Rate this book

Gamification By Design (2011)

by Gabe Zichermann(Favorite Author)

3.58 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1449397670 (ISBN13: 9781449397678)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

O'Reilly Media

review 1: I'm really interested in this topic, and was left cold by this book.It had the pragmatic enthusiasm of a marketer discovering better ways to sell things, not of an entrepreneur discovering better ways of serving customers.Odd and misleading anecdote about the impact of leaderboards on Orkut's growth. Scant coverage of the potentially significant drawbacks to leaderboards, which is odd because the founders of Twitter have specifically talked about their decision not to include one.Comparison of Yahoo Answers and Quora was nice, as is consideration of Health Month.The book is full of exhortations to go to the author's website for more information, and the book itself is light on information. Specific code examples for adding game elements to ruby forum software seem out of p... morelace, like the book is trying to do too much and failing at the theoretical and practical.Even more unforgivable than the constant self-promotion is the final chapter - which has corporate sponsorship and is a giant ad for a white-label gamification service!The reason I give it two stars is that I can see it being a useful introduction for someone with almost no first-hand knowledge of game mechanics in web apps. But if you've used Foursquare and Yahoo Answers, Quora and Health Month, there's not much here for you.
review 2: Great overview of the basic fundamentals of thinking on how you can architect and design incentives to illicit the desired behavior from you users.Frameworks can be used beyond "gamifying" apps. Having recently read Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Prof. Cass R. Sunstein, struck the similarities between the two books.A great skim for those wanting for ways to think about the psychological profiles of your users.A great read for those who are actually tasked with embedding these hooks into your appA great toolkit that walks you through available tools to code hooks or use APIs to include loyalty modules. less

Download links for: Gamification by Design

Advertising