several social networks and can then begin to interact with content on the platform and earn Rings by doing so. They can read, like, comment and share articles (from outside sources and produced internally), they can participate in game streaming competitions and even battle each other in online quizzes.

But the most epic feature comes with the name WGR CUP: an online League of Legends tournament where anyone can participate as long they have a team, and battle it out for 7 weeks in order to have a place in the live final, in a WORTEN store, where they can win 5000 euros.

But this community isn’t only online: WGR was and will be present in the most important live events in Portugal for the gaming community, bringing a taste of the online platform to real life – challenges, interacting with top WGR CUP teams, chances to win prizes, all is fair.

Finally, with the Rings they earn by interacting online, they can purchase awesome gear for their gaming adventures: state of the art mouses, keyboards, laptops, desktop pcs, screens, games, gaming consoles and even WGR merchandise.”

•Generali Hungary introduced a gamified onboarding learning platform

•The system was introduced in September 2017

•The platform has been created for the new hires of the company (approximately 30 people/month)

•125% more participants in the first new type onboarding training

•Highest user activity recorded was on weekends (during learners’ free time)
Please watch this video of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLOPtQk5Hjs&t=

Summary of our major challenges:

•Shortage of labor in the Hungarian market

•Insurance industry is not appealing to new generations of job seekers

•Average age in Generali Hungary is over 50; unsustainable aftergrowth

•New generations of clients can be better addressed by a new generation of salespeople

•New generations of employees change jobs fast

•Previous onboarding training delivery was fragmented and inefficient (6 locations with 4-5 participants)

Generali Onboarding is an onboarding learning platform that will enable employees to plan their development during the first 100 days and to acquire knowledge about several topics on Generali within an engaging and motivating framework.

Key functions:

•ACTIVITY MODULE: coaches employees about expected behaviors and planning their progress.

•LEARNING MODULE: its primary goal is to transmit knowledge effectively.

•REWARDING MODULE: provides the external motivational factor through redeemable virtual and physical rewards and connects achievements with real salary bonuses.

•FRAME STORY MODULE: visualizes progress and engages users in the learning process.

•ADMINISTRATION & ANALYTICS MODULE: serves business purposes such as content management and detailed reports of user activities.

Outcomes & Achievements

Highlights from our first 67 users during the first 16 days of the 100 day program:

•125% more participants

We expected around 40-45 new participants for the first renewed onboarding, but we have had 67. Previously, we trained on average 30 participants/month. We expect the costs of our onboarding program to reduce significantly, as a result of less travel, trainers, classrooms, etc.

•Highest activity recorded during weekend > voluntary learning

2511 questions/user > 157 questions/user/day

We were surprized by the level of enthusiasm that motivated our group to use the platform most actively during the weekends, in their free time.

•58 work activities out of 111 recorded on average

Better focus on completion of on-the-job activities

Our main procedural goal with the new platform was a guided, scheduled, structured induction process for new hires, in which no crucial steps are left out. During the first 16 days, participants completed on average 58 out of 111 offered activities. The platform not only provides a clear overview of options and paths, but it also motivates with instant rewards, which can be redeemed for physical rewards or even a higher salary.

•Average participant age is 30

Participants started using the platform immediately after their induction training, and posted photos about their system activity on SM chanels during their journey home already. This not only confirmed our approach to provide a mobile learning tool, but it also created valuable visibility for Generali as an innovative employer.

•Increased interest in learning by other employee groups

We have been experiencing never-before-seen interest in learning from colleagues working in other departments. Leaders of mentors would also like to have access to the platform to track the results of their teams. Members of our organization have become more open and curious, as they have started to understand the benefits compared to traditional ways of training.

1. 3radical created gamified loyalty system linked to a ‘pairs matching’ game mechanic which awarded points for repeat engagement and allowed consumers to self-select rewards using these points, hence creating a ‘value exchange’ between the consumers and the brand for each consumer action.”

2. Consumers could also ‘earn’ extra points by taking surveys, referring friends into the game mechanic and following/sharing content to Instagram with the #ZizziSmiles hashtag.

3. 3radical needed to prove to Zizzi that a points-based loyalty system that rewarded more than just purchase would work within their sector. One of the key take-aways from this campaign was the proof that self-select rewards significantly increased voucher redemption rates. Rates for ‘purchased’ vouchers were up to 23% higher than when the same voucher was given away as a free prize or as part of other non-gamified marketing actitvities.

4. The campaign also proved that consumers would adopt ‘Zizzi Coins’ as a points system to earn and select rewards. An amazing 75% of all loyalty points were redeemed (31m out of 42m), far exceeding the <20% target set by industry experts for this type of activity.

5. In total 31k people engaged with the campaign, of which 3,200 started following @WeAreZizzi on Instagram (generating a 20% increase in followers – hitting a key target for Zizzi), 5,300 consumers provided Zizzi with their Instagram username.

The campaign significantly increased visits to the Zizzi website (usually 2.6 visits per year). Over 40% visited on at least two separate days and 14% played on at least five different days.
Mid-price restaurants, like Zizzi operate, in a fiercely competitive sector with several national chains vying for the same space.

Generating loyalty and driving repeat business is a huge challenge. Opportunities to directly engage consumers while they are physically in the restaurant are sporadic, therefore other ways of engaging consumers are key.

Zizzi knows that engagement with traditional marketing comms (especially email) is dipping. Increasing the frequency of contact (to hit the ‘perfect moment’ when a customer might be thinking about visiting a restaurant) can simply result in consumers being over-mailed and opting out.

Zizzi wanted to see if gamified marketing, requiring repeat engagement with their website and social media, would help the brand stay front of mind and drive traffic both online and in store.

The latest campaign executed with Zizzi was the ‘Smile, Match & Win’ campaign, promoted across email, social and the Zizzi website, running for approximately 8 weeks in Jan-Feb 2017 (traditionally a quiet time for Zizzi).

In this campaign Zizzi asked us to address three main objectives:

1. Develop a specific game mechanic that would drive repeat traffic to the Zizzi website and into Zizzi restaurants by offering the chance to ‘purchase’ discount vouchers
2. Introduce an associated points system and associated ‘shop’ to convert points into these discount voucher and other in-game bonuses (i.e. extra card flips or prize draw entries)
3. Increase the level of consumer interaction with Zizzi’s social channels, in particular Instagram

The project was a resounding success, delivering against each of the key goals set for us by Zizzi.

In the words of Jo Fawcett, Head of Digital at Zizzi, “”Gamification has delivered multiple benefits… when we run new campaigns engagement metrics increase. In the latest (Smile, Match & Win) campaign, we tested the use of reward points… We have seen fantastic take up of this currency – with around 75% of coins earned being spent – and a much higher redemption rate of discount vouchers bought with points than those we give away.””, Jo Fawcett, Azzurri Group Digital Director and Marketing Director of Zizzi.

End of this year we develop an app call TimeGO. Its for all people who has a screen addiction. It is sharing some articles, tactics and tools to share.

Decreasing the screentime with gamification. Sharing some technics and tools to help people to avoid this addiction.

http://devignerworks.com/demo/timego_v0.2/

•BP-GBS implemented a gamified internal career planning and development tracking system.

•The implementation was launched in the fall of 2016.

•We implemented the system for all of our employees.

•Our organizational retention rate has come down from 23% to 9%

•BP-GBS awarded as ‘best shared service centre’ in 2017
Fuel Station Ville (FSV) is an internal career planning and development tracking system that offers development opportunities to employees and rewards all steps in the process. The platform is also designed to improve business and organizational understanding, to help individuals learn more about their workplace in a fun and innovative way.

Our organizational attrition rate has come down to 9% from 23% before the introduction of FSV. We have recorded over 500 internal moves within the organization in 12 months between 2016 and 2017.

Please watch this video of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TlCrlKc-R8

Summary of our major organizational challenges:

•Fast growth. 50% expansion in 2 years.

•High attrition rate (over 23%). Instable knowledge and organizational understanding base.

•Lack of awareness regarding learning efficiency. Lacking a learning concept.

•70:20:10 learning concept. Low adaptation rates.

•Generational challenges. Not ready to engage GenY and GenZ to this fast growing organization (average age at BP-GBS is 32).

•Weak brand awareness. BP has no exploration, production or sales facilities in Hungary.

Key functions

•DEVELOPMENT PLANNING: Work task recording and development tracking serve the purpose of coaching employees about expected behaviors and planning their progress.

•RAISING ORGANIZATIONAL AWARENESS: Learning materials are integrated into various brain challenging mini-games. Their primary goal is to transmit knowledge effectively.

•THE REWARDING MECHANISM: This module provides the external motivational factor through redeemable virtual and physical rewards.

•RAISING BRAND AWARENESS – THE FRAME STORY: The frame story visualizes progress and shifts the perspective by creating an emotional bond with corporate values.

•ADMINISTRATION & ANALYTICS – THE BACKEND: This module serves business purposes such as content management and detailed reports and statistics of user activities.

Statistical highlights:

•System use is optional for our employees

•400 users in 30 days, 800 users in 90 days

•Over 60% of 1600 employees are active voluntary users

•Over 1158 development plans have been created

The main achievements of Fuel Station Ville for our organization:

•Decreased attrition rate: 23% down to 9%

•More self-conscious development planning and tracking

•More transparent career paths and requirements

•Increased organizational understanding

•International HR recognitions for innovative approach

•BP-GBS awarded as ‘best shared service centre’ in 2017

The role of FSV is simple: to enable our employees to have a clear understanding of their current skillset, to help them create a development plan and to support their progress towards their goals. Generally we see in the organization, that there is a bigger focus on on-the-job activities, people not only seek classroom trainings when it comes to L&D.

FSV formed not only our employees, but through them it had a great impact on BP in Hungary as well. Once we faced a 23% attrition rate, which is now below 9%. One of the main reasons behind the high rate was that employees did not find their fitting career paths within the organization, and did not have a clear understanding on how to develop themselves towards those career goals. Our improved retention rate helps create a more stable culture in a continuously growing organization.

Play&Go Experience is a tool where we create customized apps that improves the visitor’s experience, based on gamification, geolocation and augmented reality. With geolocation data we provide the visitor information of interest getting more interaction, fun and immersion, in mixed reality. This kind of mechanics has been popularized through games like Pokémon Go.

Through different histories, the player will follow routes in order to fulfill certain missions. Thanks to the 3D map players will be able to go out in search of the missions scattered around the place to visit. These can be located in places of interest and/or sponsored points with information and photos.

Each mission can contain different objectives: to use the items that have been collected along the way in an Augmented Reality test, to take a selfie and share it in social networks, to evaluate and comment on the places visited or to check in at a specific location.

Play&go experience offers numerous benefits to both visitors and destination organizations. Visitors can discover all the secrets of the event or tourist destination, get fun and competition and, finally, prizes and rewards for playing. Organizations have more involved visitors, increasing the time of the visit to the selected places, viralization (marketing, social networks, etc.), allowing to know the behavior of the tourist (heat maps, favorite places, etc.), greater value for exhibitors (branding and sales opportunities) and greater traffic in “cold areas”.

Our first project was the gamification of Las Fallas at Valencia. Las Fallas is one of the most important festivities in Spain with 2 million visitors.

We created a Play&go application with information about the city and missions to engage users. With very small marketing budget thousands of visitors were able to play with the app, which offered great results: almost 7,000 players with 54% retention, more than 16 minutes of gameplay per user/day, 2,200 users/day 6,000 sessions per day, more than 20,000 conversations and ratings, 25,000 selfies, 14,000 trophies won and more than 110,000 missions completed.

Thank to the app, 84% visited more monuments than the number they planned.
Play&Go Experience is a tool where we create customized apps that improves the visitor’s experience, based on gamification, geolocation and augmented reality. With geolocation data we provide the visitor information of interest getting more interaction, fun and immersion, in mixed reality. This kind of mechanics has been popularized through games like Pokémon Go.

“- finished redefining employee incentive programs in late 2016

– launched production ready platforms for employee, store manager and top management in late 2016

– implemented tools for store management, mission allocation, objectives calculation and prize catalogs.

– achieved full dissemination of the Winners platform, across over 200 stores and 3000 employees in april 2017

– achieved +80% employee satisfaction and increase of 6% in sales in late 2016/early 2017

WORTEN Winners is an employee engagement platform focused on celebrating each employee’s day-to-day activities, for the store teams of the top tech retailer in Portugal.

Employee objectives are broadly defined according to role and store size, tailored by their Store Manager, that then becomes their Game Master: handing out Missions (individual and team oriented), challenging them to outperform themselves and driving the store to new heights.

Each employee is able to register their sales on the Winners platform (the integration process with existing platforms is ongoing), which then calculates points earned for that sale and provides instantaneous feedback for the employee: they can get to a point where they can choose to sell an extra computer to get to the prize winning tier.

They can check for progress on their different goals (according to their role) and are awarded badges for especially good performances or achieving milestones.

They get rewarded by individual goals AND team goals, and are thus encouraged to work as a team like never before. Being a business area with high turnover rates, having a store team working towards a common goal that will benefit everyone, achieved levels of engagement previously absent at WORTEN.

Employees that surpass their individual goals, while helping to achieve their team goals, are rewarded with credits they can redeem for products from the WORTEN catalog. Products they are used to see everyday, but that are usually unable to purchase. We have top sellers being able to redeem laptops in less than 3 months work, and the first employee to redeem a product, stated that he was finally able to give his children a game console for Christmas.

WORTEN employees are also able to participate in our ideation workshops (we do them every two months) in order to contribute to the solution that they use everyday: we get ideas for prizes, new features (like the activity feed) and we are constantly challenged to ask more of them.

WORTEN Winners received the Portugal Digital Award 2017 for Best Digital Workplace and the SONAE Innovation Award 2017 for the innovative changes and we celebrated with the true winners: the WORTEN employees.”

We created a bespoke gamification showcase for training of submarine candidates. To establish the game we held gamification design workshops with graduate potential candidates and interviewed former submariners to develop the storyline and gameplay for the game.

The gamification was part of a three step approach of showcasing the future of learning for Qinetiq clients.

https://www.qinetiq.com/news/2017/03/qinetiq-showcases-digital-classroom-of-the-future

Outcome was a very engaged group of potential buyers, follow on work and internal awards for innovation as well as TIGA top 10 educational game shortlist.

A former submarine took about 20 minutes to work his way through the educational gamification and several defence force personnel took to the missions presented by the captain several times to increase their players position on the leaderboard.

The demonstrations focused on training for both new and experienced submariners, showing how navies could bring down costs by expediting learning and improve platform availability for operations by reducing the amount of sea time required for training.
We created a bespoke gamification project as part of the Qinetiq xCite – Future of learning showcase. 

The demonstrations focused on training for both new and experienced submariners, showing how navies could bring down costs by expediting learning and improve platform availability for operations by reducing the amount of sea time required for training.

Helen Dudfield, Chief Scientist for Training & Human Performance, QinetiQ, said: “As technology drives social and cultural change, training styles must keep up with shifting generational attitudes and expectations. Rigid training in fixed workspaces will make way for courses that offer the flexibility to learn wherever and whenever is convenient. Most importantly, technology can vastly improve the quality of learning by tailoring courses to students’ individual competencies and circumstances. Employers can reap the rewards of a highly skilled workforce at lower risk, and be confident of an excellent return on their investment in their people.”

To establish the game we held a gamification design workshop with graduate potential candidates and interviewed former submariners to develop the storyline and gameplay for the game.

The purpose of the game was to arrive back to shore with all crew intact. The captain would give missions, which were all learning related. Correct answers would unlock progress, incorrect answers would sink your submarine and 3 consecutive wrong answers would result in losing a crew member. Boosters and power ups along the lines of “who wants to be a millionaire” could be employed to help learners through the missions.

To date the programme has received an internal innovation award and is shortlisted for the TIGA educational games awards.

Created an A.I portal for the mobile games industry, including developers, hardware, communication channels and other all in a B2C platform.

For the user, this looks like Tinder for Games, swipe right to like, save your favorites then store and manage your downloads in my games section automatically. Then there is a news feed, featured an extra’s section – all of which track data of what the user interacts with, as well as their installs, uninstalls and session times. Making our data sets some of the best in Mobile Gaming.

Raised our user base to 2000 MAU, reaching an average organic retention of 21%. Seeing over 150,000 swipes, 50,000 games tracked and recommendations from our system being kept 25% longer than other app stores.

Built a community of over 1000 Indie game developers and held online Gamejams with an average of 40 participants entering their games to win prizes and promotions.

Partnering with ‘o2′ and ‘Three’ to distribute product through retail stores, holding in-store competitions, and working on improving engagement and distribution for the telecommunication companies through games!

Challenges with the App Stores

It takes anything from 15-60 minutes to find a game that, 72% of the time, they deleted after only playing twice. Extrapolating this to the rest of the mobile gaming community means 6 billion game installs are wasted every year.

Mobile game advertising only works 1% of the time, meaning that 99% of games advertising does not affect choice.

There is no single place for mobile gaming related products, services, and hardware.

Our Solution

Gameway sits as a layer above all the current app stores and includes tailored services, hardware, and content for each player.

Players have one central gaming profile which stores data from their gaming usage, patterns, and preferences across all their devices. Therefore, certain actions can be automated or prompted at the most effective time

Gameway is a mobile gaming hub powered by A.I. It filters everything mobile gaming related to mak personalised recommendations.

Tinder for Games is our first stage product matching games with players based on their gaming preferences.

Market

Mobile gaming account for 52% of annual app installs, and 70% of app revenue. Valued at £35bn in 2016 from over 1.2 billion mobile gamers on Android and iOS, growing 8% each year.

The age range of gamers spans from 6 to 63 years old with millennials (aged 15-35) spending the most time searching for and playing games.

Route to market

Product development is tested with users from paid acquisition. Our improved communication system allows developers to reach players by sharing gifts and exclusive freebies. Building our partnership with O2 (Telefonica) to be a pre-install parent friendly and secure product. We have an exclusive partnership with Mobolize to provide the ability to stream, download and play games using less data.

Future steps include mass scaling with support of game publishers and distribution partners.

Business Model

Premium subscription where users pay £5.99/month for access to our hardware discounts (VR headsets, controllers, cases, insurance), mobile data optimisation and exclusive eSports content, all provided by affiliate and partner programs. Freemium users have access to individual premium features but will require one-off payments.

Further affiliate marketing is done with developers to boost their game functionality with software development tools and add-ons, such as PlaySeeds and Megacool.

• Pervasive play-learn scenarios taxonomy: a taxonomy for the development and sharing of pervasive, gamified learning scenarios which has been generated and validated with teachers. This facilitates teachers in becoming a community of pervasive learning creators, and was found to be clear, effective and adaptable to specific local needs, with more than 30 gamified lesson paths co-designed and prototyped from the teacher side through workshops held in UK, Turkey, Greece, France and Estonia.

• Gamified Lesson Plans: Two Lesson Plans (Maths & Robotics) are in the final steps of integration (with another 8-10, covering subjects all across the STEM domain in the development pipeline). One (VET) is already being used with further education students to explore the flexibility of the platform toward embedding different design approaches and pedagogical contexts. Integral to this, we have already have more than 400 instances of educational minigames (based on 8 basic types), used to personalise and target the Lesson Paths.

• Authoring Pathway: an innovative, layered and modular pipeline for content creation which enables those from different fields and levels of competence on both the technical and pedagogical side (game designers, learning designers, teachers) to all seamlessly contribute to the creation of new reusable content. This approach enabled the consortium to gather contributions from very diverse stakeholders across a series of workshops held in UK, Turkey, Greece, France and Estonia, and provide them with an innovative perspective on gamified learning design.

• Play-Lesson procedural generation: an adaptable approach towards seamlessly integrating procedurally generated play-narratives and ad-hoc pedagogical contents has been developed in collaboration between game designers and pedagogical experts, providing a novel avenue for engaging and sustainable content delivery.

• Local pilots are now in the deployment phase, with teachers and students being involved in testing and refining the platform. 8 sites (in UK, France, Greece, Turkey), with around 100 stakeholders, are now exploring the opportunities offered by the BEACONING Platform.

The BEACONING Project (http://beaconing.eu/) aims at digitally enabling play-learn in everyday spaces, facilitated by gamified lesson path/plan where context-aware educational resources and ad-hoc learning in the surrounding environment can be triggered on demand, (as discussed in this promotional video: https://goo.gl/rv3Nb9 ). Such a pervasive approach increases flexibility for learners and expands the boundaries of anytime, anywhere learning, enriching their learning experience. This aligns with EU level recommendations on the development of vocational learning: “the importance to Europe of a skilled and knowledgeable citizenry extends beyond formal education to learning acquired in non-formal or informal ways”

BEACONING therefore aims to enable anytime anywhere learning by using gamified, pervasive and context-aware techniques and technologies; extending the learning experience from the classrooms into the outdoor and into personal and social space. BEACONING will be a platform to facilitate, assess and author contextualised, gamified and personalised learning activities (i.e. lesson path/plan) with considerations of existing educational tools and services specific to the participating organisations. The pedagogical foundations are based on the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) model centred around active learning, whereby learners discover and work with different resources to solve problems or ‘quests’. In this model, teachers trigger tasks/quests within the system, taking the role of “quest giver” and / or “trainer”.

The three main overarching objectives of the project are:

• To integrate technologies, pedagogical and social perspectives of using pervasive, context-aware and gamified approaches, ensuring that the BEACONING platform is innovative while also extending our scientific understanding and practice-based experiments of engaging a community of learners including those with disabilities with a more inclusive, connected and contextualised learning process;

• To develop, implement and validate the BEACONING platform that leverages cutting-edge approaches including the Future Internet technology, mobile, gamification, pervasive gaming, procedural game content generation, game authoring, human-computer interfaces, learning analytics and problem-based learning model; and to produce a platform that is usable, adaptable, extendable and sustainable;

• To explore and measure the level of engagement, effectiveness and impact enabled by the BEACONING platform towards incentivising learners and fostering acquisition and transfer of knowledge and skills, validating this through large scale pilots involving a community of stakeholders and practitioners in Europe, and to provide an exploitation and business plan for the platform adoption.

* ARG played with staff of 80 DEEN supermarkets in The Netherlands, during 5 weeks in March / April 2017

* For 5 weeks, all 80 supermarket stores were visited by customer X, a mystery visitor that followed a specific scenario.

* Objective for employees was to ‘unmask’ visitor X by making them happy by ‘exceeding expectations’ in that specific scenario.

* Results: Overall higher employee engagement, increase in communication between stores and on social media. Increase in customers being greeted and approached. Increase in turnover.
During a period of 5 weeks, All 80 DEEN supermarkets inThe Netherlands were repeatedly visited by ‘X’; a mystery visitor that followed a specific scenario, that would change every 2 or 3 days. For example, ‘X’ would ‘accidentally’ drop a package of yoghurt on the floor.

Objective for the 6000 employees was to ‘unmask’ visitor X by making them happy by ‘exceeding expectations’ in that specific scenario. In the yoghurt-dropping scenario for example, they could score if they would not only react adequately and clean up the mess, but also make the customer not feel bad about it (or even better: actually make him feel relieved and happy)

After his (or her) visit, X would re-enter the store, making himself known to the employee and their storemanager, and hand them a specific token (in this case: a specially designed DEEN chocolate-bar).

X would also make a photo of the employee, and post this to the X Headquarters. (along with a mystery shopping report). The photo celebrating the discovery would be posted on the private Facebook Group that was used for this purpose, within 10 minutes after the unmasking.

A circuit of screens in all supermarket-canteens, as well as the private Facebook Group, would functions as main hub for sharing information, updates, experiences, tactics, and above all: hints.

As visitor X’s scenario would change every 2 or 3 days, hints would be distributed to give players a sense of what to look for. In the yoghurt-dropping scenario, the first hint was ‘Whoops’. The second hint, released a day later, would be ‘Fall’. The hints would lead to speculation and engagement both within and between stores, and to increased attention towards customers within the supermarkets.

The whole project was kicked-off at a store managers conference on the day before the project started, introduced by an exciting introduction video. Also, the stores were clustered in 8 teams, managed by a regional manager. These managers would compete amongst each other, while the stores would compete for the highest scores within their cluster.

Until the final scores were revealed, there was no mention of a reward.

‘Visitor X’ was a thrilling gamified project from the start. Besides the noticeable alert vibe in almost every store, we measured overall higher employee engagement, increase in communication between stores and on social media, increase in customers being greeted and increase in turnover.

•Local adoption of GameChangers at Coventry University, where various modules and courses at Coventry University have been gamified – 7 example impact cases http://gamify.org.uk/stories/

•Local/national adoption: The GameChangers has been recognised by HEFCE in 2017, where GameChangers tour was funded to carry out GameChangers workshops at other Coventry University’s campuses. The tour engaged over 300 students and 20 staff, engaging with students across Coventry, Scarborough, and London campuses. http://gamify.org.uk/2017/04/06/game-changers-road-trip/

•International adoption: GameChangers Remixing Play methodology adopted in Arthur Lok Jak’s business school Trinidad and Tobago and in Guatemala (MBA course) between February and May 2017. https://sylvesterarnab.com/2017/03/10/post-digital-transformation-via-playful-and-gameful-approaches/

•International adoption: GameChangers has also been recognised by the NEWTON Ungku Omar fund (funded by the UK and Malaysia), where the spin-off CreativeCulture initiative is now being adopted and adapted in Borneo, Malaysia. Three remote sites are being engaged, where rural schools are exposed to innovative gamified learning and teaching. The recent visit (August 2017) has attracted a lot of press in Malaysia, where we engaged with over 100 stakeholders (students and educators). http://gamify.org.uk/2017/09/21/creativeculture-in-borneo/

•Open community: The GameChangers – Game Design Thinking open course is currently live and is open to everyone (CC by NC 4.0) http://gamify.org.uk/course-overview/week-zero/ The GameChangers approach has also been transformed into a module under Coventry University’s Employability programme.The module is currently live in line with the open course and has 40 students.

The GameChangers initiative (http://Gamify.org.uk) develops a design thinking approach inspired by playful and gameful techniques and technologies (both digital and analogue) for promoting the emergence of a more playful, exploratory, creative culture in everyday academic contexts.

GameChangers is both an open game design course (focusing on play, games and gamification) and community, co-created by the Disruptive Media Learning Lab of Coventry University together with staff and students interested in exploring the opportunities of creating gamified solutions as a medium for both expression and learning. GameChangers has the goal of facilitating new models of teaching and learning, new practices in cross-disciplinary learning/collaboration and new paths of aesthetic expression. GameChangers also aims to make game creation and game literacy more culturally open and accessible to staff, students and the broader informal communities surrounding the University. The initiative is recognised both in the UK and internationally, where it has produced two spinoff programmes:

(a)HEFCE funded Mobile GameChangers – implementing playful and gameful learning across the CU campuses. The programme experiments pop up and mobile creative learning spaces for gamifying a learning process.

(b)Newton funded CreativeCulture (http://mycapsule.my) – a collaboration between the UK and Malaysia, implementing playful and gameful teaching and learning of STEM subjects in the rural schools in Borneo, Malaysia. Supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (MoHE) under the NEWTON UK-SEA programme, which aims to expand the GameChangers programme to address educational challenges within the context of inclusive learning for learners from the rural parts of Malaysia Borneo. Also more information: http://dmll.org.uk/projects/creativeculture/

The GameChangers approach has expanded beyond the university and is now being adapted and adopted in countries, such as Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago and Guatemala. Workshops have also been conducted in other countries, such as UK, France, Germany, USA, China, Denmark and Italy. We have so far engaged with 600 stakeholders from the public and private sectors.

Designing an incredible experience of recruitment in hirehunt

increase engagement of applying on the website by 92% within 10 min. only!

340% in engaging people to fill for a job appilcation from outside the website using the chatbot!

2 different Gamification Experiences, 1- for applicants engagement, 2-for employer engagement

boosting the employer engagement through using AI in the Gamification experience
HireHunt is a Gamified Recruitment platform which help people apply for their job, the platform contains a couple of application, 2 of them are gamified, 1- the applicants platform, 2- the employer platform

each of them have a different design to engage its target user

the platform won a couple of awards on local and regional basis in Egypt and the middle east

the platform was supported by chat bots and AI to increase the engagements of the Gamified experiences

HireHunt chatbot was one of the top bots awarded in the facebook regional competition

1. Playing a role in a (grit building) Gamified startup simulation intrinsically motivates students to acquire new knowledge and skills at a fast pace.

2. The curriculum is fluid and provided by using the just-in-time method, instead of classical instruction.

3. The students work together in a multidisciplinary team acting as real professionals.

4. Learning goals are not assessed by using the traditional grading system, but by building value for their start-up through gaining trust.

5. ProtoPlay is a revolutionary form of education which closes the gap between theory and business practice.

ProtoPlay, a grit building Gamified startup simulation.

Welcome to ProtoPlay. A real life simulation game where students manage their own start-up, which offers gamification projects and games in all sizes and sorts. Project ProtoPlay is part of Fontys University of Applied Science, faculty Academy for Creative Industries in Tilburg, and is located on the Science Park of the Technical University, in Eindhoven. ProtoPlay is a special minor program with a course duration of 6 months and 30 ECTS, and available for application for students who take part in a higher education program (applied university and university) but also for students taking part in an intermediate vocational program (MBO). Although students with an educational background in game art, game developing, marketing and commercial economics are preferable, every student is welcome to apply. At this moment ProtoPlay has students enrolled from six different studies, with a total of 60 students, and only started two years ago. The expectation is that ProtoPlay will steadily grow, with more students and more partners every year. In the last two years ProtoPlay has evolved from adding game elements to the curriculum, to being something of a whole next level: we transformed the complete curriculum into a game!

The central goal of ProtoPlay is that groups of five students, with preferably different backgrounds, create and run a startup together, with which they create ‘value’. During the process the startups have to deliver professional products, which are rewarded with bronze, silver and gold. They also receive an amount of (play)money matching the reward. The students have to invest this money in their startups to improve the value of it. This value is continuously visible on a big screen and changes every week to incorporate a competitive element. Scarcity is also important, since only the reward ‘’gold” provides enough money to pay all five students a decent salary. In the end, only the students with a startup that has reached the break even point or a value above break even, will pass the project. A little bit harsh you say? Play hard, work hard, is our answer! That’s how we build grit.

ProtoPlay doesn’t have a fixed schedule in providing the students with new knowledge. And we don’t speak of ‘courses’, ‘modules’, ‘classical instructions’ and ‘teachers’. We do speak of Challenges, Levels, Side Quests, presentations, coaches and more (see attachment for an outline of the process). The coaches provide new knowledge through frequent feedback given to every startup by using the ‘just-in-time-principle’. This means that the teachers have a supportive, monitoring role, providing the students with knowledge and skills that are relevant for them at that specific moment. Real clients and (game)professionals also take part in ProtoPlay. We don’t use any traditional exams and tests.

In the end, students are being assessed by how good they are at ‘playing ProtoPlay Tycoon’. And the best part is, it works! Better yet, it will create an educational revolution.

* Five year program of research that covered all aspects of a successful gamification design and implementation.

* Seven major peer-reviewed publications of this work freely available to researchers and practitioners

For the last five years I have focussed my research on delivering high quality peer-reviewed research outcomes as well as practical tools that practitioners can use in their work. I have delivered a wide range of enterprise-ready outputs such as a design framework, taxonomy, a capability framework and findings on issues such as ethics and data-driven design. All my research uses a design-science approach which means that research is based on real-world business experience that has gone through the rigours of scientific investigation. All seven publications over the last five years present a single body of work that looks to raise the standard of practice of gamification design and implementation.