Show HN: Gamification with Excel | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Gamification with Excel

flanneljesus.github.io

15 pointskremlin8 comments

Sorry, but this article is just about displaying a "progress bar", it's not really about Gamification. In other words, Gamification is so much more than progress bars...

Gamification is about changing behaviors by allowing people to do that in a gameful way. LinkedIn uses a progressbar to nudge people into sharing more information. Some people get really into it to get the progressbar up to 100% and feel competitive. A progressbar caters towards the fun motivator "Achieving a sense of completion." So this examples points in a right direction, though you could make it a nudge more gameful, e.g. by using whimsical percentage titles (80% = Writing Hero) etc.

BTW: if you want to learn more about progress bars as used in gamification, check out our Enterprise Gamification Wiki: http://www.enterprise-gamification.com/mediawiki/index.php?t...

Gamification should have some sort of reward, though typically arbitrary like "leveling up" or "gold". One could suppose that a filled progress bar could serve the same purpose.

I'm not saying that progress bars are not part of Gamification, but this article makes it seem that Gamification is only about progress bars.

There is no rigid definition of what features a process should have before it can be considered gamification. It's largely about the experience and driving engagement, largely using game theory and UI design. Checking off a bunch of boxes in order to see a progress bar increase certainly sounds like it fits, even given an unfairly simplified description such as that.

Then just about everything is gamification, even ticking boxes on a tax form, if you go like that about it, or seeing your station close in on a subway map as you travel :) If we invented the term "gamification", it was to signify a little more than "nothing" in the first place.

Nice. It seems perfect for books or other tasks with predefined progress points. Hooking it up to Coursera would be pretty awesome as well.

I've been using this for about a year now; it occurred to me that others might like to use something similar if they don't already.

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