You can find fun in unexpected places. So here's a few examples about how to gamify things that might not necessarily seem like great candidates. Volkswagen had a wonderful campaign called The Fun Theory. And I've already given you one example from that contest. The winning entry called the Speed Camera Lottery, where people would drive by a camera and if you weren't speeding, you'd automatically be entered into a lottery and win some of the money collected from the people who were speeding. But that competition that Volkswagen did had a variety of other entries as well as some examples that Volkswagen themselves came up with through their marketing agency. So, I'd like to ask you to go and look at The Fun Theory website and check out some of the examples. In particular, look at the piano stairs, where they created a playing piano on the steps coming up from a subway stop. And the fact that you could walk up and play the piano was so fun that many more people chose to do that as opposed to take the escalator next to it. Good for those people, they get more exercise, because they're having fun. Or the World's Deepest Trash Can. Where they, instrumented an ordinary trash can with sensors so that when you threw some trash in it you'd hear a sound, [SOUND] as though it was a deep cavern that you were throwing something into. Again, people found that kind of fun, and they were curious about it. And that fact alone encouraged more people to throw their trash into the trash can. Good result. So go look at The Fun Theory website, and try to familiarize yourself with some of the different ways to make things fun that don't, obviously, seem like they're good candidates. I'd like to give you one other example, and this is something that may seem so basic and simple and dull frankly, that it wouldn't lend itself to fun. But it was a case where a little bit of game thinking went a long way to generating real business results. And it comes from LinkedIn, the business social networking site. So, on LinkedIn you fill out a profile, you describe your job history, your employment, your skills. There's places where you can put in references from other people, and all sorts of details that are relevant to understanding your capabilities for jobs or other business opportunities. It's importantl to Linked In that you fill in your profiles as completely as possible. First of all that means you're more committed to the site, and you may go for some of their paid services. Second of all, it makes it easy for other people to find you and search on you and therefore makes it easier for you to network and get some of the benefits that LinkedIn wants you to get as a way of selling you again their various kind of services. And finally, more data means more that LinkedIn can search and analyze in order to understand patterns in their users and target you more effectively. So they want you to fill in the profile in every possible detail. But filling our profiles is pretty boring. Hard to think about how to make that fun. LinkedIn, though, came up with a way. And it's not the way that you might think in terms or creating some profile game where you get points and badges for filling out your profile, nope. It was something much simpler. It was this, the Profile Completeness bar. Took about an hour for someone to code in putting in to the LinkedIn system. And it's pretty simple. It just says, here's how much of your profile you filled out, in this case 90%. And here's some advice about how to fill it out more. Now, is that a game? No, not really. It doesn't have the kinds of rules and the kinds of objectives that we might think of as a game. It's also just so simple, that no one would really say, you're going to sit down and play the profile bar completion game against someone else, or against, yourself. It's just not that interesting. But it's a little bit fun. It's a little bit game-like. And just enough to encourage people in meaningful ways, to fill out their profiles more. Because it turns out that when LinkedIn put this profile bar in, this very simple little feature change that they added to their service, profile completeness went up by 20%. A material increase in the amount of data people were putting in, just from this little progress bar. So, what is it about the progress bar that's at all game like and that gets people to respond? Well, here's a few things that I might point out. The first thing is feedback. So, the progress bar tells you how far along you are. Before, you just saw your profile, where it was, however much you had filled out. Maybe there were some things that were blank, but now all of a sudden you see, I'm 90% of the way there. And when you fill out something else, when I get the other recommendation I'm going to see 95% there, and the bar will move a little bit further towards the edge. The media real-time feedback about performance. Very common and important aspect of games. Here, the feedback just gives you a number, gives you some information, doesn't force you to do anything with it. But that psychologically creates a dynamic that makes people more likely to progress. And that's the second aspect of what the bar does. It creates a sense of progression. So now we're no longer just talking about entering data, filling out forms. We're now talking about moving from the beginning to the end of a process, and that there various little things that we can do that are steps along the way. It's not just start with nothing and end up complete. It's a process of moving forward of completing this objective. So, even though nothing in the profile bar is expressly telling you that, and even though no one would say, yes, I am excited about achieving the objective of progressing to the end of the profile bar, there's that little pull. There's that little psychological draw of wanting to progress to the end of the game. And that's the final point completion. We know now how far we are from the end, and in this case, I'm pretty close. Look, here's all that's left for me to get to 100%, is this little bit at the end of the bar. We like completion. We like neatness. We like finishing up a collection. It's something that again, psychologically we're wired to want to do. And seeing visually in a simple way how close we are to the end, again, just draws us along subtly and inperceptively to want to reach that objective. So this LinkedIn progress bar, as simple as it was, as trivial as it may seem, was enough to actually drive real results. And that's what gamification does. It doesn't require you to create an environment where people are enthralled. Where they are totally focused in, that this is the most exciting thing in their life. Hey, it's great when you can do that. But gamification is about finding the fun. Finding the game-like aspects, wherever they are, and using them to create an environment that moves people a little bit more towards an objective.
