"Despite the sobering economic shocks of recent years, the Fun at Work movement seems irrepressible. Major companies boast of employing Chief Fun Officers or Happiness Engineers; corporations call upon a burgeoning industry of happiness consultants, who'll construct a Gross Happiness Index for your workplace, then advise you on ways to boost it."
"Gamification, as research firm Forrester defines it, is "the insertion of game dynamics and mechanics into non-game activities to drive a desired behavior." To be successful, businesses need to engage their communities in ways that match business goals, whether that's by increasing communication with employees and customers, reducing support costs, or promoting a greater sense of community and recognition."
Gamification expert Yu-Kai Chou has developed a framework that takes a human-centered approach to analyzing gaming strategies. This changes the focus to how the user interacts with the training program or business application as well as the rewards, gains or detriments that can occur. He created a framework called Octalysis, which can be used to assess and visually represent how well strategies are implemented based on core drives, which then fall into quadrants of deeper understanding.
"Gamification can turn otherwise unpleasant tasks like data analysis, setting through data, paying attention to specific code and other intense activities that can be quite tedious and boring and turn them into something fun. This is why Gamification is such a hot trend in technology because it can truly reinvent work."
"A little more than a year ago, Gartner said gamification was being "driven by novelty and hype" and that by 2014, 80 percent of current gamified applications will "fail to meet business objectives primarily because of poor design.""
"Amy Jo Kim, Ph.D. is a leading consultant on gamification as a business model to increase customer engagement. She also holds a Ph.D. in behavioral psychology. In 2010, Kim reworked Bartle's Player Types Model. She replaced the "Killer" type with "Express" -- a much more business- and school-friendly descriptor! Completing the axis, "Compete" took the place of "Achiever," "Explore" replaced "Explorer," and "Collaborate" replaced "Cooperate.""