A few years ago, if you would have said "gamification" to someone, you would have gotten a weird look, as though you were concocting something new. Maybe you would have gotten a quick follow up question, "Huh? What is that?"
Today, that encounter would be very different. Although very misunderstood, businesses are taking gamification very seriously, as they find it more and more difficult to engage and ultimately retain customers.
In this book, we take a closer look at gamification. We assume you know nothing about gamification but have some background in website development. We walk you through the Gamification Design Framework outlined in this book, applying gamification principles along the way.
Although not difficult to understand, gamification requires an approach that is focused on user engagement and fun to develop systems.
When you are done, you will have a live project so you can demonstrate your understanding of key gamification principles.
Chapter 1, Gamifying the Educational Process, inventories the current uses of gamification in educational settings.
Chapter 2, The Framework, gives the reader a framework to apply to future gamification projects, as well as a visual mockup of the final website project we will be building for the rest of the book.
Chapter 3, Objectives and Target Behavior, takes the reader through the first few practical steps in the gamification process. We define the objectives and target behaviors for our project.
Chapter 4, The Players, helps us identify the characters, users, and stakeholders (that is, players) in our system along with their motivations.
Chapter 5, Activity, outlines the crux of the gamified system, the mechanics, elements, rules, and so on, of our website project.
Chapter 6, The Fun, helps the reader understand the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and what makes an activity enjoyable to engage in.
Chapter 7, The Wrap Up, wraps up all that we have done in earlier chapters. The reader iteratively goes through the gamification design framework, implementing more game elements to drive user behavior.
Appendix, Tables, contains tables outlining the Engagement Loops for each of Bartle's player types and an outline of the Gamification Design Framework for our gamified system.
To run the examples in the book, the latest version of the following software will be required:
WAMP Server
PHP (Version 5.0 or higher)
MySQL
MySQL Workbench (optional)
JQuery Library
Text Editor
The reader will find the material useful if they have a basic understanding of website development (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and PHP).
This book is for IT professionals wanting to build gamified applications. You do need to understand basic HTML and the fundamentals of how websites work. If you have ever built a website of any kind, you are well on your way.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Name the database VuPoint."
A block of code is set as follows:
[DELIMITER // -- Procedure Name: SelectOnlinePlayers -- Procedure Purpose: Returns a lists of players how currently logged in is true CREATE PROCEDURE 'vupoint'.'SelectOnlinePlayers'() BEGIN Select * from Player where CurrentlyLoggedIn=true; END// DELIMITER;
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Databases menu".
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