For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business [Kindle Edition]

I am kind of biased here as I was one of the 8000 students of Kevin Werbach's online course on Coursera (Gamification 2012) who got the certification. The online course itself was excellent and very much engaging. Certainly highly recommended!

The book start with a general introduction and builds up by asking the question if gamification is right for your business challenge (following four core questions):
- Motivation: Where would you derive value from encouraging behavior?
- Meaningful choices: Are your target activities sufficiently interesting?
- Structure: Can the desired behaviors be modeled through a set of algorithms?
- Potential conflicts: Can the game avoid conflicts with existing motivational structures?

It continues on what makes gamification work - what motivates? Furthermore it explores game elements like the classic PBL triad (points, badges and leaderboards) in all its details.

The book continues with a very clear framework on how to create a gamified system. Having worked out myself a business model following this six steps framework, I can gladly say it does makes sense to follow these steps to get actual results rather fast.

A nice chapter on possible pitfalls is added at the very end.

This book "For the Win" delivers nicely as a good introduction on the interesting topic of gamification. Keep in mind it is actually only 100 pages about, so when expecting an in-depth look into gamification you will need to look elsewhere. Despite being short (in pages) it does cover the concepts of gamification very nicely.

A great introduction!

Contents:

Introduction: Why can't business be fun?
Level 1: Getting into the Game: An introduction to gamification.
Level 2: Game Thinking: Learning to think like a game designer.
Level 3: Why Games Work: The rules of motivation.
Level 4: The Gamification Toolkit: Game elements.
Level 5: Game Changer: Six steps to gamification.
Level 6: Epic fails: And how to avoid them.
Endgame: In conclusion
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Additional resources
About the authors

A well-designed game is a guided missile to the motivational heart of the human psyche, and the lessons that games can teach can be valuable tools in addressing serious business pursuits like marketing, productivity enhancement, innovation, customer engagement, human resources and sustainability, according to Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter in this book.

At the simplest level, gamification is about reverse-engineering games to discover what makes them so compelling, and then devising ways of applying those compelling features to enhance motivation in a business environment. Game elements which are explained in the book include:

* Dynamics: constraints, emotions, narrative, progression and relationships
* Mechanics: challenges, chance, competition, cooperation, feedback, resource acquisition, rewards, transactions, turns and win states
* Components: achievements, avatars, badges, boss fights, collections, combat, content unlocking, gifting, leaderboards, levels, points, quests, teams and virtual goods

The book does not provide sure-fire techniques for making the workplace compelling using gamification; instead, it outlines a range of tools and leaves to the reader the difficult design process of applying them to a business environment in a way which will increase engagement without negative side-effects. The authors recommend that the design process start with defining business objectives and target behaviours, and work from there to apply a suitable range of game elements to business processes, using a process of trial-and-error to optimise the results. There are of course plenty of things that can go horribly wrong, and a whole chapter is devoted to epic fails and how to avoid them.

True to the design of many computer games, the book is written in Levels rather than Chapters. The early levels are simple, and subsequent ones introduce more complexity. Unfortunately they read just like chapters to me, and the experience of reading the book was not quite a white-knuckled gaming experience. Nonetheless, the authors are undoubtedly correct when they say that gamification is going to become an increasingly important part of business, and this book provides a very useful introduction to that subject.

"For the Win" is striking in its clarity and persuasiveness, and like your favorite game, it rewards your effort with a continuous stream of fascinating examples from around the world. At the same time it is honest, with the authors repeatedly noting when game thinking may not be appropriate for a particular business goal. But the support and relevance for game theory to achieve business success far outweigh the exceptions. Beyond the many fun examples of game theory applications, the book also delves into the psychology of motivation to help the reader understand why "gamification" works. One of the most interesting things about the book is how many levels the authors genuinely achieve in dissecting the conclusion that "fun motivates" in ways that are both sophisticated and entertaining. And, while the book emphasizes that its overarching game analogy is more related to game design than game play, for those of us who recognize the many references to popular games electronic and otherwise peppered throughout, part of the reward here is some sense of gamer vindication.