The application of behavioral science to product, learning, and engagement design.
Episode Summary Drawing on Peter Gray’s “A Brief History of Education,” Rob Alvarez argues that modern schooling was engineered for compliance and obedience to serve agricultural and industrial labor needs, not to develop free thinkers. He maps the resulting dynamic onto game design (extrinsic […]
🚀 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 Alex Suchman, CEO of Barometer XP, argues that play at work has been miscast as frivolous when it is actually the […]
Episode Summary Elisa Navarro Chinchilla, CEO of Gold Bug Interactive, argues that a serious game’s core mechanic must be bound to the learning itself. Anything else produces “chocolate-covered broccoli” where a platformer pauses to ask quiz questions. She walks through the production cycle from […]
Episode Summary Rob Alvarez argues that community founders burn out because they build feedback loops for members but not for themselves, and because they build communities they don’t personally want to inhabit. He recommends a personal momentum tracker (points for posts, member wins, helpful […]
Episode Summary Matt Metzgar, a clinical professor of economics at UNC Charlotte and author of The Overnight AI Educator, argues that faculty are overestimating the work required to redesign courses for the AI era and that piecemeal AI additions produce a Frankenstein result. He […]
🚀 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 Dain Saint, founder of Reckless Magic and curator of Futurefull, recounts how Cypher Prime spent months trying to build Tailwind (a […]
Episode Summary Yu-kai Chou returns to introduce 10,000 Hours of Play, his second book, co-authored with former Octalysis Prime student Mark Diaz. He lays out a six-step framework (choose your game, identify your attributes, choose your role, enhance your skills, build alliances, achieve quests) […]
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 […]