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Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps
What do Foursquare, Zynga, Nike+, and Groupon have in common? These and many other brands use gamification to deliver a sticky, viral, and engaging experience to their customers. This book provides the design strategy and tactics you need to integrate game mechanics into any kind of consumer-facing website or mobile app. Learn how to use core game concepts, design patterns, and meaningful code samples to a create fun and captivating social environment. Whether you're an executive, developer, producer, or product specialist, Gamification by Design will show you how game mechanics can help you build customer loyalty. "Turning applications into games is a huge trend. This book does a great job of identifying the core lasting principals you need to inspire your users to visit again and again."
—Adam Loving
Freelance Social Game Developer and founder of Twibes Twitter Groups
—Adam Loving
Freelance Social Game Developer and founder of Twibes Twitter Groups
182 pages, Paperback
First published July 25, 2011
43 people are currently reading
1012 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
September 22, 2017
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Gamification
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Gamification
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فهذا الكتاب هو المكان الأنسب لتبدأ منه
March 28, 2012
Solidly commercial in nature. Lucid without being incandescent. I felt like this is the book you would reach for as a sad Dilbert when your manager says "I heard we could increase our onboarding with a badge system... By next week!" and you don't have the authority to talk them out of it. The infectious enthusiasm and bubbling-over of ideas and possibilities of "Reality Is Broken" does not show up here to mar the pure unsullied pragmatism of this book. While I like pragmatism, I have never felt more deadened and turned off by the likelihood of freeze tag becoming PepsiTag.
September 24, 2012
I'm really interested in this topic, and was left cold by this book.
It had the pragmatic enthusiasm of a marketer discovering better ways to sell things, not of an entrepreneur discovering better ways of serving customers.
Odd and misleading anecdote about the impact of leaderboards on Orkut's growth. Scant coverage of the potentially significant drawbacks to leaderboards, which is odd because the founders of Twitter have specifically talked about their decision not to include one.
Comparison of Yahoo Answers and Quora was nice, as is consideration of Health Month.
The book is full of exhortations to go to the author's website for more information, and the book itself is light on information. Specific code examples for adding game elements to ruby forum software seem out of place, like the book is trying to do too much and failing at the theoretical and practical.
Even more unforgivable than the constant self-promotion is the final chapter - which has corporate sponsorship and is a giant ad for a white-label gamification service!
The reason I give it two stars is that I can see it being a useful introduction for someone with almost no first-hand knowledge of game mechanics in web apps. But if you've used Foursquare and Yahoo Answers, Quora and Health Month, there's not much here for you.
It had the pragmatic enthusiasm of a marketer discovering better ways to sell things, not of an entrepreneur discovering better ways of serving customers.
Odd and misleading anecdote about the impact of leaderboards on Orkut's growth. Scant coverage of the potentially significant drawbacks to leaderboards, which is odd because the founders of Twitter have specifically talked about their decision not to include one.
Comparison of Yahoo Answers and Quora was nice, as is consideration of Health Month.
The book is full of exhortations to go to the author's website for more information, and the book itself is light on information. Specific code examples for adding game elements to ruby forum software seem out of place, like the book is trying to do too much and failing at the theoretical and practical.
Even more unforgivable than the constant self-promotion is the final chapter - which has corporate sponsorship and is a giant ad for a white-label gamification service!
The reason I give it two stars is that I can see it being a useful introduction for someone with almost no first-hand knowledge of game mechanics in web apps. But if you've used Foursquare and Yahoo Answers, Quora and Health Month, there's not much here for you.
June 3, 2014
Ok book... Has some interesting tips & checklists on how to monetize a social game. Content is somewhat repetitive and doesn't get into too much detail of HOW to design.
June 11, 2012
Blech, a shallow treatment by someone who is using their knowledge of buzzwords to make a living. If you want your product to have the veneer of "gamification" without actually leveraging what make games compelling, read this book.
z-stopped-reading
November 8, 2012It was a bit boring... It's written as a manual and it lacks very interesting examples. But the information looks useful enough for me to consider coming back to it again while I'm working on a specific design that needs to be gamified.
June 18, 2013
gave me lots of ideas
August 23, 2018
RU GM?
A very "hot" topic these days is using gamification to create incentives both for customers and and employees. Zichermann and Cunningham (Z&C) provide a very accessible and largely non-technical approach that I found fairly useful towards understanding this perspective. Key to the experience is establishing an addictive feedback loop showing the players' current status with relationship to others in real time through leaderboards as well as achievable goals.
Metrics can be multidimensional to reinforce different kinds of behaviour ranging from engagement (time spent and frequency of use) , skills mastered, contributions to the knowledge base and karma points either for being helpful or for introducing others to the "game". In some cases points can be converted into real or virtual goods, the advantage being that the business hosting the game can set and even reset the conversion rate for what is essentially a captive market. Global ratings may be interesting to hilite the achievements of top players, but localized scores such your position within the nearest 10 similarly ranked individuals or within a given social and/or geographic space (redheaded Prius owners in California) may be a more relevant motivator. As indicated by the acronym SAPS (status, access, power and stuff), incentives can also include member only and early access deals and the right to manage aspects of the game, and yet can be as inexpensive as issuing an icon as a badge. The old adage to keep in mind is that, for better or worse, one gets the behaviour one rewards.
Designers of the user experience should also take into account the level of expertise from novice to expert to visionary. Z&C also discuss some interesting research by Richard Bartle that groups users into 4 types: socializers (75%), achievers and explorers (10% each) with the remaining 5% labelled as killers/griefers who seek to dominate by disparaging others - this last group is probably the type of customer or employee that you should both discourage and avoid. Users can be maximizers who need to explore every possible option, therefore give them the tools to do so, or satisficers who drop out (in a good sense) by purchasing the first product that meets their price/feature goals. In general people tend to be a mix of all of the above and exhibit different behaviours at different times and in different scenarios.
The range of activities that categorized as games was much wider than I supposed. In light of the above both Airmiles and e-Bay can be thought of as games. I was surprised that yahoo's ask.com is actually a game where points were awarded both for the number of questions asked but also for the assessed quality of the response, though the internet meme "how is babby formed" critiques its effectiveness. The attraction of farmville and foursquare escapes me, and the ecofeedback used in the Ford Fusion showing a thriving or wilting plant based on carbon emissions seems to be both overly simplified and paternalistic. On the other hand the innovative "Speed Camera Lottery" which distributes a portion of the fines of speeders amongst those who drive safely within the limit seems plaudible for it's effectiveness albeit gaudy and an eyesore. Nike+ can also be treated as a game, one where you compete against yourself or against others.
As I was more interested in the ideas as they relate to the business world I skimmed over the last quarter of the book which described a free demo application written in ruby for managing a gamified web site. Though I do know SQL and suspect there's a database in behind somewhere, I can't comment on the code presented, or how difficult it would be to set up and manage, but can say that the designs while spare, do convey the desired functionality. The book also provides two excellent summations, one a chart describing different kinds of activities that people enjoy (pp80) the other a bullet list of different personal motivations (pp83).
A very "hot" topic these days is using gamification to create incentives both for customers and and employees. Zichermann and Cunningham (Z&C) provide a very accessible and largely non-technical approach that I found fairly useful towards understanding this perspective. Key to the experience is establishing an addictive feedback loop showing the players' current status with relationship to others in real time through leaderboards as well as achievable goals.
Metrics can be multidimensional to reinforce different kinds of behaviour ranging from engagement (time spent and frequency of use) , skills mastered, contributions to the knowledge base and karma points either for being helpful or for introducing others to the "game". In some cases points can be converted into real or virtual goods, the advantage being that the business hosting the game can set and even reset the conversion rate for what is essentially a captive market. Global ratings may be interesting to hilite the achievements of top players, but localized scores such your position within the nearest 10 similarly ranked individuals or within a given social and/or geographic space (redheaded Prius owners in California) may be a more relevant motivator. As indicated by the acronym SAPS (status, access, power and stuff), incentives can also include member only and early access deals and the right to manage aspects of the game, and yet can be as inexpensive as issuing an icon as a badge. The old adage to keep in mind is that, for better or worse, one gets the behaviour one rewards.
Designers of the user experience should also take into account the level of expertise from novice to expert to visionary. Z&C also discuss some interesting research by Richard Bartle that groups users into 4 types: socializers (75%), achievers and explorers (10% each) with the remaining 5% labelled as killers/griefers who seek to dominate by disparaging others - this last group is probably the type of customer or employee that you should both discourage and avoid. Users can be maximizers who need to explore every possible option, therefore give them the tools to do so, or satisficers who drop out (in a good sense) by purchasing the first product that meets their price/feature goals. In general people tend to be a mix of all of the above and exhibit different behaviours at different times and in different scenarios.
The range of activities that categorized as games was much wider than I supposed. In light of the above both Airmiles and e-Bay can be thought of as games. I was surprised that yahoo's ask.com is actually a game where points were awarded both for the number of questions asked but also for the assessed quality of the response, though the internet meme "how is babby formed" critiques its effectiveness. The attraction of farmville and foursquare escapes me, and the ecofeedback used in the Ford Fusion showing a thriving or wilting plant based on carbon emissions seems to be both overly simplified and paternalistic. On the other hand the innovative "Speed Camera Lottery" which distributes a portion of the fines of speeders amongst those who drive safely within the limit seems plaudible for it's effectiveness albeit gaudy and an eyesore. Nike+ can also be treated as a game, one where you compete against yourself or against others.
As I was more interested in the ideas as they relate to the business world I skimmed over the last quarter of the book which described a free demo application written in ruby for managing a gamified web site. Though I do know SQL and suspect there's a database in behind somewhere, I can't comment on the code presented, or how difficult it would be to set up and manage, but can say that the designs while spare, do convey the desired functionality. The book also provides two excellent summations, one a chart describing different kinds of activities that people enjoy (pp80) the other a bullet list of different personal motivations (pp83).
October 30, 2020
This is a good nuts-and-bolts introduction to the basic tools and constructs of gamification. It focuses less on the philosophy, ethical considerations, or research and more on practical aspects.
It suffers from being out of date: many of the sites it references are no longer available and the reader is left assuming that there are also newly developed practices or tools not covered as a result of its age.
One dated-feeling chapter focuses on building a gamified forum based on a Rails framework, including code samples. While the example and code are not cutting edge, it was still useful to see some worked examples.
Another focuses on using Badgeville, a now-defunct white-label Gamification-as-a-service platform. Since Badgeville no longer exists, this was useful only in thinking about it as an example administration interface and as a review of concepts covered earlier.
Overall this is a useful introduction to the the tools you should have in your toolbox, but be prepared to skim and skip and to supplement it with more recent material.
It suffers from being out of date: many of the sites it references are no longer available and the reader is left assuming that there are also newly developed practices or tools not covered as a result of its age.
One dated-feeling chapter focuses on building a gamified forum based on a Rails framework, including code samples. While the example and code are not cutting edge, it was still useful to see some worked examples.
Another focuses on using Badgeville, a now-defunct white-label Gamification-as-a-service platform. Since Badgeville no longer exists, this was useful only in thinking about it as an example administration interface and as a review of concepts covered earlier.
Overall this is a useful introduction to the the tools you should have in your toolbox, but be prepared to skim and skip and to supplement it with more recent material.
November 2, 2018
This book is outdated. Which is fine, so long as the concepts contained within are timeless. Maybe they are, but their coverage leaves much to be desired. This book is written in typical 'Math Professor', which is to say that the author clearly knows what he means. So he doesn't bother to write out things that are 'obvious'. He relies too heavily on a tiny pool of examples, a couple of which are actual games. (This is only a problem because the book is a manual on how to apply game ideas to non-game concepts.) There is little to no research involved, and the best practices contained within seem to be based on a few websites who got popular, due to unrelated factors, and perhaps even despite the mechanics highlighted. However, this book gave me much to think about. I will not be returning, but as a quick intro into what the basic categories of gamification are, it is a halfway decent manual.
January 23, 2018
Yes! I have found a book that explains the mechanics behind gamification. What points systems are there? How do we decide to use levels? What kind of leaderboards exist? All these questions are answered. The most important one of all: if I want to use gamification, how do I do it? There's even two worked-out examples to show you!
Read the full review at my blog.
Read the full review at my blog.
November 15, 2018
برای اولین کتابی که در مورد گیمیفیکیشن می خونید می تونه خوب باشه، مطالعات موردی (Case Study) های زیادی در کتاب وجود داره که البته اگه گیمر باشید و یا با سرویسهای نرمافزاری زیادی کار کرده باشید، هنگام خوندن کتاب «تعداد «آها» گفتناتون زیاد خواهد بود.
ولی چون مدتی از انتشار کتاب گذشته ، سرعت رشد تکنولوژی باعث شده که نمونه هایی که در کتاب نامبرده جز سایتها و بازیهای قدیمی محسوب بشن، ولی مفهوم و علم گیمیفیکشن همیشه صدق می کنه.
ولی چون مدتی از انتشار کتاب گذشته ، سرعت رشد تکنولوژی باعث شده که نمونه هایی که در کتاب نامبرده جز سایتها و بازیهای قدیمی محسوب بشن، ولی مفهوم و علم گیمیفیکشن همیشه صدق می کنه.
April 29, 2023
Muy buen libro sobre los fundamentos de la gamificación. Me ha ayudado bastante a tener ideas y cómo enfocar dinámicas para que tengan más adherencia.
No le pongo 5 estrellas porque al final se liaba el libro con código en Ruby que no aportaba tanto, pero muy buen libro de fundamentos.
Recomendado 100%
No le pongo 5 estrellas porque al final se liaba el libro con código en Ruby que no aportaba tanto, pero muy buen libro de fundamentos.
Recomendado 100%
December 5, 2017
Shallow understanding of both games and gamified apps. The term was pretty new back then, but it's more than just badges, points and progress bars. Avoid.
June 11, 2018
The content of this book did not age well.
Want to read
July 23, 2018What are your plans today
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 19, 2018
El texto presenta una introducción al concepto de gamificación mostrando algunos casos de aplicación que son orientadores.
June 11, 2021
Basic understanding of gamification, good starting book for those who just start on knowing gamification
February 19, 2017
I've read several game design and gamification books and to be fair this was written some time ago. It is a quick read with solid examples for workplace motivation and design.
January 19, 2016
Came across this book when my friends were all crazy about FourSquare, checking here and there. The book is well organized. (Too) many examples were from FourSquare. Many of the practices were well-known and used wildly in today's applications. If you are looking for a collection of gamification practices out there, this is the right place.
However, I expected more from a book. The mechanisms can be extracted right from the apps that I use everyday. FourSquare uses half of them, and other apps that weren't mentioned in the book still have a lot of similarities, one way or another.
I did expect more on the psychology side of it, more analogy from real life (games that we all played and loved), how business model evolved around the mechanisms, etc, things that motivate further innovation into app development.
However, I expected more from a book. The mechanisms can be extracted right from the apps that I use everyday. FourSquare uses half of them, and other apps that weren't mentioned in the book still have a lot of similarities, one way or another.
I did expect more on the psychology side of it, more analogy from real life (games that we all played and loved), how business model evolved around the mechanisms, etc, things that motivate further innovation into app development.
November 23, 2011
Great overview of the basic fundamentals of thinking on how you can architect and design incentives to illicit the desired behavior from you users.
Frameworks can be used beyond "gamifying" apps. Having recently read Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Prof. Cass R. Sunstein, struck the similarities between the two books.
A great skim for those wanting for ways to think about the psychological profiles of your users.
A great read for those who are actually tasked with embedding these hooks into your app
A great toolkit that walks you through available tools to code hooks or use APIs to include loyalty modules.
Frameworks can be used beyond "gamifying" apps. Having recently read Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Prof. Cass R. Sunstein, struck the similarities between the two books.
A great skim for those wanting for ways to think about the psychological profiles of your users.
A great read for those who are actually tasked with embedding these hooks into your app
A great toolkit that walks you through available tools to code hooks or use APIs to include loyalty modules.
January 15, 2017
For somebody like myself who's run informational websites for years, but has always struggled to keep user engaged I got a ton our of this book. Its really helped me to abstract the idea of visitors into something more tangible than just anonymous blips of traffic.
Frankly, it put to bed the idea that one my fledgling sites even needs a CMS. Because in the construct of a website who's role is that of an expert system at a point additional content has diminishing returns. To the extent that the game is really about managing the lifecycle of a visitor to maximize interaction. Since that's the only way of increasing the profits per visit once you hit that content ceiling.
Frankly, it put to bed the idea that one my fledgling sites even needs a CMS. Because in the construct of a website who's role is that of an expert system at a point additional content has diminishing returns. To the extent that the game is really about managing the lifecycle of a visitor to maximize interaction. Since that's the only way of increasing the profits per visit once you hit that content ceiling.
January 3, 2012
It is a good compendium of gamification patterns used in successful websites and companies.
I purchased the eletronic version and there are some things that bug me about this book: it has blocks inviting me to go to the same website in EVERY chapter. Apart from that, there is also an sponsored chapter. :-S
Anyway, if you plan to use gamification concepts in your product/website, this book is a must have.
I purchased the eletronic version and there are some things that bug me about this book: it has blocks inviting me to go to the same website in EVERY chapter. Apart from that, there is also an sponsored chapter. :-S
Anyway, if you plan to use gamification concepts in your product/website, this book is a must have.
November 23, 2014
Good books for summarizing gamified techniques. The book helps me to organize concepts and I realized what knowledge i have been missing. The last part about coding and platform can be skip by developers. Anyway, this is an interesting book.
February 11, 2016
Quite useful guideline for those, who wish to implement gamification on their web resources. The last chapters are a bit technical and code-rich, but it is easy to understand the logic behind the code and use it in web and/or mobile applications.
October 16, 2016
The book was ok, but not as informative as I would have liked it to be. It give you some basic inofrmation but it doesn't really help you out with much advice on how to implement the details for your gamified solution.
May 24, 2011
A fine treatment of how game mechanics work, how different sites and social networks utilize said mechanics, and get you thinking on how to design your own viral game.
August 6, 2012
A great book to push an idea into the business world. Although the "coding" part was not engaging for someone like me with zero Ruby experience.
February 18, 2012
[TO EXPAND. Strong points: gamification elements; structured approach; extensive examples. Weak points: high-level; coding part felt shallow and just a space-filler.]
April 7, 2012
Really good introduction into gamification
Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews