Gamification Mechanic Monday: lives refresh
With the end of another year fast approaching, I always love the fact that it also opens up opportunity for everything new. For me it is like a full refresh of your lives in a game, in most games time expiration will give you extra lives or in social games you can ask your friends. But imagine your experience, level and everything remains where it is at and you just have a new set of opportunities to tackle a new game.
How do you play your new lives? Do you delve right in? Do you reflect in the down time an work out new strategies or do you wait and see what happens? Do you look for input from friends for the next steps?
I love dreaming up new strategies for the new year and have done so for years, with a birthday in June I have the perfect mid-way checkpoint also for course alteration if necessary.
When using the new lives technique in an enterprise setting, do you set your employees up with a number of lives or just one? I prefer games where I get more than one chance and would expect the same in an employment setting. What are the parameters for them to refresh, are they time related or project based? Time is an interesting measurement and in online games very adequate, but for enterprise 20 minutes refresh is probably a bit too soon to be meaningful. So decide on a meaningful amount of time, where the element of waiting provides an eagerness to start again.
I have yet to come across a workplace where there were lives to be earned, but working as a freelancer often felt like this and the excitement/tension of the wait between gigs often felt like lives being refreshed (often also quite literally). With the future of work changing and tending towards a more and more freelance structure, having 3 to 5 lives (i.e. gigs) in your pipeline at any given time could well be a way forward. Finding new gigs usually for me involved activity and strategy to make sure they happened so quite naturally aligned with what I do anyway around this time of year and in games.
How would you use the refresh of lives in enterprise?
