Welcome to A Question of Gamification, a podcast where gamification expert An Coppens answers your questions. Welcome to a question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host and chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. And this week's question is a build on last week's question of what are the processes that we use? What are the deliverables that we have? And this week is what is the reality of a gamification project? Because last week, we went through the five steps in our process phases: business specifics, user research, gamification design, development and support. And this week, I want to delve deeper into what is the reality like in a gamification project. We just finished a major project which took us nine months to get to where we are today. I'd love to say it was a smooth and easy process and everything worked according to plan. But hey, that's not reality! In fact, we had from day one, a delay of a number of months, thanks to lengthy terms and contract negotiations and setup negotiations. That's something which in a lot of cases, and a lot of projects is forgotten about. Procurement typically has a say about everything. Commercial terms, we may have a say about too. In gamification and game design, what we aim to do and how we work is that we aim to retain the IP which is what makes it a win/win for everyone. That way we're not limited because of one game design that we used for one client, which would tie us down to never ever be able to use that again. It would be crazy for us to sign away. Let's say the intellectual property for a crossword or an unlocking of content game mechanic, and then to never be able to use that again with future clients. When we are looking at game design and intellectual property, obviously, anything like branding, graphics narrative that we take from the client or that the client already has, even content that the client already has, that is retained by the client. We just put that into different shapes and formats. Always expect to have negotiations in terms. That is one thing. The reality of a project may mean that you spend a lot longer in the procurement and negotiation of the terms phase. Originally, we had nine months, and then that got shorted down to five months thanks to the lengthy procurement process. That meant some of our design processes had to really work concurrently and in very rapid succession. I remember doing the business scoping phase in two weeks, at the same time, we launched the user research phase, which had already been started, but because nothing had been signed off, we didn't have access to the client's people. So yeah, there is a lot of factors in there. Did it compromise the level and depth of research? Absolutely. And, you know, that's the reality. You know, I'd love to say for every project, we do user research with 10% of the target audience, or idealistically, that's fantastic. In reality, we may only get a fraction of that because of time, because of the budget, because of the due date. I come from the broadcast sector and in the broadcast sector, you often have a go-live date where the promotion has already started for a program or a movie or a production to go-live on a certain date, even a channel at times. Everything else has to backwards fit into the timeline. Sometimes that's not too dissimilar to a lot of our game design processes and project. Often the client has a very definite time. I recall one of the board games we designed, there was a definite conference date. So we had to work backwards from there and say, okay, which printer can still deliver in what time frame? How far can we push the deadline before it has to go to print? And how quick can we work then to make sure that we deliver, so it's fine. And it's a great achievement when we do deliver in those very sharp deadline situatio...
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