The Raccoopod #9
Today we are interviewing Dr. Piers Steel, about his book the Procrastination equation. We’ll look at the equation, what it is and how it effects your motivation for any task at any time. We’ll also break down 3 methods outlined in the book to get around your habit of procrastination that are applicable to gamification.
Today we are interviewing Dr. Sarah Boyle today where we talk about her study looking at how gamification made a Personalized Normative Feedback approach more engaging. Her study focused on reducing drinking habits in sexual minority women.
Today we are interviewing Dr. AguWe have an interview with Dr. Aguilar-Cruiz today where we talk about her study looking at using the Bethe1 Challenge app to teach kids English in Colombia.
Today we are interviewing Craig Bednar and talking about escape room design.
Welcome to the Raccoopod! Where the goal of our podcast is to give you the insights into gamification, what it is, and why you should consider it for your applications. I’m your host Zach Bearinger, and Today we are going to be exploring the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. What are they and how do we use them in gamification to better our users? Let’s jump in
So lets first off look at defining Motivation as it’s important to understand motivation itself before we break it down into it’s intrinsic and extrinsic components. Ok so from very well mind Quote “Motivation is the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors.” So motivation is why a person does something and is the driving force behind human behaviour. Easy to understand, so how do intrinsic and extrinsic motivation fall into that definition?
Both of these terms are looking at where the motivation is coming from, whether it is coming from outside or inside. Extrinsic motivation is when your motivators come from forces outside yourself commonly in gamification this can be points, levels and rewards. Intrinsic motivation is where you feel that you are motivated to do something because you want to, either because you find it enjoyable, or see it as an opportunity to learn or grow.
Ok, so simple enough extrinsic is things that are motivating you that are outside of you and intrinsic motivation is you doing something because it’s a thing you want to do for a personal reason. So how do we use these concepts when designing gamification? For us we take cues from self determination theory, which we will do an episode on in the future. But it looks into how to get someone from being extrinsically motivated to intrinsically motivated.
For gamification applications that are designed to help users develop a skill or habit knowing and utilising the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Surface level gamification is choc full of extrinsic motivation, points, levels and in-app rewards. By only adding such mechanics you can add extrinsic motivation but without the feeling of accomplishment that intrinsic motivation provides you’ll have a hollow experience. By the nature of gamification, developing extrinsic motivation is easy but you have to set a plan for shifting users to intrinsic motivation. How you should approach this depends on what you are gamifying, as the end goal will differ if you are gamifying a course or a treatment plan. Some will provide a natural draw into internal gamification, such as with a fitness app.
Let’s run with the fitness example to go through how a user will move from external motivation to internal. So a user is looking to get more fit and has chosen your gamified application, you have them set goals, join some groups/challenges with other users in the same boat. Your gamification mechanics keep encouraging the user to start exercising. At this point they are extrinsically motivated. Now they start getting fitter and start to enjoy exercising and start noticing their abilities improve. They start trying new exercises and sports, they start to enjoy feeling fit and now workout not just to progress in the app but also because they feel better after working out. At this point they are starting to shift into mostly intrinsic motivation. The user starts setting goals outside of the app, joining a group to go on hikes and races. They are doing different exercises because they see the intrinsic value now.
That’ll wrap up this podcast about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, we hope that you are clearer on what they are, how to use them and why it’s important in gamification.
Thanks for listening! You can find the podcast on Spotify, Stitcher, and Google podcast. We’d really appreciate subscribers, feedback and shares to help grow the podcast. If you’re interested in learning more about our app development services or how gamification can help your organization, feel free to book an exploratory call today and meet the pack at Raccoopack Media! If you have any suggestions for future episodes message us on social media @Raccoopack.media two c’s two o’s have a great day.
Transcription of the podcast below
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Zach Bearinger:
Hello, and welcome to The Raccoopod. Today we have an interview with Jay Cormier. And he’s going to go through a Best Buy training gamification, where he took the traditional Best Buy training, and added gamification for increased engagement. Let’s hop into the interview. Alright, so our guest today is Jay Comey.
Hello, Jay.
Jay Cormier:
Hi, there.
ZB:
So, for our audience, who are you and what experience do you have with game design slash gamification?
Jay Cormier:
Yeah. So I’ve designed, I don’t even know now actually, over 15 Different games that are published out in the world. I’ve also become a board game publisher, and have published my first game called Mind Management, which is out on the shelves right now. And I teach board game design at Vancouver Film school, as well as Langara college. And I’ve done a bunch of escape room creation for corporate events. And then my day job, which is probably what we’re mostly talking about here, and the gamification, as at Best Buy Canada. And for 10 or 15 years or so I worked in the training department. I’ve been there for 25 years. So I’m trying to put together all the time I’ve been in the train department. And for the last three years of that time, I’ve been in video production for the last five years. But the last three years that I was in the learning department, I was in charge of running all of the Canadian training events where we’d bring in hundreds of people from all different parts of Canada to a large training event. And I had to organize all that.
ZB:
Okay, so this training event, that’s the big gamification project that you came on to talk about, right?
JC:
right. Yeah. Yeah.
ZB:
So what’s kind of a high level view of this project?
JC:
Oh, sure. So maybe even for a little bit of background is that I always added not gamification, really, but games, to training events. And so like one training event was themed after the Olympics. And so we would have the Olympic events, and there’d be some, just more activity based, hardly gamification, just having more fun with it. And so that led up to a point where I really wanted to take it to the next level, and really gamify an entire live training event, if you can imagine with, you know, I don’t know how many people there six or seven hundred people they’re learning from all across Canada. And the concept, the high level concept is that we kind of themed it after a Zelda type world where everybody’s playing an adventurer. And they have to accomplish quests go out and talk to vendors that were located in what we call the dungeon, which was the trade show floor, they had to do these quests and they had to go to a town hall, which is located in the middle of the dungeon, they had to get their quest verified. And they would earn experience points and they trade them in to level up. And they would literally wear their name badge and it would slide in and out their current level. So throughout the day, and the multi day event that this was. You could look around and see what level everyone else was at. And it acted like a nice little kind of passive peer pressure of like, wow, that person’s level six already Holy crap. How do you do that? There also were boss battles. And I don’t know how much like whatever details you want me to get into, but it was massive.
ZB:
It sounds really cool. Yeah. So will it look like before the gamification you know, how would a typical training event like this go?
JC:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So usually, the live training events would have, you know, a day or two of classroom to classroom training for attendees, and they would all rotate through various classrooms to keep the classroom size small. In the class they’d learned something hands-on with the vendor, or with sales or something like that, from this by themselves. And then on one day, or one afternoon, or something like that, we’d have a big trade show. And they would go in groups, and there sometimes would be a bell every 7 to 10 minutes and they’d rotate. From the time spent at each booth they’d learn from all sorts of other vendors that didn’t have enough information to warrant a whole, you know, half hour training session, but they had enough to warrant a 10 minutes of like, Hey, look at my stuff. And here’s, here’s how it works, the whole concept being that they would then go back to their stores, train the rest of their employees about all the stuff that they saw, and hopefully, therefore, the sales would increase. Okay.
So the end goals of the training were to, you know, get people more fluid with sales in the Best Buy ecosystem and stuff, right,
and the product knowledge of the products so like, how does this fridge work? How does this work, what’s the difference between this TV and that TV? That kind of stuff? Okay.
ZB:
I see. So that was the end goal. Were there any other constraints that you have to keep in mind for making your gamified approach?
JC:
Oh, for the gamified approach. So, these always cost a lot of money. So you know, over a million dollars events, these words kind of thing, this was what they cost. And that would be shared by the vendors who would often pay money to be part of these events. Because, you know, they knew that that was going to help them in the long run, if they got in front of salespeople that were selling their product directly, that would help them immensely. So they would often share the load of the costs. And so there’s definitely a lot of approval processes. And so for the normal pre gamification, he was pretty straightforward. It was kind of the same old, same old every year, and we were into a rhythm and like, you know, there wasn’t much to do to kind of get approved, because everyone kind of understood the concept. Unless I was trying to pitch like, hey, this year, we’re doing these wacky Olympic things. And here’s how this works. And then you have to kind of pitch that or whatever. But this year, the year that I started the gamification, it was a big thing to try to get people to understand. And it was really challenging, not just internally from getting my boss and boss and the execs and other VPs and everybody involved to really understand what’s going on. But even then it trickled down to the vendors. Because in the past, the vendors would pay for, you know, how much time am I getting with each employee at a booth, and you’re like, Oh, you’re getting seven minute, you’re getting 10 minutes, they would pay according to how much time they would get. But my proposal specifically for the tradeshow portion of the event, there was absolutely no schedule. And that was frightening for everybody. Because vendors were like, I’m paying money, how much time am I getting? And I couldn’t, I couldn’t tell them. I’m like, listen, they’re going to have these side quests that have them come around to the booths. We have the side quests worked in, such that we had, I think 10 different side quests. And they were basically a piece of paper that had multiple choice questions from booths in one certain area, like just this one, you know, for these four booths, for example. And you’d have to go there, and you’d have to learn enough to answer these questions. And so I worked with the vendors in advance to ensure that the questions were things they couldn’t just Google that they really had to find out from the booth. And they’re like, oh, that’s how you open that, or I tell you to demo that aspect. And like, oh, so things that they really, really learned. And so that started to help them understand the value of this. But up until launching it, there were a lot of question marks from a lot of people. And I think I benefited from a shift in my old boss to a different role, like right when this was kind of getting pitched and a new boss came in. And he was a bit hands off. And by the time he kind of started understanding what I was doing, it was way too far along in the process. So I’m like this is what’s happening.
ZB:
Okay, nice. So with the side quest, it sounds like, you know, the targeted goal with those was learn new information that you can’t google that the different vendors want you to have.
JC:
Yes, so it was that was the purpose of those on top of that, and they would everyone carry a binder around with them. So they can kind of keep these side quests and their information, so they could take it back to the stores afterwards. But on top of that, there were on the map, the dungeon map, which was the tradeshow floor map, there were specific booths highlighted a certain color. And so there’d be three booths all over the place highlighted red, and three, highlighted orange, and whatever. And there were a bunch of these. And if you went to each of those red ones, for example, they would stamp your map saying that you visited them. And then you could take that back to the town hall in the center of the dungeons trade show, and there’ll be NPCs there literally wearing a vest. And on the back of that NPC for those that aren’t gamers, that means non player character. And that’s great. That’s so great. And then and they would show that, like, Hey, I didn’t know what was gonna happen. But they were told this in the rules, that you go to the town hall and show them that you’ve been to all three of those special ones. And like, Oh, you’ve been to all three of those, okay, then an NPC would go down and grab a card and give it to that person playing with just a player, that player employee. And the card would have a room number in the hotel that we were in and a specific time at 230 Go to this room, like what? And so they had this mission now that 230 was a key to a room at 230. And anybody else that got finished that question around this, they would get the same card. So it was really neat, because you wouldn’t necessarily go with your friends, you would go with just random people that finish the class at that time. So it was really, really neat. And so what would happen is they go to this room on a different floor or something like that in the hotel, and they go into this room like what’s going on here. And those same three vendors where they got this key from are again in this room. And this part was really interesting, and really, I think quite different than any other event. And I’ll give some context before I tell the story is that at a lot of training events, we you want to often test or validate that the information that you’re training has been retained. And so sometimes that’s been done with a quiz. Like at the end of the event, we’ve literally sat people down and done a big quiz and then based on the quiz gets maybe some prizes or something like that. Sometimes we’ve done it back in the store and they get a quiz. So We’re trying to validate. Is this worth it? Are you learning something? And so this is the first time that the validation has been done like right there during the training event. So they come into this room, and those three vendors are there and a big monster is there. This is a boss monster battle. And, and it was all pixelated, like a kind of old Zelda type looking thing. Okay, monster and on a big metal board. And the concept here was, they would be asked a question that they should have learned at their booth, like, Okay, so from our booth, you might remember we talked about this, how does that work? Or whatever the question was, and then somebody would answer correctly, they were given basically a sword magnet. So the concept was a little fridge magnet, and it was a sword. And they had to, they had a chance to throw this magnet onto the boss monster image, but they had to stand on a line. And depending on what level they were at, they had to could stand closer and closer, if they were a little level they to stand really far away, ah, and the higher the level they got, the more they could do it. And they had literally exactly 10 minutes, a 10 minute timer from when they started to what it ended, is how much time they had to do to kill this boss. And so they had to throw it and then the magnet would have to make sure it hit a port part of the boss. And then there were these heart magnets on top, they would have to take a heart magnet off for every time they got to hit. There were some other areas on the board that was a counter hit counter strike, counter attack. And if they hit that accidentally, then they would lose a heart, every player had three hearts that they had. And if you lost, if you lost enough heart, you had to go back to the town hall, and you had to get a potion to bring it back to life. So there was all these intricate things, there was hidden, hidden stuff, we gave vendors and we hid around like bow and arrows. And if you ever had a bow and arrow, it was a free shot, like you didn’t have to throw it, you just literally place it wherever you want. So it’s a free hit, but you have to find them. And they were tricky. There were random monster encounters, where every so often randomly, maybe one every half hour, there was that monster, you know, kind of like you’ve encountered a monster, and any vendor that maybe didn’t have anybody at their booth at that time. If they wanted to participate, they could hold up this sign that showed that they had a monster. And if you weren’t doing anything yourself, you could run over to that booth and interact with that vendor, possibly again. And they would ask you a question of like, hey, how does this work in this thing? So it’s another validation tool in the middle of the event, and it kept some vendors that maybe thought they had nobody at their booth, this might get people back at a booth as well. So it was pretty exciting.
ZB:
Okay, nice. It seems like you’re using a lot of unpredictability and hidden content to get people to engage with it more.
JC:
Yeah, that really lights up the brain when you find things you’re not expecting, that really gets people excited.
ZB:
And I do like how for your validation that people learn things that you get it right, you have a chance that it’s going to work. It’s not Oh, I got the question, right? Of course, it hurt the boss, it’s, oh, now I have to do a skill testing thing.
JC:
Yeah, and it really reinforced the idea that I got to level up, because this is hard. Because if you kill the boss, you get I think 10 or 20 experience points, usually getting like one every booth or something. So 10 experience points is a lot, and I’m just gonna help you level up a lot. And if you don’t kill it in 10 minutes, everybody is in the room, they don’t get that 10 experience when they walk away empty handed. And so that really motivated them like okay, hold on, I got to level up before I go to my next boss. So yeah, that was pretty interesting. It’s pretty cool.
ZB:
So what made gamification a good fit?
JC:
Well, I think it accomplished all the goals of making sure the vendors and to clarify, so day one of the event, it was still the same kind of classroom tread training, but they were giving out experience points, even on day one. So if you were on time for class, the first 10 people that came into class got a free one, if you interact and maybe ask questions, and during the class, they were motivated, the vendors were motivated to give out experience points. So you’re still getting experience points. But it’s pretty normal of a day, it was day two, the entire day two, which was kind of the tradeshow day, was so no schedule, no agenda, and that’s where it was a bit scary. And so that’s where it was more different. But the objectives were still mostly about making sure the employees left with more product knowledge and sales techniques then they came in with and making sure all the vendors felt like they got enough value out of the event that they felt like yes, I got my message out to the salespeople. And I feel like sales will increase because of it, which is the ultimate goal. And I think the gamification really excited people and the way we gamified it motivated them to do the things we wanted them to do. And so I had to kind of point out I had one person come up to me right near the end of the event and I can see he had level 10 which is the highest level on his name badge. And he’s like, Jay you know when you were explaining the game rules on the first day one, I was kind of rolling my eyes saying this is silly. And then I started getting some experience points from the classes and I was getting into it. And then today, I just went all-in man, it was just so exciting. Like I couldn’t help it. I just, I just tried to get as many experience points as I can. And to do that, he had to do all the things we wanted him to do. He had to go to booths to do the side quests to answer questions and go to the town hall to get experience points and do all of the upgraded kind of the boss battles and everything. He had to do all that. And he wanted to do it, he was excited to do it, as opposed to “BONG” everyone rotate to the next booth. And you shuffle along. And it’s like no energy. And it’s just the energy, but the VP of HR came up to me during the event, she goes, Jay, I have never seen our employees so engaged, ever. This is amazing. So it was really, the gamification really got people excited. And they felt like they had autonomy, even though everything we had them do was motivated towards our end goals. Yeah, but they felt they had autonomy and control over their own path.
ZB:
You still have all the same training that you’re doing. But you choose. I guess they got to choose the order a little bit, right.
JC:
100%? Yeah, I mean, they had side quests, and you were probably motivated to do those side quests, because that’s how you get experience points. Because if you just but you can just go to any booth and just talk to them. There’s no nobody stopping you from doing that. And you can, but people mostly once you do a side quest, you go you get a mark, because it was a little remember a little multiple choice trivia question. And then you get experience points, and you get a new side quest. So you’re constantly going back out. But it’s possible that you didn’t see all the vendors, which is super weird. Yeah, that usually you would see 100% See all the vendors, but the motivator here was that every time you leveled up, you would take out your previous level, and you would write your name on the back of it. And you put it in a big fishbowl. And at the end of the event, we had huge prize draws. And so then there would be a lot of you can imagine from Best Buy a lot of prizes that are people want. And so that was very apparent that that was another motivator to participate and making sure you leveled up was because every time you leveled up, and just like in video games, the first few levels are very easy to get. And it gets harder and harder to level up.
ZB:
Yeah. And sounds like you have a lot of you have a great core loop of you know, you get your small quest, you go to the booth, you come back, you get the answer, right. And you’re in a win state. Oh, here’s another one you can do. And then it’s like, well, I could go for lunch. Or I could just do this at the booths right there. You know? Yep.
JC:
It was great. And what really surprised me was that, so we told the vendors all about it. And we kind of had to make them you know, understand and some of its goofy like I got a hold up the sign of a monster, what. And you can imagine some of these people are just like executive type salespeople. They’re not creatives, you know, people that are gonna play games, possibly, you know, some, but that said, some of the vendors really took it to heart. And I remember Sony specifically, in decorated their entire booth, as if it was in a dungeon. Oh, like they put stones around it. He dressed up like a wizard. It was awesome and fantastic. I was so happy and blown away. And others, like that was the pinnacle, the Sony booth. And others did too, though others took part in dressed up or just kind of made it more feel like a dungeon. It was great.
ZB:
So this has been going on for several years now. Right?
JC:
So we did. So we did that the first year. And I will also say that we did a really cool kickoff video, where we actually did a mock Zelda opening where Link wakes up but he’s got a blue shirt instead of a green shirt. Yeah, anyway, you know, and he has to watch a video for like, he talks to the mayor. And there’s anyways, it’s a really cool little animated video, which was really fun. So that was the first year and then the second year, you know, always wanting to outdo myself, we then started to involve technology. And we partnered with a company that had brought their own iPads to the event, so we didn’t have to carry a notebook around. And so the second year was all about superheroes. And so you could be your own superhero, and you could become the kind of superhero that you want to. And how that worked was during the trade show. Now I’m trying to remember this one, as this one is a bit different. There were different boss battles, but they’re right in the trade show this time. But one of them was the same as before the magnet guy. But another one was cans that were stacked up. And so the magnet magnets weren’t really effective against that. And then there was another one like a cornhole thing where you throw into a object into a hole. And so they weren’t effective. The magnets weren’t super great for that either. But you could get superpowers to get a ball. And that I can I can recall that like a snowball type superpower or something like that. And you or you can get a dart gun which was great for the can bosses who were weak for the cans. They’re stacked up but great for the whole trying to get into the whole game and so you had to tailor your how you spent on this app, you had to spend your experience points. To unlock certain superpowers, so when you went to a boss battle, you would show them what superpowers you have. Oh, you get two balls and one dark. Okay, go. And you had to then try to defeat this boss with whatever superpowers you had.
ZB:
That’s pretty cool. Yeah. Did vendors buy in more throughout like your one? You know, you mentioned Sony and some other ones kind of decked out their stuff to be a little dungeon like you’re too. Did some of the vendors start to step up and get really into the theme?
JC:
I don’t think so the theme for the superheroes is as approachable, as it’s a bit harder to get into for a theme does mean it’s like unless you got dressed up, and some did some did. But about the same but the same. But I think making your booth look like a dungeon is fun and obvious. But this was just city blocks each each we each have like this whole thing I camera would call there was a certain slight metropolis like the whole tradeshow was a certain city name. And there were different districts you could go to. Yeah, it wasn’t as freeform as the previous one, just based on the theme, you would spend time in a district. And then at the end of that time that you were allotted for that entire district, you would then go to fight the boss battle with everybody in that district. It was little, but the app had all sorts of other functionality, like you can chat to other people on the app, presenters in classrooms could have their presentations on the app. So you didn’t have to, you can interact more with them like they could have games and activities throughout the events as well. Nice. Yeah, it was pretty neat. So we did that for two years. And then after that, all training, all live training events died, we did some studies on live trading events and track sales, and year over year increases and compared it and tried all sorts of different things. And just found with a large national company, international, really, but we are just dealing with the Canadian employees, where we get two people per store coming to an event, you know, maybe three, maybe four, if we’re lucky. And they have to go back and train the rest of their teams. And we just found that it wasn’t effective learning and training in the sales weren’t really didn’t really having an impact. Overall, maybe this brand did sell a bit more than this brand, because they run the training event. And these weren’t, they weren’t. But we ended up moving things to more online after that, too, which is maybe less fun, obviously. But now at least we can impact off all the employees instead of just a handful.
ZB:
Yeah, that makes sense. Because it’d be you know, what, two people out of the store that probably be like 10% of the workforce, there’s something like that.
JC:
Oh, way less like some stores have over100 people in the store?
ZB:
Oh, Andrew. Yeah, so then you’re only hitting 2% of people. And that training might be super effective for that. 2%. But it’s still only 2% of the store.
JC:
Yeah. And we didn’t have tons of control to ensure they rolled out that training to the rest of the departments. So we would do videos and all sorts of things to you know, roll out, but we still didn’t have a lot of control once it got back to the store of how they use it or if they used it.
ZB:
Because if it’s too awesome, they just keep talking about how awesome it is not. Not everything that they learned.
JC:
Yeah. And then I had to fight. Yeah, throwing magnets at the thing was wild. Yeah.
ZB:
Um, so on the effectiveness of the individuals who did attend? How effective would you say it was? Like, do you know what the average level of people was after the Zelda one?
JC:
That’s a good question. No, because we didn’t really track it. Like, it’s just, we just kept upgrading people and they walk around. So no, I don’t even have any stats or anything like that. But I think I think three people managed to get to level 10, which was the hardest, the highest level?
ZB:
That’s a pretty big accomplishment, either way.
JC:
Yeah. And it’s weird. It was really hard pre-event to try to give everything a number to try to figure out like, how, how many? How many experience points can somebody get? And therefore, you know, you don’t want to make it too easy. So that by 12, o’clock on day two, everyone’s at level 10. Yeah. So it was really, but you don’t want to make it so unattainable that nobody could do it. So it was almost literally perfectly set. I don’t know how I did it. I don’t know what kind of math I did try to figure out like, how can we get it so that people can level up that much, but yeah, it worked.
ZB:
What things would you change about them, if you could go back to pasture and be like, Hey, we should do these things or not these things, we should implement this.
JC:
I mean, I mean, back then, not too much. But now that we tried the second year, technology, like we literally were handing out cards, like playing cards that had a we made them up and they had one experience point printed on it. And so people had to collect these literal physical playing cards, which has a nice tangibility to it, which is kind of nice. But imagine just tapping your phone to something and getting experience points. And keeping track of it that way, would probably be a lot more accessible. But also having to carry around a literal three ring binder and flipping pages and trying to find the page you’re going to and writing notes and it’s a bit cumbersome. So again, that’s why we went to the iPad in the second year, but it’s still so many issues with getting iPads on a WiFi signal in a big kind of convention center type thing. It’s lots of issues. With that, so many signals are lost, and it’s just very frustrating. Otherwise, what else would I have? I mean, it’s like, during all my time, 25 years of Best Buy is the number one thing, the favorite thing I’ve ever done was that Zelda event, it was just so. So bonkers, amazing. No, I would, I would change. I mean, mostly because as we learned, the training events weren’t that great in the sense that the sales wouldn’t necessarily increase as a store afterwards. So I guess there’s definitely some more, figuring out how to do that part better. But at the event specifically, there’s only so much control I had over what each vendor taught and showed at their booth. And as much as we’ve always asked them to, we want you to do hands-on things they are here in front of you, in person, get their product in your hands, and tell them how to use it and demo it. And too many vendors still have this thought that if I can just talk really fast for 510 minutes and tell you every feature in all my different products, that that’s somehow going to be beneficial. And too many vendors still believe that. And I wish more vendors really understood the value and power of getting products in hands and demoing and showing you how to demo in your store. This is what you have to show: this is the difference between this product and this product, and why these two are different. That’s what they need to know. And so that’s I can only do so much I can’t enforce what they do at their own booth.
ZB:
Yeah, and now my mind spinning of how would I gamify the people who went to the event how to do it to your store, you know how, how to track that how to Yeah, because that that is an important part of any gamification thing is, you know, you had great onboarding, because you know, you have day one still in classrooms. Oh, you get experience points. Oh, that’s kind of neat. I don’t know if I’ll do it. But you gave them just enough that they start going into it. That’s the scaffolding, you know, oh, I know what I’m supposed to do. I know how to get more experience. I know these things that I’m learning. Awesome. And then you know,
JC:
you know, what, in hindsight would have been good is to gamify for the vendors to give them experience points for doing things that motivated the behaviors we wanted them to have, such that the only way to motivate them would be some sort of discount on a future training show. Yeah. So if you get this many experience points or level up or whatever, it yourself, then yeah, you’re gonna get X amount of $1,000 off next time, which will be wild. They’re like, That’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah, if you decorate your booth that’s like, boom, 10 experience points. If you dress up, that’s another five experience points. But if you get to go by your booth, and you’re doing actual demos, people actually getting to learn how to demo it. That’s another three experience winds. That’d be pretty cool. Actually.
ZB:
Yeah, that Oh, and that would be really cool to see it. Like, after like, three years when it’s like, alright, you know, I’m Sony. I’m showing up. Alright, we’re gonna have you know, the whole thing. You know, the superhero themes are going to have this massive supervillain where, yeah, we have this giant animatronic boss. Yeah. Oh, really cool. And then, you know, as someone who’s attending it, it’s just like, this is amazing. Oh, yeah. It’s awesome. Cool things like this is a convention I want to be at. Yeah. And it’s trading. And I’m like, I wish I could go.
JC:
Up. I agree. Yeah. So yeah, so there are so I think that’d be a nice focus on how to get the vendors more on board with the theme. And not that they weren’t. But you could, they could always be more.
ZB:
Yeah, always be more on, you know, having physical products for demos that would encourage people to be like, Oh, this is how you demo it, you know, get more to doing the actual practical demonstrations.
JC:
Yeah, yeah. And some of their booths would be immense. There would be huge structures with TVs built in and seeing and like, they’d be massive undertaking sometimes in some of these events. So not that they didn’t put effort in. That’s not my definitely, if any of them are listening. That’s not my intention. It’s just being more on theme would be cool again, and motivating. Those of you that would be cool,
ZB:
have a greater level of immersion, because yeah, everything around you is reinforcing that you are an adventurer or superhero or whatever the next thing would have been. Yeah. And, you know, motivating them to be like, Yo, you know what, I don’t have a quest to go over there. But I want to look at that. Oops, you know? Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Oh, is there anything else about the project that you’d like to talk about?
JC:
I don’t think so. From the gamification perspective, no. I think we covered it. I’m just trying to think of any other little things that I missed, I think that’s I think that covers all the aspects. Yeah. Okay.
ZB:
Awesome. Are there any upcoming projects you’d like our audience to know about? Or things that they can learn ways they can follow you?
JC:
Yeah, I mean, off the page games is my brand From a publishing perspective where I’ve just released the my management game if you into board games that just came out, which is pretty exciting. So you can find me on the Facebook’s and Twitter’s at Off The Page games. Other than that, yeah, I think that’s probably for this audience. Probably pretty good. I don’t know how much like board games necessarily, but board games are cool.
ZB:
Didn’t you also have the design blog at one point in time?
JC:
I did. Yes. I’m converting that into an actual video training series right now, but it’s not ready yet. Yeah,
ZB:
I didn’t know that. I’m excited for that. Yeah, yes, that was definitely useful when I was looking for game advice. But thank you so much for joining us. This was a real pleasure hearing more of the details about this project and how you apply the gamification and hearing your excitement about it makes me want to do something similar, something big, but you know, got started small.
Jay Cormier:
Awesome. Hey, thanks for having me, Zach, appreciate it.
Zach Bearinger
No problem. Thanks for listening to the record pod. Follow us on social media, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. To learn more about us and gamification. Have a lovely day.
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