LIS 505A Gamification
Gamification is the process of using gaming tools (points, leaderboards, leveling up, etc.) to entice people into using your products or services. This is quickly building across all industries: Fitbit and Jawbone let you game your fitness, Foursquare games your attendance in different locations, airlines let you game your tickets and seats, and even medicine has used crowdsourcing and gamification with Foldit to learn about protein folding. Libraries have not been left out of this and have used gamification to increase patrons' interest and value they find in library materials and services. In this class, we will look at some of the principles of gamification, look at the way businesses and non-profits have used gamification to increase user interest, and study the ways libraries have used these principles. We will construct some gamification scenarios students may take into their library work.