Last week, @enjoymentland posted a good list of thought leaders on the topic of gamification (but no links to any resources or explanation why these folks are on the list). I wanted to learn more about each person, so I’m adding biographical information and links to each name below.
Jane McGonigal, of TED Talk fame “Gaming can make a better world” and one of the founders of Gameful, a secret headquarters for “World-changing game designers” (read more about this at Kickstarter). Jane works at the Institute for the Future and is on twitter: @avantgame
Jesse Schell, from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, is also the author of The Art of Game Design, which examines psychological principles that make all kinds of games “good games.” Twitter: @jesseschell
B.J. Fogg teaches at Stanford and examines interesting methods and metrics for changing behavior (captology) and I so wish I had the time to take his Persuasive Online Video course. Twitter: @bjfogg
Dennis “Dens” Crowley is the co-founder of Foursquare and teaches (adjunct) at NYU. Twitter: @dens
Amy Jo Kim is a researcher on online communities and social architecture (and CEO of Shufflebrain). You can watch her Google Talk: Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software. Twitter: @amyjokim
Natron Baxter makes productivity games: “Fun is not the enemy of work … or productivity” and was one of the developers who built Evoke. In particular, I love his tips for Knowledge Sharing (Zipline) and I suspect he’ll love the article that I’ve written about KM that publishes in December (if he asks nicely, I’ll let him read it now). Twitter: @natronbaxter
Jen McCabe builds mobile health and Internet health games (see imoveyou). Twitter: @jensmccabe
Nicole Lazzaro is the President of XEODesign, Inc. She has a 2004 paper called Why we play games: Four keys to more emotion without stories (PDF). The four “keys” are: 1. Hard fun, 2. Easy fun, 3. Altered States, and 4. The People Factor. Twitter: @nicolelazzaro
Raph Koster is the author of my favorite book from the last year, A Theory of Fun for Game Design and a game designer in San Diego. Twitter: @raphkoster
Mark Pincus is the co-founder and CEO of Zynga (they built the games Mafia Wars and Farmville). Twitter: @markpinc (not active)
Gabe Zichermann of Gamification Co. is involved in organizing the Gamification Summit and is co-author of the book Game-based Marketing. Twitter: @gzicherm
Eric Zimmerman is the co-author of Rules of Play, teaches courses on Game Design for various schools, is a member of Local Number 12, and writes the blog Being Playful. I attended one of Eric’s social game design workshops at GLS2010 and it was great! Twitter: @zimmermaneric (not active)
Keith Lee is the CEO and co-founder of Booyah (see MyTown). Twitter: @keithlee0 (not active)
Byron Reeves is a professor at Stanford, and the co-founder of Seriosity, Inc and has built a product called Attent (to gamify productivity). You can see one of his talks, Work Sucks, Games are Great on TechAffair. Twitter: @Seriosity
Colleen Macklin (my addition to the list) is a Professor at the Parsons New School for Design and the director of the PETLab. I’ve seen Colleen speak twice and I think she’s doing some awesome work on influence games. Twitter: @colleenmacklin
Who am I? Here’s my bio. 🙂 Maria Andersen is a learning futurist and math professor who has spent the last two years researching games, learning, and game design (why? she has her reasons). She’s given numerous presentations in education about restructuring learning around the principles of game design and play (especially as it relates to math). She’s created a collection of good games for higher education. She is very interested in the gamification of learning, and soon enough (December), you’ll see one of the things she’s been working on. Twitter: @busynessgirl