Every episode of the Professor Game podcast, hosted by Rob Alvarez of The Octalysis Group. Honest breakdowns of gamification, behavioral design, and the Octalysis Framework, applied to real products, retention, and engagement. New episodes weekly, plus interviews with leading experts.
Episode Summary Rob Alvarez breaks down Skool as an all-in-one platform for building paid online communities, walking through its core features (community feed, classroom courses, calendar, members map, and built-in leaderboard with levels) using Ted Carr’s community as a live example. He argues Skool’s […]
Episode Summary Game theorist Jesper Juul returns to discuss Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer, arguing that the standard Atari-crash-then-Nintendo narrative of gaming history erases the European home computer culture that actually dominated the 1980s. He traces the C64 […]
Episode Summary Amy Jo Kim returns to describe how she, Piyush Mahajan, and Scott Kim built JourneyMaker, a GenAI tool trained on decades of her client data that generates ICP screeners, job stories, synthetic personas, and end-to-end player-journey storyboards covering discovery, onboarding, habit-building, and […]
Episode Summary Rob Alvarez argues that most online communities lose members not from weak content but from three structural failures: a generic first-five-minutes that feels like walking into a party where nobody greets you, the ‘spread the butter thin’ trap of producing more posts […]
🚀 Want your community buzzing and bringing in more revenue? Snag my free mini course with 3 killer gamification hacks: professorgame.com/freebie-3-gamification-hacks Episode Summary Dr. Joe Lasley, founder of Gamenamic Leadership and Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Maine, describes piloting LeadRPG (a method […]
🔥 Losing users? Get free, expert-backed resources to boost retention with gamification: professorgame.com/freecommunity-web Episode Summary Swedish upper secondary teacher Anders Kjellberg describes co-creating The Great Gambit with developer Zhenya Luchaninau. A role-playing simulation covering 1871–1914 designed to help students understand the forces that escalated […]
🔥 Losing users? Get free, expert-backed resources to boost retention with gamification: professorgame.com/freecommunity-web How do you gamify learning without losing the learning?We talk with Bram about designing Minecraft-powered learning experiences that actually work. From working with NASA to teaching democracy through play, he reveals […]
🔥 Losing users? Get free, expert-backed resources to boost retention with gamification: professorgame.com/freecommunity-web What if learning felt like playing — and retention was built into the design?In this episode, Rob interviews Aldi Agaj, CEO of Alter Learning, who shares how his team builds educational […]
🚀 Want your community buzzing and bringing in more revenue? Snag my free mini course with 3 killer gamification hacks: professorgame.com/freebie-3-gamification-hacks Episode Summary Rob Alvarez argues that most loyalty programs (airline miles in particular) are transactional cost-transfer schemes that fail to generate actual loyalty […]
🔥 Losing users? Get free, expert-backed resources to boost retention with gamification: professorgame.com/freecommunity-web From clueless to collaborative in one session? That’s the power of a well-designed Tabletop RPG. Rob Alvarez sits down with Anthony Kurza, creator of the SAN model and higher ed coach, […]