Actionable Gamification

Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

By: Yu-kai Chou

Narrated by: Scott R. Smith

Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins

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

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.

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.

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.

good concepts made but too much self marketing

Good book with reasonable concepts. It is annoying that he is always trying to get you to advertise for him with Twitter and sell his framework consulting capacity. At the end he even compares himself with Jesus as a prophet of sorts... So, other than trying not to throw up at his massive ego (or low self esteem?) the framework he presents seems to be pretty useful. Certainly worth reading.

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.

Essential for people building engaging products.

A marvelous framework to classify your ideas and help you define a product vision that is aligned with your user behavior.

very long but good book!

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

Great book for any behaviorist!

An amazing behavioral and decision making book. A must read for anyone who wishes to incorporate behavioral designs in their life

¡An outstanding set of tools!

¡WOW! ¡This book is Freaking Awesome! If have you ever had any inkling towards gamification or played games and wanted to understand better than the mechanics of it this book will reveal much!

Great info with a catch

Great information, but his idea of licensing the Octalysis framework doesn't make sense - its doesn't seem to be software, what will they do, sue you if you write code that include his ideas? Don't know how that will stand up in court, hopefully it won't.
A lot of his information is based on psychology books like "Drive," "Thinking Fast & Slow," "Hooked," and some game design books, so I don't know what he is licensing. But otherwise great information that was fun to learn about designing user experiences.

I had to keep playing....

Loved this book. Enjoyable and educational not only in its presentation of the octalysis model - one that's extremely useful in developing gamified features on and off screen - but also as it's beautifully written. A mix of meaty lessons and personal anecdotes that really drive home key learning points. Highly recommended to anyone wanting to up their game.

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.

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.

Highly Recommend!

One of the best books I’ve read/listened to!

I love how actionable the information in this book is. It’s not just about the theory!

One of the best books I've listened to

Loved it so much I'm definitely gonna listen to it Gain 2 or 3 more times. You won't be wasting your time here

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.

Unadulterated self-promotion

The book contains some useful content but it could easily be condensed to a magazine article. Instead, the author pads it out with endless self-promotion, delivered in a wheedling whine.

Phenomenal book on gamification

Really enjoyed this book and it’s comprehensiveness in exploring all aspects of gamification! Goes well beyond simple gimmicks and provides a framework for incorporating gamification techniques within products.

Great ideas

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

disappointing

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