The Kurty D Show

013 - Gamification Guru with Yu-kai Chou

Episode Summary

Known for his Octalysis Framework, and the author of "Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards.", Yu-kai Chou unpacks his stories on what the ideas of games captured his attention and what inspired him to come up with After stepping down as CEO of his startup in 2012, Yu-kai published his gamification framework Octalysis. He is now a full-time consultant and speaker on gamification. In this episode, we dive deeper into ways in which gamification has been used and could be used in the future to make the world a better, more sustainable, and more fun place to live our lives. Our guest, Yu-kai Chou, is an Author and International Keynote Speaker on Gamification and Behavioral Design. He is the Original Creator of the Octalysis Framework, and the author of Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. He is currently Founder Partner/Chief Creation Officer of The Octalysis Group, the leading consulting firm on gamification and behavior design. Yu-kai explains Octalysis framework, which is now the leading gamification framework in the tech sector. We get to hear what the framework is, how he developed it and how it has helped improve over 1 billion user experiences across the world creating behavioral change among their customers and employees. Yu-kai was one of the earliest pioneers in Gamification, starting his work in the industry in 2003. In 2015, Yu-kai was rated #1 among the “Gamification Gurus Power 100” by RISE, and was also awarded the “Gamification Guru of the Year” Award in 2014, 2015 and 2017 by the World Gamification Congress and the Gamification Europe Conference. He has helped a variety of companies, from seed stage startups to Fortune 500 companies such as LEGO, Uber, Volkswagen/Porsche, eBay, Fidelity Investments, AIG Japan, Verizon, and more. His work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, The World Journal, PBS, NBC, and many more. This episode has much to offer to those in sales, marketing, product, and community & ecosystem development.

Episode Notes

What we covered:

4:26 - Conversation about Taiwan and how World War III might start because of the feud with China

8:15 - Life compared to an idea of a game

10:10 - Inspiration on gamification

12:59 - Mentality shift from having to move from different places

15:05 - Introduction of the Octalysis framework - our 8 core drives

16:06 - Parts of the Octalysis framework - white hat, black hat, left side, right side

19:42 - Light bulb moment for the Octalysis framework

23:50 - Value created by the Octalysis framework

28:11 - Yu-kai's early experience and projects (Future Delivery and Reward Me)

33:51 - More about Octalysis - company's growth

36:34 - Yu-kai's sense of the emerging future and NFTs

43:58 - Overcoming failure and having integrity

Episode Sponsor:

Hunt Club

Tweetable Quotes:

• "Having a game-like mentality is like everything you face in life is an opportunity to learn, grow, score high. I think even just that one thing will change a lot of people's lives."
• "If you say yes to every opportunity, you have no strategy."
• "I think it's important for people to be able to respect and like themselves. I think that's worth a lot of luxury in life."
• "Even if everything was successful. If I did things against my moral principles. Like, I'd be super rich and successful. I'd be in a big house, a nice TV, a nice house and all that nice stuff will be surrounding a piece of shit. And that piece of shit is me. And I think that's not worth it. Like I need to respect myself. I need to like myself for me to enjoy my life."
• "When you move from country to country, you realize: Hey, what's like socially polite and expected in one country (and) is offensive another. And you realize, (oh) these are all variables. These are all up to change human systems. And that's when you can think the most stuff fluidly. So my work has inspired a lot of people to try to change their life into games and change their minds."
• "I think there are so many facets that life can improve if you see it as a game. Like just one simple thing is just attitude and mentality, right? Some people think, "why do you have so many obstacles in my life?" "so much bad luck," and they kind of give up. But if you look at a game, a game is really boring if there are no obstacles or resistance or bad guys that are going against you."
• "In a game, every obstacle is actually an opportunity to score more points and people tackle them with a strong attitude. And I think in life, a lot of the same people when they face any obstacles, any setbacks, they're just like, oh my life sucks. I'm not going to try anymore. Like even with the game of golf, right? If golf was just about getting to the goal, then it's kind of boring. Just pick up the ball, walk up to the hole, and put it in. But no one would want to play that. So we need to add a lot of difficulty and obstacles or we need to stand up far away, headed with a weird stick. There needs to be little sand puddles and ponds to make it more frustrating. And now it's a fun game."

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Octalysis group website