Gamification Mechanic Monday: Crowd-creation
A number of games are built on what the player creates, to name a few Minecraft, Lego, Sim city, Mario creator, etc. In the case of Mario, the came out with a creator kit after their already successful games, where the player just followed the designed track. Crowd-creation thanks to open-ended games like Minecraft has a strong appeal with younger players and I believe this is a mechanic we will see transfer into gamification design for enterprise purposes.
In some organisations it is already acceptable to share external resources as part of learning in internal social networks and in some cases into a curated platform, which allows social sharing. From a learning perspective the best way to embed and make learning contextual is to share your view on it in a real life applied scenario. It is also a way adults retain information best and where learning then becomes relevant.
By encouraging crowd creation, whether that is the new office design, a project plan, an innovation or corporate vision or learning, the scope where it can be applied is vast. When you look at open ended creation games, there are still limits within which one must operate, such as blocks for example, textures and some creativity limitations to be overcome. If you apply this to gamification in business, the design may be to have limits as to what can be crowd created and potentially a curation point, where other game elements such as voting and ranking may be useful additions of it to stick. The key will be to set a purpose and explain the rules of engagement, but then to back off and let crowd-creation do it’s thing. If you start limiting and curating too soon, you will also stifle sharing and creativity. In fact initial encouragement will be necessary to have more people share and take part.
Where will you use crowd-creation and for what purpose?
