The first three months of the year are always packed with excitement for games industry people, with CES in January, DICE in February and GDC in March.

While I personally love GDC and all the events surrounding it, we chose to check out the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas instead this year.

Organized by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, DICE stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate and Entertain and brings together the top video game designers. developers and publishers from around the world to discuss important topics about the industry.

This year was no different, with speakers like Tim Sweeney, Richard Hilleman, Eric Hirshberg, David Jaffee, Tomonobu Itagaki, Todd Howard, Seamus Blackley and many more. You can check out some of the talks from DICE 2012 here.

And here is my favorite: Tim Sweeney’s thoughts on the next 20 years in gaming:

But the talks alone don’t begin to describe the true appeal of DICE – compared to events like GDC, DICE is really small and you can actually hang out with the best and the brightest in the industry at cool networking events like go-karting (which was awesome), golf, poker tournaments (welcome to Vegas) and several great parties.

Tadej with Jesse Schell and Hendrik Lesser (taken by Wendy Dominguez, Gamestop)

I had a great time at the conference and I am definitely coming back whenever I can – and not just for the nice February weather (wearing a T-shirt while there was heavy snow back home), the classy venue (Red Rock Resort) and the abundance of high-quality shows in Vegas.

Here is an overview of the current state of the platform and some of our future plans.

For more background on games and office work, you can check out our post on gamification and motivational design.

Every year, the research firm Gartner publishes a report of emerging technologies and the stages of their impact in the marketplace.

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report has become a constant source of inspiration for all kinds of technical and business professionals, from IT managers, marketers, directors to entrepreneurs.

The latest report includes technologies such as speech-to-speech translation, 3D printing, quantum computing and gamification.

To better understand the individual phases, here is the same graph with explanations.

Gamification, serious games, motivational design – these are some of the terms used when we apply lessons from game design to drive engagement in non-traditional contexts such as office work, health care or education.

Slowly but surely, games are changing the way employees and managers around the world tackle their daily tasks.

Here is a shorter version of a presentation I gave this year at the FMX 2011 conference in Stuttgart (Germany), showing some of the examples and ideas we are using with our clients.

Games are all about fun. We play them because we are competitive by nature and we feel challenged through them, because we can risk it all in games and lose nothing in the real world, because games are a welcome break from our daily routine and, most importantly, because we get a feeling of accomplishment when we make progress in a game.

These are surely not the only reasons, but from a psychological viewpoint, these are some of the main motivators why people play games.

Gamification, or motivational design, is all about engagement. It means using the motivation that is inherent to games for e.g. increasing someone’s productivity and for enforcing a certain behavior by integrating game mechanics and dynamics into an existing activity.

While games are a great tool for increasing engagement, in order to be effective, we have to think about the following two aspects first:

1) Are we increasing the level and intensity of an already existing behavior?
2) Do we want to initiate new behavior?

These two points do not necessarily counter one another as many businesses need gamification to meet both aspects. The “mix ratio” of these two aspects however often depends on whether people are engaging in the process of our interest in their leisure time or if they are engaging in this specific process at work.

Here at Motiviti we are researching and implementing practical applications of gamification techniques both in business environments such as call centers, as well as on websites that users often visit outside of work hours.

In reality, this means that a call center company for instance would want to give its operators additional motivation independent from their salary in order to motivate above average work results – i.e. intensifying an already existing behavior.

Owners of a website with entertaining content, however, might want their visitors to post more links to the website on social networks instead of just browsing through the content. This means initiating new behavioral patterns.

In both cases, we want to get end results that benefit our businesses but we have to bear in mind that there is a basic difference in the individual behavior of visitors of a website and workers in a call center.

The first browse the website to have fun and we want to motivate them to do something they aren’t necessarily inclined to at the moment – while the latter are performing the same work anyway because it is their job, and what we can do is infuse fun and purpose in the otherwise monotonous daily routine in order to achieve better work results.

We love our work because it is creative, engaging and simply intrinsically fun.

But we realize that many other types of work lack elements necessary to keep workers motivated for a longer period of time.

One example of such a work place are call centers, especially outbound and sales centers, where everything is about numbers and companies have historically focused on optimizing the grind work with methods similar to those in the early industrial era (from conveyor belts & assembly lines).

Throughout the last decade, we have established strong long-term business relationships with several medium to large enterprises where the above is very much the case.

This has allowed us to recognize the opportunity to introduce change through technology and game mechanics.

One such example is undergoing deployment right now: we are working closely with an established call center to see how we can use elements from games to help make work there more fun and engaging.

We will soon be ready to publish some results and invite you to join our private beta program, so follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook to learn more!

A few months ago, we started work on a new action/puzzle game for the iPhone and iPad.

The main character in the game is Bruno Anaconda, a goofy and extremely over-confident explorer on a secret mission in a slightly twisted version of the Amazonian jungle.

We are currently testing a few new game mechanics and playing around with the artwork a bit. The main focus is on Bruno himself – we want a combination of goofiness and macho appeal, as well as a character that people can relate to and remember.

As this is an internal project with (currently) no deadline, we are using some of our spare time to work on it. We are aiming to get a working demo out there soon.

Games are an important part of our lives – online games take up as much as 3 billion hours of our collective time every week.

Playing games, we experience something everyday life is often lacking – clearly defined goals, endless motivation and a constant source of challenges.

Over the last couple of years, game designers around the world have tried and often succeeded in applying principles from games in fields such as health care, education, science, productivity and even crowd-sourcing.

To better understand what it is we are tapping into, we need to know a few basics about motivation.

We distinguish between two types of rewards that keep us motivated to play – extrinsic and intrinsic.

Extrinsic rewards include points, badges, levels, progress, combos and other kinds of payment, praise or tangible or intangible feedback.

Intrinsic rewards include the feeling of achieving mastery, being part of a community, the feeling of creating something unique and other deeply-seeded motivators.

Some of the caveats of extrinsic rewards are explained in this excellent talk by Dan Pink.

It is a common belief among game industry professionals that the recently coined term gamification refers to services (especially websites) that predominantly focus on extrinsic rewards (see Just add points).

A lot of love for this trend came from Jesse Schell’s talk at DICE last year.

At GDC 2011 (taking place this week in San Francisco), a panel of distinguished game designers was even debating the proper usage of the term (see Gamasutra article).

But regardless of how we call it, we believe tapping into intrinsic motivation is key to harnessing the power of games in traditionally non-gaming environments.

Just slapping points on something does not necessarily make it more fun (although it may produce some short-term results).

Our latest project is about understanding the space we operate in and using the existing social dynamics that are already in place to achieve the goal outlined above.

And what exactly is the space? A full blown professional call center.

Hopefully, you will be able to check back in a few weeks to follow our progress!

In December, we were part of a very exciting project for LG in New York (with North Kingdom and Y&R).

Instead of doing what everyone else is doing in Times Square (rolling video), LG decided to use their huge 84 feet high LED billboard to host a dynamic and interactive character named Gil.

His role is to spread good news in Times Square in the form of tweets, SMS messages, RSS and later other media. People in Times Square are able to interact by sending SMS messages or Tweets to the board.

In order to ensure that all content falls under the category of good news, a moderation company was hired to moderate every message entering the system.

To make this possible, we built a special content management system. As it was tailor-made for this specific purpose, the moderators were quite excited about its ease of use.

Our team worked mostly in Slovenia, and we spent the last three weeks before launch in New York finalizing the details.

It was by no means an easy ride, but in the end, we are happy with the results, and we managed to pull off an amazing launch!

It was great being part of such a fantastic project!

In spring, we were asked to develop a Facebook game prototype to help promote Ancestry.com’s new site Mundia.

Like Ancestry.com, Mundia is a site where you can build your family tree and research your family history. Our challenge was to come up with a game design that would be fun and engaging and at the same time incorporate the family tree metaphor.

Our client was looking for a Farmville-style mechanic with virtual goods, so we built a game where you can tend to your crops in the garden and decorate while growing your family tree by adding family members.

When the family tree reaches a certain level, you build a tree house. At this point, most of the gameplay moves into the tree house – using your family members and energy points, you play games and cook dishes, which gives you experience and energy points.

Using the energy points, you can look under mushrooms growing outside in the garden. Mushrooms usually hide cash, fruit or items that you can use to complete collections.

We had to complete the working prototype in two months, which included designing the gameplay, building the engine, the backend, producing the art (with all the decoration items and character customization, we ended up with a LOT of assets), sound effects, music and testing and balancing it before launch.

In the end, we had a pretty successful launch and crunched a lot of numbers to tweak the final design. Some players reached impressive levels and we saw a lot of nice decorated tree houses.