Is also a growing amount of serious research (especially within the learning sciences) on creating more motivating work and learning environments by leveraging game design. Pink‘s recent business bible ✽rive« is just a reiteration of this focus on intrinsic motivation.) Briefly, it states that for employees to be productive and creative, they have to be intrinsically motivated, which is best achieved by a playful attitude towards their work.

If you look up the scholarly HCI databases, you‘ll already find papers on this in the early 1980s, the first heydays of video games ( csscek.)ġ994: The Fish! Strategy In the 1990s, there was a business bible craze around »The FISH! strategy«. The idea that we can deduce heuristics for designing more enjoyable applications from video games is nothing new.

To change people‘s behaviour.« On the campaign website, you‘ll find more videos, a (now closed) competition and the core idea: ✿un is the easiest way to change people‘s behaviour.« (One thing I always wonder is: What happens on day 2? What is the »replay value« of these designs? But more on that later.) Here‘s one example how they use game mechanics to motivate users to use the bottle bank. To use the bottle bank by making it fun to do? The most articulate version of »The Fun Theory« is a recent viral video campaign by Volkswagen Sweden that runs by that name. Today, I‘d like to (1) present this meme, (2) summarise the research on why games are fun, (3) show some problems with applying game design in other contexts, and (4) point out what we can actually learn from game design. Designers can (and cannot) learn from games Sebastian Deterding UXCamp Europe Berlin, cbnģ 2 4 Why games What we are fun can learn There‘s a meme currently circulating in the UX community that the best way to motivate user behaviour is to make it fun – and the best way to make it fun is game mechanics.

Mafia wars add ons