In February of 2011 we made a trip to Orlando Florida to attend InControl 2011. We met Daniel Burka (@dburka) who was there to speak about Gamification. We’re a little behind schedule in using this interview but it’s a good one and Daniel shares some great insight with us so we really wanted you guys to see it. He was in Orlando talking about Gamification because at the time he was working on the online game Glitch, at the time he was director of design at Tiny Speck.

What is Gamification?

‘Gamification’ is the concept of bringing game mechanics or design to something that isn’t usually considered game-like, whether it’s a website, web app or native app. So taking something that’s a traditional website or web app and make it more engaging by adding a game-like experience to it in some way. A very quick example is to take a to-do list add in scoring when you complete a to-do item and award badges for levels of scoring. Some other examples of game-like features are: badges, easter eggs, countdowns, progression, onboarding, questing and status type information like leader-boards. The list is really almost endless and as you can start to see the implications of adding something like this to your website or apps user experience are very great indeed.

About: Daniel Burka

Daniel Burka (@dburka) is a web designer living in San Francisco. Currently one of the founders of Milk Inc. where he’s released the iPhone App Oink. In the past he was creative director at Digg and director of design at Tiny Speck where he worked on the online game Glitch. He grew up in PEI, Canada, and was one of the founders of silverorange. You can follow him on his blog deltatangobravo.com.

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