Juggling with Gamification Gurus weightings

Hi friends, hola amigos (Sorry, just training for this year Gamification Design MOOC).

As you may know, after an awesome chat with Toby Beresford about metrics and gamification, he let me propose a new weighting of the gamification gurus ranking for next month, justifying my proposal. Not because I’m more objective or wise than other gamification professionals, but because I was just there talking with him (and because this way the next nominee will surely bright when compared with my redesign :D)

I eagerly accepted the challenge (of course!) and here is my exploration on the topic.

First, a purpose

What defines a “guru” within a community? Lots of things, I know. But taking into account that gamification community is not so huge and that one of the main milestones I think we need to achieve is proactive interaction (not among members, but with the generated content), here it is my definition.

Gamification guru’s ranking should identify the members creating the content that motivates other people to engage with it the most, generating in turn their own contents and making community knowledge grow.

It’s not a tweet size purpose, but almost. Of course is not a forever and ever all-solving purpose. But it will serve for this month.

And now, the reasons...

Having a written purpose (even if incomplete) facilitates A LOT the design of the rules that later I’ll apply to the KPI. Let’s create some rules, then:

Members that create and share content should achieve higher positions in the ranking

Content that generates active behavior from audience should have higher value than other content

The more engaged the audience behaviour, the more valuable is the content  for the community. We understood that a behaviour is more “engaged” as it costs the user more effort. For example. Clicking “Like” is a less engaged behaviour than comment something entirely new, but it’s more engaged behaviour than simply “view” the content.

Content could be equally valuable for its novelty, for reframing old content in new ways or for presenting it in a aesthetically attractive format, as long as it motivates members proactive engagement

I think these four game constraints will be enough to begin our game. Applying them, I weight from the most valuable activities to the less ones as it follows:

Content evoking audience’s High effort behaviors (ie. Audience creates new content, comments…)

Content evoking audience’s Medium effort behaviors (One click actions)

Content evoking audience’s Low effort behaviors (Views)

The Content by itself (isolated from audience)

I’m not sure how influence generated due to other rankings position (Klout, Alexa…) affects the main purpose as I stated it, so I have zeroed Alexa and Klout

And the final (imperfect) weighting is…

@Mentions	10%
Blog Comments	10%
G+ Mentions	10%
Slideshare Comments	10%
Post Plusones	8%
Retweets	8%
Slideshare Downloads	8%
Slideshare Favorites	8%
Youtube views	6.5%
Slideshare Views	6.5%
Instagram uploads	5%
#gamification tweets	5%
Blog Posts	5%
Klout score	0%
Alexa Rank	0%

Further discussion & iterations

I’m aware that this initial approach (philosophical, almost) has many flaws that need to be addressed. This is only the beginning and I hope next nominees will find other solutions and will ask other questions towards new achievements.

Some unaddressed questions:

Is the defined purpose useful at this moment for the gamification community? Why or why not? Any alternatives? Iterations?

Are the proposed KPI representative enough of the purpose? Why or why not? Alternatives? New KPIs?

How can we reinforce the mathematical sustainability of the whole system, given different metrics with different scales (how do you compare the number of youtube views vs the number of retweets?), taking into account the possibility spaces given for each activity design (some widgets usually give more opportunities for one click answers than for complex ones, for example and others could facilitate sharing or not due to its intrinsic design and not the content itself, like blogs).

In addition, to balance the tool a bit, I think if we’re counting slideshare views, downloads, comments and favs, we should equally count youtube views, comments and likes, at least.  Same thing applies to other channels who share widgets with almost the same features. If not, one channel may be biased.

But all those are tales that will be told by others. Now, as Davy Jones said…

Release the critics!!

And the next nominee is…

As I said in other post, let’s make this more social and playful, ice-bucket style. I challenge one among the top 20 gamification gurus to do this same weighting game for next month’s ranking.

Who?

Pokemon mode on

My dear Andrzej, I choose you! (You say interesting things about a non leaderboard system, and I would want to know more).

Pokemon mode off

It is a FUN way to discuss gamification and metrics, isn’t it?