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Discover how to skyrocket engagement by 7,000% with innovative gamification techniques! In this conversation, Bernardo Letayf and Rob Alvarez dive into the complexities and rewards of creating meaningful, long-term engagement through gamification. They discuss the launch of Tabi, a cutting-edge platform that redefines player progression by focusing on mastery rather than rewards, and highlight how effective gamification, while challenging, yields extraordinary results.
Bernardo develops game-like solutions through their software on a mission to transform education. With over 12 years of gamification experience and over 25 years in web and UX design/development, international speaking and consulting, Bernardo has created a platform that makes learning engaging and exciting for students of all ages and backgrounds.
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Lets’s do stuff together!
Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,
Rob
Full episode transcription (AI Generated)
Rob:
This is Professor Game, where we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking who brings the best of their experiences to get ideas, insights and inspiration that help us in the process of multiplying engagement and loyalty. And I’m Rob Alvarez. I’m a consultant and founder of the Professor Game and professor of gamification game based solutions at IE business School, UFMD, EBS University and other places around the world. If this content is for you, then perhaps you will find our free gamification course useful. Find it for
[email protected]. freegamificationcourse hey engagers, and welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game podcast. We have today a return repeat, however you want to call it. Guest Bernardo has been here several times and we’re excited to have him back because he’s been doing many different things and there’s exciting news that he has on his end that we would like to discuss and see what’s up on that corner of the world and of the gamification world especially. Hello, how are you? Are you prepared actually, actually, are you prepared to engage?
Bernardo Letayf:
I am prepared to engage. All systems go.
Rob:
How are you?
Bernardo Letayf:
I’m good, thank you very much. Things are having pretty busy. We’ve been doing a lot of work the past month especially, and a lot of work seems to be coming up on the upcoming month.
Rob:
So yeah, things are good. That is the best news that we can always hear when somebody is working in the area that you’re getting work. That’s always what we want to hear, right? I’m busy, but busy like getting work, right? That’s the, that’s the news we’re always looking forward to. So Bernardo, I’m not going to read your intro once again, if anybody wants to read it, you can go to professorgame.com, comma type Bernardo, Bernardo or Le Taif. That’s a little bit more complicated to find or to spell correctly, but it’s.
Bernardo Letayf:
More just like that.
Rob:
You’ll find three, four, I don’t know how many episodes already. You can see several of the intros you’ve already had on the podcast and people can get to know a lot more about you. Quick summary Bernardo has been awarded for the software gamification of the year a few years ago for Blue Rabbit, but now he’s also working on something called Tabby, which is going to be probably our main focus for today. So Bernardo, that’s the first question. What have you been up to lately?
Bernardo Letayf:
Well, a couple of years ago, I started working with Roman Rapids in the development of a new software called Tabi. Tabi is the japanese word for journey. And our focus entirely has been specifically on something that will build player journeys and specifically focusing on player progression and mastery. We have found out throughout the combined many years of experience that we both have, that we have been having a philosophy or certain approach to gamification that’s different from the mainstream. A lot of people tend to focus a lot on rewards or having good prices at the end of something which is very extrinsically motivating. And it works for a marketing stunt that you’re going to run for, I don’t know, 2 hours or maybe a day of something. It will get people engaged because they’re going to do it for the reward. But when you are looking for long term engagement or where you’re actually looking for true loyalty, what you should be looking for is progression and mastery. And definitely what I mean, you don’t play a game because it’s going to give you points or reward the end. You play a game because it’s engaging and then you feel how you’re progressing and you’re getting better.
Rob:
No, let’s not get into just points, right? God, no. Yeah, it’s like you say that and sorry to interrupt, but it’s always that thing that people. Oh, yeah, but do you do the points and the points of vacation? I’ve heard before as well, you know, points can be useful. I’m not saying others, it’s a good metric. It can be useful for some things, but you don’t lay because you get points.
Bernardo Letayf:
Exactly. So, I mean, one of the things that we, that I always play is, and this has been an ongoing discussion with Roman, is I have to calculate the points on the back end. In terms of the system, everything is points. Don’t get me wrong, when you strip it and then you look at, as a developer on the back, everything’s a count. You’re counting behaviors, you’re counting hashtags, you’re counting something. And there will always be a part in the system that you’re actually counting the points. But the user does not have to see the numbers and the user does not need to see that to be engaged, which is the key feature in tabi. In Tabby, what you get is a map that you can decide however you want. Your player can be horizontal, vertical. You can have what we call it, we have, it’s different modes. You have cluster modes where you can have multiple places where you can go, you can have an overview that not all milestones are connected. You can have one that it’s a decision tree, and depending on the decisions you make or the milestones you complete, you can go and open up more and more. So you can decide your journey as you wish at the beginning. For someone who has no experience, we always recommend it’s a linear, vertical, one direction, just one way to do it. But then you can start doing a matrix with that. It opens up possibilities on many directions. And you start seeing how you don’t need to show the player how many points they’ve earned to really see that they are dancing and progressing. One of the things that was not to say revealing, but it was very interesting to see that we could generate the same or even higher engagement is without levels. Because a lot of gamification that I’ve done in the past has to do with the leveling up. You level up, you level up. What if there’s no levels, but if everything is just. There’s no actual level, but you see probably how many times you repeated a milestone, how many times you’ve done this. And the level of the user is presented in tabby in a different, in a very different way. So quickly, a quick overview of how it is, and I know this is just audio, but mainly you have a digital card of your journey, and on one side you have the map, and on the other side you will have like a beautiful picture that will become richer and more beautiful as you complete things. It will, let’s say that it has like ten layers of images, and as you complete your journey, you earn parts of those layers and that image starts with them better. So your card itself is both your avatar and the reflection of how much you have progressed and how much you’ve leveled up. But depending on your decisions, that image can have, I don’t know, maybe an apple or an orange or a monster, depending on how you build it. So that’s how your journey impacts your progress and your development. So you can create one journey that creates multiple results for the users, and in an infinite, or not infinite, but a very high number of combination of things. And that’s what we’re trying to look to go for. You can make something, but we did. For a game economy, it had 56 different layers. So depending on the presentations that you would go and the milestones that you had completed, it was impossible for someone to have all of them, unless you go through the replays of the presentations, which would take far more time than the 48 hours that the event was running. So if you go through all of it and then you collect everything then you get a full image, but if not, you would get little pieces of it. And there were not two tabbies that were exactly the same, because not two people experience the same journey, which is also one of the most important things that we want to. That we want to share. Right. No two people will complete the same story ever. You will go through the same game, but you will feel different things. That’s what we want to achieve.
Rob:
Interesting. Like, I have to confess, like, I’m loving everything that you’re saying. Many other things make so much sense in my mind. The only. But I have to confess, one of the things that. The first thing that came to my mind was this sounds like it is a lot of work putting all those different scenarios and. And different possibilities for, you know, from a designer. Of course, my perspective is that of the designer and the creator, in this case. Okay, how does it look like if. Of course, it’s like, again, user centric. Completely agree with that. But how does it look like for the designer, the creator, who is on the other side of Tavi, not the developers?
Bernardo Letayf:
No, no, no.
Rob:
And I’m sure it’s super complex, but the actual designer, the ones creating that journey for brothers.
Bernardo Letayf:
All right, so what we did this time is we started simplifying things, because from Blue Rabbit, we have a lot of experience on that part where it becomes really complex for the designer. One of the things I always say to people is, I understand that it feels complex, but gamification is complex by definition. So it’s not going to be. It’s not going to be like, oh, I just click two things and we get it free, we get it easy, because you need to actually design your content. So aside from the fact that you have to design your content and choose, okay, I’m going to split my content into 20 steps or 20 milestones or 20 quests. Challenges, however you want to call them, you have to put in that word. That’s it. Now, on the other side of this, on the other side of the structure, when you go into tabby, what you have to do is literally put a list, because we have a beautiful field where you bulk upload your stuff, and then you put on one line, on each line, the milestones that you want to do, and then you publish, and then it creates the masters, and then you organize them in the map. You do not need to go through 100 different steps. The hard part of gamification is the design without the software, not the design in the software. And that’s one of the things that we wanted to take away from it. The software itself offers a lot of options and you can go into the advanced options when you start using traits so that the player earns more things and get some sort of resources that will open up other things for the next milestone, stuff like that. You can make it really complex, but in simple terms, all you have to do is write down the list of milestones you have to complete. You put that copy paste enter and then you just organize the milestones in the order. Because of the nature of Tabby, we have some templates where you say, I’m going to go with this template, but in the end it requires you some tweaking. I’m going to put this milestone here, maybe this milestone there, but it’s pretty much drag and drop and uploading pictures, which is the only part that you might take some time. That’s it. When you were doing something in blue rabbit, for example, you had to calculate how many points you want to give to this quest. Where this quest for one, level two, level three. Do you have requirements for this quest or this other quest? Is this going to be a team mission but you’re building different types of structures? In blue rabbit, it’s a software for mainly engaging in learning environments. Tabi is for engaging any environment where you want your users to progress.
Rob:
So I understand, it’s just, again, when I was saying that, again, full transparency here, one of the things I was thinking is one of the projects I was involved in was a, a simulation that was basically a huge decision tree, right?
Bernardo Letayf:
Yeah.
Rob:
The department was usually trying to run away from that kind of projects. But why? Because, you know, you had to record, you know, a bunch of videos to have all the different scenarios and all that. So it was a fantastic project. I’m pretty sure they’re still using it. It’s not from my area, it’s from economics, I believe. I teach operations. And again, don’t get me wrong, it was fantastic and they updated it a couple of times and since I saw it and worked on it, but it was a lot of work. Like there are projects, there are things that are quote unquote simpler, right. That don’t require, as you were saying, like 56 different layers and that when you say that kind of number, you know, some people can feel intimidated. So, yeah, so, yeah, I agree that, you know, there’s, there’s just so many things that can be done and, and honestly usually should be done like a journey. If you’re thinking of, of loyalty and engagement in terms of, you know, having engagement and loyalty for an event for a day, as you were saying, maybe at most that means a totally different thing that if you’re talking about, I don’t know, a semester at the university, even if one single subject, or if you’re talking about employees loyalty or customer.
Bernardo Letayf:
Loyalty, let alone, right, and here’s the thing that people underestimate what creates the engagement. And this is something that we were teaching on our last latest workshop. Easy is not equal to engagement. Not because I built something that was easy to make or it’s easy to complete. It means that the players are engaged and that’s the entire thing. When you have a semester course, for example, engaged players do not look like you’re doing something easy. Engaged players look completely opposite. They look like they are doing hundreds of thousands of different things and you see them super busy and they’re super focused. I mean, think of an entrepreneur that’s building a business. They are not doing anything easy. Everything is a lot of work and they’re putting in the hours. We tend to think that because technology has made a lot of things easier to develop, everything should be instant. And that’s not true. My job as a developer is to make sure that it’s easy to use, but it’s not necessarily easy to decide when the user decides. I mean, if for a semester course, someone had to write down the coursework, and that was not easy work, that was just instant work. Now what we’re trying to do with these tools is now you have your content, put it in a way in that, as easy as possible, put in a way that it’s going to be super engaging and it’s going to give your players a sense of direction and a sense of progression, a sense of mastery. That’s what’s going to create the engagement, not making it easy or oh, click, click, and that’s it. We are integrating a little bit of AI into it so that we can take away the image creation process, because sometimes for the client might require a lot of time to, hey, I’m going to find 52 different layers of images that are going to be part of it. But for that specific example, it wasn’t as hard as you might think. A graphic designer will take about an hour to do something like that. It’s not super complex and you can always find ways of designing something in the 100 different free design softwares that are out there. It will take some time, but it’s not going to be infinite. It’s going to be just a matter of, oh, I’m going to do this and I’m going to put these steps, and that’s it. We can provide you with a hundred different examples of how simple things and easy things will get you there to get a very good level of engagement. And what you were saying about this huge decision tree. Yeah. When you talk about decision tree, you’re starting thinking about exponentials. And maybe this is going to be. But one of the things that we found out where we were developing tabby, because basically it means having one choice and then you have different choices and then you from that, it’s not actually exponential. It actually offers you, like, maybe you have 20 different milestones and then how you connect them, how you connect the decisions, that does not mean that every decision splits into two and two and two and two, because they interconnect.
Rob:
Yeah.
Bernardo Letayf:
So you can create.
Rob:
One of the efficiencies that you create in decision trees is, you know, it’s. It is choice. It is meaningful choice. Depending on what you decide, you’ll get to different places. It doesn’t mean that it’s the only decision that will take you to that place. I mean, read your own adventure books.
Bernardo Letayf:
Yep.
Rob:
You know, and it tells you, go to page 72. You can bet that there are other pages that say, go to page 72. Right? Yeah. And that’s okay. That’s not. It’s not bad. It’s not bad design. It’s not lazy or anything. It’s just, you know, depending on what you’re doing, it can take you to a similar or exactly the same situation. Right. And that was part of the efficiency that was used on the decision series. We were there. But still, you know, again, still a lot of work. That’s. That’s exactly what I’m saying. What I want to make sure is, with the audience, people who are listening, is, you know, it is a lot of work. It is a lot of work. There’s a lot. Lots of stuff to do, lots to create when you’re doing these things, which does not mean it’s not worth it. Right? This is not. Oh, create this social media post and you will go viral. Creating the social media post might be relatively easy. You know, maybe there are some creators who spend hours creating a single post, right? And that makes sense for them. But there’s a way to do it quick and easy, and maybe that goes viral. But, you know, if you want to be a creator on social media, right? It’s not about creating that single post that goes viral. You need to continue doing that. I just read a post on, you know, the guy who was, you know, simplifying, you know, all these trends online. And he just, like, showing, like, why are you doing so complicated, this is. Yeah, why are you doing this? So complicated, this. Look, it’s easy, you know, what. What are you doing? What are you thinking of? Right? And you might think, oh, he just did something so stupid and so simple. Well, kind of stupid and simple, but he did, like I was reading, he was doing three to four videos per day.
Bernardo Letayf:
Per day, every single.
Rob:
And it was, you know, recorded from his phone. They were relatively simple. No huge edits or anything. It was just building on top of content from other people. But it was a lot of work. And he’s probably still doing maybe not three or four videos every day. He’s doing a lot of videos. A lot of videos. It’s a lot of work. And he has to be researching to find the videos to work on top of. And, yeah, you know, it is work. And if you want a company, if you want to. People want to become millionaires, right? It is a lot of work. That’s the strategies don’t work. It’s essentially the same principle.
Bernardo Letayf:
I think in the end, it’s not because what you signed or the specific piece of work, published work is simply done. For example, like the videos from Cabbie, for example, the video itself is simply done because he puts one piece of video, then he records himself doing that, dude. Simplified. And that’s it. Not because that is easy to do. It means if the process to get to that point is simple, the ability to simplify something to that point is incredibly complex. Plus, he’s not doing one video. He did four per day. Let’s say three per day. Let’s say one per day. Not one of us can do one video per day. Because you have other jobs, you have other things to do. You have to do this to do that. He found a way to do it, and then he started monetizing over it. But he had to be consistent and authentic. So when you get your own content and just thinking that I don’t want to do a big, a lot of work, it is going to be a lot of work. If you want to have something worth it, if you just want to have something instant and badge and one more thing in the shelf, it’s very easy to do. You just pop it into whatever automotive process that you’re going to have, and it’s not going to be engaging, it’s not going to be gamification, and it’s going to be a wordy journey, but something that’s worthy it’s going to take a little more time. Now, what are the things that we know from experience? The more you do it, the quicker you’ll do it the next time, because now, you know this doesn’t work. This does work. And then you start adding and removing features from your own gamification design that you know that the users are not using. So it becomes a lot easier for you after the first try. And sometimes first try is scary, but it’s not because it seems a little scary. And there’s a lot of people out there, especially the gamification community, that’s so generous that we will provide you with so much time. We will be there for you, we will give you demos, we will give you guidelines, we will do support calls, we will do everything so that people can keep on doing it because we know how effective it is. I was remembering the other day that we have case studies where there has been 7000% increase in participation from employees, 7000%, not 700, not 70% increase, 7000% increase. And every time that we do a game fight activity or whatever, we always get compared to previous participation of people, whether it’s for marketing, whether it’s for learning, you get 700, 600, 800% higher numbers, whether it was more work, they did, more submissions, they do. The numbers, when you have a gamified strategy, are always 810 times higher than what you did before. Because guess what?
Rob:
It works fantastic. Fantastic. It makes, it makes a lot of sense. Bernardo so we agree it is work. It is a lot of work and it is good that it’s a lot of work for many reasons, because it’s worth it, right? And if it was easy, everybody would do it and it would stop probably being, well, I’m not sure if it would stop being as effective, but it would not, it would probably not be, you know, a strong strategy, a differentiating strategy for many, well, many the relatively few companies and educators that are actually using it with great success, right? It would not be as big of a thing to do. It’s like when people started doing all these, you know, when, when people started using AI in the classroom, right? Oh, the few ones who were doing it were doing something extraordinary and different. You know, when everybody starts doing it, it’s, you know, it’s part of what everybody does in a way. And it’s, you know, it still is all the work that was involved in creating that. But now, you know, there’s not so many, not so many people being, having the benefits from that. And I’m not sure, I’m not an AI expert. Don’t get me wrong. We did an episode on AI and education recently. Mfon is, is an expert on what he’s been doing for, at least for a while on education. But I was just using as an example, and I’m sure there’s many other things, but. So, Bernardo, again, we’ve been talking about this. I think we got into some of the depths of why this type of design is important and how it can affect the outcomes that you get. You were mentioning 7000% or even 700% seven times what you were getting before can be huge. It can be definitely humongous. So, I don’t know, do you have any recommendations in that sense? Like, is there any. I don’t know. Again. And we always like to talk about, you know, best practices and that kind of stuff without being a silver bullet. What can you say in that sense to the engagers that are thinking or actually creating stuff right now?
Bernardo Letayf:
Probably one of the greatest realizations that we’ve had in the past years for, well, for example, one of the most beautiful things is when you read a little bit into neuroscience. Again, not a neurologist, not an expert on that subject, but we used to believe that, for example, dopamine was what you would release when you had huge reward, right? And then turns out that dopamine is not even a neurotransmitter, is a neuro modulator, and it involves a lot more stuff than we would think. But this is not something that we knew 20 years ago. This is something that’s been out for two or three, two, three years, maybe four years at tops. So being on top of this kind of information helps us understand one thing. This is huge. Dopamine releases. The dopamine releases higher with the anticipation rather than with the reward. So knowing that something fun or something engaging is coming gets people more excited than the reward itself. So these are the kind of, of thinking that got us into understanding how to keep that engaging engagement coming. It’s a little bit like getting into the flow zone, and the only thing that gets you there is progress, making sure that people progress, progress, progress, progress. It’s, oh, something big is coming. Something big is coming. And then as they can feel that something else is coming, something big is coming towards their, towards themselves. It’s incredible. That’s what gets people and keeps people engaged. You have to make sure that there’s release buffs for that excitement and for that anticipation and the rewards. Let me be insanely and incredibly blunt. The rewards should not be stuff it does not need to be physical things that you give them. You should reward the progress of your players with resources, which will then let them progress further and further and further. And at some point, if your journey has to come to an end, for example, after a semester, then you make a big party or big something. That not necessarily means that you’re spending $10,000 in the biggest price. The prices are something that you should keep in the pocket for a marketing stunt. Do not spend the money on it. Spend the money on development of the progress and the excitement of the journey and making sure that your players will have power over certain decisions. They will have. They will earn a specific status, and that’s going to keep them progressing. And now I have access to more stuff, and I have access to these other decisions. Once they see that their actions have consequences, they start doing more. People stop doing stuff because what they do does better. Well, what’s the point of doing it? So that’s what gamification has proven, at least in my experience, is when the players see what they do impacts their progress and their journey, everything changes. Oh, look at. Oh, what? Wait a second. You’re telling me that I did that and that happened? That gives me so much power that I want to keep doing it. And the next time I try it, I get better at it, and the next time I try to get better at it, and the next time I try it, get better. This feeling of mastery will get people engaged. It’s not a silver bullet, because I cannot tell you exactly what you have to do to make sure they feel that progress, because we’re talking about infinite amounts of content. If you’re selling windows, like windows for your house, or if you’re selling chairs, or if you’re selling headphones, or if you’re selling video games, or if you’re. It’s a different story. If you’re selling your class content, it’s a different story. Everything has to do with the content of what you’re doing. So always think what is what your players have to become, what you want your players to become after they gone through this incredible journey and then start giving it to them drip by drip, little by little. Make sure that every step of the way gets them to progress a little bit. It’s not as hard as you might think. You will be surprised how easy it is when you put it all together. And that’s. I mean, I’m sorry, I got to go back right into it. That’s why we built tab, so that you can make sure that you put your big mouse on the bottom, and then you can decide your steps into it and every simple step in the way.
Rob:
Actually, Bernardo, this is a perfect timing to ask you to give us, you know, where we can find out more about Tabi. What can tabi do and all that. Where can we find that information? I’m guessing you have stuff on the Internet and people can contact you as well before we say, because we’re all almost in the 30 minutes mark already, so we want to have that information before we go real quickly.
Bernardo Letayf:
So you can go to Tabby one, t a bi dot o n e one as the number one, but tabby dot one because, and you can also find us in LinkedIn. That’s where we are posting a little bit more information about it. Or you can reach out to either me, Bernardo Lettice in LinkedIn, or Roman Raktitz in also LinkedIn, and we’ll definitely be able to reach out to you. That’s where we have posted any information that we have about the software. We have posted something on Facebook, but we mostly do all our communication in LinkedIn, so that’s the best place to find out about us.
Rob:
Awesome. We will have reference to that and much, so much more. If you go to professorgame.com and you type in the search bar, you type Bernardo, you type tabby. In this case, you’ll find all of that. And Bernardo, thanks again for coming back to the Professor Game podcast, for delivering all of these value bombs for the engagers. We are really excited to have you back and hope that this continues to go as well as it has been going, that we talk again to see any new insights that you might have, any new projects you might be working on. Hopefully we will also have Roman talking about this, your partner in this adventure, in this, in this journey that you’re having with Tavi. However, Bernardo and engagers, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Thank you for listening to the Professor Game podcast. And since you are into gamification and game inspired solutions, how about you go to professorgame.com freegamificationcourse and get started today for free. After that, we can also be in contact, and you’ll be the first to know of any opportunities that we can have for you here at professor game. Remember also, before you go on to your next mission, remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.
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