GAME CHANGE PLAY WILL BE TO THE 21ST CENTURY WHAT WORK WAS TO THE INDUSTRIAL AGE - OUR DOMINANT WAY OF KNOWING, DOING AND CREATING VALUE. PAT KANE Author of The Play Ethic Published by PHD The Telephone Exchange 5 North Crescent Chenies Street London WC1E 7PH www.phdmedia.com First published 2013 Copyright © PHD Worldwide Author PHD Co-authors Craig Atkinson Malcolm Devoy Mark Holden Frances Ralston-Good Alasdair Reid Chris Stephenson With thanks to Avril Canavan Anna Watkins Ed Freed Nicholas Dacre Design Pen&Pringle Illustration Gary Neill CONTENTS 13 “GAMIFICATION” : 25 Beyond the Buzzword FOR THE EPIC WIN: How Games Can Change the World in Extraordinary Ways 35 GAME ON: “Gamification” for Brand Engagement 47 and Customer THE GAME Loyalty OF WORK: New Insights on Optimising Employee Engagement 59 PLAY THE GAME: Building a “Gamified” Enterprise 71 System SUMMARY: Towards a More Playful Future MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE PLAYING GAME A genre of role-playing video games or web browser based games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world. Foreword Are you a gamer? What does all this play this mean for the workplace? Currently, an overwhelming 97 per These days, most people are hesitant to answer cent of young adults in the U.K. and the U.S. “yes” to this question – even if they adore play videogames, on average more than an hour games. And who can blame them? As a society, a day. Perhaps more surprisingly, 92 per cent we have so many biases about games: They’re a of two-year-olds are already gaming on their waste of time, they’re anti-social, they ruin your parents’ phones and tablets. Virtually everyone attention span. We just as often judge the people is growing up a gamer these days, which means who play games – they’re sad or lonely, they a steady pipeline of super-empowered hopeful can’t cope with reality, they are throwing away individuals into our workplaces over the next their real-life potential. decade and beyond. With so many biases about games, maybe we The fun, if daunting, task for today’s companies need a new term to describe someone who is to figure out how best to leverage the spends a lot of time playing them. Here’s what I typical gamer’s superpowers for real work. propose we call them: Fortunately, companies like PHD are pioneering innovative systems like Source, which empowers Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals. employees to gamefully tackle the daily For more than a decade, I’ve been researching challenges within the organisation that excite the impact of games on how we think, act, and interest them most. Source is my favourite and solve problems in our real lives. And the example of “gamification” at the workplace, most important thing I’ve learned is this: People because it creates an endless stream of who’ve grown up gaming have greater reserves opportunities for just-in-time collaboration - of optimism, motivation, determination, and while helping employees identify and develop resilience in the face of failure than non-gamers. their individual strengths. They are more likely to co-operate than compete. (It’s true! 3 out of 4 gaming hours today are There’s an old bit of wisdom commonly spent in co-operative, rather than competitive, attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato: “You environments.) And they absolutely relish difficult can learn more about a person in an hour of play challenges and hard work – as long as they feel than in a year of conversation.” Perhaps it’s time capable of rising to the heroic occasion. to update this saying. In the next decade, we will be able to learn as much about a company by Of course, gamers don’t always display these the games it plays, as by the work it produces. super-empowered, hopeful traits in real life. They are most likely to flourish in carefully Happy gaming! designed environments that provide clear goals, a strong sense of purpose and frequent, positive feedback. They also must feel in control: After JANE MCGONIGAL, PhD all, it’s only play when you choose to tackle the Game developer and author of tough obstacle. And although competition will Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better motivate them in the short term, their strengths and How They Can Change the World shine most when collaboration rules the day. | 12 LEVEL 1 “Gamification”: Beyond the Buzzword “GAMIFICATION” | 14 stories of people taking time off work) many occasions, she’s addressed influential believe they have worrying implications for audiences of people from the marketing, media the economy. and advertising sectors. McGonigal’s message was that nothing could But never before had she talked about games be further from the truth. Game playing, she and “gamification” to an audience at an event said, is “good news for business, it’s good that had itself been “gamified.” Delegates could news for innovation, and it’s good news for collect Cannes “Pings” for completing tasks anyone who wants to help solve the world’s and attending events via a specially developed most urgent challenges.” interactive mobile app. Ten per cent of the total delegation played the game – over 1,500 It is, she argued, all part and parcel of what people – competing on a live leaderboard. she termed the “Engagement Economy” and the Engagement Economy is a huge concept, McGonigal doesn’t exactly own the theory of not just in terms of the raw numbers but also “gamification” – she didn’t invent the term “GAMIFICATION”: in the structural challenges and opportunities and, interestingly, she rarely uses it. But her BEYOND THE BUZZWORD it represents. TED presentation, posted in March 2010, was a landmark moment in the evolution of an It’s driven by basic universal human impulses, Engagement Economy manifesto. such as the desire “to be challenged, to get better at something, to master new skills, to Her theme that day was a subject that yet again as a keynote speaker at a seminar AS A PLANET, WE’RE put those skills in service of something that everyone sort of knew about – the immersive held at the Cannes Lions festival in 2013. really matters, to be connected to a larger power of some online game environments SPENDING 7 BILLION HOURS community,” McGonigal explained. – but had never quite considered in the A WEEK FUELLING OUR DESIRE One billion people – an astonishing one in round. However, her speech wasn’t just an TO BE ENGAGED WITH GAMES. seven of the world’s population – spend And she added: “Decisions about where to exploration of the immersive feelings routinely IF BRANDS CAN REPLICATE on average at least an hour a day playing work, what to spend money on, which brands experienced by gamers. It went much further. EVEN A SMALL SLICE OF computer and videogames. 300 million to be loyal to, these decisions, will all be The compelling aspect of her presentation was minutes a day (the aggregate equivalent of made based on how well an organisation, its passionate insistence that this sort of online THAT ENGAGEMENT, THEN 400,000 years) are spent playing Angry Birds. THE PAYBACK MUST SURELY or experience or product fulfils this urgent engagement could (indeed should) have real 170 hours a year per player are devoted to Call desire to engage whole-heartedly with world implications. BE SUBSTANTIAL. of Duty. That’s the equivalent of signing off one meaningful challenges.” month of full-time work every year to the game. Online game players represent a hugely Game playing generates huge numbers – that’s In fact, the Cannes Lions advertising festival underestimated and much misunderstood pretty much universally understood these days 1 in 4 players called in sick to stay home and in June 2013 represented something of resource and, viewed from a certain – but Jane McGonigal has few rivals when it play Call of Duty Black Ops II on launch day in a new experience for Jane McGonigal. As perspective, the game world is an archetype of comes to bringing those numbers to life. November 2012. a game designer, an acute commentator a blissfully productive community working hard on all things gaming and a director of The to achieve shared goals because they find the She’s also rather good at turning Some people still find these sorts of numbers Institute for the Future, she’s been making work inspiring. They’re also proof positive that preconceptions on their head – as she proved rather scary and (especially when linked to high profile presentations for years; and on the collective will, when harnessed in the right 15 | GAME CHANGE “GAMIFICATION” | 16 ways, be awesome in action. economics to drive user engagement.” (See box for a fuller Zichermann definition.) McGonigal built on the online buzz created by this TED talk by publishing in 2011 a book that has become one of the central texts in the “gamification” canon, the best-selling Reality Is GARTNER, HAS Broken. It is a book outlining “why games make FORECAST THAT, BY us better and how they can change the world.” 2015, 50 PER CENT OF Right time, right place – McGonigal’s message was one that her audience was absolutely ORGANISATIONS THAT ready to hear. The book provided a catalyst MANAGE INNOVATION around which all sorts of related ideas began to coalesce. Those determined to put theory PROCESSES WILL into practice, in other words, to drive forward the engagement economy, began congregating BE “GAMIFYING” under the “gamification” banner. THOSE PROCESSES. According to Google Trends, before July 2010 AND BY 2014, 70 no-one was using “gamification” as a search term.