South By Texas State

SXSWi panel "Can Gaming Make the World Better?"

To kick off this Sunday morning of SXSWi, all those with altruist concerns congregated for the enlightening panel called “Can Gaming Make the World a Better Place?”. This panel was a must-see for I feel a strong, magnanimous aclivity for any person or organization working to improve the world and not just their bank accounts.

The panel consisted of 5 panelists from a diverse array of organizations and companies that utilize and employ gaming and “gamification” in their daily arsenal. The panelist line up included George Weiner from Dosomething.org, Adam Bosworth of Keas, Samantha Skey from RecycleBank, and Nadya Direkova game mechanic from Google inc. The overarching theme of this morning session was the potential of gaming and gamification inacting large scale good by providing incentives to educate and motivate end-users.

Fortuantely for us viewers, the panel was superbly moderated by Gabe Zicherman from www.Gamification Co. (great gamification blog with no room for shameless product placement). From the beginning, Gabe set the record straight and provided a great forum for discussion on a number of intriguing topics for instance reward systems and how its related inciting positive actions and results.

After much discussion, what stood out to this viewer was the battle-tested representative from DoSomething.org George Weiner. His repertoire of experience provided numerous, useful responses and many effective strategies regarding “inciting” a population with goals of deriving social good.

“Make it fun, everything must be fun in some sense. What we are terrified of is competition, there shouldn’t be a loser when competing for positive social change” -George Weiner, Dosomething.org

Adam Bosworth of Keas dispensed a number of health-related responses affording a unique angle to “Gamification” and human welfare. A number of queries he answered were situational examples relating his experience as a parent in order to clearly state his position or knowledge

“The primary goal is to have users constantly challenged to succeed and try to get people to compete against themselves instead of each other”

As you can see in the video above (with George), the world can be made better with gaming and “Gamification”. Those who are looking to impact the world with “Social Good” through Gamification need to focus on effective strategies and creative execution rather than shameless adoption resulting in countless failures.