Hi guys,

I would like to spice up my gamification masterclasses by adding this ‘BULLSHIT BINGO’ scorecard (just to increase the level of FUN and attention)… Please share this on Twitter if you think I should use it @BartHufen #Gamification #Bingo.

I am really looking forward to the next episode of mobile: Smart Watches! At first I wanted to buy the I’m Watch – beautiful Italian design, but from what I read on the internet ‘crappy’ technology. There is also the Sony Smart Watch but that’s not gonna be compatible with all my Apple devices and after the PlayStation Vita (what? yeah – it’s a handheld PlayStation released last year but no one will remember), I don’t really trust the innovational design skills of Sony… ;-(

There is also Pebble – which gives me a good feeling although I am looking more for a ‘Smart Screen’ on my wrist that just uses all the intelligence of my iPhone instead of launching their own ‘golden cage’ – iTunes-like app-store…

Since I couldn’t wait with buying a new watch, … I bought this classic Casio, unfortunately without games on it… but hey… you can’t have everything… It surprises me though, that Casio hasn’t made any steps into developing a smart watch yet…

SO… CASIO WAKE UP AND START INNOVATING!

I always pretend I am not allowed to touch the edges of tiles and can only step on the white stripes at cross-overs…

One of my clients is looking for a ‘Head of Gaming’…

With immediate effect they are looking to recruit for our office in Amsterdam:

Head of Online Gaming

The Dutch authorities are going to legalize online gambling, and want to issue licenses for this. My clients’ aim to apply for such a license, for the Dutch market, to play for money. The objective is to build a new business aside of their current operations to support their causes. In line with the their current business, a substantial share of the gaming revenues will be donated to charities.

To ensure that my client is in pole position when the market opens, they are already looking for a Head of Gaming to lead this online gambling initiative. Until they get the license the head of gaming will be responsible to develop the business plan, defining the strategy, building the platform and setting up a team. Pending the regulatory decision-making we will start to launch free games. As soon as we have the license the head of gaming will be responsible for the marketing launch, and developing a substantial new business.

As Head of Online Gaming you will be the dedicated business developer building our new state of the art integrated gaming platform, and shaping the future of it. This platform combines fun, entertainment, winning and sharing to one of the best game experiences of the near future. This platform will be built by a 3^rd party (that has been chosen already) and will leverage our existing brand and customer base.

You’ll take the lead in creating multi-disciplinary teams that run the sites and the apps, which create a fantastic gaming experience. You’ll shape the voice of the platforms from determining positioning feature prioritization and making strategic decisions, to organizing product launches and forming the future marketing strategy to ensure growth. This means you’ll have to create a cross-functional team in collaboration with existing experts in the Lottery of (online) revenue/retention marketeers, game content experts, web designers and copywriters.

You’ll be responsible for developing the Gaming portal and its growth of the overall revenue. We will start with free games but when our license is in place, (hopefully within 1,5 year) we’ll launch paid gaming, so in the end you will be responsible for the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

The Head of Gaming will report directly to the Managing Director. Tasks and responsibilities for this position include:

• developing and executing the strategy vision goals and business plan for the Gaming Portal;
• building and managing a cross-functional team of professionals;
• carrying full profit & loss responsibility for the portal which will attract a lot of unique visitors each month;
• improving the overall gaming experience by delivering the best high performing content;
• identifying and defining the best monetization strategies and revenue models for our audience/customers;
• growing the business sustainably in terms of reach and retention, revenues, ad impressions and margins;
• being on top of industry best practices and newest trends; and
• bringing a high degree of innovation energy and focus that will support significant expansion.

Your profile

• Master’s  degree in relevant field of study;
• Experience in online gambling development
• Extensive experience with an online consumer-facing platform (B2C)
• Experience in product management
• Previous exposure to online media and technology enabled services (e.g. online advertising) is essential
• Demonstrable passion for driving high quality, innovative and engaging user experiences
• Demonstrable experience in building and managing successful teams
• Ability to work effectively in a hands-on role in a start-up environment
• Strong analytical skills and a data-driven approach to decision making
• Prior cross-platform knowledge and experience (mobile tablets web) desirable
• Passionate about online games and about the target audience

Why join this company?

Be part of a business who is looking to grow rapidly in online gaming, where selling tickets for a better world is our daily work.

• A competitive salary and bonus system
• A good pension plan
• Extras such as visiting our projects in the Netherlands and abroad
• And most importantly a budget for training and development—because when you grow we grow with you!

Send me a TWEET if you are interested! @BartHufen

Brilliantly developed by ‘Learned Evolution’ and righteously backed by Twitter the #Feed project is a typical crossover event that bridges the gap between art, social content creation (through Twitter) and Real Life… I was there with my good friends from Amsterdam on Friday before SXSW really kicked off and I must say the video wall installation on the 1st floor of the MOA was awesome and unmatched! The Top floor of the museum featured all kinds of short video’s by various directors and artists supported by great music and (of course) free cocktails! 😉

I have to thank Len Stein for putting us on the guest list and hope we can visit something extraordinary again next year at SXSW! Check out every day’s video here: http://feed.is/live/

This is the last update about SXSW 2013 from my side. Apart from visiting a lot of fun things and hearing about some great innovations I can say that LEAP impressed me the most. Not because it’s that innovative – basically it’s Kinect for your Desktop computer – but because it is so perfectly optimized. In potential it could unleash a new iTunes store full of creative applications. Think of typing on a virtual keyboard, playing gesture games in a 3D environment, presentation tools for keynotes, Interactive Stand up comedy, etc. etc.
Check out the video below to see what it is.

To be honest, the other presentations I witnessed in these two days, just weren’t that impressive, apart from ‘The Playful Viewer’ of course, where I was a panelist 😉 Check out my previous blogpost about that if you wish to learn more about the gamification of a documentary…

I will update a video shortly!

By exception a posting in Dutch!

Inmiddels ben ik begonnen met het plannen van een nieuw boek: ‘Laat op je werk spelen!’ Omdat ik graag input wil van Learning & Development en HR professionals nodig ik je uit om gratis naar de inspiratiesessie te komen tijdens Festival of Games in Amsterdam op woensdag 24 april. Daar zullen twee opdrachtgevers hun case presenteren waarvan de resultaten om te smullen zijn!
Verder zou ik graag vernemen wat jouw top 5 HR uitdagingen zijn binnen de organisatie waar je voor werkt. Komt dus allen in grote getallen!

Het trainen van personeel is kostbaar en het resultaat is niet altijd helder. Sterker nog, uit onderzoek blijkt dat het effect binnen enkele weken al is uitgedooft. Games worden als trainingsmiddel steeds vaker succesvol toegepast. Deze games worden ontwikkeld voor bijvoorbeeld het opleiden van personeel op het gebied van sales, compliance, HR, brand awareness etc.

Serious gaming gebruikt spelbeleving om bewustwording en verandering van houding en gedrag te bewerkstelligen, waarbij de speler in een veilige omgeving kan experimenteren en fouten mag maken. Games bevorderen actief leren (learning by doing) binnen een relevante en veilige context. 

Bart Hufen – auteur van het boek ‘Laat met je merk spelen’ – toont tijdens deze sessie op het congres Festival of Games aan de hand van drie projecten samen met opdrachtgevers hoe games succesvol worden ingezet als trainingsmiddel voor verandermanagement bij ABN Amro en Schiphol Airport en als middel om upselling & cross-selling te verbeteren bij Ziggo.

“Games zijn zeer geschikt omdat ze inhaken op onze basis motivaties als competitie. Het spelen van een game vereist 100% aandacht, alles is meetbaar en boven 1.000 medewerkers is de inzet van een game voor gedragsverandering zeer kosten efficiënt. Bovendien stimuleer je ‘leren van ‘verplicht’ naar ‘vrijwillig’ doordat games gebruik maken van ‘intrinsieke motivatie’!
De resultaten bij diverse opdrachtgevers waren dat tot 70% van de medewerkers de games gemiddeld tot 3 keer toe vrijwillig speelde. “

Gratis inspiratie en praktijk cases op 24 april 2013

Programma:

9:30 uur               Inloop
10:00 uur             Inleiding Bart Hufen
10:20 uur             Case KPN i.s.m. IJsfontein
10:40 uur             Case ABN AMRO Dick Krikke
11:00 uur             Q&A
11:30 uur             Einde en koffie!

Locatie:

De Overkant, Gedempt Hamerkanaal, Amsterdam Noord

Aanmelden via deze link

The day started with breakfast: bananas and oranges – healthy old men we are! Then we went on to get some real breakfast and coffee at Congress street. I met my panel leader for the gamification of a documentary – Suvi Helminen – at 11:00 (she was one hour late… 😉 Our panel discussion is called ‘The Playful viewer’ and you can read more details (or put it on your schedule) here. It’s upcoming Tuesday at 14:30 hours.

At the gaming expo we saw Cliff Bleszinski in a panel about the Oculus Rift – the all new virtual reality gaming device. They received 2,5 million dollars from 10.000 backers. Let’s see if VR becomes the new standard of immersive gameplay!

– Postmaster
– Lynx Laboratories
– Subtle data
– Axelo
– Aumanil
– Taskbox
– Meritful
– Rock Your Paper
– Stormpulse (which was the only one note worthy in my opinion…)

The full article of ’10 steps to make you more interesting’ is stated here, since she previously published it on the Forbes website.

After that – we went to a party organized by the Dutch Fellows, free booze and dancing women, what more does a geek want?

On the third day of SXSW we did the following:

Watched the documentary innovation lab of MIT, where some cool things are happening, altough gamification was not mentioned.

We went to an – almost empty room – and watched the talk Games for Good, basically portraying the different options you have to publish a game… Not really innovative and ground breaking…

Since I couldn’t get into the presentation about Minecraft (too many parents and kids were in the room and they apparently had an advantage over international press…?) we just strolled the floor of the gaming expo…

Gaming Arena

– Steam’s box: read IGN’s vision about it here

– Augmented Alternate Reality Games the future? iPhone becomes scope rifle. This was actually quite cool. You just put you iPhone on a ‘specially developed’ gun and there you go: paintball 3.0 !

Make love not Porn

Hoping to learn t=from payment and distribution methods used in the porn industry I felt this presentation was more a promotion for socialisation of sex and open discussions of sex – as opposed to porn. More about this keynote here: http://makelovenotporn.com 

After arriving in Austin yesterday after a nine hour flight and four hour car drive, we (Mike and I) picked up our badges at the Austin Conress Centre. Then we headed up to our lovely Air BNB place at ‘Pat and Bill’ only 1,5 miles away from downtown. I shared a bed with Mike, which brought me back to my college years I guess, but, it beats couch surfing I guess…. We met up around eight with our two other cowboys in crime Bas (Vanguard games) and Michiel (Little Chicken Game company) at coyote ugly…. Talk about old glory gone…. 😉

Today the game starts to visit about 100 keynotes, inspiration sessions, drinks, art events, interactive installations, dining, wining, etc…

My schedule for today is in the picture and I noticed a lot of things start at the same hour…. So I guess I am not yet done making choices… 😉

SXSW – The biggest creative blend of Film, Music and Interactive art & entertainment takes place in Austin – Texas. I really look forward to indulging myself seven days during the festival. I rented an apartment for myself and three friends that also work in the creative / games industry. For the past weeks I have tried to set up a schedule to visit all the interesting keynotes. workshops, seminars, meet-ups, mashups etc. but it’s just too much!

We have decided to just ‘go with the flow’ and see what people we meet and were people go. So if you’re going – LET ME KNOW! Send me a tweet @BartHufen

I will probably follow everything on the ‘digital domain’ from MIT sessions to start-up material…

http://sxsw.com/film/sessions/digital-domain

And of course – there is one event I will be visiting at least, since I am in the panel 😉

My opinion about gamification of film has been influenced positively since the release of ‘The Walking Dead‘ was released. I first started playing on iPad, but now my girlfriend and I are playing it on PlayStation 3 and she’s scared shitless! 😉 It reminds me of the classic ‘point and click’ adventures of the nineties.

The advantage the game has over film is that it’s all animated and not ‘film fragments’… Since your mind is ‘actively involved’ in adding ‘imagination’ to the experience, you don’t feel too much interruption. In a ‘real’ film, you witness ‘real-people’ experiencing real stuff, so every ‘moment of choice’ feels like an interruption (pause-play)…. But I haven’t played Suvi’s project all the way yet, so don’t take my word for it, but try it yourself!

Play her project here: http://www.48hourgames.com