TOPICS INCLUDE:
• Gamification and game principles
• Team building and collaboration
• Experiences and interfaces
• Training and retraining
• Game and simulation dynamics
• Shaping and influencing behavior
• Leveraging gaming data
• Solving complex problems with games
• Innovation and rapid prototyping
CONFERENCE OVERVIEW
Tomorrow, serious work will be done through serious fun. The combination of work, games, and play is a powerful mix that will shape real-life behavior of individuals and organizations. Smart leaders will know how to use games and gaming approaches to help structure the chaos of creative work.
We're quickly moving past simply connecting and integrating a social fabric into every facet of our digital and analog lives; soon, we'll be able to influence individual employee and consumer behavior. Games invigorate and enrich team building. Multiplayer online games can facilitate training and give employees a platform to develop and practice their skills. Players working collaboratively can develop a rich assortment of new strategies and algorithms, innovate collectively, and problem-solve on the fly. Complex problems will be solved using human-directed computing.
More and more, game dynamics are unobtrusively finding their way into real-world scenarios. Games can strengthen a person's ability to translate sensory information quickly into accurate decisions and can change the way our brains process visual information. Are those who play action games better able to make the right decision when they are under pressure? Meanwhile, does some simulation training reinforce bad habits, and if so, how can we avoid this?
Is there evidence to suggest that games, especially networked games, work better than real life? Future workforces may find more incentive to join organizations with significant virtual and game-based environments. We're entering an era in which games will affect our work (and play) lives in profound and possibly imperceptible ways.
Are we hardwired to play games? In this conference, we'll examine the future of games and serious fun, as well as the organizational benefits we can derive from games and gaming in the workplace. What strategies can we employ to further integrate gaming into the enterprise world and embed games into the culture? We've learned the business value of storytelling; will the integration of "fun" be as beneficial?
Intelligence gathering, analysis, manufacturing, marketing, and management will feel the impact of new games and game dynamics. We’ll look at how to harness unpaid armies of players to get very useful work done. The future of serious fun may result in inspired, motivated individuals and inventive enterprises.
WORKSHOP:
GAMIFICATION: SERIOUSLY FUN
May 2, 2011 8:30 AM – 3:30 PM
Gamification is the use of gaming principles and mechanics for nongame applications. To date, most of these applications have been associated with consumer-oriented websites and mobile devices. We are now seeing the adoption of gamification in more traditional enterprise environments, where the notion of doing something "fun" is believed to increase employee morale, make training more effective, and build fruitful internal and external collaborations.
Gamification works because it takes advantage of what we as humans find psychologically absorbing, interesting, and rewarding. Properly designed, it can help encourage desired behaviors and make mundane tasks enjoyable.
What is gamification's secret sauce? How can we use the techniques of game designers to improve non-game-type experiences? As more and more demands compete for our attention, technology outputs and interfaces need to be more engaging than ever.
In this workshop, we'll learn how to most effectively use gamification within the enterprise. Through discussion and hands-on, small-group exercises, we’ll explore the following themes:
• What makes games fun?
• What game elements are right for your application?
• What are "game mechanics," and how can they be used?
• How can story and characters make an experience more engaging?
• What game designers know about interface design.
• Play-testing dos and don'ts.
• Gamification can backfire; what you should watch for.
• Technologies: which ones should you use?
• Balancing: the delicate art of economy management.
• The importance of social and community factors.
Workshop leader: Mr. Jesse Schell
Chief Executive Officer/Creative Director
Schell Games
Before starting Schell Games in 2004, Mr. Jesse Schell was the creative director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, where he worked and played for seven years as a designer, programmer, and manager. Mr. Schell was involved with numerous projects for Disney theme parks and DisneyQuest, as well as Toontown Online, the first massively multiplayer game for kids. Schell Games is a full-service game design and development studio specializing in creating innovative, interactive experiences. He is on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, teaching classes in game design and leading several initiatives, including GameInnovation.com, a systematic study of the history of videogame innovations, and Hazmat: Hotzone, an antiterror team-training game for the nation's firefighters. Previously, Jesse worked as writer, director, performer, juggler, comedian, and circus artist for both Freihofer's Mime Circus and the Juggler's Guild. He was also a software engineer at IBM and Bell Communications Research. Jesse was the chairman of the International Game Developers Association; and he was named one of the world's Top 100 Young Innovators by Technology Review in 2004. He is the author of The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.