Actionable Gamification Quotes

“people do not take actions that are necessarily the most economical, but actions that make them feel the smartest.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“Effective gamification is a combination of game design, game dynamics, behavioral economics, motivational psychology, UX/UI (User Experience and User Interface), neurobiology, technology platforms, as well as ROI-driving business implementations.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“The truth is, simply incorporating game mechanics and game elements does not make a game fun.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“principles that optimize for human motivation”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“continue protecting and innovating the core essence and the promise of gamification.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“Human-Focused Design optimizes for human motivation”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“I realized the game I was looking for was simply life itself.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“How could I instead, play a game that everyone is playing but the outcomes would actually mean something in the real world?”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“As you can see, workplace competition can be extremely destructive to company morale, especially during weak and uncertain economic conditions where people are preoccupied with getting laid off. On the other hand, collaborative team dynamics are much more common in start up companies because employees often get paid with equity. In that case, employees only “win” if the entire company stays competitive against the industry giants that are stagnant and competing internally. It’s a collaborative Group Quest as opposed to an individualized Leaderboard which compels the employee’s motivation to fulfill their company’s mission and create subsequent equity value.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“This is incredibly frustrating for those who have creative ideas which may positively impact the status quo, especially when their ideas are immediately shot down or the approval process is dragged out indefinitely. It is a sad scenario - as companies grow larger and more bureaucratic, they become less agile, less adaptive to changing business conditions. As a result, younger and more nimble companies adapt to changing business models more swiftly than their cumbersome counterparts and quickly take advantage of new opportunities. All too often many great companies from the past century eventually fall into extinction.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“In a bureaucratic organization, though everyone likes to talk about innovation, innovation requires risk, and the corporate ladder trains people to be risk averse. If anything new is happening, it is only after authorization through many signatures - to the point where no one could claim full responsibility if things went wrong. Managers often push everyone to come up with innovative ideas, but when they actually hear something new, they immediately respond with, “Hmm, has any other company done that before?”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“gamification is the craft of deriving fun and engaging elements found typically in games and thoughtfully applying them to real-world or productive activities.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“If I were my own role-playing game character, I would never just stay in town, be idle and do nothing – the real life equivalent of watching TV, “hanging out” and leaving dreams unfulfilled.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“If something is engaging because it lets you express your creativity, makes you feel successful through skill mastery, and gives you a higher sense of meaning, it makes you feel very good and powerful.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“Studies on Trust and Reputation in Peer-to-Peer Networks by researchers like Yao Wang and Julita Vassileva of the University of Saskatchewan, as well as Minaxi Gupta, Paul Judge, and Mostafa Ammar of the Georgia Institute of Technology found that the average consumer prefers and trusts reviews by peers over those by professional critics5960. This is somewhat odd, because professional critics have made it their life mission to distinguish the good from the bad. For every published review, they would spend a significant amount of time collecting all the necessary information, going through the experience, just to write a well thought-out piece reflecting their depth of knowledge and commitment. But when it comes down to it, consumers seem to prefer the thoughts and opinions of other consumers, who likely do not have the same level of sophistication and understanding with the product, let alone spent the same amount of time experiencing and reviewing the item in question. At the end of the day, we value the thoughts of people we can relate to, often more than the voice of authoritative experts.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“In essence, the beauty of social media was in how you designed and implemented a campaign, not in the bells and whistles you used. It was the informal and formal dialogue you had with your community that ultimately taps into the platform’s unique possibilities.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“What most people didn’t recognize then was that social media is much deeper than simply possessing and posting on profile accounts. That’s just the outer shell of its influence and impact.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“Coonradt addressed the question, “Why would people pay for the privilege of working harder at their chosen sport or recreational pursuit than they would work at a job where they were being paid?” He then boiled it down to five conclusions that led to hobbies being more preferable to work. Clearly defined goals Better scorekeeping and scorecards More frequent feedback A higher degree of personal choice of methods Consistent coaching”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“Expectations have everything to do with happiness and motivation. A hungry teenager in a poor country will have an extremely difficult time understanding why a perfectionist student in a developed country would be depressed for three weeks simply because she received a “B” in school. On the other hand, a student who expects to fail the class celebrates for a week when they obtain a B. Similarly, a billionaire who lost a lot of money and became a millionaire might end up committing suicide210, while the average person who end up with a million dollars would become ecstatic. From my own observations, our happiness is almost exclusively determined by our expectations matched against our circumstances. Based on that, the easiest way to become happy may be to adjust our expectations and appreciate what we do have, instead of becoming upset because of the things we don’t. Even many marriages fail because of unrealistic expectations for each other, leading to built up bitterness over the years that plagues the soul.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“What users need is Urgent Optimism, another term coined by Jane McGonigal18, where the user feels optimistic that they can accomplish the task, but also the urgeny to act immediately. When”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“the reason you are using a product on Day 1 is often very different from that of Day 100. Since”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“Yu-kai Chou”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“I never ask them, “Do you have badges?” I ask, “Do you make your users feel accomplished?”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

“many students who neglect school and get in trouble all the time aren’t like that because they are dumb or dislike learning - they just don’t see the purpose of learning the subjects that are taught in class.”
― Yu-kai Chou, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards