IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015 - 76

deploy games in the workplace is the application of core skills for
improving organizational citizenship behavior. This is perhaps
best explained through an example. In 2007, the Microsoft Windows team deployed an internal game to encourage employees
around the world to help validate the linguistic quality of Windows. At that time, Windows supported more than 100 languages
and contained thousands of text strings that need to be quickly and
accurately translated. The Windows Language Quality Game was
deployed for one month and attracted 4,000 players who reviewed
500,000 screens through gameplay. The core skills in this game
were the ability to natively speak a language and the citizenship
behavior to help the Windows team ship an important product for
Microsoft. In many foreign subsidiaries, management supported
this effort by allowing their employees to play as part of their
work to increase the quality of Windows 7.

GAMES AND BIG DATA
Whenever you can, count.

testing and synthetic transactions, do not necessarily provide the
authenticity of real user data, and real user data does not provide
the precision necessary to draw insightful conclusions. The concept of a "gamified transaction" enables the best of both
worlds-high precision and high authenticity (Figure 2).

DATA PRECISION
A/B TEST TRANSACTIONS
A/B test experimentation is the practice of exposing two iterations of a product or feature, each to a subset of users in a
controlled experiment to test one against the other.

SYNTHETIC TRANSACTIONS
Synthetic transactions are artificial actions that are run in real
time against objects that are being monitored-a synthetic
transaction may mimic a customer action or experience in an
automated way. The telemetry data from these transactions
can be used to perform controlled experiments.

-Sir Francis Galton

DATA AUTHENTICITY
CROWDSOURCING DATA GENERATION

AUTHENTIC TRANSACTIONS

In the world of online services, there is tremendous value in
using big data to help improve the customer experience. Telemetry data generated from the use of the service can be applied to
identify problems, improve existing experiences, and build better
features to improve future experiences. However, to gather comprehensive telemetry data, users sometimes need encouragement
to try new features, especially in areas of the service with which
they may not be familiar. This is where gamification comes in:
game mechanics can motivate users to use all of the services to
generate comprehensive telemetry data.
There are two attributes of data that can successfully impact
the quality of the user experience: 1) precision and 2) authenticity.
The precision attribute impacts whether there is a sufficient
amount of representative data to draw statistically significant
conclusions. The authenticity attribute impacts how representative the collected data is of real user actions. The challenge is
that many of the traditional big data techniques, such as A/B

Authentic transactions are real actions by real users using
real software, hardware, and networks.

Low

Data Precision
High

Data Authenticity

Synthetic
Transactions

Gamified
Transactions

A/B
Test
Transactions

Authentic
Transactions

Low

High

FIGURE 2. User transaction types.
76 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

july 2015

GAMIFIED TRANSACTIONS
Gamified transactions are those done by real users under the
influence of game mechanics. This category represents the use
of game mechanics from games and play to motivate real users
to do real transactions to generate the needed telemetry data.

GAME MECHANICS
Badges, points, leaderboards, and levels are quite popular in
gamification platforms. Several great companies, including
Dopamine, Snowfly, Badgeville, and Bunchball to name a
few, offer services to build out great gamified experiences.
However, it's not enough to add a badge to a Web site. Ian
Bogost, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, captures
this well [4].
The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous... Gamification is reassuring. It gives vice presidents
and brand managers comfort: they're doing everything
right, and they can do even better by adding 'a games strategy' to their existing products, slathering on 'gaminess' like
aioli on ciabatta at the consultant's indulgent sales lunch.
Gamification is easy. It offers simple, repeatable
approaches in which benefit, honor, and aesthetics are less
important than facility. For the consultants and the startups, that means selling the same bull **** in book, workshop, platform, or API form over and over again, at
limited incremental cost. It ticks a box. Social media strategy? Check. Games strategy? Check.
It's critical for people to understand that game mechanics
are not a panacea. Gamifying someone's job won't deceive
them into working harder or trick them into working

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015