OK, so there’s no secret that I’m working on building gamification into an ITSM tool out there (and vendors, if you’re reading this, I recommend doing the same with your software).  So we’re almost ready to go release this thing into the wild, and I swear there’s something I’m missing.  But what could it be? We have the badges built, graphics are uploaded, back-end rules are in place, the tables are ready….it’s all pretty much there for phase 1.  While checking in on Foursquare tonight, it occurred to me.  We’re missing a “personal” touch.

See, the idea of gamification is to use a person’s natural desire for competition to drive behavior.  It’s natural to be competitive, and often we really don’t have many places in society where we can truly compete (except in academics, sports, and my wife’s family).  So gamification is about giving people an opportunity to compete, and win, against their peers.  But there’s something even greater in competition when it comes to a personal level, and that’s the element I saw tonight in Foursquare.

Foursquare has a nice feature in which after checking in, it shows your score compared to your friends.  What I saw tonight immediately caused me to grind my teeth; I was (and have been) losing to a specific friend of mine.  In fact, he even took the mayorship at my place of employment, which prompted me to consistently check-in to liberate it from him.  And that’s the part of our gamification that’s missing – a certain personal element.  Sure, we’ll allow people to see scores against a general scoreboard, but that may only be good enough for the top three or four competitive people.  With limiting competition to a few “friends,” it now narrows the scope of the game from a general population to a specific group.  A group with it’s own social culture, behaviors, and even peer pressures.

Is all lost that we don’t have some sort of “friends” list?  Absolutely not.  ITSM is about continuous improvement; a type of evolutionary approach to IT.  I now know what else to build into this gamification project and it’s a definite feature to include for phase 2 (or 1.5).

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Started working in IT in 1999 as a support desk analyst as a way to help pay for food during college. Studied Electrical Engineering for two years before realizing biochemistry was more fun than differential equations, and so ultimately graduated with a Biology degree in 2006. Having (reluctantly) failed at getting accepted into dental school, embraced working in IT and has gone broke becoming an ITIL Expert. Likes to jog, sing camp songs, quote Mel Brooks movie lines and make dumb jokes and loves working for an Israeli tech company where December 25th is a regular work day.