“Gamification is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging.”
This came up in last night’s EdSocial, and I discovered that I understood the word better than I was sure how to spell it. (Well, “gamification” just looks wrong as a word.)
Madly click on little pixel eggs to turn them into dragons
In May 2006, an American high school student, T.J. Lipscomb, came up with a bright idea: a website called dragcave.net with little pictures of eggs. Players click on eggs to adopt them: it’s an artificial pet game. If the egg gets enough views/clicks, it becomes a baby dragon, dragonet, adult dragon. Because there are different species of dragon (so many, eventually, that the dragcave had to be divided into six zones: Alpine, Coast, Desert, Forest, Jungle, Volcano), because players can breed their own dragons and raise them from eggs, players keep coming back. And back. And back. Apparently dragcave.net has 40,000 active users and 2 million page views each day. Reputedly, Lipscomb earned enough from the dragcave game to pay his own way through college.
Continue reading →