Book Review: Game On by Jon Radoff

In the interest of full disclosure, Jon Radoff and I have a bit of history! He bought a company from me. Hired me at gamerDNA to run product development. And now him and I are working together on a small project at MeYou Health. When I heard Jon was writing a book about social media games, I told him I would be happy to read and review it. So here we go!

As the title states, Game On is about nothing less than transforming how you think about your business through the application of ideas and patterns born out of social media gaming. The hot term for this is "gamification". And while that term is helpful, gamification is a technique, but it isn't a process. What Jon gives you is a way of thinking about how you apply this nebulous term to your business right now.

Ultimately, that is why I like this book. It doesn't spend a ton of time trying to convince you that gaming is a trend you should pay attention to. Zynga (one of the hottest social game companies on the planet) has a multi-billion dollar market cap. We shouldn't need much convincing. 

But what I think we do need is a clear understanding on how any of this social game craziness matters to us. Jon attacks this head on in Chapter 2 - "Games have changed the business playfield" - by laying out very clearly how the media and online landscape has changed and how these changes have altered how we interact, and how social games have capitalized on these changes to become so popular. It turns out that social media games focus on doing many of the things your business should be doing!

• Facilitating human contact
• Creating enjoyable experiences
• Recruiting the learning machinery of the brain
• Engaging your creativity
• Allowing you to Interact anywhere through digital technology
• Building around asyncronous consumption

All of our businesses should strive for these things in this connected, digital, participatory, entertainment-driven era. If you aren't striving now, maybe after reading Game On, you will be!

For me, since I am not specifically building a social game, the meat of the book was Chapters 4 - 6 where you learn to think of your customers as "players", the process around "Fungineering" and some case studies of turning work into fun (which features MeYou Health on pages 150,151).

With my work on behavior change in the health space, I continue to rely on the fulfillment mechanics that games are so good at leveraging. For the longest time I have used Dr. Richard Bartle's model as a way of describing motivation, but going forward I plan to reference Jon's refactoring of that model into a slightly richer version that accounts for a few different nuances that I find valuable. See below: 

In summary, I think Game On is a book written at the right moment. It takes a term like "gamification" that people can't decide if they like or not, and cuts straight through to what really matters: the patterns that drive greater loylaty, engagement, and passion for your product and business. I plan to recommend it to anyone I know looking for a good primer on this latest trend.

Comments

[Jon Radoff]

Thanks, Trapper! Your review is much appreciated. Thank you also for sharing my player motivation model--my small attempt toward a unified theory of gaming!

[Trapper Markelz]

No problem Jon! Your "small" attempt is a nice one. I really like how cooperation is factored in as a primary mechanic in this model. I wonder if there is a bit of a continuum to an end state here.

When I've talked about Bartle in the past, it makes sense to think of it as a progression of interaction from solitary exploration and achievement, into sharing and celebration which makes that social, and finally into comparison and competition with those you were social with. And once you progress through those phases as a novice, you settle into the player preferences you outline in your model.