One Challenge for the Gamification Community

There is a Spanish saying that could be traslated as something like “gratefulness is a feature of great people”. That is the essence of this post.

Last Wednesday I had a nice chat with Toby Beresford, whose team developed Rise and its leaderboard tool that holds the gamification gurus list that I talked about in my last post. We were going to have that conversation on Hangout, but technical problems at the last minute forced us to change to Skype.

Topic: Gamification Metrics.

Metrics are, maybe next to balance, two of the most difficult questions when designing gamification solutions. As gamification origins arose mainly from business and not from academia, I don’t feel like having yet objective enough, scientific, medium or long term data to produce consistent conclusions on what indicators best represent certain concepts (like engagement).

As you may expect, we didn’t reach conclusions in our little meeting (that wasn’t the point) but we share powerful questions that will keep my neurons (and his, and yours I hope) busy for the next weeks.

What questions? We talked a lot not only about what metrics would define a valuable contribution to a community, but also about what would be an adequate weighting formula to design those metrics as a balanced system. And also talked about how and who should decide that. What are your thoughts on these topics, my dear reader?

And when we were just finishing, Toby asked me to share my thoughts about the ranking metrics, and propose some weighting configuration for the next month as a way to explore the questions we shared.

I wasn’t expecting that gift! By doing that, Toby gives the gamification community the possibility of using Rise’s ranking as a tool to explore what metrics are the most interesting and (most important reason, I think) a way to talk about why do we choose one key performance indicator over the other.

That said, I would love to extend Toby’s idea into a game-based challenge (ice bucket style).

What if each month the present “Ranking advisor” could nominate other member (let’s say for example one among the top 20 gamification gurus) to manage the weighting and indicators for the next month?

But with that “power” comes great responsibility: New advisors should post via their blog or facebook (or wherever) the reasons for their decision. This way we could develop interesting threads on this topic, learn and share.

I’m going to do that. In my next post I’ll publish my weighting proposal and the next nominee for the “Ranking Advisor” position (if he / she wants to accept the challenge). My proposal won’t be perfect (it will be inaccurate and subjective, for sure) but maybe it will have some little useful idea, and I hope it will spark some nice critics that will serve to grow.

Do you understand now, my dear reader why I tag Toby’s challenge as a “gift”? That said, I keep my opinion that this ranking shouldn’t be the one and only way to detect valuable members of this community (Don’t forget that :D).

I want to finish this post thanking Toby again for being such a wonderful guy, open minded, with great sense of humor and an enormous interest in helping the gamification community to achieve new heights.

Thanks, my friend.