The Game Changer: How to Use the Science of Motivation With the Power of Game Design to Shift Behaviour, Shape Culture and Make Clever Happen Paperback – April 28, 2014

How to make change stick? How to engage and inspire? The elegant and simple refrain, "make progress visible" has profound impact. This is one of the most useful principles of the book and is why I quote it in every change management workshop I deliver. It has also spurred my own interest in apps that track progress (and regression) in personal and professional projects.Jason's wry wit is engaging, his illustrations hilarious. This book is a gem.

Fantastic book with a lot of very stimulating thoughts. The big problem is execution. How do we do it? Believe me, it's not easy. For example, one of the big points in the book, with which I fully agree, is to "make progress visible." And we need to shorten the feedback loop. It's not always easy, within conventional business tools to make progress visible. And then, trying to enhance the visibility of progress can easily slide into the realm of the corny. There aren't many good, concrete examples of how to do these things.In the book, Reality is Broken, often cited in this book, there are numerous examples of great gamification platforms. Few of which continue to operate.The ideas in this book should stimulate a lot of good thinking but the execution will prove difficult. I find it very hard to get people to maintain feedback systems and to 'make progress visible'. I have found that bringing attention to progress is helpful in keeping momentum up---so I now report more on progress of my own projects. That helps me but does really spur others to great work.I highly recommend the book but expect to do a lot of work figuring out the how...Yes, still a 5 star book.

An abundance of great information and a very good introduction to gamification, but could benefit by a strong editor.

I am still reading this book. I decided to review it early because I cannot imagine how accurate it is describing where I am right now. I read many self help books, watched lots of programs, came into a state of depression where I want to make a top selling game and all I do is watching more programs, reading fluff on facebook and getting more depressed. This book describes my current state and telling the problem, the root problem not the apparent one, and give the solution which is for the first time a practical solution.I am so grateful to Jason Fox. I will buy gifts and give them to people who are in the exact poition. <3

great book, with the right tips and advises to make us think about how we can act as game changers.I've started applying the concepts learned while reading the book! Extremely helpful to the projects i have in hand and which need simple and creative approach, focused on ''gamification''.

The book outlines the things you need to do to get behavioural change and drive progress. I found this book more thought provoking than Quest.

A must read for all those interested in working smarter, improving productivity and enjoying business more. As a professional coach I recommend this to virtually all my clients for the great insights (and the quirky humour). Dr Fox is a Game Changer.

Solid book that provides a clear thesis, backs it with science, and builds on it throughout. Upfront, the book puts out there that everything in the world is a game, some things are just poorly designed games. Based around this theme, the book provides an easily understandable breakdown of the science behind motivation. It makes clear the three major parts of what make a game - goals, rules, and feedback; moving on to talk about how the science of motivation can be applied in this fashion. There are a number of useful tips on how to 'hack' motivation and ways to create better constructed games for your work or the work of a team. The focus at the end of this book is on how to be the game changer, or person who drives change within teams or yourself. I found the analysis on how to be the game changer a bit light, but thought the overall book had many useful details on motivation, tips to improve it, and a clear way to think about motivation in relation to work.

There exists a very strange paradox with some lazy people, a 'lazy' person loves to play computer games like World of Warcraft instead of doing work, they put in so much dedication and effort in to playing games, but isn't playing games a form of work? Why is it these games are so much better at motivating people than work?This book believes this paradox is the result of poorly designed work that fails to inspire and motivate. It states that we can look at games for inspiration on how to create work that is both rewarding and motivating. This is known as gamification.There are many excellent points in the book, I will try and sum up the ones I think are most important.A key element of gamification is giving people a sense of progress. Just like how people hate to be stuck in the same part of a game for a long time, in real life people don't like been stuck on something for a long time either. We want to believe that we are going somewhere, achieving something and we like to see visible progress, work needs to be constantly moving forwards, complex tasks need to be broken down into small easily achieved steps so each easily achieved step gives people a sense of achievement and progress towards a longer term goal.When people don't get a sense of progress they will often turn to tasks that do give them progress(e.g checking emails) even tho it's not important as the work they should be doing.Another vital part of progress is that even when you fail you're still making progress because you're figuring out what does not work, this is very important (think of how many times you die in a computer game as you figure things out). The author believes we need to leave behind the cult of success and focus more on progress and making tasks more rewarding.Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are very important for happiness in people's lives in general. Games have this perfectly, the player makes decisions for themselves (autonomy), they learn about how the game works and how to do things in the game (mastery), and they have a cool purpose to work towards (e.g complete game to rescue the princess, save the world etc). If you want to get people motivated, you need to incorporate these things in to work.Giving rewards can be a useful part of gamification. The gap between action and reward for the action needs to kept as small as possible as people need quick feedback. But rewards must be used carefully as they can change people's motivation to just wanting the reward. Money as a motivator only works up to a certain point then its effectiveness plateaus and other things become more important."Using our hero teacher as the shining example, he introduces a new reward scheme: `The top 10 per cent of teachers will be given a $ 10 000 bonus at the end of the year', he boldly proclaims. There are 40 teaching staff at this school. And now they start eyeing each other off, wondering who will be in the top four to receive the reward; $ 10 000 is a lot of money, after all. Activities begin to narrow. Teachers who would otherwise innovate and think creatively now perform within the parameters dictated by the reward. Those teachers who used to share their resources have stopped collaborating; things have got competitive. And then the bickering and politics start -- and what was once a wonderful culture of collaboration focused on enhancing learning opportunities for students has now become a bitter culture of compliance and competition.""Pay well, provide a good base package, and then focus on the motivational opportunities inherent within the work (which is the premise of this book). Use incentives and rewards cautiously for short sprints of grunt work, and use good motivation design to bring out the best in your team."Goal setting is heavily criticized as it can focus too much attention on the wrong things which results in bad results. (e.g lying about achieving the goal or doing quick poor quality work), intrinsic motivation, making the work, progress and change inherently rewarding works a lot better.This book considers the motivation industry to be based on poor science and to be using cynical psychological manipulation to exploit people but actually delivering very little of actually use beyond psyching people up with "I can achieve anything I want" and other such nice to believe things. (actually getting people with low self esteem to chant such slogans makes them even more depressed!). It is written in a informal and sometimes funny manner with some amusing drawings and has good science to back up its claims.

This book is fantastic. It's written well and the illustrations do a wonderful job of communicating the content.The information and ideas in the book are great too. It's really challenged the way I think about motivation in the workplace and how to better design businesses and processes.Well worth a read.

Given as a gift

Great insight into what motivates us and how to help young audiences apply game-like techniques to their studies.

Great book, great ideas. I bought the audio book first then doubled up kindle AND hard copy.Lots of applications.