A half-day, hands-on crash course in engaging people with gameful design.
Conducted at CHI PLAY 2017 on October 15 in Amsterdam, How to Do Gameful Design is your chance to learn a comprehensive, research-based, validated method for gamification from its creator, Sebastian Deterding.
Gamification, the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, is an increasingly popular strategy for increasing user engagement. While there is now an abundance of industry methods for gamification, these are rarely grounded in research and often skip over crucial aspects of the design process, such as selecting the right game design elements. Most pursue a ‘cargo cult’ application of the same few design features – points, badges, and leaderboards – with no regard of the application context or deeper understanding why and when these elements work (or not).
In response, we developed research-grounded method for gameful design, the lens of intrinsic skill atoms approach. This method revolves around identifying the inherent challenges in the to-be-gamified activity, to then tease out the latent skill atom around it – the systemic structure of goals, actions, rules, and feedback that give rise to said challenge. The method then guides designers with the help of design lenses to either ideate entirely new skill atoms, or to identify shortcomings in the particular design of the skill atom’s elements and ideate particular improvements that would support motivation and engagement. The method has been tested and iteratively refined in over 20 industry projects and workshops, ranging across a large number of practitioner audiences and use cases, from online dating to car assembly training, disaster response, quality assurance in highly automated factory contexts, self-driven learning of analytics software, and online video engagement. It has also seen adoption among HCI researchers and been validated in its utility and effectiveness by independent research groups.
At the end of the course, participants will be able to independently understand and identify the key challenges of gameful design and apply the lens of intrinsic skill atoms method in the design of gamified systems.
This course is addressed to all design practitioners in the UX and games industry in designing gamified systems, as well as HCI researchers wanting to design gamified systems or advance the research of gamification design. It is open to all experience levels, although participants with basic familiarity with interaction and/or game design methods (user research, ideation, prototyping, user testing) and gamification will benefit the most.
The course begins with an introductory lecture that presents the method in its steps. Participants then use instructions and templates to collectively identify the latent skill atom of the worked example, followed by questions about the method arising in this step. Participants will then break into small groups that use provided design lenses to each analyze one structural element of the skill atom per group – goals, actions, feedback, rules, or challenge – and assemble and sketch improvement ideas via provided ideation techniques and sketchboards. The course closes with a facilitated open question segment to address key recurring issues that emerged in the course of applying the method.
Founder and principal designer of the design agency coding conduct, Sebastian has a 10+ year career as a user experience, game, and gamification designer and consultant, creating engaging experiences touching millions of users for clients including the BBC, BMW, Deutsche Telekom, KLM, Novartis, or Supercell.
As founder of the Gamification Research Network, co-editor of The Gameful World (MIT Press, 2015), and author of field-defining publications with 5,000+ citations, Sebastian is one of the international key scholars in gamification research. A senior research fellow at the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York (UK), his research is exploring how to translate game design into other design fields.
Sebastian has keynoted, presented, and organized workshops at venues across the globe including CHI, Design and Emotion, GDC, Google, Lift, MIT Media Lab, IDEO, UX London, and Web Directions. He is the creator of the intrinsic skill atoms method and has taught it to over 300 UX, game design, and digital product practitioners across the world.
Sebastian has strongly contributed to improve the user experience of our games. His training sessions spread a wealth of knowledge in our team and resulted in sustainable skill growth. I absolutely recommend him.
I was amazed at both the breadth of Sebastian’s work–all the different techniques of gamification–and its depth: You really understand why these techniques are working and when to apply them in different contexts.
12:45-13:00 Welcome
13:00-13:45 Presentation
13:45-14:45 Skill Atom Analysis
14:45-15:15 Break
15:15-15:30 Result sharing
15:30-16:00 Ideation with Design Lenses
16:00-16:30 Sharing Results
16:30-17:00 Emergent Questions
Register at REGONLINE.
Choose a regular conference ticket or the Industry Day Pass (Sunday Events).
Before you finalise the registration, you can add the workshop to your ticket.
Workshop: 50 EUR + CHI PLAY conference ticket or Industry Day Pass (Sunday)
Industry Day Pass
Early Bird until Sep 14: 100 EUR
Regular until Oct 14: 150 EUR
On site: 200 EUR
How to Do Gameful Design 