Without a good governance, you’re blind and mute

Welcome back, Gamers and Players.

Today, I begin a new series of post about a question I never found within online and free resources: the problem of Governance of Gaming. Here I mean “gaming” primarily as gamification, but also as game-design, game developing, playtesting and relationship with players.

Why I choose this topic? Because I’ve noticed that readers of this blog are more interested in technical and specific topic (as Roi or Game on Demand process step-by-step: this is the reason why you can find both into Hot Topic).

There is also another reason. Acceptance of a new strategy or model, for business, is a process that follows a number of step before full acceptance. The well-known Gartner Hype Cycle is built on this statement, for example. Those steps are usually the following:

1. objectives and definition, with strategic advantage, of the new idea.
2. Roi and economic sustainability,
3. applying the process and the governance of it.

If “reality check” gives positive result on these step, the process/technology will be adopted broadly very quickly, due to competition. In fact, I don’t know (and don’t want to predict) at what stage Gamification is actually (Gartner said it’s near to the “plateau of productivity… it is the step where you start to need governance). Anyway, sooner or later, the governance issue will explode… so it’s better to be prepared.

As usual, within the following series of post, I’ll focus any time on a single aspect. The next days I’ll try to distinguish between different gamification solutions, highlighting how, when and why governance may be difficult. There are also deep consequences in governance in relationship with game structure, game mechanics and even with game “fluff”(or flavour).

So stay tuned, and let me know if you want to see some specific point of view about this topic!