Wharton Book and Podcast: On Serious Gamification

Book and podcast on the subject:

Gamification Is Changing How We Work — and Succeed

‘For the Win’ authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter discuss the revised and updated edition of their book and how gamification has changed the way we work toward goals.

Podcast  At link ... 

The story of gamification isn’t fun and games. It’s serious.

Authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter have been at the forefront of the development of gamification tools in business. In a revised and updated edition of their book, For the Win: The Power of Gamification and Game Thinking in Business, Education, Government, and Social Impact, they explain that when used carefully and thoughtfully, gamification produces great outcomes for users, in ways that are hard to replicate through other methods. Other times, companies misuse the “guided missile” of gamification to have people work and do things in ways that are against their self-interest.

The authors recently sat down with Brett LoGiurato, senior editor at Wharton School Press, to discuss their revised and updated book.

An edited transcript of the podcast conversation follows. 

Brett LoGiurato: I wanted to talk first about your initial interest in gamification and what drew you together. I understand it started as a shared interest in World of Warcraft, so how did you develop it from there?

Kevin Werbach: It was a shared interest in games and the power of games. We were originally both faculty at Wharton, and we were both studying what was then called “cyberspace”—virtual worlds. Dan actually did this work before I did, but he and others started looking at virtual worlds of games and comparing that to the virtual world that was getting built with the internet in cyberspace. I found that incredibly fascinating, and I found Dan to be a really brilliant guy, as well. So we became friends, and one of the things that we did was with a group of researchers, journalists and others who studied games in virtual worlds — we got together and started playing a game, World of Warcraft, back when it originally launched, now 15-plus years ago.  ...'

Gamification for Productivity

 Current re-look at gamification.   We did a brief trial of using gamification for crowd sourced problem solving.   Not productivity, but for potential originality in solutions.  No pressure to participate.  You did have to have some background knowledge to be invited.   

Are we having fun (at work) yet?  in Strategy-Business

Games or contests meant to inject some motivation and productivity into the workday can backfire if employees feel pressured to take part.

Anybody who’s endured a tense Scrabble night with their family or been picked last for the team at school knows that “friendly” competition isn’t always fun and games. What might seem like endless amusement to some can be a source of anxiety to others. Nevertheless, in an effort to boost performance, lighten the mood, or relieve the tedious nature of repetitive work, many managers are introducing game-playing to the workplace, typically in the form of app-based competitions.

by Angela Lester and Claudia Montgomery

This so-called gamification of work has caught on in several fields, including retail, banking, and human resources. It’s been hailed as a way to keep employees more engaged and focused (especially those in younger generations who grew up playing video games). The appeal is obvious: Research shows that job satisfaction is the key to employee happiness and engagement, and engaged workers tend to be dynamic, supportive, and committed at work. Engaged employees also deliver higher-quality customer service and are less likely to quit, which cuts down on organizational turnover costs  ... '

Ohio's Vax a Million as Gamification

Followed this closely, good short description.   The embedded psych is well described.

Why Public Health & Civics Lotteries Are So Highly Effective: Gamification  By Gabe Zichermann in the Gamification Blog 

This year I got a pretty amazing birthday present: a public example of highly effective health gamification.

Namely, Ohio’s Vax a Million campaign, which is giving away $1M per week to residents that get vaccinated. Vaccinations jumped 28% total, with weekly vaccinations increasing by over 50% week over week, according to the state. Maryland and New York have followed suit, and several other states (and perhaps even the Federal government) are poised to follow suit.

Large scale social good gamification is not new, per se. And we’ve been talking about the importance of lotteries to incentivize good behavior for years, including in the fields of prize-linked savings and rescuing journalism. But with the COVID-19 pandemic looming large, and a sinking vaccination rate in the US, the idea has received some major new attention. So why do behavioral lotteries work so well, and how can we expand their use?

Behavioral Lotteries take advantage of several cognitive biases and psychological processes that are relevant for public health and social good:  ... ' 

Record Gaming Sales

 Implications? Increase of spare time? Increase of game hardware sales. Less serious work being done?   Opportunities for more gamification?    Will this continue postpandemic?

We're still spending record amounts on gaming, a year into the pandemic in Engadget  By J. Fingas  @jonfingas 

The PS5 and Switch played key roles in the sales surge.  

Video game sales are still smashing records roughly a year after the COVID-19 pandemic led many people to stay indoors. The NPD Group has determined that video game spending in the US surged 18 percent in March 2021 compared to a year earlier, hitting a new record of $5.6 billion. Hardware sales in particular jumped 47 percent to $680 million, breaking a March record that hasn't been touched since 2008 — yes, the heyday of the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360.  ... "

Contact Tracking Failing

I have read in other places it is not only a failure in the US.   Is it merely a measure of trust?  Having enough people buy into the capability, without clear direct indication of value to the user.  Could it have used a game oriented model?   Anyone done or proposed that?    Seems  a potential for future efforts.

Contact Tracing Is Failing in the U.S. Here’s How to Fix It.

For starters, turn responsibility over to local organizations and communities, where trust is higher.

Sarit Markovich Kellogg Insight

As COVID cases surged across the U.S. last December, the CDC reckoned with a stark truth: contact tracing couldn’t be scaled up to match the virus’ spread.

The practice of contact tracing—or identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to a disease—is an essential tool for controlling outbreaks by interrupting a disease’s transmission chains. And indeed, combined with lockdowns and mask ordinances, some countries have had great success using contact tracing to reduce outbreaks.  ... "

Amazon Gamification Example

Intriguing example, where can gamification work in supply chain?    Our own efforts in the space were often not taken seriously?

 Amazon expands gamification program that encourages warehouse employees to work harder

The program, FC Games, is expanding to at least 20 fulfillment centers in the US

By Nick Statt@nickstatt   in TheVerge  .... 

Reinforcement Learning and Entropy

 Have recently been looking at Reinforcement Learning methods.   And this as a form of simulation-optimization for 'Twin' style models that need training.  Berkeley BAIR  makes some points about entropy (disorder) in a recent  article.   (Technical)  Consideringe the application. See the full article, linked to below,  for sufficient detail.

Maximum Entropy RL (Provably) Solves Some Robust RL Problems  By Ben Eysenbach    Mar 10, 2021    Berkeley BAIR  AI

Nearly all real-world applications of reinforcement learning involve some degree of shift between the training environment and the testing environment. However, prior work has observed that even small shifts in the environment cause most RL algorithms to perform markedly worse. As we aim to scale reinforcement learning algorithms and apply them in the real world, it is increasingly important to learn policies that are robust to changes in the environment.

Robust reinforcement learning maximizes reward on an adversarially-chosen environment.

Broadly, prior approaches to handling distribution shift in RL aim to maximize performance in either the average case or the worst case. The first set of approaches, such as domain randomization, train a policy on a distribution of environments, and optimize the average performance of the policy on these environments. While these methods have been successfully applied to a number of areas (e.g., self-driving cars, robot locomotion and manipulation), their success rests critically on the design of the distribution of environments. Moreover, policies that do well on average are not guaranteed to get high reward on every environment. The policy that gets the highest reward on average might get very low reward on a small fraction of environments. The second set of approaches, typically referred to as robust RL, focus on the worst-case scenarios. The aim is to find a policy that gets high reward on every environment within some set. Robust RL can equivalently be viewed as a two-player game between the policy and an environment adversary. The policy tries to get high reward, while the environment adversary tries to tweak the dynamics and reward function of the environment so that the policy gets lower reward. One important property of the robust approach is that, unlike domain randomization, it is invariant to the ratio of easy and hard tasks. Whereas robust RL always evaluates a policy on the most challenging tasks, domain randomization will predict that the policy is better if it is evaluated on a distribution of environments with more easy tasks.

Prior work has suggested a number of algorithms for solving robust RL problems. Generally, these algorithms all follow the same recipe: take an existing RL algorithm and add some additional machinery on top to make it robust. For example, robust value iteration uses Q-learning as the base RL algorithm, and modifies the Bellman update by solving a convex optimization problem in the inner loop of each Bellman backup. Similarly, Pinto ‘17 uses TRPO as the base RL algorithm and periodically updates the environment based on the behavior of the current policy. These prior approaches are often difficult to implement and, even once implemented correctly, they requiring tuning of many additional hyperparameters. Might there be a simpler approach, an approach that does not require additional hyperparameters and additional lines of code to debug? ... " 

Videogames as the Future of Work

Something we examined briefly.  Can we convert work into game?   Some people already do in their heads, is that workable?  Key drivers?

Are Videogames the Future of Remote Work?

The Wall Street Journal

Christopher Mims

The startup Gather offers a videogame-like format for remote work, supporting virtual two-dimensional workspaces for enterprise clients. Gather's servers provide an artificial office environment for remote employees' avatars, including interaction via videoconferencing interfaces and collaboration on Web-based documents and applications. Nearly a dozen startups like Gather are building clientele that includes workers at ride-sharing company Uber, universities, and IBM; customers use these platforms to hold classes and events, and increasingly as an all-day replacement for office work. The builders and users of these platforms claim they activate place cells in users’ brains, enabling socialization and collaboration based on routines acquired from physical office experience. ... '

On Serious Gamification

Podcast on the evolution of serious gamification.   We used it to some extent in the enterprise, but never to my satisfaction.  It requires a change in business user behavior.  There is much opportunity here.

Podcast:

‘For the Win’ authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter discuss the revised and updated edition of their book and how gamification has changed the way we work toward goals.

The story of gamification isn’t fun and games. It’s serious.

Authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter have been at the forefront of the development of gamification tools in business. In a revised and updated edition of their book, For the Win: The Power of Gamification and Game Thinking in Business, Education, Government, and Social Impact, they explain that when used carefully and thoughtfully, gamification produces great outcomes for users, in ways that are hard to replicate through other methods. Other times, companies misuse the “guided missile” of gamification to have people work and do things in ways that are against their self-interest.

The authors recently sat down with Brett LoGiurato, senior editor at Wharton School Press, to discuss their revised and updated book.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows:

Brett LoGiurato: I wanted to talk first about your initial interest in gamification and what drew you together. I understand it started as a shared interest in World of Warcraft, so how did you develop it from there?

Kevin Werbach: It was a shared interest in games and the power of games. We were originally both faculty at Wharton, and we were both studying what was then called “cyberspace”—virtual worlds. Dan actually did this work before I did, but he and others started looking at virtual worlds of games and comparing that to the virtual world that was getting built with the internet in cyberspace. I found that incredibly fascinating, and I found Dan to be a really brilliant guy, as well. So we became friends, and one of the things that we did was with a group of researchers, journalists and others who studied games in virtual worlds — we got together and started playing a game, World of Warcraft, back when it originally launched, now 15-plus years ago.

That experience of seeing what it was actually like in this incredibly sophisticated virtual world really further kindled our interest. Then when this phenomenon of gamification started to develop a couple of years later, people were saying, “We can learn from games and take insights from developing effective games and apply that to business and apply that to the things in the real world that we are studying.” I think that’s really the point where both of us jumped and said, “Yes, we really think this is something significant, and we can contribute to the understanding.”  ....  '

Games for Education

Will games work for this purpose?  Look forward to see a report on how well.  A very quick look at this makes me wonder, but look forward to seeing more details.  Gamification can provide a means of engagement, but must also have the best possible goals.    Thats why its very useful to emphasize recognized fundamentals in education.   Will this address these fundamentals?

 With Coronavirus Closing Schools, Here’s How Video Games are Helping Teachers
The Washington Post
By Elise Favis

The quarantine caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted teachers to utilize popular video games like Assassin's Creed, Minecraft, and Roblox to conduct lessons on a range of topics. Game publishers are facilitating this trend by making their platforms as accessible as possible to educators during the crisis. In 2018, Ubisoft added a new mode to Assassin's Creed: Origins, which is set in ancient Egypt, called Discovery Tour. This mode lets players embark on guided tours through famous historical sites and cities. This mode was recently adapted for Assassin's Creed: Odyssey—set in ancient Greece—complete with additional content like quizzes. Minecraft also comes with an education mode, which Microsoft has made free for educators and students through June 2020 due to the pandemic. Roblox is a platform that lets players create their own video games from scratch. The company has partnered with more than 170 educators from 35 countries to discuss applications for the game. ... "

Linking Gamification and AI

Steve Omohundro talks some favorite topics of mine in a recent presentation, slides at the link.  Integration of gamification a favorite.  We used gamification as a means to find alternative 'expert crowdourcing' to explore alternative solutions to wicked problems.   In the supply chain space.  Makes mention of Bytedance, that I had not heard of, will take a look.

Talk: The AI Platform Business Revolution, Matchmaking Empathetic technology and AI Gamification.

On October 15, Steve Omohundro spoke at FXPAL (FX Palo Alto Laboratory) about “The AI Platform Business Revolution, Matchmaking, Empathetic Technology, and AI Gamification”:

Abstract
Popular media is full of stories about self-driving cars, video deepfakes, and robot citizens. But this kind of popular artificial intelligence is having very little business impact. The actual impact of AI on business is in automating business processes and in creating the “AI Platform Business Revolution”. Platform companies create value by facilitating exchanges between two or more groups. AI is central to these businesses for matchmaking between producers and consumers, organizing massive data flows, eliminating malicious content, providing empathetic personalization, and generating engagement through gamification. The platform structure creates moats which generate outsized sustainable profits. This is why platform businesses are now dominating the world economy. The top five companies by market cap, half of the unicorn startups, and most of the biggest IPOs and acquisitions are platforms. For example, the platform startup Bytedance is now worth $75 billion based on three simple AI technologies.

In this talk we survey the current state of AI and show how it will generate massive business value in coming years. A recent McKinsey study estimates that AI will likely create over 70 trillion dollars of value by 2030. Every business must carefully choose its AI strategy now in order to thrive over coming decades. We discuss the limitations of today’s deep learning based systems and the “Software 2.0” infrastructure which has arisen to support it. We discuss the likely next steps in natural language, machine vision, machine learning, and robotic systems. We argue that the biggest impact will be created by systems which serve to engage, connect, and help individuals. There is an enormous opportunity to use this technology to create both social and business value.  .... '

Game Based Learning and the Power of the Human Element

Of interest to my readers,  following up:

Franz,

My new, co-authored book has been launched and may be of interest to members of your community.

Emotify!: The Power of the Human Element in Game-Based Learning, Serious Games and Experiential Education,

 is available at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1704604680/
or AMAZON UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/product/1704604680/

You may find the following links of interest:

• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/death-lecture-michael-sutton-phd-cmc-fbei-mit/
• https://www.seriousgamemarket.com/2019/11/new-book-emotify-dynamics-of-successful.html
• https://www.shortsims.com/single-post/2019/11/29/Episode-29-With-Dr-Michael-Sutton-on-The-Use-of-Quests-and-Other-Activities-to-Develop-Emotional-Intelligence-from-the-New-Book-Emotify

Please contact me at michaeljdsutton@gmail.com with any questions, comments, or constructive criticism.   Have fun reading!         Michael Sutton

Generating Text for All

Should we delight or be worried?

The world’s most freakishly realistic text-generating A.I. just got gamified  By Luke Dormehl  in DigitalTrends

What would an adventure game designed by the world’s most dangerous A.I. look like? A neuroscience grad student is here to help you find out.

Earlier this year, OpenAI, an A.I. startup once sponsored by Elon Musk, created a text-generating bot deemed too dangerous to ever release to the public. Called GPT-2, the algorithm was designed to generate text so humanlike that it could convincingly pass itself off as being written by a person. Feed it the start of a newspaper article, for instance, and it would dream up the rest, complete with imagined quotes. The results were a Turing Test tailor-made for the fake news-infused world of 2019.

Of course, like Hannibal Lecter, Heath Ledger’s Joker, or any other top-notch antagonist, it didn’t take GPT-2 too long to escape from its prison. Within months, a version of it had found its way online (you can try it out here.) Now it has formed the basis for a text adventure game created by Northwestern University neuroscience graduate student Nathan Whitmore. Building on the predictive neural network framework of GPT-2, GPT Adventure promises to rewrite itself every time it’s played. It’s a procedurally generated game experience in which players can do whatever they want within the confines of a world controlled by the fugitive A.I.

And you know what? Not since Sarah and John Connor teamed up with The Terminator to take on Skynet has the world’s most dangerous artificial intelligence been quite so much fun.  ... "

Game Builder to Build Your Serious Games?

Took a quick look, and the approach is set up for non-serious games.  But could such a method be used to construct special purpose games that would interact with their context to achieve serious goals?  Always thought you needed much better control of the context and meta-game and goals to make that happen.  Is that here?

Google's Game Builder Turns Building Multiplayer Games into a Game 
in TechCrunch
By Frederic Lardinois

Google's Area 120 team has developed Game Builder, a free tool for PC and macOS users who want to build their own 3D games without having to learn to code. The overall design aesthetic is at least partially inspired by Minecraft, but users are free to create whatever kind of game they want. Game Builder can create first-person shooter games, a platformer, and a demo of the tool's card system for programming more complex interactions. Building a 3D level is like playing a game itself, and users can build multiplayer games and even create games in real time with other users. In addition, players can use JavaScript to go beyond some of the pre-programmed features. Google is also relying on Poly, its library of 3D objects, to give users lots of options for creating and designing different levels. ... '

Fortnite Gaming Powers Business Technology

We examined examples of game engines for analytic applications early on.  Now seeing the addition of VR and other immersion techniques.   Management still needs some help understanding this.  Best way is to start with currently used analytic methods and then extend from there to show augmentation.  Some good examples in this article of use.

Engine Behind 'Fortnite' Powers Business Technology 
The Wall Street Journal
By Agam Shah

Businesses are tapping the gaming-engine software of "Fortnite" and other videogames for applications ranging from car design to drug discovery. Gaming engines exploit complex calculations performed by hardware like graphics processing units to create photorealistic three-dimensional visualization and simulation, in addition to physics models. In conjunction with virtual reality (VR) technology, gaming engines let designers and engineers invent products, visualize sophisticated designs, and structure worker-training programs. Designers at McLaren Automotive are using Epic Games' Unreal Engine to create, assess, and refine digital car models, expediting a process that formerly relied on drawings and modeling clay. Meanwhile, the U.K.'s C4X Discovery Holdings uses gaming engines to discover new disease-fighting molecules, with chemists employing VR headsets and in-house software to configure virtual molecules for more precise targeting.   ... "

Amazon Using Gamification in Warehouses

Had not heard of this, but always looking for ways we can augment work by tweaking behavior.  Like adding some elements of fun.   Don't know if it actually works in practice,  but it is worth the try.

‘MissionRacer’: How Amazon turned the tedium of warehouse work into a game  By Greg Bensinger in the WP   

Inside several of Amazon’s cavernous warehouses, hundreds of employees spend hours a day playing video games. Some compete by racing virtual dragons or sports cars around a track, while others collaborate to build castles piece by piece.

But they aren’t whiling the time away playing Fortnite and Minecraft. Rather, they’re racing to fill customer orders, their progress reflected in a video game format that is part of an experiment by the e-commerce giant to help reduce the tedium of its physically demanding jobs. And if it helps improve the efficiency of work like plucking items from or stowing products on shelves for 10 hours a day or more, all the better. .... " 

Gaming AI

Have not heard this discussed much of late, but integrating human skills a favorite idea of mine.  We had it succeed in some cases.  Sometimes it did not work because it required the integration of more human resources which can be more difficult than just plugging in an algorithmic solution.  Worth considering.

Why gaming AI won’t help make AI work in the real world—but could

The underlying game-theory principles could be applied to the real world, only if the test cases reflected the real world, not artificial fantasy environments   By James Kobielus in InfoWorld

Multiplayer games are seen as a fruitful arena in which to simulate many real-world AI application scenarios—such as autonomous vehicles, swarming drones, and collaborative commerce—that may be too expensive, speculative, or risky to test fully in the real world. And they’re an environment in which researchers can explore the frontiers of game theory, decision theory, and other branches of advanced mathematics and the computational sciences.

But when you dig deeper into AI in gaming, it becomes obvious that very little translates to the real world, so be very cautious of any business-oriented AI that comes out gaming contexts. But the underlying game-theory principles could be applied to the real world, only if the test cases reflected the real world, not artificial fantasy environments. .... "

Google Creates Doodle Games with Garden Gnomes

Once again Google leverages their search page to present a clever yet simple gaming idea.  I like their use of their entry page to teach about history, technology and even approaches to simple game design.  Very hard to predict what will be next.  Gamification can be used to teach employees about what can be done in context,  and how to understand and achieve company goals.  More about their latest Gnome game.

Echo Buttons for Games

The somewhat mysterious Echo 'buttons' and now more clearly assigned to game playing.    Have yet to see a very engaging game there.   Now think about how these might be used for gamification, aka 'serious games'?   Or crowd sourcing by low effort voting or signaling?  By colleagues or customers.  Given to key customers to build their engagement?   A reminder of the 'Easy Button'.   I like the open ended aspect of these.  Just add creativity.

Revisiting Virtual Worlds

As I have chronicled here, we looked closely at the Virtual World Idea, with the support of some management.   But it never stuck well enough, had too many problems involved with just getting things done.  And the older generations rolled their eyes.  But now that is turning over, and changes are underway, does it have a place?

    Its not augmenting reality, but replacing it with one that's potentially built for the job at hand.   A piece about changes being considered.  More closely connected to an effort called Sansar, which appears to bring it closer to game environments, which we also sought to make this useful for business.   Note that IEEE has a Virtual Worlds Standards Group, but a quick look at it shows the work is still thin.