-
Hi there. I'll be your professor in this course.
-
Now, don't worry, I'm not actually
going to teach the class
-
from inside a video game.
But I am going to show you
-
how some of the techniques that
designers use in games like this one
-
can be applied to problems in business,
education, health, and other fields.
-
That's a technique that
we call gamification.
-
Hang on a second, I'll get out of here.
-
Much better. Hi there. I'm Kevin Werbach,
a professor at the Wharton School at the
-
University of Pennsylvania and I'm thrilled
that so many of you have signed up
-
for this online course about the emerging field of gamification.
-
In the next six weeks I'm going to
teach you about what gamification
-
means and how you can apply it
to solve real world problems.
-
Some of you may not be familiar
with the concept of gamification,
-
so let me give a brief
introduction here.
-
I'll give you a much more concrete
and detailed definition later on.
-
Gamification is about learning from games.
So what can we learn from Angry Birds?
-
Well, we can learn that there's
something really popular there.
-
Angry Birds in its various incarnations has
been downloaded over one billion times.
-
Can one billion people be wrong?
-
But there's more to it than that.
Gamification is about learning from
-
games not just in the sense of learning
about the games themselves, but
-
understanding what makes the game successful.
Understanding what makes the games engaging.
-
Understanding what games can
do, why games have power.
-
And then taking some of those techniques
and thoughtfully applying them
-
to other situations which are not
themselves games. So, for example,
-
let me show you a service
called Samsung Nation.
-
Again, we'll talk about this
in more detail later on.
-
Samsung Nation is something that
Samsung has on its corporate web site.
-
And it's a system using what
we call game elements or game
-
mechanics to solve Samsung's
business problem, which is they
-
want more people to come to their site
and they want people to do things
-
on their site to interact with their
products, to write product reviews,
-
to watch videos to find out more, to register
products that they've already bought.
-
So what Samsung has done here is to build
a site using simple elements that they've
-
developed from games. Things
like leaderboards, things like
-
badges to reward achievements, things
like point systems, and they've taken
-
these and applied them to a situation
that isn't a game. The situation is
-
Samsung wants you to spend time and do
stuff on their web site so that
-
you'll eventually buy more products.
That's an example of gamification.
-
It's not by any means the only kind of
example of gamification. As we'll see,
-
gamification is by no means limited to
these kinds of contexts that you see here,
-
but it's a good example, as a starting
point, of what we're talking about.
-
So in the next series of lectures
I'll start to unpack what exactly
-
gamification means, which
will then allow us to
-
start to understand how
to do it effectively and
-
what some of the challenges
in applying these techniques.
-
And if you're curious about what the
things are on the bookcases behind me,
-
well, you'll just have to watch the
rest of the videos to find out.
