So, where does gamification come from? As I've said it's pretty new as a business concept, but as it turns out, it's roots go way back. A 100 years ago, the Cracker Jack company started putting a toy surprise in every box. And since then, countless companies have use games and toys and other kinds of fun as a way of selling products. There are many other related examples like the S&H Green Stamps, frequent flyer program and so forth that have some of these components in them. But there are gamification in the sense if we talk about today systematically thinking about how to make things more game like to rise business results. The first example that we can find of the term gamification was from 1980. It involves Richard Bartle, who is a noted game designer and researcher at University of Essex in England, and he was brought into a project called MUD1. Mud1 was the first multi-user domain or multi-user dungeon. Essentially, the first massively multi-player online game. Didn't look like much. As you see here, it was a text based system on a university computer network. But MUD1 was the first time people could experience a shared virtual world in this way, and thus was a precursor for things like Second Life and World of Warcraft today. Bartle's role in this project was to take what was basically a collaboration platform and gamify it, make it feel more game-like. So, he actually jokes today that gamification then meant taking something that wasn't a game and making it a game. Where as now it involves breaking games down into these constituent elements. So, taking an actual game and turning it into something that's really not a game. The work that Bartle did was called gamification. But, it really wasn't the same kind of thing that we see today. But there were other developments at the time that helped to lay the groundwork for today's gamification. One of them was research by education scholars looking at video games and learning. So, Tom Malone who is now at the Sloan School of Business at MIT, started aro und this time doing work on early video games. Remember, this was 1980. Very early, simplistic games on early PCs. But he was able to show kids could learn from playing these video games. Since then, a number of researchers have done similar and more sophisticated work. One of them is James Paul G, who is at Arizona State University. He's written a number of books about how video games, even off-the-shelf, commercial, entertainment oriented games, like the Tomb Raider series. Encode powerful knowledge creation and learning mechanisms that relate to all of the deep research that we have on how people learn. A second stream of work that contributed to today's gamification is the Serious Games movement. The Serious Games Initiative was founded in 2002 by Ben Sawyer and David Rejecsk, and it brought together the communities in the private sector, academia, and the military that were using games, full-fledged games, for training and simulation various kinds of non-game purposes. So, for example, the military was very interested in being able to simulate the battlefield and also in being able to use games as training mechanism for the thousands upon thousands of soldiers and others that it has to train every year. And many companies had similar interests. Now, serious games are different in a sense from what we're talking about in this course because they're full blown games. You have to actually have to build the simulation for a particular purpose. That's very powerful and there have been tremendous accomplishments using serious games. And, and the work on serious games informs much of what we're doing in gamification today but it's distinct for that reason. The Games for Change movement is a related initiative, or set of initiatives that focuses on using games for social impact. For example, Letting you play a side in the Arab Israeli Conflict in the game called, "Peace Maker", to understand some of the complexities of that incredibly naughty issue. Games are great for teaching systems thinking, for showing you that your individual actions fit into a much more complex larger whole, which is valuable for pure education, and is also valuable in trying to promote understanding of major social issues. Now, the first time that gamification was used in something like the current sense was 2003. When Nick Pelling, a British developer and a designer, set up a consulting firm called Conundra, which was there to promote gamification of consumer products. He wanted to take a hardware product and make it more game-like. Didn't have a lot of success, the consultancy didn't last all that long but it was an indication of this notion that game mechanics and game concepts could be applied in this way to consumer products and other kinds of situation. In 2005, a company called Bunchball was founded. In 2007, it launched it's product, which was really the first gamification platform. They didn't call it that at the time because again the word was not in common usage, but it was the first platform that incorporated mechanics like points and leaderboards and so forth to serve engagements purposes in companies. Since then, Bunchball has been joined by a number of competitors like Badgeville and Bigdoor and Gigya, they are variety of company now that offered these gamification platform to companies and then they also are specialized service providers. Companies like Kiosk which I mentioned and Practically Green and Rypple (Salesforce) which offer gamification services to companies in specific areas as well as many companies now that are building gamification services and systems on their own. In 2010, gamification really took off. This was partly because the community reached critical mass and they agreed to use gamification as the common term, but also partly because of a set of presentations that really crystallized the idea of gamification for people. Probably the most prominent was a presentation by Jesse Schell, a well-known game developer who has his own firm called Schell Games and also teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. Je sse Schell spoke at the DICE Conference, a big games industry confab in 2010, and his presentation immediately went viral. Let's look at a clip of it and see why. Play And what would that world be like. Well, I think it'll be like this. You'll get up in the morning to brush your teeth. And the toothbrush can sense that you're brushing your teeth. And so, hey, good job for you. Ten points for brushing your teeth. And it can measure how long, and you're supposed to brush them for three minutes, and you did a good job. You brushed your teeth for three minutes. And so, you get a bonus for that. And hey, you brushed your teeth every day this week, another bonus. All right. And who cares? The toothpaste company, the toothbrush company, the more you brush the more toothpaste you use. They have invested financial interest. You go to breakfast, there's the cornflakes. On the back, there's a little web game that you can play. While you eat, instead of reading the back, you play a game while you eat your cornflakes. And you get that. And you get ten points just for eating the cornflakes. And then it turns out you can see your list of friends who also have cornflakes, and the scores that they got, because you're wifi, and then Facebook connected and everything, and so, you know, you get five bonus points because you just beat out one of your friends at the cornflakes game. So, then you go and get on the bus. The bus? Why am I taking the bus? You're taking the bus because the government has started giving out all kinds of bonus points to people who use public transportation. And you can use these points for, for tax incentives. And while you're sitting on the bus riding to work and you're playing your little Tetris and getting a few points here and there, you suddenly remember, I had this dream last night. I had a dream that my mother was dancing with this giant Pepsi can. And then you realize, oh yeah, the REMtertainment system. Right? Which is the thing you put in your ear and it can sense when you enter REM sl eep, and then it starts putting little advertisements out there to try and influence your dreams. And, then you can fill out a little form, it's a test to see if those things came through into your dreams. And if they did, then big points for you. Okay. It's a great presentation. I encourage you to watch the rest of it if you can. The link to the YouTube video is there. Now, of course, Jesse was being a little bit sarcastic there but also pushing people to think about just where this could go. And again, it really lit a fire in terms of getting people to imagine the potential of gamification. Something else that had that effect the same year was Jane McGonigal's book, Reality is Broken, and a tech talk that she gave at that point. Jane is a game designer known for her work on what are called alternate reality games. Games that are embedded into the real world. And she talked about how games could actually solve major human problems, help us address things like climate change or inequality in the developing world. And otherwise, make people more healthy, more complete, more engaged and more successful. Jane, herself, doesn't like the term gamification. She doesn't use it in the book. And she's concerned that gamification trivializes the possibilities of using full-fledged deep immersive games to address these issue, but many of her ideas about how games work, how games motivate, are things that we're also going to talk about here in this course under the banner of gamification. So, today gamification is starting to mature. It's still new. We're still developing the ideas. But there are conferences and many companies and different as, areas of the gamification space. There are market research reports giving big figures about the gamification industry. I would take all their specific numbers with a grain of salt, but clearly something is going on here. And clearly, the, the industry is reaching a point where its real and significant. So, we've come a long way, but we also have a long way to go.
