Christopher Pouncy's List: PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAY

• It Boosts Our Creativity Mark Beeman, Ph.D., at Northwestern University found that people have an easier time solving a puzzle after watching a short comedy clip
• It Helps Us Think Outside the Box Barbara Fredrikson, Ph.D., of the University of Chapel Hill – North Carolina found that positive emotions increase our cognitive resources by expanding our visual attention as well as our social resources by improving our ability to connect with others.
• Stuart Brown, M.D. describes in his book Play how the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL)
• It Improves Our Health
• laughter can also improve physical health.
• When we lose ourselves in play, we can enter a state of Flow, a concept proposed by research psychologist, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
• About 50% of the time, we aren't in the present moment, according to a study of 5,000 people by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University.
• “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

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• “Gamification is a way of thinking about customer engagement,”

  • FROM GABE ZICHERMANN'S BOOK.
• You don’t need a giant jackpot. An estimated 120 million Americans collect frequent flyer miles; very few expect first-class tickets to Tahiti. “Most frequent flyers will tell you they don’t care about that,” says Zichermann. “What they really care about are things like status, access and power. In this model, status trumps stuff. That’s a core tenet of gamification.”  

  • STATUS TRUMPS STUFF.
• Points are good. Badges, too. And ribbons. And gold stars. All are subtle ways of motivating people.

  • REWARDS AND FRIENDLY COMPETITION IS GOOD IN THE WORK PLACE (remember the piston tickets the company had).
• Companies like BigDoor, Badgeville, Gamify, and Gigya can assist you with strategy and software—often free of charge.
• Games are very effective teaching tools. They help you learn through experience—and that can be very meaningful.

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• Zappos has an employee culture that seems very much of one mind, focused on customer service and not in some sort of cookie-cutter corporate way. Zappos really cares that you're happy, and it's baked into their beliefs, their customer interaction, and even the way they hire.
• "When we hire people we do two sets of interviews. The hiring manager and his or her team will do the standard fit within the team, relevant experience, technical ability and so on. But then our HR department does a second set of interviews purely for culture fit."
• "We've formalized the definition of our culture into 10 core values. Basically what we're looking for are peoples whose personal values match our corporate values.

• The Zappos Core Values are:

   

  1. Deliver Wow Through Service
   2. Embrace and Drive Change
   3. Create Fun and a Little Weirdness
   4. Be Adventurous, Creative and Open-Minded
   5. Pursue Growth and Learning
   6. Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication
   7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
   8. Do More with Less
   9. Be Passionate and Determined
   10. Be Humble
• Zappos figured out, and continues to deliver on,is the idea that people who don't fit the company culture are better off being paid to leave.
• In the end, the culture is about more than money. "It's not me saying to our employees, this is where our culture is. It's more about giving employees permission and encouraging them to just be themselves.
• Tony Hsieh says in the book that research found that the best companies in terms of long-term financial performance are ones that are able to combine profits, passion and purpose.

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• Business experts agree that we're living in a time when traits like imagination and creativity are of the utmost importance in business. Richard Florida calls it the "creative age," and Daniel Pink has dubbed it the "conceptual age."
• In the same way that machines have replaced our bodies in certain kinds of jobs, software is replacing our left brains by doing sequential, logical work," Pink explained
• "What's important now are the characteristics of the brain's right hemisphere: artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big-picture thinking. These skills have become first among equals in a whole range of business fields."

  • PINK SAID
• Some of our most creative business ideas come from this 'downtime,'

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• Employees receive points or badges for completing jobs or meeting time limits for assignments,
• Companies also may use leaderboards, which let players view one another's scores, to encourage friendly competition and motivate performance,
• Tech-industry research firm Gartner estimates that by 2014, some 70% of large companies will use the techniques for at least one business process.
• "The reason why gamification is so hot is that most people's jobs are really freaking boring,"
• University of Colorado Denver Business School found that employees trained on video games learned more factual information, attained a higher skill level and retained information longer than workers who learned in less interactive environments.

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• “there’s some evidence that great physical space enhances creativity,” she said. “The theory is that open spaces that are fun, where people want to be, facilitate idea exchange.
• In over 30 years of research, I’ve found that people do their most creative work when they’re motivated by the work itself.
• Physical space is the biggest lever to encourage collaboration. And the data are clear that the biggest driver of performance in complex industries like software is serendipitous interaction.

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• #1: Achievers (Bartle’s Types)
• Richard Bartle‘s four player types: Achievers, Explorers, Killers and Socialites.
• #2: Badges as a Reward
• #3: Challenges
• consider the context of the underlying application and the user’s state within the player life cycle to sustain user engagement
• #4: Demographics
• “50% of gamers are reported as being female, 30% are over 45, and in the U.S. there are 40 million active social gamers (who play at least 1 hour a week), and there are over 200 million gamers on Facebook.”
• #5: Explorers (Bartle’s Type)
• #6: Flow Theory

• Csíkszentmihályi identifies ten factors of flow.

  • Clear goals
  • A high degree of concentration
  • A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness
  • Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered
  • Direct and immediate feedback
  • Balance between ability level and challenge
  • A sense of personal control over the situation or activity
  • The activity is intrinsically rewarding
  • A lack of awareness of bodily needs
  • Absorption into the activity
• #7: Gifts (Game Mechanics)
• #8: Having Fun Is Okay
• #9: Incentivizing Online Activities
• #10: Just So You Know
• “Gamification” was added to the Oxford Dictionary 2011 Word of the Year Short List!
• #11: Killers (Bartle’s Type)
• #12: Leaderboards
• Leaderboards are one of the major features of games.
• #13: Motivational Design
• Good gamification design seeks to understand and align an organization’s objectives with a player’s intrinsic motivation
• through the use of extrinsic rewards and intrinsically satisfying design, move the player through their journey of mastery. This journey requires elements such as desire, incentive, challenge, reward and feedback to create engagement
• #14: Not the Opposite of Work
• think of play as being at the root of gamification and when done well, people can engage in playful activities and still do business at the same time.
• #15: Organizational Goals
• #16: Progress Bar (Game Mechanics)
• #17: Quantifiable Outcomes
• #18: Rewards
• Make your community a valuable user experience where users will be proud to participate and as a result will be more inclined to value your rewards.
• #19: Socialites (Bartle’s Type)
• #20: Tactics and Gamification
• #21: Users’ Needs and Goals

• There are a number of motivational drivers and DiTommaso recommends you simplify to four key factors. Decide if your users are motivated by:

  • Achievement of goals or enjoyment of experience
  • Structure and guidance or freedom to explore
  • Control of others or connecting with others
  • Self-interest in actions or social interest in actions
• #22: Virtual Environments and Engagement
• maybe it’s about our desire for distraction or our need to find a way to relax from the usual demands of our day
• #23: Website Invigoration
• #24: (E)xamples
• #25: (Wh)y Do You Want to Gamify?
• #26: Zeitgeist at the Appropriate Time

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• Social scientists have been studying and debating the effects of media violence on behavior since the 1950s, and video games in particular since the 1980s.
• games are more realistic and bloodier than ever, and because most American boys play them at some point.
• Girls play at lower rates and are significantly less likely to play violent games.
• Playing the games can and does stir hostile urges and mildly aggressive behavior in the short term.
• Moreover, youngsters who develop a gaming habit can become slightly more aggressive — as measured by clashes with peers, for instance — at least over a period of a year or two.
• The research falls into three categories: short-term laboratory experiments; longer-term studies, often based in schools; and correlation studies

  • SHORT TERM LAB EXPERIMENTS
    LONGER TERM STUDIES
    CORRELATION STUDIES
• Lab experiments confirm what any gamer knows in his gut: playing games like “Call of Duty,” “Killzone 3” or “Battlefield 3” stirs the blood.
• It also tested whether the students would behave more aggressively, by having them dole out hot sauce to a fellow student who, they were told, did not like spicy food but had to swallow the sauce

  • CHRISTOPHER BARLETT
• It is far harder to determine whether cumulative exposure leads to real-world hostility over the long term.
• Some studies in schools have found that over time digital warriors get into increasing numbers of scrapes with peers
• Brock University in Ontario found that longer periods of violent video game playing among high school students predicted a slightly higher number of such incidents over time.
• “None of these extreme acts, like a school shooting, occurs because of only one risk factor; there are many factors, including feeling socially isolated, being bullied, and so on,”

  • CRAIG ANDERSON
• I think it’s clear that violent media is one factor; it’s not the largest factor, but it’s also not the smallest.
• aggressive children who are the most likely to be drawn to violent video games in the first place;

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• Many psychologists argue that violent video games “socialize” children over time
• a habit is so consuming that its influence trumps the socializing effects of other major figures in a child’s life.
• In surveys about 80 percent of high school-age boys say they play video games, most of which are thought to be violent, and perhaps a third to a half of those players have had a habit of 10 hours a week or more.
• The number of violent youth offenders fell by more than half between 1994 and 2010, to 224 per 100,000 population, according to government statistics, while video game sales have more than doubled since 1996.
• We found that higher rates of violent video game sales related to a decrease in crimes

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• it helps you consider each area of your life in turn and assess what's off balance. As such, it helps you identify areas that need more attention.

  • CREATED BY PAUL J. MEYER

  • THE WHEEL OF LIFE

• That's when I developed a framework called "Work, Play, Fit, Push

  • AMBER RAE
• 1. Set priorities on Sunday.
• 2. Map out work, play, fit, and push.
   Work
• 3. Batch your days.
• CREATE on Monday/Wednesday/Friday: I create holes in my schedule for thinking and creating. On these days, instead of thinking about how to spend my time in advance, I pay attention to my body and take breaks as needed.
• CALLS and MEETINGS on Tuesday/Thursday
• SPONTANEOUS Saturday: With so much structure, I make room for spontaneity
• INTENTIONAL Sunday: Plan for the week ahead.

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• launch “a playful revolution to help people bust out of cubicles.”

  • CARY UMHAU
• trick out decommissioned ice cream trucks and deploy them to cruise the city offering services such as on-the-spot hairdressing, chefs serving up cookies and milk or “recess teams” that will bring line-dancing flash mobs to downtown sidewalks.

  • SPACIOUS MOBILES
• an informal alliance of academics, therapists and human resources experts that is spreading the word about the role of playfulness in maintaining mental and physical health.

  • THE PLAY MOVEMENT
• We stop playing at our peril

  • GWEN GORDON
• We think we are a playful culture, but we are really overworked.
• Americans on average have 13 paid vacation days per year, and most people don’t even take them. Other countries have 40.
• We take our weekends to play hard, but that’s really to let off steam from our play-deprived lives and just get enough energy to get back into the ring.”
• aims to restore “lightheartedness” to society. It advises adults to dance in grocery stores, rock out in their cars or just blow bubbles for the fun of it, said Katie West, a former life coach who runs the nonprofit.

  • LEVITY INSTITUTE
• “Certainly stress levels are very high,” said David Ballard, who directs the American Psychological Association’s Psychologically Healthy Workplace Program. The APA’s 2012 Workplace Survey found that low salaries were the top workplace source of stress along with lack of opportunity for advancement and heavy workloads.

  • DAVID BALLARD
• People are working longer hours and also don’t feel valued, which gets tied to physical and mental health and motivation
• get them moving and connect humor and happiness to work
• means you’re scrolling through your BlackBerry during your daughter’s dance recital.

  • WORK LIFE BALANCE
• Washington’s just very high-strung,

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