This Will Blow Your Mind (in a good way)
Conferences are an essential part of professional life, but they can sometimes feel overwhelming or even scary.
Yes, GamiCon48V is circling the globe -- not once, but twice -- in a 48 hour period with speakers and attendees from around the world. But the expanse of the experience should not deter you. There are countless great reasons to attend GamiCon48V! Check out our Why GamiCon page for just a few.
Imagine, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear from the BEST in gamification for learning from across the globe, without ever leaving the comfort and safety of your home or office.
USA Participants - Sessions start Monday, May 9.
Please download your GamiCon48V schedule with time zones here.
Download the GamiCon48V Schedule with USA Time Zones
Global Participants - Sessions start Tuesday, May 10 at 00:00 GMT.
Please download your GamiCon48V schedule with a time zone converter here:
Download the GamiCon48V Schedule with GMT Time Zone Converter
Day 1
9 May - 7:00 PM CST
10 May - 0:00 GMT
Welcome and Introduction
Prepare for an Unprecedented Adventure! Time to embark on a 48-hour gamified experience. Meet your hosts and learn about the gamified aspects of this conference.

Monica Cornetti
Sententia, Inc
The Future of Gamification
Gamification, defined as “the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems,” is becoming core to engagement strategy for brands across industries from healthcare to automobiles to electronics. It is much more than a point system or cute game features. Based on what we know of the highly interactive, responsive, and personalized nature of Internet of Things (IoT) products and services, gamification promises to be one of the most-effective marketing concepts to apply to both customer experience and employee retention
... [More]

Susan Peahl
Impro Theatre-The Home of Narrative Improvisation
What if? Why not? How about?: Build your Possibility Thinking Muscles
If we're going to change the game, we need a new mindset, new muscles, to get unstuck, find new choices. Instead of focusing on what we can’t do, let's say “What if? Why not? How about?” and build the pathway to more creative learning. Let's work out our possibility thinking muscles! In this workshop, build the muscles of “YES AND” possibility thinking. Sue Peahl will lead you in some very simple, fun, playful, everyone-can-do-them exercises to get us ready for the GamiCon21V experience.

Kevin Bell
Janison
The Game of Life - How Experiential Learning and Gameful Design Can, and Do, Intersect
In a review of the Intrinsic Motivators inherent to effective gameful design, this presentation will compare aspects of gamified experiential education with recommendations as to how the best can be made of both these philosophies.

Eric Nelson
Gamification Schoolhouse
The Epic Use of Design Thinking in Gamification
Properly managed, the game space is a safe place for students and teachers to once again take risks without triggering concern for “how it will affect the grade”.
Walking through "The Habbit" gamified learning program, attendees will go on an adventure to discover how Design Thinking can be used to superstruct the training of instructors in applying gamification to design challenges.

James Bishop
Koru Consulting
Carol Lin
Koru Consulting
Escape the Tomb
Online escape rooms can be a powerful approach to team problem solving, and Escape the Tomb will fully test your knowledge and out-of-the-box approach to problem solving. Best of all, you’ll go through this experience in teams.
Do well and fabulous prizes await you. The alternative is ...[More]

Abhilash Purohit
Gentle Bamboo Solutions
What's in it for the Learner?
The pandemic has made live virtual sessions a new reality for learning and development among companies in India. The most common complaint in such programs is that learners are not engaged and that facilitators do not have the tools to make learning engaging in this new environment.
The tools facilitators were recommended to use did not seem to be built for learning... [More]

Kerstin Oberprieler, PhD.
Pentaquest
KangaZoo: Demo and Design Journey
Think Government is too conservative to have fun? Think again!
Presenting ‘KangaZoo’, a game about Australia’s beautiful flora and fauna. Developed for the Australian Government, KangaZoo lets you explore Australia, capture and rehabilitate injured animals, and meet diverse characters along the way.
Learn about how to take a client from concept to reality, and see a demo of this award-winning game! (Finalist in the Australian Game Developer Awards 2020).

Helen Wong
Beatrice Chu
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
James Bishop
Koru Consulting
Co-Creating the Future of Tertiary Education - The Learner's Journey
Helen Wong and Beatrice Chu are part of a movement within Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to let faculty, staff, and students co-create a better way to learn. Combined teams of students, staff, and faculty participated in design sprints, conferences, and real-time prototyping of ideas to re-imagine the future of tertiary education.
They wove together a range of initiatives, for everyone to learn graphic recording and visual facilitation, gamification, design thinking, and art. The results include student designed curriculum, regional conferences and a level of excitement and engagement not seen for a long time.
Helen and Beatrice will share not just the student's learning journey, but theirs too. James Bishop will host the discussion, with videos of the experience. Questions are encouraged!

Mohsin Memon
Gamitar Learning
Evivve: The Leadership Game - Learn Problem Solving through Play
Play/witness a multiplayer online game based learning (MOGL) experience. Learn the key principles involved in designing and delivering MOGL experiences.
During the session, Mohsin will use the immersive learning methodology to provide a framework for attendees to follow in designing their own MOGL experiences.

Pete Jenkins
Gamification+ Limited
Seven Steps To Gamification Success
Pete talks you through the Gamification+ framework for designing and delivering gamification projects. The seven stages in this process are the secret to continuing success. For each stage, Pete will explain how to apply it, the best practices from around the industry to apply at each stage and a few of the critical issues to watch out for.

Loredana Zaharescu
Société Générale
Three Ways to Gamify an E-Learning Course Beyond PBL
The session will present three ways to gamify an e-learning course beyond PBL: 1. Creating a meaningful challenge, 2. Setting clear goals, 3. Creating meaning. These topics are widely covered theoretically, yet rarely well implemented. The aim of this session is to provide some guidelines that can quickly improve the quality of the gamified module.

Rob Alvarez
IE Business School
Gamification in Business Education
IE Business School in Madrid has been creating interactive learning experiences in business education for the past decades. They have seen how gamified learning materials can make a difference. Whether directly involved in business education and related areas or not, you will certainly find nuggets that you can apply for your learning efforts from the best in the field.

Ashley Parker
Harvard Business Publishing
Smart Stories: Under the Hood of Narrative Simulations
Certain games use different quantitative features "under the hood" to enrich the pedagogical impact of gameplay. I’ll show four examples of how simple features and functionalities added to a branching game pay huge dividends to the learner.
The first is simple: every decision the user makes tips the scales between three values... [More]

Ahmed Hossam
Oakland University
Gampact
University of Wales
Gamfed
Serious Gaming, from Genre to Behavioral Transformation
For a long time, Serious Games and Gamification have been in a special category in the games industry. Set apart by the serious purpose of their designs, we think of them as something largely unrelated to the various just-for-fun games.
However, in recent years, we have seen many entertainment games with more learning and development value than some serious games. If we suppose that learning is fun (and we know it is), and the market can support games that are entertaining because of their educational value (rather than despite it), the line between learning for fun and learning that is fun is blurrier than it's ever been before. Should we still be treating educational games for fun and fun games for education as separate things?

Jan Bidner
Bidnerdonethat AB
How Can a Digital Moose Improve the User Experience for Tourists?
We need to know what’s in it for the users. What motivates them to engage with your service. WHO are we actually designing for? And WHAT do they need to do? What are the behaviors we need to support? What are the user stories that we need to enable? HOW could we support that within our design and decided features?...[More]

Adam Palmquist
Insert Coin
Level the Playing Field: Discovered Enablers and Barriers when Implementing Gamification in the Learning Environment
Gamification for learning is widespread, and there has been a focus on student increased performance when using gamified educational technology. However, there has been less attention given to identifying and solving the challenges of implementing gamification in the learning environment... [More]

Alyea Sandovar
Tint Hue
Gamification for Online Courses: 5 Myths About Gamification that Keep You from Better Completion Rates
Are you online course completion rates, getting you down? Then Gamify! There are many misconceptions about gamification for online/digital courses and what it can actually do to transform your online course. Alyea uncovers the 5 myths of gamification for online/digital courses... [More]

Dennis Glenn
Dennis Glenn Consulting
Can You Learn to Create a Micro-Learning App in Under an Hour?
At the end of this workshop, you will: Create a business plan for micro e-learning simulations using a tutorial of the Business Model Canvas program created for my graduate students. I present the Business Model Canvas as a planning and organizational methodology to share the development process with your team... [More]

Javier Velasquez
Free to Play Gamification
"Thank you Mario, but your princess is in another Castle" - Declared, Nested, Suggested and Narrative Goals in Gamified E-Learning
We'll take this session to discuss goal setting and challenge design in gamification. Some topics we'll explore are nested goals, arbitrary goals, non-verbal goal queues, secondary goals, optimization goals, uncertain results and progression goals. We'll examine how this affects attention spans, motivation direction, and measurable learning.

Jim Egan
Brown University
Naomi Pariseault
Brown University
Dave Eng
University XP
The Dark Side of Gamification
Gamification is supposed to be fun. That’s why businesses, organizations, and individuals use it on a daily basis. Why else would someone play games? But what are the ethics of gamification? What stops someone from doing something nefarious? Is there a limit to gamification? Should it be up to academics, the government, or individuals to police how gamification is used? Can you imagine a world dominated by the Black Mirror episode Nosedive? Join three gamers, designers, educators, and academics as they discuss a world where everyone you interact with is rated on a five-star scale.

Dr. Ginger Malin
Badgecert
Digital Badges and Micro-Credentials: The New Currency of Credentialing
This session will discuss how stackable micro-credentials differ from traditionally offered credentials, and present case studies about how they provide additional value for professionals while developing new revenue streams for organizations. We’ll explore: "Is a digital badge a micro-credential?", "What’s involved in developing and granting micro-credentials", "How to generate new revenue streams with micro-credentials", and "The innovative trends and how to stay ahead of the curve so you’re future-ready".

Kevin Miklasz
Nickelodeon
The Global Game Jam
Intrinsic Rewards are why Games are better than Schools for Learning
Although reward structures are successful in games, the types of rewards used in education typically impede the learning process. Badges and other rewards have generally failed to take root in education because of deep-seated design constraints in schools, colleges, and adult education that affect what types of rewards get used- the fact that you are using a badge is far less important than how you use a badge... [More]

Alex Galloway
Wells Fargo
The Evolution of the Text Adventure Game into Digital Humans
In the beginning, you started in a forest, cave or dungeon with a troll to the north, sunlight to the east and there was an open field west of a white house with a boarded front door. You entered text, and the story progressed. All that mattered was figuring out the story. You will look at how all that changed with the addition of graphics and what it takes to build a visual adventure today in Unity3D.
While the technology has changed, you will find that building it resembles the text dungeon from simpler times... [More]

Betty Dannewitz
ifyouaskbetty LLC
Destery Hildenbrand
Motive.io
Augmented Reality ScavengAR Hunt Unpacked
Augmented reality has found an accessible space in learning and development. Developing with AR is easier than it ever has been and gamified learning is the perfect use case! In this session, you will explore how to build an effective, engaging, and immersive AR scavenger hunt... [More]
Day 2
22 February - 18:00 CST
23 February - 0:00 GMT

Dr. Larysa Nadolny
Compassnorth
Iowa State University
Lean in with the Science of Gamification: A Decade of Research
Many of the trends in gamification are NOT supported by research. Why? Many developers look to other software tools or the most popular gamification strategies for their own applications. This perpetuates a cycle of ineffective applications for gamification. This presentation will walk the participants through the research on making the right choice for their own unique situations.

Chuck Sigmund
Microsoft
Playing in the Dark – Gamification with Nefarious Intent
The phrase dark pattern was originally used by Harry Brignull to describe the ways that UI designers were creating interfaces, web pages, and marketing strategies that were deceptive or manipulative. As instructional designers have increasingly leveraged elements of game design to engage their learner-players, they have often taken cues from the UI work done in some of these other spaces... [More]

Christian Gossan
KPMG International
Funding Your Idea
Tips on creating a better business case. Have a great idea on how to transform an experience within your business, but don't yet have the funding or approvals to execute from your organization? This session will share tips (and traps) in forming your value proposition to get the funding you want.

Jimbo Clark
innoGreat
"This Was Better than Face to Face." Making the Virtual Physical to Blow the Box Off People's Minds
In this session, Jimbo take you through the methodology that he used to unlock creativity, deepen sharing, and motivate change from two perspectives.
1. Participant View: You will engage fully in the mindset change process ... [More]

Vaughan O'Leary
KPMG International
KPMG’s Interactive Learning Apps Program
During 2020, due to an emphasis on working virtually, KPMG's people needed a solution to help them feel they belonged. The Interactive Learning Apps Program was able to step up with various initiatives, engaging more than 20,000 people across the KPMG network. Some of those initiatives will be highlighted in this session.

Rakshith Bhagavath
Gentle Bamboo Solutions
Race for Rockets: 3 Keys to Building an Engaging Management Game
With the pandemic, classroom training has largely reduced in India. While companies are adapting to live virtual facilitation, issues surrounding technology, engagement, and participation persist. Experiential learning is being replaced by lectures; teams are operating in silos and there is little interaction between participants.
Game-based learning, especially in virtual environments, is still looked at skeptically... [More]

Wesley Ball
Sententia Gamification
Roleplaying Games - Exploring Structure, Motivation, and Gamified Application
The evidence is clear that storytelling is a powerful way to prompt learner engagement and increase knowledge retention. The defining feature of roleplaying games is the huge amount of narrative freedom they afford participants.
Together we will explore what makes a roleplaying game and see what lessons can be learned and brought back to your gamification design.

Ehab Abu-Dayeh
Edraak
GamifiedMENA
Gamifying Massive Open Online Courses
As education organizations worldwide move towards putting educational experiences on the internet via Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on Massive Open Online Education Platforms (MOOEPs), the retention of enrolled students throughout the course remains a challenge.
E-Learning reduces delivery costs significantly... [More]

Mohamed Reda
The Catalyst Entity
The Oracle
“Stories are learnings for the ages”
Any educator can tell you a story is the most compelling form of learning and by stories we can let learners travel to worlds beyond possible imagination.
Which begs the question: “Aren’t stories also a form of games that...[More]

Karen Sikkema
LivingStory
Game-Based Learning Demo: Cold Case
Cold Case is an innovative new concept, linking paper dossiers sent to the participants with online communications via online conferencing tools. This online teambuilding game / online Escape Game was developed to help people learn how to better communicate and cooperate online. Supported by slides and funny pictures of people trying to solve a Diamond Heist... [More]

Carlo Fabricatore, PhD.
E.H.E. Europa Hochschule EurAka
Intrinsic Gamification: A Human Factors Approach to Overcome the Limits of Badges and Leaderboards
The gamification of learning is very often centered on leveraging extrinsic rewards to promote learners’ engagement and attainment. However, complex learning activities are driven by stronger motivational factors, which are crucial to make complex learning intrinsically motivating... [More]

An Coppens
Gamification Nation
Co-Create a Collaborative Game
Using the game A Planet Called Hope as a starting point, the challenge, should you choose to accept it, will be to build either extension packs, level-ups, a digital version, or other items that will make this collaborative game bigger and better. You will discover the basics of a collaborative game, the deciding factors on choosing digital or physical games, and then you will get to co-create additions. Those that are workable will be included in our free to play and download game.

Ercan Altuğ Yılmaz
Istanbul Bilgi University
Bahcesehir University
Beykoz University
Gamfed Turkey Representer
Inooster Gamification Designer
Gamification Works Because of Science
Gamification is still just a buzzword for some, while for others they’ve already implemented it with powerful effects on their business process. We’ve seen some gamification projects which have a very pretty design but have failed to engage users, and others with a very ugly interface but are addictively engaging their users! What is the secret? Is motivation only way to motivate people? Let’s analyze these and talk together at this session with AltuÄŸ.

Dr. Philipp Busch
Philipp Busch Consulting
Gamifying Online Training for Reforestation in Afghanistan
Imagine yourself as a 13 year old girl named Ayla living in the mountains of Afghanistan without intact vegetation, facing existential problems due to climate change, desertification and erosion. You are concerned about the supply for your village, but it is hard for you to talk in front of the local dschirga, the gathering of the village that is mainly driven by men. What are your perspectives? ... [More]

Valary Oleinik
U.S. Distance Learning Association
Upcycled Gamification: Remix, Repurpose, and Reengage
The idea of upcycling focuses on finding creative ways to reuse things. In Upcycled Gamification you will participate in a brief gamified adventure to explore how remixing games and instructional design, and repurposing content and tools, can lead to learning experiences that will reengage your learners time and time again. By adopting this gameful approach to design you will always have an abundance of creative options right at your fingertips.

Yuan-Ting Chiu
Wells Fargo
Matt Taillon
Wells Fargo
UX: Embrace User’s Feelings to Drive a Successful Design
The key to successfully engaging user experience is to know and understand your user’s feelings. We are often taught to not discuss or show emotion in order to act like a mature adult, especially in work environments.
A big part of user experience is about understanding a person’s emotions and attitudes. We can leverage these feelings to design an authentic product outcome to be more practical, experiential, effective, meaningful and valuable. We can allow the user to have more product ownership and use their understanding to transform their behaviors.

David Chandross, PhD.
Ryerson University
Hyperreality, Mixed Reality, and Open World Games: Designing Serious Games for the U.N. and the W.H.O.
In this session, we will explore the design of game worlds for professional education. The building of alternate ‘realities’ for training is closely connected to the design of mixed reality training games including VR, AR, and desktop immersive narrative simulations. Game worlds have the following features which we will discuss in design:
a. extensive narrative and back story... [More]

Jeffrey Riley
Practical Learning Concepts
Escape the Compliance Cave
We have been told for some time that xAPI is the solution we have wanted for decades to include all learning in a person’s record. While this is technically true, few businesses are adopting this standard. The main reason is most Instructional Designers, course developers, etc. are not programmers. To make xAPI work, people must be javascript experts. Now that Torrence Learning has created the xAPI.ly builder, this is no longer a barrier. This session demonstrates how any person can use this tool with a Learning Record Store and Learning Management System to collect information they can actually use.

Prageeth Sandakalum
Virtusa
Reimagine Learning with Gamification & Social Enterprise
Gamification in many organizations is limited to a stand-alone platform that offers points and badges to independent productivity matrices and show the highest gainers on a leaderboard. While this does not bring great results, it can also lead to a strong employee active disengagement. In order to gain the best out of gamification, the following building blocks must be in place:
- Well defined key performance measures
- A platform that enables the user journey (To earn rewards, complete quests)... [More]

Robin Kreiglstein
Live Neuron Labs
The Hero Design Framework
The majority of projects fail because we’ve been so very wrong about how human behavior works. Fortunately, a renaissance in the Behavioral Sciences has been replacing folk wisdom with data. And the new field of Behavioral Design is establishing how to apply these findings to greatly improve outcomes on real-world projects.
In this session, one of the pioneers of the field will teach us the fundamentals of his “Hero Behavioral Framework”. You’ll learn Robin’s most practical insights distilled from his decades on the frontlines designing large-scale positive behavior change. You’ll find it a very applicable synthesis of insights from game design, media design, behavioral science, behavioral economics, social science, and more.

Bernardo Letayf
BLUErabbit
GamiCon Player Journey Wrap-Up
Throughout your GamiCon gamified conference experience, you'll get to learn how to build your own gamified player journey by using an analogue version of the BLUErabbit gamified learning platform. In our final session, I'll show the results of building and using such a system. We know turning new knowledge into actionable steps can be challenging. This is why we built a system you can use through the entire event with clear results at the end. Follow along with an example during GamiCon to design a journey with a clear path and set number of steps.
Day 3
23 February - 18:00 CST
24 February - 0:00 GMT
GamiCon After Party & Game Show
We know you learned a lot and had a great time throughout Gamicon21V. Let’s conclude our time together by playing Text Breakers Virtual Game Show for the After Party! Get to know some of the amazing people you’ve met over the past 48-hours and laugh with new friends!
Text Breakers Virtual Game Show is 100% interactive and involves participation from everyone who is playing. Games range from trivia to humming, and so much more! Host Steve Silverberg and Producer Dr. Amber LaJeunesse will make your jaw hurt from laughing so hard. We can’t think of a better way to conclude this incredible virtual conference than with a game! So, grab your drinks and let’s play!