Actionable Gamification

Publisher's Summary

The new era of gamification and human-focused design optimizes for motivation and engagement over traditional function-focused design. Within the industry, studies on game mechanics and behavioral psychology have become proliferate. However, few people understand how to merge the two fields into experience designs that reliably increases business metrics and generates a return on investment. Gamification pioneer Yu-kai Chou takes the listener on a journey to learn his 12 years of obsessive research in creating the Octalysis Framework, and how to apply the framework to create engaging and successful experiences in their product, workplace, marketing, and personal lives.

©2015, 2017 Yu-kai Chou (P)2017 Yu-kai Chou

Just a bunch of rules and no source references

If you wanna learn how Gamification works and how to apply it, read Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. This book has tried to summarize the theory while implying the author came up with it by himself while giving no one the proper credit. This is not even a simple breakdown, it's 8 core areas, with a bunch of numerical rules inside each. Hardly practical.
Most of it is self advertising. I returned the book after listening to half of it. There are cool points but these are better explained in other literature.
If you want to take a shortcut or just be able to add this topic to your LinkedIn, this book is for you. Just don't go thinking you can apply it to a product.

11 of 13 people found this review helpful

Great book, but the Author...

I really love the content of the book, but have struggled to get through it because of all the little side comments that make the author seem very arrogant. He could have left out about a page worth of content in the book that makes up all of these comments and I would likely be at a 4 or 5 star rating. It makes the book feel unrelatable even though the actual content is extremely relatable.

If you can push through the small remarks, you will be rewarded with a tremendous amount of knowledge on what motivates people and how gamification can be used to influence these motivations.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Best book on gamification

So many books on this subject are fluffy, solely spending time on adding badges and leaderboards to everything which in my personal experience is only sometimes effective in motivating people. But Yu-Kai unpacks the whole science behind human motivation and how to really use gamification in anything. Very engaging book and will definitely re-read and continue to add notes.

5 of 6 people found this review helpful

Not good as an audible book

There are lots of good ideas that I will follow up on. The audible book is too hard to follow. Lots of references to things I need to recall and then I lose track and have to rewind. The gamification of the book, i.e. Stop now and post something to social media, is annoying and not conducive to the Audible experience. I listen to books while I drive, I can't do that. I returned this by chapter 8.

3 of 4 people found this review helpful

very long but good book!

I love the framework. I love the methodology. the book is so long but good.

gamification tips

muy buen set se reglas y guías de gamification, grandes ejemplos muy reconocibles y fáciles de ubicar

very thorough yet enjoyable, easy to understand

this was a great introductory book about gamification for those who aren't necessarily gamers. it applies gamification to life

Great Overview

The book gives a nice overview of different gamification mechanisms and what phycological and behavioral aspects make them work. The author has developed his own framework, called Octalysis, for designing and reasoning about gamification and human-centered design in products. While the framework has its pros, the way the author forces everything to be viewed in the Octalysis perspective, with different numerical IDs for rules and levels of insight (Octalysis rule #57, Octalysis level 3, etc.) makes it feel partly like a TV shop product that desperately wants to create a following, like “the school of Octalysis” or something. This nagging and forced repetition of “Octalysis” gives me the feeling that it is more important for the author to create a customer-based following separated from other research on gamification and human-centered design, and to promote the Octalysis product, than it is to spread his actual insights about the matter. That being said, Yu-Kai Chou's seems to have a good overview of, and much knowledge about, gamification and human-centered design.

Makes sense to me!

Great narration made it easy to listen and understand. Seems like a sound theory and is at least a great way to broaden your human motivations insights. Probably will need another listen through to take notes because there's a lot of information.

Great book for creative feature development

I found this book to be very insightful for brainstorming and thinking about the products and features that I work on in new and creative ways, really getting to the heart of what motivates humans to add an enjoyable aspect to everything I build. I also found the reader to be engaging and enjoyable, and recommended it to my entire team- in fact, I'm thinking of having us all read through it together. The author does do some work to sell their personal brand, and I think the octalysis name is a little bit silly, but the concepts that it represents are very solid. Note that it is more pointed towards the brainstorming side, so it would be well accompanied with another book that leads towards the measurement and execution side.

Best gamification book

Best gamification book that I came across. Well done! Yu-kai! And thank you for sharing with us. Octalysis is yet to be mind mapped for me.

Good stuff

Some very good information in this work which relates to my line of work, a bit difficult to keep up with in some parts tho. Not sure that what describes can be easily visualise without the diagram in front of you.

Great ideas

Great ideas, I can definitely see myself revisiting this book maybe a few months later

Great but...

Be prepared that this maybe hard going for you (if I knew this before I would have prepared myself and I'd have not found it so if that makes sense ) . It was for me, but it gets 5 stars because he really tries to make it fun and the actual content makes brilliant sense. Onto the next one.

disappointing

The listener has already bought the book, so there is no reason to continue selling the book from inside of

1 of 7 people found this review helpful