We're all gamers

They say that time is our new currency. And who would disagree that spare time is becoming more rare in our increasingly intensive lives? Then why are people willing to daily spend hours of this precious time killing green pigs with blue and red birds with no deep or fulfilling meaning? Or why do people spend more time building their avatar in world of Warcraft than being out in the world meeting new people, working and building their actual life? Such questions have started a new movement and what some people think will be the new big thing after the explosion of social networks: Gamification. Cybercom has recognised the potential of games and the effect they have on peoples behaviour and assigned us to do our master thesis on the subject.

To fulfill the purpose of this master thesis we are starting of by doing a thorough  research about gamification, trying to get an overview of the concept. As we dig deeper into the subject we are constantly finding new, interesting and inspiring angles and information that we are going to post on this blog along with updates on our own work.

We recommend this video to get an inspiring introduction to the subject. Even if she sometimes tends to get a bit carried away we believe that she got some good points!

Skeptical? Here are some facts worth thinking about:

- Since the beginning of 2005, has gamers all over the world spent 5.93 million years of total game-hours playing World of warcraft. That's on avarage 0.74 million hours a year. To put this figure in perspective we can compare it to how many hours the swedish population are working annually. Roughly calculated that is around 1,6 million years.

- There are over 250,000 articles in the world of warcraft wiki, making it the second biggest wiki in the world.

- If you grew up in the UK and are 21 years old you already spent, in average, 10,000 hours gaming.

- In the US 215,000,000 hours in average are spent gaming annually.

- The average age of the most common game buyers is 41.