The Gamification Report Blog

Think of how much you played as a child. You exerted a tremendous amount of energy, and spent as much time as possible, playing games. Why such a commitment? Because it was fun!

Ultimately, we were motivated by "fun," though we differ in our definitions of fun. Our brains have receptors for...

Beginning Warning

What motivates your learner? The answer is more complex and complicated than you may think, certainly more complex and more complicated than popular business books would lead you to believe. 

When it comes to assessing the motivational profile of learners, the first and...

With a nod to Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, it’s important to know WHY we are gamifying a program or process before we begin to actually gamify it. If I could anticipate what he would say (at least a few years ago) about the WHY of gamification, I believe Sinek would say our WHY will...

Roughly 10,000 years ago, humans created formalized language. Before then, they certainly communicated, but with grunts and gestures. With language, people could share important concepts with each other, warn about dangers, entertain, and preserve the tribe’s history by telling stories to...

Gamification is the use of game elements and game-design techniques in non-game contexts. Let me break that down.

Game Elements:  Think of game elements as a toolkit for building a game. Game elements include game pieces, avatars, rules, scoring points, proceeding to the next level,...

In his seminal work describing flow, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi discusses the frustration we feel when a challenge is more difficult than our abilities, or how boring a task will be if our skills surpass the challenge. Flow, he says, comes at the balance between challenge and...

What Uber Can Teach Us About Engagement

by Jonathan Peters, PhD

In an effort to continue the piling-on of Uber Technologies, The New York Times published an article that is critical of Uber’s use of “psychological tricks” to “manipulate” people to drive at...