Gamification Roundup – February 20, 2012

This week on the Gamification Roundup we have big news on incentivization and research.  In addition to Badgeville’s recent partnership with BazaarVoice, now they are collaborating with Klout. Hearing news of this and an NY Times article on incentivizing civic behavior, we may soon have all our actions incentivized with the promise of glorious prizes (yay!). In the realm of research, gamification is surely becoming more and more legitimized with the introduction of a peer-reviewed journal for games research and a $1.5M grant for video game research at University of Boulder: Colorado. There has also been research on Pinterest, revealing some very interesting statistics about the Pinterest user base. Read the full roundup after the jump.

Badgeville Now Incorporating Influence Scores from Klout

Now you can really let your social media presence pay off: Mashable reports that Badgeville is now integrating data from Klout to identify and reward the most prominent advocates of brands using the Badgeville platform. Brands using this information could provide their most influential advocates with additional benefits, such as product discounts but only if their Klout scores remained above a certain score. It will be interesting to see whether this will generate more brand advocacy or just cause brand spam all over our social networks.

Peer Reviewed Gamification Research

Much of the skepticism revolving around gamification for health and education deal with its lack of legitimate research. Launching this month, The Games for Health Journal is a peer-reviewed journal that will contain studies about the research, development, and clinical-application of games. There are already a number of full articles available to read online for free here. Some notable studies to look at are “Story Immersion in a Health Videogame for Childhood Obesity Prevention” and Results of a “Dietitian Survey About Nutrition Games”.

National Science Foundation Awards $1.5M Grant for Video Game Research

The University of Colorado: Boulder has announced that it has received a $1.5M grant for video game research. The grant was awarded to the iDREAMS Scalable Game Design Summer Institute for their work in designing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) simulations. These simulations model natural and social phenomenal and are being used as educational tools. iDREAMS has already generated over 10,000 games and simulations and the new grant will go towards research in analyzing student performance and how that affects their computational and STEM learning. Congratulations iDREAMS!

Some Statistics on Pinterest’s User-Engagement

There are some sentiments that Pinterest’s method of engagement is superior than that of gamification. WebProNews does some analysis on statistics regarding how Pinterest’s unique platform is generating some really strong and interesting numbers. The one statistic that stuck out was “Users who have joined in recent months are 2-3x less active during their first month than the users that came before them.” WebProNews also questions if Pinterest traffic actually brings sales despite large volumes of traffic. The rest of the statistics show a really strong platform at work but these are just statistics open to interpretation. Could there possibly be a Pinterest bubble?

The Good Citizen Badge

In an op-ed for the New York Times, professor Richard H. Thaler talks about the various ways some governments have incorporated gamification to promote civic behavior amongst its citizens. We’ve seen this sort of behavior promotion with concepts like the speed-camera lottery but have you heard of the dog-poop lottery? New Taipei City in Taiwan has rolled out a concept that that incentivizes dog curbing by entering people in a gold-ingot lottery for discarding dog waste in special receptacles. The article continues to talk about other instances of civic incentivization, such as lotteries in health assessment and reward systems for recycling. Would you be enticed to do better actions with these incentives?