sometimes one mistake can cost us everything,family, career, respect in our community. when that mistake is a dui the loss can bemore intense than we ever imagined. but just because the loss is great does not mean thatit has to be forever. our dui lawyers specialized in negotiating potentially treacherous waters.for someone accused of driving under the influence call or visit our website today for an evaluationof your situation............
virginia state bar video briefs if you think you need a lawyer for whatever reason, we're here to help you find one. the virginia lawyer referral service assists the public with referrals to lawyers in virginia. the service makes more than 50 referrals a day, or more than 12,000 a year. your call will be answered by a referral specialist, who'll ask you for a brief description of your problem. [on phone: thank you for waiting. this is the virginia state bar's lawyer referral service. how may i help you?]
if there appears to be a matter of legal concern, you'll be given the name and telephone number of a lawyer in your area who has an interest in handling your type of problem. [on phone: we can refer you to a private attorney who will consult with you up to a half-hour for a thirty-five dollar fee. the fee is due at this time with either visaâ® or mastercardâ®.] we will then send a confirmation notice to the attorney acknowledging the paid referral and alerting the attorney that you will call. then it's up to you to call the lawyer
and schedule an appointment. if you are referred to a lawyer, you may consult with him or her for up to one-half hour for a fee of $35 that is collected from you at the time you receive the attorney referral through the virginia lawyer referral service. if your problem requires more time and work, you will be responsible for any additional legal fees. there is no obligation for either you or the lawyer to go beyond the first consultation. to contact the virginia lawyer
referral service, please call 1-800-552-7977 or visit www.vsb.org/vlrs for more information. lawyers who want to join the service should call (804) 775-0591 or visit the bar's website.
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sometimes one mistake can cost us everything,family, career, respect in our community. when that mistake is a dui the loss can bemore intense than we ever imagined. but just because the loss is great does not mean thatit has to be forever. our dui lawyers specialized in negotiating potentially treacherous waters.for someone accused of driving under the influence call or visit our website today for an evaluationof your situation...........
sometimes one mistake can cost us everything,family, career, respect in our community. when that mistake is a dui the loss can bemore intense than we ever imagined. but just because the loss is great does not mean thatit has to be forever. our dui lawyers specialized in negotiating potentially treacherous waters.for someone accused of driving under the influence call or visit our website today for an evaluationof your situation..
the speaker i have is jon artz. a little backgroundon jon artz, we try to present, and i think you'll see with all of our speakers here,some of the top people in the field. you can tell me if you think this is one of them.graduated in 1967 from the university of california los angeles. got his law degree from uclain 1971, and ucla turns out fine lawyers, they don't play much football there, but theysure turn out lawyers. (laughs) how did he get to be a dui lawyer? well, you gotta earnmoney when you're going to law school. where would you work if you want to be a dui lawyerand you're in law school? you work at a bar in marina del rey. and that's what jon did.he got out. he had his first case in 1972. so 2-4 deuce. trial hung. not bad for a firsttrial. i remember my first trial, i'm walking
the wells and all this stuff, a fair defense,and my client, judges look at me and i say "what's going on?" and my client says "don'twalk in there. he's been in court more than i have." jon's been in court, a little bit.250 jury trials. so you might want to pay attention to what he is saying. because ifyou're going to win some of those, even a blind squirrel is going to find a nut. orwe will have some jurors like we had at lunch, you hold the door open, thats great. he servedas a judge pro tem. and not only is he seriously, if you just watch his presentation, you canjust see jurors just slowly gravitating to him and getting them to align with his side.but he's also a superb, superb writer and creative motion person. if you don't thinkso, some of these motions that you are filing
on these trials come from jon artz. the toleranceone, yea yea yea, never works, ok. but it's a nice motion to make. there is a motion though,if you're not familiar with it, its the 403-c motion, that thing is lethal. ok? how manypeople are familiar with the 403-c motion? i'm going to ask jon to talk a little bitalong the way. one motion, all this stuff is hit and miss. that is a legal motion. nolonger does the test go to wait. it tells the jury it goes to admissability and theyare to decide, no foundation, no test at all. that's a nice instruction to have. i use itin my trials because of jon. he is an editor and consultant to simons and bergens and hesays that he has grown as a lawyer during his experience. he has learned the mindsetof jurors and the constantly evolving and
changing themselves. and that is a sign ofa good lawyer. that's a sign because he is growing. how is he been doing the past coupleof years? well, he's had 14 trials. he's only won 11 of them though. one was a hang, gotdismissed. and he got flat out beat by 2 dui trials. they were in lax court in compton,so, we told jon he wants to stay out of there. but he's won cases in orange county, los angelesand ventura, i mean 80% of those last 14 trials, 80% he's won, so let's give a big hand andlets take notes. i would. i am pausing because i am trying to ask my higher power to helpme tell you what i've learned in 40 years, and i'm trying to diminish the ego that wellsinside of me so i can share with you because i truly believe that jurors sense who we areand i truly believe that if we convey to these
12 people who don't really want to be there,that we are being of service to our client and to them. and we relate to the jurors ina way that's not aggressive, not trying to challenge everything, but that they will dothe right thing. they will do the just thing. if they listen to the evidence and the burdenof proof. i am very respectful to the jurors. and so, before i really get started in tryingto share with you what i have learned through a lot of. i wanted to call out some practicalpointers. and first of all, as been mentioned to ya, you gotta get the books. the coolwatchbook, and i know eddy, and i liked him way back when. the other day i had a dmv hearingand it came up on the arrest report that the cop advised the chemical test and the clientsaid no thank you. and the cop put him in
the squad car and read him the admonition.in that case i did not subpoena the cop. and i did not bring in my client. and ijust arguedthat there was radio transmission, there has to be. and i needed the case, i didn't havethe coolwatch book, and got in 30 seconds. so, you gotta have that. two. the bartel book.phenomenal. i never used to have timelines in my opening statements. i don't make anopening statement, imake an opening argument. my opening statement is the same stuff asthe closing arguments. same stuff. i use the same timeline. because i know where my casesare going. i know what i can do and i know the timeline, you gotta get the bartel book. chpmanual. you gotta get it. here's a phone number it's called the hpm70.4 and believe it ornot, the chp is your friend. they are transparent.
if you call 916-376-3200 again, 916-376-3200they will give you an ordering sheet and you can get this dui enforcement manual. necessarytool. also, these vendors over here, chris baloo, are you here? just stand up. i usechris mcdonald, that man over there, why? because they help my clients. i want to beof service to my clients. and so when i tell the clients, hey listen, get your insuranceit will save you money. it's also a service to me. i don't have to talk to that clientand take my valuable time to guess about stuff. i can give it to him, it saves the clientmoney, it helps the client get the thing filed, it's a win win for everybody. so you know,use these vendors, they are really good at what they do. don mentioned the 401-c3 solet me run that by ya. ok. i've had very good
success with clients because i emote to jurorsand in my eyes, in my closing argument, i usually tear up. i don't cry. tears don'tcome, but i tear up. and that's part of the fear i have inside me because i want to dowell. that's part of the fear that i channel to showing the jury that i care and that it'sthe right thing to do to prove not guilty under the facts presented and in this case,you can hold your head high ladies and gentlemen, when you walk back there in that jury room.parenthetically, always know what the jury room looks like, because you go back thereand you describe it to them. but when you walk back there in that jury room, you canhold your head high after you come back with a not guilty because this case wasn't proved.and i think the fear that's inside of me,
the fear that maybe i'm going to lose. thefear that maybe i didn't do everything i could. i channel that. so, you know, for your ownjourney and how you're doing and what you want to do, i'll just tell you that in thelast 12 years, i've been in a 12-step program. and that's helped me with ego. i was a veryself-centered guy. i still am. but i'm better. i share that with you only because i sincerelywant you to get the message. if you can reduce your ego, and be of service. if you can conveythat to those 12 people, your chances of helping your client, who has paid you money and trustedyou, has gone up exponentially. so if you want to win these trials, figure out how toget rid of the egotistical, which is a hard challenge, is it not? because on the one handwe want to show that we know this stuff. we
want to cross-examine vigorously. we wantto present our arguments. objection your honor! it's a hard line. to defend your client, getthat jury, when you want that 12-zip 12-zip, your way. it's not hard to get it the otherway. so, how to be of service, how to get these results. one. i tell them in boredire,i tell them however i can. i tell them subtly, i tell them by my body language. to the extenti can. i tell them that to do justice in this case. justice. to do the right thing. to getto the right results. you can say it any way you want. but i keep saying about the rightthing. i try to be a trustworthy guy. how do i do that? i tell them the time line. itell them the facts. i stand up and bore dire, i say something along the following lines,ladies and gentleman. when the judge says
to me, it's time to stand up, from that momenton, from the moment i drive to the courthouse. my essence is developed to think about don'tcut anybody off because you're in the parking lot. don't be a jerk. and to show them thati'm a trustworthy, credible guy. as i've gotten older it's gotten easier. but iconvey thatto them and that's my whole deal. and if the judge shits on me, which they do. i just saythank you. yes sir. fine. very well. i used to say, "objection! your honor, there is objectionyour honor! your honor, you're wrong." one, it doesn't work. two. the judge it's his court.three. the jury gets turned off. four. you're not going to be of service to your clientso when the judge shits on me, thank you. very well. and you know what? when you dothat. when i do that, when i just say, yes
sir. jurors sense that. jurors sense thati'm doing the right thing. just, very well, and move on. don't be a jerk. ok. credible.sincere. i had a police officer in englewood. i'm talking now about the image and the feelingwe have to have to help these folks who are charged with this crime. ihad a police officeout there who was sick. he had the flu or something. i bought him water. i offered himtissues. i was very kind to him. and the guy was giving me hallmark answers. the wholeway down the deal. hallmark answers. and that jury took an hour or three hours and cameback 12-0 12-0. with a chp officer who by using the chp manual, and leading him throughit. if you don't know the chp manual, check it out. you can ask the officer, have youever had any training with respect to absorption.
chapter one. it talks briefly about absorption.in it, it says, "oh, absorption can take up to an hour." why not use that. why not getcreative and use what the chp officer what you are going to be talking about later, andjust post up queues that you can cover with the officer. and of course, the driving queues.and you know you can do it gently. not to pound him. oh officer, isn't it true thatyou have been trained regarding queues that you would expect to see if someone was underthe influence. yes. and you know, under the influence is not something you can turn onor off. sure. and you know, you would expect to see erratic speed by example, wouldn'tyou? yeah. if he says no. then you get out the manual gently, and before you do that,so you can, stop the potential harm from the
police officer, you lay your foundation. so,the officers always talk about, i've been trained at the academy of dui and this thatand the other. so i like to, because iknow i'm going to pull out the manual ijust toldyou about. the enforcement manual. so i ask him, you've been trained there was a manualwith a blue cover it was hp 70.4, yeah yeah yeah. that was important training right? right.and that's the training that you need to have to be able to make opinions here. you guysgot all that stuff. but you take the manual and you can turn this witness from someonewho is walking in with a uniform and all his experience and training. that's the beginningof the end of the prosecution's case. you're not there yet. but that officer can turn yourcase around. so when the judge reads off the
complaint, i tell my clients, the first dayis going to be a rough day. you ever look at jurors when they read off the driving underthe influence? they don't want to be there. they don't like this case. they don't likeyour client. they don't like you. that's just the truth. now, by the end of the officer,we are half-way there. halfway there. so, ok. so what can we do to create this psychologicalfeeling so that these jurors actually want to go your way? respectful, courteaus. non-hostile,not angry. you ever had a discussion with a friend or foe and you've said words to theperson like, listen to me ra ra ra. the person that you are talking to like that cannot hearyou. so if you want to be heard, it's imperitive in my opnion to tone it down a notch or two.now, that doesn't mean as skilled advocates,
we cannot raise our voice or develop a tone,but only when, only when it's a critical piece of evidence, do i ever try to raise my toneand say "officer, isn't it true that" and add a little inflection get my bulk up, dosomething. and there's a thin line between me doing that and a way that is still respectfuland being an ass fill in the blank.
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all right well um in this googlehangout we're going to be speaking with doris freyar, who's the head ofclaims for wea, the pa group, and wea insurance, specifically about precertification, or treatment, precertification authorization of treatment in the us if you have international insurance. so, thank you, doris, for joining us andtalking about some of the tips and tricks and importance ofprecertification authorization. thank you. ok, so i think i'm going to break this into little,
3 little segments, so we have our members who come to the united states, they're already in the us, they're visiting their family and the most important thing is always to have your id card, so that they know what numbers tocall where they can locate us so we can guide them. on their id card, they can contact us,we'll let them know what participating providers are in their, you know, zip code area. if there's a specificdoctor that they need to use
or one of their choice within the network,. basically, the way that would work isthey would make an appointment with their provider. the provider would contact ouroffice and and we would let the doctor know if a specific procedure requires preauthorization prior to it taking place. the doctors would provide us the medicalrecords. we would have it reviewed, see if it's covered under the policy. if it's covered,we would proceed to send a written approval to the doctor's office with the um, letting them know that thisis covered under the member's policy.
so this is the plan treatment,this is all something that takes affect within time. this is something that was planned. we also have where some of our members, you know they'retraveling from abroad, and done they're coming to the united states with limited time. well we would encourage those insuratists, if you're coming, andyou know you're gonna be seeking treatment with a specific doctor,specialty, or you know that you need to have a specific surgery,
or a procedure that falls underour pre-authorization area, then we would encourage them to send us their medical records ahead of time, let us know what facility they're trying to visit, who the contact person is there and we can contact the facility, let themknow what our requirements are, and we can assist them inexpediting the pre-authorization on their behalf,knowing that they're limited on time. we also encourage that they let us know ahead of time,
because a lot of times when they come, they may not have the medical notes,and we want them to send us whatever their physician hasin-country in order to help us expedite the processon their behalf. so it's kind of a cleaner process, not a last-minutething, which would probably take a little bit moretime, and it does help and alleviates everybody's roll in getting this to a positive outcome. then, we also have a last minute emergency, that perhaps you're here
and you know you broke your leg, and now you need a cast, or you need on mri you did not know when you're on a timelimit. i mean, the emphasis here, is always to have your id card, and tocontact our office whether it's during work hours, or afterhours, we do have 24/7 after hours service that if our members call they do initiate notification. that we're able to reviewthem, and you know be proactive. we do contact, if you need our phonenumber the after hours service,
we contact our members, or thehospitals, or the doctors and we let them know what their benefits are, what we require and it's just a cleaner process. we do encourage thisa lot because should you not follow the notificationor the pre-authorization process or its specific procedure, there is a 50% penalty, and so we want to avoid our members incurring unnecessary, you know, penalties. there are timeswhere perhaps we have been able to
you know we're our members to a facility a center of excellence facility that's in the network where perhaps they did notknow was in the network and also helps them avoid higher out-of-pockets by, we would prefer proactive steps in order to help them as well. so, now when you say that, theunderstanding there is that, yeah, they have their card with them before they would travel back to the states, they know who to contact definitelyif they're planning a
some kind of medical treatment in the us, and they know they're coming back hoping to get this kind of attention, thatthey let you know even while they're overseas before they make that trip, what their intentions are. correct i think one of the most importantthings, that i can tell you this be the so manyyears of experience that i've had is you know not everything under yourpolicy is covered. you know sometimes members have policies with a general exclusion or a specificendorsement,
and all of these things need to be reviewed prior to a person making a determination to get on an airplane, and perhaps finding out that oncethey're here it's not gonna be covered. you're gonna have limited resources, and you're gonna be like, why did you not tell me that? so we really encourage proactive, look, i'm feeling this way, and i'mgonna go to the hospital, is this gonna be covered, these are my contact details. if we can look at that, look at whatyour conditions under your policy is,
under what terms your application wasaccepted, does it fall under a pre-existingcondition or an exclusion? or maybe not! it will be 100 percentcovered. we want you to make an informed decision. so i think beingproactive would be the best way i really appreciate that, 'cause that that's really important informationfor our clients, our customers, and those seeking insurance should know we always try tobe helpful and upfront, and i know yourselves, i know wea is just wonderful at that. almost just exemplary.
the other number of clients that we have are people who are traveling, they're either on furlough, they're on a sabbatical, they're back in the united states with theirfamily or individually to visit family or support raising or for refreshment, and just a time away before the return back the field, whichis their residence. so they're in the united states fora short period of time, and so they're they're traveling, youknow, they're going from place to place, or they're visiting grandma and grandpa.
you, um, mentioned about having theirinsurance card handy, but in the emergency, the child fallsout of a tree, they're in a car accident, what would you suggest or recommendfor that family? is there anything specifically in regards to their care. right, i mean on one of the things that ialways recommend in the absence of having an id card with the number, i personally even with my insurance, have a phone number or a littlebooklet where i keep the important numbers just in case.
the number one thing i always recommendis to always have your insurance carrier phone number. our after-hours service, it's always there to guide you. they also have, if you don't have your policy numberavailable, we make that list available to our after-hours office, so if you were to call, you know and you say, i'm one of wea's insured person's and my name is such and such. they can review or research your name in a roster, and they're able to provide you your policy number. they also send us the notification,
they're also able to assist you withfinding a facility that's in the network so you know, the after hours service is also like a service, like if it was hours, but they become a key player as well. so the id card, or having our phone number on your cell phone, or in a little booklet, or something. emergency contacts, that would be, you know, the biggest suggestion that ican give you. yeah and they don't need to worry in anemergency, obviously if if they're hit by a car or somethingand they have injuries, they're gonna
be rushed to a local hospital, and atthat point, i mean obviously they're going to be covered. yes. i mean, except for their deductible of course, but i mean they're gonna be protected, they're gonna be taken care of, and then at that point if they have longer-term needs, they might be transferred to ahospital that might be cheaper for them or better care. oh well, i mean not necessarily. if youhave a a life-threatening situation like you got hit by a car and they took you to the closest facility and you end up being in there, and you're unconscious, they're gonna keep you there once you wake up.
if the hospital is not in network, and we determined that yes, this is a true-life situation, we will number one try negotiating discounts on our members' behalfto alleviate their out-of-pockets and the other thing is, if they don't negotiate then we'll definitely end up paying at the higher percentage, being that it is a life-threatening situation not necessarily have to transport them to another hospital. sure. well good, i think those are a couple of good tips
for people who are considering coming back to the united states. if they are considering some kind of treatment ahead of time, to contact you, and with medical records and if they'vealready seen a doctor overseas that's recommending a procedure, that they let you know about those, thatthat communication, and that medical treatment has been recommended, and then also that they have in their phone, they have on their person, in their wallet,at hand if they have that medical information as to where they're going to be traveling and how to contact you
in a unique emergency or even if it'snot a a life-threatening emergency how to reach you to find out where theyshould go, if they need some form of treatmentas they're traveling in the united states. right, i agree. now, the policies, just to clarify now, since some people might not know, the policies that they're buying, these are international policies. if they bought one of the standard policies not excluding united states, they're gonna be covered even with all the new regulations and stuff like that, they're going to be covered when they're
in the united states on the international insurance, correct? right. yes, they will. i mean, now on regulations, are you talking about the health care reform? yeah, i mean maybe there's some questions as to whether or not they're gonna be covered when they, you know, with their national insurancepolicy when they're visiting the united states. i mean, they're not coming back to reside in the states, but they're coming back on a visit, 2 months, 3 months. they're gonna be covered whenthey're in the states. right. if you buy an international coverage including us you will have coverage in the us, granted it's not a general exclusion under
the condition that under the general exclusions, or an exclusion that was provided to you specifically at the time of the application. other than that, it should be a straightforward. wonderful! well, of course it's gonna be always cheaper for a client, almost always, to be treated overseas than the us, just due to all the extra costs. but we realize that sometimes that can't be helped, and sometimes clients prefer to come home and see a doctor, family doctor or some kind of specialist that they've seen, as you mentioned.
before, as you were speaking, sometimes an oncology doctor, or somebody who knows their history, so as long as they contact you ahead of time and let you know their intentions and you can guide them,that sounds like wonderful advice. so, thank you so much for talking to us about pre-certifications in the us, and i'm sure if we have more questions, we'll reach out to you. you're welcome, anytime. thank you so much, we'll be talking to you soon. thank you, bye.
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my name is les nessman reporting for wolfpackreality network. we are outside of small claims court where there is quite a commotion. studentsfrom all over campus are here because of the wave of missing laptops. dozens of computershave been stolen from students while they were studying in the library. the plaintiffin this civil action is claiming her two hundred dollar reward, the plaintiff returned thecomputer to the student listed on the reward poster in the library.all rise, oh yay, oh yay, oh yay, small claims court for the district of [inaudible] is readyfor the dispatch of business, his honor dale miller is present and residing [inaudible].please be seated. the next case mitt versus johnson, ms. johnson are you present?present your honor.
mr. johnson are you present?present your honor. my review of the complaint of court papersindicate that this dispute is for 20 dollars. the deputy sheriff served a summons, signedthe document and returned one copy. the defendant is here, the amount is less than five thousanddollars and this court has jurisdiction. plaintiff are you ready? defendant are you ready? mr.bailiff you may swear in the parties and their witnesses.do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help yougod? i swear.plaintiff you may begin. i took a break from studying in the librarywhen i saw a poster on the hall bulletin board,
i would like to introduce this poster intoevidence. this poster is one i put up all over campusso i have no problem with it being placed into evidence.okay this poster will be marked as the plaintiff's evidence number 1.your honor i called and called the number on the poster all day long and no one answered.that evening i went to the address listed on the poster, the roommate of the owner ofthe computer answered the door and said that the owner was not home. i gave the roommatethe laptop in exchange for a written receipt for the computer. i waited weeks and weeksand never heard anything and still your honor some two months later i still have never beenpaid, that is my case.
your honor it is true that ms. smith had droppedoff my laptop when my roommate was at home. it is also true that she was given a notesaying she had returned it. however when ms. smith came to the door my roommate recognizedher, she works at the library. ms. smith has always been seen lurking around the librarywhen computers seem to go missing; it is his belief that she is the one that's been stealingall these computers. order in the court or i will have the bailiffclear out the room. my roommate said he could look into her eyes...objection the roommate is not here to testify, it is not fair.your honor my roommate had to work, he had no other option.did you subpoena your roommate as your witness?
no, sir i had no idea the subpoena was required.the subpoena forms are in the deputy clerk's office, plaintiff your objection is sustained,defendant you may not quote your roommate. well, i saw on tv that it's all right if aletter is used in court. objection the roommate is still not here totestify, i cannot ask him questions. objection is sustained.your honor i prepared my entire case based on the fact that my roommate had this notarized,it was done in front of a public notary. objection the roommate is still not here totestify, i cannot ask him questions. the notarized letter is inadmissible in court because it'snot giving me my rights. the letter and a notarized document are both[inaudible] and inadmissible.
your honor i was interviewed by the campusdetective as well on this matter. well brian you were very smart to call thecampus police so we could put a stop to this, so many people's computers have been stolenall over campus, the owners are all very upset. i'll take some fingerprints and run some testson your computer in the mean time i suggest avoiding contact with ms. smith.should i pay her the 200 dollar reward or no?that's up to you we don't give advice in civil matters, if she does turn out to be thiefand you paid her the 200 dollar reward it might be very difficult to get your moneyback. thanks for your help officer.based on the campus detective's opinion it
is my case and i'm not going to pay ms. smith,that is my case. anything further from the plaintiff?anything further from the defendant? very well my decision will be based upon thetestimony and evidence heard in court today, my decision will be sent to you in the mailwithin no less than ten days. the judge has the right to reserve and delayhis decision. if you would like to know the judges decision, please your opinion as tohow the court should rule to ron underscore campbell at ncsu dot edu for wolfpack realitytelevision we hope you have enjoyed the preceding case.
>> zicherman: thanks, chris. that's a--it's a--it'salways funny to hear your bio read out loud because you realize you're very sensitiveto every like word--i wrote that bio so i--it's my writing, yes. so, you're very sensitiveto every word. and then also, no matter what my accomplishments are, i'm humbled by thequality of your kitchens. i think it's like one day i aspire to have a company that haskitchens like that, where today i made my own espresso, which i'll enjoy for a second.so, as you heard my name is gabe zicherman. i do a bunch of stuff around gamification.and today i wanted to talk with you guys about--it's a little bit presumptuous to use the phrase"mastering" with something as new and as slippery
as gamification, but we'll do our best. i'mgoing to share some of the top insights gleaned from researching the book, game-based marketing,which came out in april, work that we do with brands big and small everyday. i work on thesummit and the research that goes into the new book, gamification by design, which is,as chris mentioned, a techbook that will come out at the beginning of the year. so, whenbiting off a topic like gamification, or any topic for example, i like metaphors. so ithought a pretty good metaphor--i realized that pretty good metaphors can be found inthe movie mary poppins. and if you're too young or too straight to know this basic storyof mary poppins, i'm going to recount it for you. it's the story of a hard-hearted butturns out fundamentally nice guy with two
really, really, super sweet children, really,really darling children. and they need a nanny so they write up an ad and this woman on anumbrella comes flying into their lives. she has magic powers like being able to levitateor jump into a chalk drawing and at the end all is well, which is an important part ofthe story. all ends well in the story of mary poppins. so think of me as your "mary poppins,"down the sort of rabbit hole of gamification. i mixed literary metaphors there. well, ifyou would like to talk about alice in wonderland later, we can talk about that. so, as chrismentioned, i'm the author of these books, game-based marketing, which you can get now.i blog at gamification.co. it's a gamification blog. we talk all about the subject. i advisestartups. i talk about interesting things.
and then, as chris also mentioned, we havesome upcoming events related to gamification. if you are currently working on a gamificationproject, either from a product, or marketing, or design side, you might be interested innovember 12th's san francisco bay's gamification workshp. amy, joe, kim and i will give a hands-onfull day, come in with your problems and we solve them working together workshop. it'sactually almost sold out but if you're interested in going, let me know. there's really likeone seat left at it. and then in january, we're running here in san francisco againthe gamification summit which is a full day of--a full day event focused on the subject.bringing together some of the most interesting thought leaders like jane mcgonagall, who'llbe revealing her new book. i'll be giving
a keynote on metrics which i know you guyslove. we'll talk about all that kind of stuff. okay, so let's begin with a simple word definition.gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and engageaudiences. four square. not the product, but the four squares there. so, it's game thinkingand game mechanics. and this is really super important, game thinking is the product ofthree generations of game players. i'm 36 years old. i'm the old--hi, my name is gabe.i'm 36 years old and i'm the oldest cohort of people who grew up with games as a coretype of entertainment in their lives. today's youngest children, you know, kids were--well,the youngest children will be like just born. but kids who are, you know, maybe five yearsold today are growing up with games as their
principal form of entertainment and that multi-generationalexposure has simply affected the way that we think. you know, if shakespeare was a realperson--this is the best analogy--if shakespeare was a real person, he wrote--he or she wrote,"all the world is a stage," famously, right? but if shakespeare were alive today, wouldn'the have written, "all the world is a game," because isn't it just a better metaphor forhow we think about interactivity in the world. and that really gets to the heart of whatgame thinking is. it's solving problems and engaging audiences using a rubric that comesfrom games. okay, so let's talk about some of the main things that we've learned fromit. how many of you in the audience recognize some of the things up on the board right now?any of them? okay. these are some of the top
selling games of the last five years. andthey include--i'm not kidding--being a male technician, diapering a baby, being a waitress,running a farm, being an air traffic controller, which as many of you know is the highest suicide,highest stress position in the entire world. i mean, if you would come into a game publisherfive years ago and said, "i've got a great idea. we're going to make a game where youplay an air traffic controller, planes could crash, what do you think? sound good," right?you'll be laughed out of the room. that doesn't sound like fun. that doesn't sound like funat all. it highlights a really important conclusion which is fun and the theme of the thing whichare fun are actually not connected. if you've been in a casino before and you've seen theoprah winfrey branded slot machine and the
harley davidson branded slot machine and theneutral slot machine, you all as science-oriented people are aware, the slot machine acts onyour brain the exact same way. once you choose to sit down in front of that slot machine,same behavior in your brain, same engagement loop, same reaction. "ding, ding, ding, oh,yeah, ding, ding, ding," right? it's the same thing. it doesn't matter which brand is onthe front of the slot machine. theme is a lure to bring people in to an engaging experience.it's a lure. and that has important implications. that means, if air traffic control can befun my friends, anything can be fun, right? it's an opportunity. it means we can turngovernment. we can make government fun. we can make getting fit fun. we can make searchingfun or more fun. all right, so it, of course,
begs the question, you know, "what is fun?"so, i put some words in a word generator. and i put them up on the board. some--thewords on the top are things which normally people associate with fun and the words onthe bottom are words that normally people associate with work. and what's interestingis, you know, there's a big bright line drawn between the two of them in my childhood. youknow, i grew up in a house in which my mom said, "eat your vegetables and then you canhave dessert," right? "eat your vegetables and then you can go out to play." there isa theme around vegetables. so, these things though are arbitrary distinctions. they'rearbitrary. these are lines drawn by people in the air that say, "this is fun and thisis not." if you're a parent in the room, if
i could deliver for you a piece of cake thathad the same nutritive value as broccoli, the exact same nutritive value as broccoli,can you honestly tell me that you would never cave and give your kids broccoli cake, right?the point is these lines are arbitrary. they--them--they're meaningless. we can make anything fun or anythingwork depending on its design. and that's a very important kind of like switch that'sbeing flipped in people's heads and they're going, "oh, okay." so, i can make anythingengaging--and you really can--which brings you a question my favorite allegory in thiswhole story. so i played a game that many of you might recognize called, "where in theworld is carmen sandiego?" if you played it, put your hand up. if you played it on theapple ii, keep your hand up. okay, so now
i know how old you are, so. okay, so it'sthe '80s and i'm playing "where in the world is carmen sandiego?" on my apple ii, greenscreen, lots of fun. would it surprise you to know that that was the last really successfuleducational game in history? would it surprise you to know that since then 1,200 startups,$4 billion have been spent on "edutainment" software and not a single hit like, "wherein the world is carmen sandiego?" and that's it's a completely captive market. there are60 million children. it is a captive market. what's happened? here's what went wrong. parentsand teachers got involved in the design of the games. and as soon as they did, kids couldsmell that shit a mile away. that's not fun, that's work, right? in parallel, incidentally,civilization and sim city have taught hundreds
of millions of people basic, basic tenantsof the human historical arch and how cities function in civics, basics, completely unintentionally.sid nor--neither sid nor will will tell you they were on a pedantic pedestal trying toteach people with those games. they simply chose that as the framework for a game, asetting for a game that they thought compelling. they thought the real world would be morecompelling than a fantasy world. and it turns out that that's true. non-fiction has a bigadvantage over fiction and gamification is, think of it as, non-fiction gaming. it's gamingwith your real friends and your real money and your real stuff in the real world. it'snon-fiction gaming. so, it, of course, going back to mary poppins, there's a famous songin mary poppins called "the spoonful of sugar,"
and the premise of that song is, "if i makethe medicine sweet enough, you won't know that its medicine and you'll take it," right?creating the objective, which is, of course, is a good analogy. if any of you are marker--marketersin the room, a word that marketers sometimes use to describe that phenomenon is loyaltyprogram, right? loyalty programs, let's just do a simple working definition, are intendedto get a user to take an action in your favor when all competing options are mostly equal,right? mostly equal. when things are really unequal, loyalty programs are not that effective.but when their mostly equal, loyalty programs have the effect of getting people to takea choice in your favor. okay, so here's a brief history of loyalty programs throughouthistory, 19th century, you go down to a local
mercantile in boston and you're wearing heavywoolens and you haven't showered in a while and you're like, "i need 10 pounds of sugar."and the merchant is like, "aarr, you get a pound for free." i don't know why it's a piratemerchant. i'm just--okay, because all the people in the 19th century to me are pirates.it's like, "aarr, pound of sugar." okay, so buy 10 get 1 free. that turns out to be areally sticky mean, right? we're still doing buy 10 get 1 free as this sort of dominantmodel for loyalty programs. i don't know why. i've asked lots of researchers, if any ofyou are interested in doing a phd on buy 10 get 1 free, let me know. i think i can findyou funding. it's like we got figure this out, we don't know why. okay, that stays aboutthe same until the 1930s, when a company called
s&h launches their green stamps program. itwas very simple. instead of buying 10 and get 1 free, you went to participating merchants,they gave you these little green stamps which you licked and stuck into a book and you savethem up and when you had enough, you went to the s&h store or to the catalogue and youredeem them for stuff. the brilliant thing about the s&h green stamps program was itcompletely, by creating a virtual currency, it completely broke the users ability to keeptrack of a redemption rate, right? it used to be 10 to 1. i buy 10 pounds of sugar, iget one for free. now, i have no idea how much i'm earning in virtual currency as expressedin redemption, right, because it was actually totally variable. s&h knew what every greenstamp was "worth" to them but the end user
couldn't keep track of it. they had no idea.is 10 green stamps the same, you know, is 10 green stamps for a t-shirt the same as60 green stamps for a transistor radio? it's almost impossible to figure that. it turnsout virtual currency is very powerful that way. okay, that's today's dominant model until1981 when american airlines launches aadvantage and a week later twa and the united launchedtheir programs, which turns out to be a good metaphor for that whole industry. and whatamerican figured out, and what twa and united aped, is that actually, it's not about rewardsat all. it's about status. status is what drives loyalty. and if any of you tried toredeem your frequent flier program points this summer for a trip to europe, you'll knowthat redemption is not the core value proposition
of a frequent flier program, or for that matter,a loyalty program. and that's today's dominant model until just a few years ago in whichloyalty programs emerged like foursquare in which you cannot redeem for anything in thereal world. there's not even the notional concept of redemption, right? they just dispensedwith it altogether. let's be super clear. i want us to be super clear on this. you cannotextract one dollar from farmville. there is not a t-shirt, a hat, a badge in the realworld you can get for your farmville credits. not a goddamn thing. in fact, it's all moneyin and no money out in farmville to the point that when zynga did that super successfulcampaign with 7-eleven for the slushies, you know, the "get a slurpee, get farmville credits?"it wasn't, "get farmville credits for every
slurpee," it wasn't, "redeem your farmvillecredits for every slurpee," right? it was "buy a slurpee and get farmville credits."let's be clear, no real world redemptions. money in, nothing comes out. it's brilliant,right? so, the corillary, which is probably even more powerful, is that while the costof an incremental unit of loyalty--let's think of a customer making a choice of your product,a choice in favor of your product when all things are being equal--the cost of deliveringthat incremental unit of loyalty is dropping precipitously. it used to be 10 cents. itwas 10 to 1. it was 10 cents. that number is now closing in to zero as completely virtualloyalty programs start cropping up out of the weeds. the other thing which has becomevery important is that the loyalty choices
now become public. loyalty used to be a privatedecision, right? how did i convey to you that i preferred kitchenaid mixers over cuisinartmixers in the past? you had to be in my house for starters, right? we had to go throughthis ridiculous dance where i somehow bring up the subject of, you know, mixers to you.it's like, "hey, do you like my mixer?" and then we sit down and we have a whole conversation.i mean, books were written about word of mouth marketing, conferences were held about wordof mouth marketing. it was all bullshit. there was no process to word of mouth marketing.no one ever understood how it worked. no one still understands how it works. zynga knowshow it works, right? now, there's a process for word of mouth marketing. it's on the socialgraph. it's processized. it used to be random.
now, it's structured. this is a humongouschange in behavior. and it means that every decision is public and whenever decision ispublic it means decisions that are not taken aren't potentially negative. so if your productis not the one being specified or chosen in the public sphere, that maybe a sort of lightweightdemerit against your product. so it begs the question my friends, what is status worth?how many of you know or recognize either of the two people up on the board? okay, we gota couple of people. so anyone want to call out one of them?>> christian siriano and tomorrow rodriguez. >> zicherman: right. okay, so these two peopleare both winners of fourth seasons of major game shows on television, right? the gentlemanon my left is christian siriano. he won the
fourth season of project runway. the womanon the right is the first winner of deal or no deal ever. she won in the fourth seasonand she won $1 million. okay, is $100,000 enough to launch a fashion line in new yorkcity? it is not. is $125,000, the price on top chef enough to pull permits in the cityof new york to start a restaurant? it is not. what do these people played those games for?>> for public fame. >> zicherman: they play for attention. theyplay for power. they play for status. they don't play for cash. it turns out cash isa great incentive if you have a bunch of it to throw around, right? it's also this weird10 to 1 relationship comes up here, but let's set that aside and that continues to be 10to 1. the bottom line is if you don't have
a good status system to offer users in exchangefor their behavior, you need to give them cash. and the worse your status system is,the more cash you have to give them. that's basically the relationship of these things.and so at the heart of all this, we talk about this in game-based marketing, the book. wetalk about this a lot. this is called the gamification loop and at the heart of it isa point system. and around that point system are a whole bunch of what we call game mechanics.points, badges, levels, rewards, challenges, leader boards, things that can be used toengage users based on a point system. points systems are super important, right? we usethem in real life. money is an example of a good point system. but these things aroundthe point system are incredibly important
because often, it's hard to communicate tosomebody exactly how many points you have. like, it's really hard for me in conversationto tell you, or how much money i have in the bank. "i have $n in the bank," right? so insteadof doing that, i buy a whole bunch of stuff which tells you how much money i have in thebank, right? it signals to you through a series of ab--through a series of status choices,i signal to you how big my point balance is. signaling is an important part of this kindof interaction, right? it's not always about the points, sometimes it's about the signalsfor the points. so some other examples of things that you may have seen called meta-games,things like structured exchanges, gifting, poking or flirting, questing and raids, theseare groups of game mechanics put together
into one sort of unified experiences. theseare other things that we use to create user engagement, to create desired behavior withusers in games. and they, you know, some of them are fairly familiar. i want to sharewith you a little quote. if you don't know kiva, kiva is one of the leading non-profit,you know, social service startups in the world. they do micro-lending for important causes.so we interviewed last weekend in techcrunch, the founder of kiva, premal shah, said, "ourbiggest competitor is actually zynga." consider the implication of that, right? he runs anon-profit. he runs a large scale non-profit. he views his competition as zynga. what ishe saying? he's saying that increasingly, users are forced--increasingly, users arefaced with a set of choices that are basically
distinguished between--we used to think ofthem as work and leisure choices, but increasingly they are compulsory and optional choices.compulsory and optional replaced fun and work in the language. once we get into optionaltime, disposable time, discretionary time, users are naturally going to gravitate tothe experience that they find the most rewarding. notice my choice of words. they will naturallygravitate to the experience that is most rewarding. and by definition, games have a big advantageover just about anything that you might be creating in your own spare time, right? whichis there designed explicitly to maximize reward. so, if i can freely choose like, do kids notread books today because they don't understand why books are important? no, it's becausethey have the choice of stuff that's way more
interesting than books so they are choosingsomething more engaging than books. it's a jingoistic response to market choice. it alsohighlights something really important about the power of games. games are the only forcein the known universe that can get people to take actions which are against their self-interestin a predictable way without the use of force. and this is an important distinction. sexis extremely powerful at getting people to take actions against their self--people self-interest.it's very unpredictable. and you can pull a gun out and make people do just about anythingyou want, but they tend not to like that. games are the only force that can get peopleto act like they're sex-crazed maniacs but in a predictable way without having to pulla gun on them. i know. i know. i know. that's
a bit--that's a bit dark. but no, i'm justkidding. but you get my point. my point is it's a powerful force and it's what beingexpressed now in this like, you know, relentless pursuit of engagement that's coming from thelikes of companies like zynga. and behind this is important work. there is importantacademic work that underpins some of these things. there's a guy named richard bartlewho in the 1980s was one of the first researchers to look at why people play games and he identifiedin--these were muds at the time not mmogs but they are precursor to mmogs, text-basedmulti-user dungeon games. and bartle discovered--identified four different types of players. he identifiedthe achiever, the socializer, the explorer, and the killer. and i'll tell you about themall a little bit. what's interesting is the
four had since turned into 16, which includethings like a judge, a politician, a lawyer. but the four turned out to be very enduring.and bartle never intended them to be a personality type like an mbti-type inventory but now thatwe have three generations of game-thinking i bet you can start slotting some of the peopleyou know into one of these four categories, thinking of that as a personality type. so,the achiever. the achiever likes to achieve, right? simple. the only problem with a communityfull of achievers is not everyone can win. and it's a big design problem, right? it'snot a little design problem, it's a big design problem. the second biggest problem, probablywhat i face the most in talking to audiences about gamification all the time, is that youhere in this room are not normal. you are
way more achievement-oriented than the averagepopulation, right? way more. if i gave you an achievement inventory, you'd score offthe charts by comparison to the normal--the norm population. the norm population, 80%of the population, are socializers and they're after lightweight, non-confrontational, easyto reciprocate social interactions with other people. they are in other words as other,you know, sort of social science researchers have said, they are lonely. and they are lookingfor social engagement with other people. lightweight, non-confrontational, easy to reciprocate;sounds a lot like poke, right? poke is a good expression of that idea. farmville is, withouttaking anything away from zynga, poke with cows, right? it leverages that sociliazerinstinct, that socializer demand, that socializer
insight, to its extreme. ten percent of thepopulation are achievers, 80% are socializers. explorers, if any of you played super mariobrothers, right, on the snes or the nes, you might remember having friends who knew whereevery single like hidden level was, every easter egg was, which pipes to go down, whichblocks to push, to get an access to the secrete levels. in the days before the internet, thosepeople where classic explorers in the bartle typology. they had to play those games forhundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours to find which pipe was the right one to godown. they'd have to like, you know, go to the pipe, push down. oh, that's not it, goto the pipe, push down. the explorer is playing for the social credit for having discoveredsomething. that's what they are after. they
want to be the one who discovered this thing.they're the explorer. and killers were the most controversial segment of the market.they make up probably less than one percent in the average group. they're very, very similarto achievers, except, "it's not just okay for me to win, i win and you lose. and notonly do i win and you lose but all of you need to watch me kick your butt. and theni want as much credit from the community as possible for having done that. i want youto say, 'i respect you. i love you. you killed me.'" okay, killers are--killers sound badbut actually in many cases they're really good. i'll give you an example. i frequentlytalk to big company executive management team so i'm in at very, very well-known publisher.a company you'd all recognize. it was a big
busy online community of commenters. and soone of the best examples of killers is comment killers are really, really super common andobvious, right? you post an article and these guys are in there like, "bam," right? rightaway. and then someone will post a comment and they'll be like, "you're an idiot," andthen someone else will post a comment and they'd be like, "you're stupid," right? andso you see these people and some of you might be those people. if so, i highly recommendkeeping your hands down for now, so your friends won't know. so, you know, i'm talking withthese guys, i'm talking with these publishers about comment killers and, you know, in thecanonical web view or publisher view of what to do about a comment killer would be to tempdown that behavior, right? you're going to
write a script that listens to the tone ofthe post and if the tone of the post is too extreme, the post goes to moderation, right?or if the person posts too quickly, multiple posts, tad-tadah-tadah, too fast, put theminto moderation, right, or ban them from the website because they're disrupting. that'sterrible. that's not at all how a game designer thinks about that, right? killers are themost active, most engaged members of your community. they're just expressing their behaviorin a bad way. so the right design, from a game design standpoint, is to put them onrails. not ruby on rails, rails, right, which is shape their behavior by creating a pathwaythat they go down. so in the case of comment killers, we unpack their motivation. whatdrives a comment killer? they're after recognition,
right? they want to be recognized as smartby the outlet or the writer. so you set up a reward system that says, "okay. you canearn dinner with walt mossberg. you can earn an op-ed in the washington post. in orderto do so, however, you need to be the commenter who's most frequently given a positive reviewfor the quality of commentary," right? you set up an incentive system that's more carrot,less stick, right? consider, i can't guarantee you that we'll get 100% adherence to that,we may still need moderation cues, but we will turn some of those people and some isbetter than none. another good example, the u.s. tax system, it's 100% stick and no carrot.you get nothing for filing early unless you're owed money and you get your money a littlesooner, right? but if you owe money, there's
no end zero incentive for you to file early,there's a lot of disincentive for you to file late. why? empirical evidence tells you thatit would be better if there was an incentive scheme. why not offer some kind of benefitto users, preferably a status benefit, but why not offer them some kind of benefit forfiling early and on time? i--this is the kind of thing that game designers think about,"reward early, reward often, try not go negative." good axioms. so for you--we'll do q&a in justa little bit. i'd write it down, think about it, text it to yourself if you have to. okay,that's so meta. so it brings me, you know, it brings me to this important point for youguys, you know, which is from--i believe that there is a seismic shift underway. and ifwe believe that consumers understand metrics
but in more abstract way, like the metricsthat drive themselves but in an abstract way, increasingly consumers care about fun as anactual metric. it is a value. pleasure, enjoyment, fun is a value that consumers increasinglyexpect to be in their products and services. consider this, right" sorry. i know many ofyou are carrying android phones. consider, we--i could be using an android for this example,it's the same thing. consider this device. this is not a good phone people, right? weall acknowledge this is not a good phone. but we can never go back to a motorola startac,can we? we can never ever go back. our expectations have been changed irrevocably. our devicesmust be internet connected. they must be beautiful. they must like be able to play games and doapplications and make calculations for us.
we can never go back. and so consumer expectationis rapidly shifting. what was once an advantage, meaning clarity, simplicity of purpose, mayactually turnout to be a disadvantage in a world in which consumers are engaged lookingfor more deep--more engagement. we've been trying--following this web design holy grailof finding you know the most straightforward, cleanest way of presenting information ordata. i actually think the tide is turning from a consumer standpoint. i don't thinkthat's the main metric that consumers are looking for at all. i think the main metricthey're looking for now is fun and engagement. and increasingly that will become their numberone choice factor in deciding what wins. and it means for you there's a new metric on thehorizon. and we haven't defined it yet. i'm
going to--i'm working with some researchersbetween now and january to define this in time for the summit. if you guys want to workon it let me know and i'm happy to have you involved. we need a new metric to describeengagement, consumer engagement, because the old metrics don't actually work anymore. pageuse doesn't describe engagement. daily active users does not describe engagement, right?return--time spent on site, return visits, these things do not individually define engagement.there is a new metric for engagement that needs to come out of the miasma and it willbecome all important. there will be a metric just like it has happened before. of courseyou guys, you know, you're in a good position to define what that metric should look likejust like facebook defined the daily active
user-monthly active user metric, but, youknow, we need to have that engagement metric. so i want to share with you a couple of examplesand then we'll have time for q&a. so the first example of a pretty good gamefide system overallthat i like to use is nike+. how many of you use nike+? anybody? oh, this is--this is awesome.this is awesome. i'm never in a room without a nike+ user so this is fantastic. okay, sonike+ is a gamefide system where you typically you buy a little piece of hardware and youwear that on you and it records your score and then you upload that score or you cando it manually on the web with sort of is social experience. it's got points, badges,levels, leaderboards, challenges, rewards, all around how you exercise and how you performin exercise context almost exclusively about
running. and it's cool. it's well designedconsidering that, you know, not many game designers actually worked on the problem.but it has some issues. that up top is my actual score at nike+ today. today. and iwill tell you that while this is body by butterfat i am not antithetical to exercise. i don'twake up in the morning going, "exercising, i hate it." i'd like to be fitter, you know?but nike+ apparently doesn't care about me as it's evidenced from their--the very firstminute of their design, right? i am not already fit enough to play nike+ and there's no incentivefor me to progress. even the way this progress bar is designed is a humongous disincentive.remember the olden days of walking up to a video arcade machine in the old brown cabinets,and you walk up and the first thing that you
would see is a leaderboard of 10 people withastronomically high scores, right? like, jeff, 10,487,642, right? and then the next personwould be like one point below that and then the next person will be like two points belowthat, and you'd be like, you know? and it was actually--one thing that we learned fromthose leaderboard days was how humongous of a disincentive a poorly designed leaderboardcan be. bad leaderboards are terrible, terrible disincentives. bad scoring systems are terribledisincentives. you walk up, you see that, and you're like, "i'm never getting on thatleaderboard." and if you're in any way competitive in any way, or achievement oriented, and thegame isn't inherently achievement oriented, you're like, "well, i'm not even going toplay this game. i'm going to go look for a
machine where i can maybe get on the board,"right? and look for a game where i can get on board. so, we've revamped leaderboard designin the context of social games. here's how leaderboard should be designed now. it's actuallylike that prescriptive. okay, so in the new design of leaderboards, you put the user rightin the middle, and you put their next two best friends above them and the next two bestfriends below that, right, so no matter where they are in the actual rankings, they arein the middle. two friends above, two friends below, with a little dialog bubble that says,"in order to beat sue, do this," right? it's so much better of a design. it turns out tobe so much more engaging than the old leaderboard design. and the only exception to that, andthis is important as well because i think
this is--this kind of goes against some ofthe core web design hegemony, which is that you actually think through different usedcases and explicitly redesign experiences for different users, so the exception to thatdesign is if the user's actually in the top 20, literally in the top 20, you show literallythe top 20, right? because that user probably then really cares that they're in the top20 and wants to see the top 20, right? so anyway, so we've rethought some of those thingswe rethought about motivation. another example of a game that i think highlights some ofthe challenges is chase picks up the tab. how many of you know that? i think it's aneast coast thing. basically, the premise was during this promotional period chase has runa couple of years in a row, if you use your
chase debit card and you swipe it during thepromo, sometimes you'll get an sms from chase saying, "oh, we picked up the tab," and they'llreverse the charge, right? so, setting aside the fact that that is clearly a casino game,that is absolutely positively--absolutely positively a slot machine, and there's noquestion about it, and they should be regulated under like gambling law, and i don't knowwhy they're not but i can't figure this out, but they should be. okay, so setting asidethe fact that that is a casino game, the problem with chase picks up the tab is i have to bea fucking chase customer to play. do you know how much time it takes to set up a bank account?i have to go into the bank now, i have to bring two forms of i.d., sign my patriot actpaperwork, wait for them to run the background
check on me, send me a--give me a temporaryatm card, send me the regular one in the mail, activate the one in the mail, sign up forthe promotion, and then play. that is a mistake my friends zynga would never have made, right?why can't anybody play chase picks up the tab? why can't you play the game just by connectingon yodelay, right, anybody comes in signs of yodelay, sign up for text alerts? it'san opportunity for them to convert a customer later. but they think like a big, old, kindof, dumb bank. "you have to be a customer of ours first." the bar is way too high. andthe market will no longer support those kinds of ideas at infinitum. every opportunity--i'mgoing to tell you this right now social gaming designers, every single touch point is anopportunity to convert a user. there is no
such thing as a moment that exists in a worldwhere we can't draw another user into our experience. we have to start thinking aboutthe world in that way. i mean, we don't have to but things will work out better for youif they do. okay, so here's one that more of you will know than nike+. how many of youdo not know what the lunar x prize was? oh, awesome. i just used geek pressure. okay,there was--there's one person. i'll just recount it for you. a $10 million prize given by theansari family to the x prize--through the x prize foundation, to the first team to launcha reusable spacecraft into space twice in three weeks with a human payload coming backalive, okay? the premise was we're going to unstick the stuck space program because nasakeeps launching crappy space shuttles into
space that don't make any sense, okay? that'sthe premise. so, here's what happened. my amateur sleuthing, here's what happened. twentyseven teams entered the ansari x prize. of the 27 teams, a third of them are now outof business, two-thirds of them minus one are doing government and principally universitycontracts which begs the question about why they didn't just do that in the first place,and the winner, the winner was going to win this contest anyway, burt rutan backed bypaul allen. burt had 20 years of experience building private spaceships. he was so farahead of everybody else in the rest of the world, and backed by a billionaire who's preparedto fund it to the tune of at least $25 million to win the $10 million ansari x prize, whichis, as we know, a fundamentally irrational
choice to make. so, tell me this, who wonthe ansari x prize? i'll take opinions, anyone? the x prize foundation won the x prize, right?it formed an actual thing. it's good that they got a $150 million worth of free pressfrom it and it highlights probably the most important point i can make for you, whichis the game always favors its creator. no matter what game you're playing, the housealways wins. the deck is absolutely stacked together. i'm using metaphors, they're allpoint--they all point back to a fundamental truism. there is no way to beat the houselong term. no, no way. so you have the choice in a more gamefied world of either being thehouse or being played. those are your choices. but there's no ambiguity here. the sooneryou build gamefied experiences, the sooner
you get to, you know, taking your cut, becauseit's ultimately the best business in the world to be in. two people or multiple people battleit out and you get a cut of everything that happens. you might at google be familiar withthat as a premise. so, let me summarize some of the--i'll summarize some of the main thingsthat we talked about today then we can do some q&a. so, the first important takeaway;fun and theme are not correlated. we can merge fun and work, you know, with games by usinggamefication and game thinking, that line is not so bright in red. status is probablythe most important motivator that you can deliver to users. cash is really--should befar down on your list of things to give away unless you really love to give away your cash.the gamefication loop is a great guide, points
in the middle, game mechanics surround theoutside; badges, level, challenges, awards, leaderboards. fun is a new metric. engagementis a new metric. and games fundamentally favor their creators. so, i'm really, really interestedin hearing your questions and i will lay out for you in advance that there are three questionsi get asked at almost single talk that i give and so i am keeping a leaderboard in my headof how well team goggle correctly anticipates those questions. yes?>> how did griefers fit into this picture? for instance...>> zicherman: griefers. yes, go ahead. >> ...a lot of the corporate stuff you talkedabout was straight with the corporation so you think the next step might be more social.but then, when you look at xbox live, you
know, you see the obvious problems with thelittle design social systems. >> zicherman: so, i'm going to rephrase yourquestion because there were a couple of questions in there. so, i think the biggest questionthat you're asking is, can you create a social experience that's like fundamentally corporatebut also social? and are there--what are some of the pitfalls of building an experiencelike that? so, one of the things that happens anytime you build a social interaction platformof any kind is you get unintended user behavior. users do things that you don't want them todo. users do things that are not necessarily on your pathway of, you know, design conceptso you want your users to be there happily talking about, you know, google checkout.and they come, and some of them happily talk
about google checkout, and some of them likestart talking about neo-nazis, right? and you're like, "okay, it's unexpected thingbut, you know, what are we supposed to do about it?" or, you know, they're like obstructioniststhat make the experience negative or obstructionists that make the experience negative for otherpeople. so, there is no substitute for good moderation. you know, in a--i gave a keynoteshortly after the world financial meltdown that was actually on the subject of how ifa game designer had been in charge of the federal reserve how the outcome would havebeen different for the meltdown. and one of the most fundamental things that game designersdo not do is they do not ever think that people will not try to game the system. they beginwith a fundamental assumption that, "if what
i build is valuable," and there's always that"if," but, "if what i build is valuable, people will attempt to get whatever they can outof it by doing as little as possible," right? that's the basic tension that game designersbelieve exist in all these systems so we're never naive about that. we often make mistakesbut we're never naive about that. so the right answer to that, it's a broad omnibus answerbut it basically means expect the worst, expect the unexpected, and think about things likea game designer would. so, any game design community has cisops, right, who are oftenpromoted users who demonstrated some clarity and then some system of command that allowsmost importantly the game to turn transactions back at will that--which is really super important.so in the real world outside of games, normally
like when somebody defraud somebody else yougot to go to court, you have to seek some third party remedy for that. in the worldinside of games, with the right terms of service, the remedy is tell this, you know, the cisopnotices either it's algorithmic or human or a complaint. somebody says, "oh, that's notthe right kind of interaction, that person's misbehaving. they've stolen something. something'sweird. they are able to pause/play, read the log, decide what to do in, like, a coupleof minutes. pause/play, read the log, decide what to do, take money out of someone's pocket,put money back into somebody else's pocket, ban a person, change their status, and thegame continues, right? it's autocratic. it's somewhat dictatorial. but it is necessaryfor the, in this context, necessary for the
effective functioning of most of all to userexperiences so you need to consider that in your design, if it gets big enough anyway.more questions? there can't only be--oh, yes. please use the microphone.>> so we just went through our annual performance review cycle a few weeks ago. and when youwere talking about that system where you're in the middle and then you see the two peopleabove and below, what would it take to move up? i'm just thinking, "wow," you know, "thiswould be really useful during performance review." because...>> zicherman: oh, yeah. >> ...it's really unclear, you know, whatit takes, you know, to move up or whatever and i was wondering, you know, how would yourun performance reviews as a game?
>> zicherman: it's a great question. i lovethe put on the spot game design questions and i'm going to be like, "all right, so here'swhat i do." no. so, actually, hr is a huge piece of the--i think the next big frontierof gamification. sales teams have been using basic game concepts since the beginning, right?they've often--if any of you who have worked with a sales team, you've seen the leaderboardup on the wall. they've been doing that forever. or, like, non-profits for their donation thing,you know, like where they show a thermometer like with the number filling up? that's akind of like sort of status meter score health meter, that you might use. so some of thesemechanics have been imported with sales teams for a long time but they haven't really seendistribution beyond sales teams but there's
an increasing chorus of people playing withideas. so one idea that wasn't implemented super well but people kind of liked on thehr side was a game that the guys called seriosity build which was a--it was an email game andbasically the premise was you had to put a certain amount of virtual currency behindevery email you sent and the amount of virtual currency you put behind it demonstrated howimportant the email was. so the recipient--the recipient could sort of score their inboxbased on how intently you really wanted them to read their email, right? now, it was overlyconvoluted. it didn't work quite the right way. the design wasn't perfect. but there'sa germ of a really interesting idea in there, right, which is using a virtual economy tosignal like intent one way or the other and
i think probably for hr, and certainly forperformance reviews, the biggest thing that i would do is i would expose the xp systemof reviews. so, do you all know what i mean by xp? xp is experience points. it's a pointsystem that generally is revealed as going up continuously. it never goes down. it canbe reset periodically according to calendars but it pretty much always goes up and youget xp for all kinds of activities in the world. but xp is not redeemable. you can'tturn xp into stuff. it's like experience points. and you've seen it in xbox if you play xboxlive. you've seen it in linkedin, that bar that fills in that says your profile is 33%complete is a type of xp, okay? so what i would do as a test is i would expose the actualprocess for getting a raise and making an
xp bar that everybody could just see on your,like, personal homepage. "here's your xp, here's your distance to next race," right,"and you got to keep doing the things." you know, "here are the challenges and questsyou need to follow. you got to keep doing these things to get to your next level," right,and at least demarcate the next level. so, you know, and the other cool part about xpis usually those bars never actually fully fill up, like you could never--right? younever get to--it's sort of--it's a logarithmic project, you know, projection so it keepsgetting, you know, closer and closer to, you know, vertical but it never quite gets thereso you can kind of do a lot with that. but that would be my main--my first main hackwould be the test that in performance reviews.
and what effect would an xp bar have on people'sbehavior just if it was on their homepage everyday? maybe, you know, you logged intoyour homepage and that was the first thing you saw is how far away you are from yournext race. do you have a question? yeah? >> yeah, i'm just going to ask about the engagementpower metric you mentioned. >> zicherman: yeah.>> and if you thought about what it might look like. then maybe you can just repeatthe question since i didn't go up there. >> zicherman: sure. what does the engagementpower metric look like that i've described? >> yeah, and it's because there are so manydifferent websites. >> zicherman: right, there are so many differentways to think about it. so i've been doing
some preliminary thinking on it. and, youknow, i would love to have a dialogue with people who are involved in that kind of metricsaround it. and again, you know, we'll talk about that at the summit in more detail butbasically i think we need to amalgamate a few different metrics and look at some newones that track user behavior against some norm because i think we've been missing someof that normative tracking components which are kind of important and then there's someelements on the--i know these two things are already kind of fleshed out of my head. weneeded a baseline and we need an amalgamated metric. and then the other thing that i'vebeen thinking a lot about is we need to start measuring certain behaviors in core analyticslike referrals. friend invitation should be
a core analytic. it should be in google analytics,actually. like friend invitations, right, it should be tracked by google. it's likeobviously missing there, right, because it's important to everybody, right? okay, justso i wanted--i'm just waiting to see if i'm, like, the only person. okay, so friend referralsis a simple example of something, you know, that tells you. so i think if we pull togethersome of these things, you know, we can, you know, we can kind of create some interestinghybridized metric. but we frequently, when we talk about metrics in gamification frameor point systems we, you know, we frequently make things opaque for a reason, you know?so i'm not--i think the secondary level to that is whether it should be transparent oropaque. and, you know, there's lots of justification
for some kind of semi-opaque metric, you know?a good example of that is--another good example of semi-opaque metric is if i was a buildinga game to help you lose weight at your local gym or getting people fit actually. so, broadlyspeaking, i'm building a game for engagement in a local gym, right? if i created a linearpoint system like the old school point system thinking, i'd have kind of a problem, right,because for me losing 10 pounds or for you losing 10 pounds are two completely differentvalues, right? is that--for me, it's a rounding error, right? for you, it's like a seriousweight loss goal. and two--yeah, i actually do lose like six to seven pounds in waterweight tmi. so, you know, so these two things would mean something different and we mayalso even be walking into the game with completely
different motivations. i may want to loseweight, you maybe want to bulk up. how can we all be on the--playing the same--how canwe all be in the same experience, right, under those circumstances? if we use a simple pointsystem that's like measure the number of pounds you lose. and then on top of all of that isthe privacy question, right, which is how would people feel if their actual weight losswas on a like publicly viewable board in a gym, right? so, these things all point to,if i give you a lot of evidence to support this idea, you don't actually need all ofthis evidence to support the idea of an opaque point system in which the game designer takescare of all that and just produces one magic number. and the one magic number is, you know,where you're at against your goal and that's
all you need to know. and if you believe thatthe system is honest, if you believe that the game designer knows what they're doingand you see some proof of that early on, you buy into that point system and you just say,"oh that makes sense." more questions? yeah? >> i have another question.>> zicherman: go ahead. >> i have a question. so when i go to playa game, i am not a member of the game, so how would i be in the leaderboard or how wouldthat work? >> zicherman: so, the early days of any gameare supper, super important. the term that we use in games to describe the first minuteor so that a user plays with us is called "on-boarding," which is a term you may haveheard before, and the game view of on-boarding
is totally different from the web view ofon-boarding. so on the web view of on-boarding, a user might be coming from anywhere and wedon't really know what they want to do so we're going to drop them on a page which givesthem 8 or 10 standards, 8 or 10 options, right? google.com is in a notable exception to thisrule, but most websites, when you land on them, there are 8 to 10 options of what youcould do, right, log in, register now, tell a friend, follow us on twitter, find out more,read about us, like, press section. so, a game designer would never, ever, ever, ever,ever do that ever. there is one experience. it is the on-boarding experience for the game.it's what we used to call a tutorial level but now we just call it level one. and theuser is dropped into the game experience,
and i'll give you the basic rhythm of it rightnow, the user is dropped into a game experience knowing--and the designer knows full wellthat they're going to lose a whole bunch of people in the funnel, right, but that's notthe point, so usually this is what the rhythm looks--the pattern looks like now. "welcome,do this simple challenge," like any idiot can do, right? "do this simple challenge.yey. okay, here's another one. can you do it? cool. here's one more. can you do it?yey. register now," right? and then, most importantly, invite friends, right? that'sthe rhythm that's if you deconstruct the, you know, if you deconstruct the first minuteof most successful games they look like that. so, in the olden days we dropped you on anoption that said, "start, play a tutorial
level," now we just make that level one. you'retightly boxed in as a user. you don't even know that you're tightly boxed in but you'rereally tightly boxed in in that first minute of the game. and some of the core things thatwe've unpacked is you first get a reward, "yey," before you're asked to register, andthe registration step is the one that you use to claim the reward, right? so the siteis advancing value to the user before the registration occurs and it uses that valueto get the registration to occur which is really backwards, right, from the way mostweb design is done. so, that's become--that's been very, very powerful. and that also inthose two, or three, or four steps that we do in the first couple of minutes, we unveillike we reveal the complexity of the game
in slow steps, right, slowly. "let me showyou a little bit more, oh, a little bit more, oh, a little bit more, okay, now you're in."one of the--and then there's still some revealing that goes on, right, leveling up and so on.>> so, we were in conversations recently about some--about gamification of some areas thataren't necessarily, you know, that are obviously games. and one of the objections was thatthis would take away from the value proposition of what's already there and sort of createthis distracting layer of game on top of this other thing that already had--gives valueto users. and... >> zicherman: yes.>> ...it would sort of shift the value to, "i've got this behavior that i'm--i feel compelledto engage in because i have these innate human
characteristics and all these things.">> zicherman: yes. >> and the argument was that, now i've taken--you'vetaken away from the original value that we had.>> zicherman: yes. >> is there--how do you--what do you say tothat objection? >> zicherman: that's a great question. so,the question is--i'll rephrase it and... >> yeah.>> zicherman: there's two questions. so, one of them is, you know, how do you gamify anexperience that has intrinsic value already so you know one thing, and then two, whatare the risks of gamifying something that has intrinsic value, you know, and what happens?so, there's a two part answer for you. my
favorite allegory around this is jet blue.you know, when jet blue airlines launched, it did not have a frequent flyer program.they said, "we don't need one. we are a new kind of airline. our planes are new and clean.our employees are happy. we fly where you want to. we give you free tv and snacks. wedo not need a frequent flyer program. that's what crappy old airlines use as a crutch.our core product, our intrinsic product is good, enough." how long did that last? oneyear, approximately, right? and they are super, super not invented here like, that's why theywere able to go for a whole year, you know? the reality is sometimes, and i think it happensin almost every commoditized market, the game subsumes the intrinsic action--activity. itjust eats it because it's more important.
it's more compelling. as everything becomesmore of a commodity, the loyalty becomes the actual end user product. it's what the useris engaging with, this loyalty program, not the underlying product. we used to have brandmarketing to do that, right, that was the other lever that companies could use. buttoday, it's really hard to get that message through the users so increasingly, loyaltybecomes important. so that's one aspect of it. the other aspect of it is a little bitscarier, which is what's called replacement. so, i did a weird undergrad. my undergraduatewas the psychology of gifted children and their social-emotional affect. and so, oneof the things that's been in the literature of gifted kids for a long time is replacementand here's replacement in a nutshell. you,
intrinsically, are a great piano player, chris.you play piano. you just start playing piano. there's just one around, you start playing.you love it. you're playing music. you're playing all the time. and your parent's decidethat you're going to do competitive piano. so, now they introduce competitive piano playingto you. you start going to competitions. you're winning. it's cool. you're getting prizes.you're getting rewards. you're winning and then if we withdraw the reward, right, wewithdraw the prizes and withdraw the reward, chris will stop playing piano, full stop.he stops playing the underlying intrinsic behavior that he's doing before we ever camealong with our fruit cocktail reward program, right, he just did it because he loved it.what replacement is, it's a very, very clear
and it happens almost 100% of the time, ifyou replace intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards and you extinguish the extrinsic rewardthen the underlying behavior is also extinguished. once replaced, intrinsic motivation rarelycomes back, that's the basic thing. so, it leaves you in a bit of a dilemma, which isyou're facing markets that are basically going to extrinsic rewards everywhere, that's effectivelywhat's happening. and i don't think and i know it's controversial. i just gave a talkon gamification for non-profits like last week in new york at this great meet up fornon-profits and i was like, "i hate to be a harbinger of doom for you here but let mebreak it down, this is an opportunity rather than a threat, but intrinsic motivation isover. it's over. depending on consumer's intrinsic
motivation to take actions for you as a brandis over. the sooner you accept that, the better you will be. we can no longer depend on it."in fact, it begs the question of whether or not there is an intrinsic versus extrinsicrewards system anymore at all, right? our private lives are now public. our social mediapresence is omnipresent. it follows us around all the time. is there an internal life forpeople? i don't even know anymore. but here's what i do know, every vertical will become--therewards will become externalized and you'll need to find a good external rewards systemto compensate. yeah? >> how do you apply that to a business context?so, i've got a deal with a material that's listed as a, b, c and d and i can't get apartner to commit so i introduce extrinsic
value e. i mean at what point are you craftingan unsustainable relationship? like you have six months of exclusivity but six months,you know, in month seven, are you still going to be happy with the deal?>> zicherman: right. so the question is, how do you make that sustainable?>> yes. >> zicherman: so, i'll tell you kind of a--idon't know your personal situation but i'll share a story. so, from the time that--andmaybe it's a very personal situation, but we can talk about it later. so, from the timewhen united first unveiled mileage plus in 1981 a week after american, until 2007, thetop level you could achieve in mileage plus was one million mile flyer, that was the maxlevel you could achieve. and of course, that
seemed insane in 1981. "a million miles. oh,my god. how many people would ever get to a million miles? that's crazy." so the designersdidn't design passed a million miles. what happened when users reached to a million miles?they stopped playing because it stopped being fun. there was no more reward to win. theygot lifetime gold status, right? there was just nothing to get out of the level pasta million. using game term, strict game terminology, that was the boss level of the game. theybeat the boss level. once they beat the boss level, the game's not that much fun anymore,right? so, three, four years ago, united added additional tiers beyond a million; two million,three million. they're not necessarily thoughtful but they are interesting because they pointto a--the fact that you have to constantly
be thinking about the game system and constantlyextending and redesigning it. i don't think that there is a--there is definitely not amagic like sprinkle game sauce on something to make it taste good. there is no like, youknow, there is no like quick answer where you can like just drop in one game mechanicand all of a sudden, "man, this thing that wasn't working before now really hums," youknow? that isn't the case. these are long term engagement systems that we're buildingand they will require care and nurturing. one of my big predictions, and then i thinkwe got to wrap up, but one of my big predictions is that i think every company will have achief engagement officer working on their staff, whose a different kind of discipline.it's not quite marketing. it's about engagement,
whose responsibilities, you know, encompassall the different things that we've talked about. so, that could be you, for you personalproblem. thank you all very much. if you want to continue the dialogue with me, i'm on twitter.i'm @gzicherm. the blog is gamification.co and, you know, feel free to chat with me anytime.thank you.
