First round of the Loyalty Games 2014
As you know from my blog posts before the event and my social media posting probably too, that I took part in the first round of the Loyalty Games also know as the Loyalty and Gamification World Championships 2014. Originally I had signed up for the Gamification World Championships, which then got postponed and then ultimately morphed into something called the Loyalty Games. Whilst I read and write, learn and teach as much as possible about gamification and work actively in implementing this for clients, I wouldn’t consider myself a loyalty specialist per se. Most of the work I have done so far has been around employee engagement, content gamification and learning.
The first round took place last Saturday with participants from across the world participating in the online questionnaire for 2 hours solid. I never expected any world championship to be easy, but I would have expected to be able to understand more than I did at times. I reckon for about 40% of the questions I was not completely sure what was being asked and I would consider myself a near native English speaker (even if originally I grew up speaking Flemish). I feel for all the people that don’t have a good command of English, because they were at a distinct disadvantage. The wording was academic and highly management consultant focused. So for a good 10-15% of the questions I had to throw a guess at it, because I had no clue what was being asked and didn’t have the time to linger too long on it.
The first 69 questions were loyalty and recommendation engine related, now baffle me stupid, but I never heard of such engines before…duh! So more guessing! At that point I started to panic when would there be questions I actually felt I could properly answer? Thank goodness from question 70 to 108 we finally hit some gamification. It was obvious that the Gartner definition of gamification was favoured and mainly digital solutions were sought, which I found a pity. For some of the questions I would reckon women and men would answer differently although that thought only occurred to me in a handful of questions.
The part of the competition where I would feel my strengths were, namely the last 4 questions, where we were asked to design a board game for supply chain revenue maximisation, I ran out of time. I only managed to answer 2 for sure and maybe 3 if the system did an autosave before I got cut off. I had in my view a good fun concept for a game, but wasted too much time in the earlier sections trying to understand and make sense of questions that I hadn’t enough time left to do this as well as I would have wanted.
So in all I am disappointed with my performance. My game strategy to work from the top to the bottom and whilst I did keep an eye on the time I reached the half way point at my set time, didn’t pay off. Maybe I should have started with gamification and creativity before tackling any loyalty and other mystical areas. My preparation about loyalty definitely didn’t cover half the stuff I was asked about, but at least 30% of the questions I knew something about.
Anyway, I am an experience richer and on Wednesday we find out whether we have done enough to make it through the first round. You never know, miracles do happen and all I have at this point is a bit of hope that maybe there were others in the same boat and that for some reason the top 50% still includes practical creative people who don’t speak like academic text book riddle makers.
Good luck to everyone!
Update: jut as this post went live I received a message to say I have made it through to the next round…miracles do happen 🙂
Here is the breakdown of my efforts:
Your Results for Round 1
Overall Result: Top 50%
Section A Result: Outside Top 50%
Loyalty, Rewards and Gifting
Section B Result: Top 40%
Employee Loyalty and Management
Section C Result: Top 40%
Recommendation Systems
Section D Result: Top 40%
Mobile Marketing and Loyalty
Section E Result: Top 10%
Gamification Theory and Design
Section F Result: Top 40%
Football and Olympics
Section G Result: Top 40%
Enterprise Strategy
Section H Result: Top 30%
Supply Chain Management – Case Study
