Business Week: 'Gamification': A Growing Business to Invigorate Stale Websites

Business Week

When done right, games exert a strong psychological influence over consumers, says Amy Jo Kim, a game designer who worked on hits such as Rock Band after earning a PhD in behavioral neuroscience. "What games do is help you come up with stories about yourself," she says. Earning points or reaching new levels creates the illusion of progress and is akin to "telling you a story about yourself getting better and stronger and more powerful," she says.


Social status is another motivator. "We have this tendency to care about what image we portray," says Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University. In real life, there are mansions and handbags. "In the gaming world," says Ariely, "there are badges."

DOD Launches Casual Games site

http://clc.dau.mil/games

from Armed with Science

On December 1st, 2010, Defense Acquisition University (DAU) launched the first ever Department of Defense casual games site with 13 mini games designed specifically to enhance Acquisition workforce education.


DAU’s Global Learning Technologies Center became determined to launch a site of this nature when it was realized that DAU students were similar in demographic to users of other casual games sites. The rationale behind the site was to serve as a place where professionals in the Acquisition workforce could go to play games that were related to the “core competencies” that are central to Acquisition. The result was a game site that mirrors some of the functionalities that most sites use today, including the ability to create a login to store, rate, and comment on games as well as collect badges for achievements in play.