For the Win

How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business

By: Kevin Werbach, Dan Hunter

Narrated by: Walter Dixon

Take your business to the next level - for the win. Millions flock to their computers, consoles, mobile phones, tablets, and social networks each day to play World of Warcraft, Farmville, Scrabble, and countless other games, generating billions in sales each year. The careful and skillful construction of these games is built on decades of research into human motivation and psychology: A well-designed game goes right to the motivational heart of the human psyche. In For the Win, authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue persuasively that gamemakers need not be the only ones benefiting from game design. Werbach and Hunter are lawyers and World of Warcraft players who created the world’s first course on gamification at the Wharton School.

In their audiobook, they reveal how game thinking - addressing problems like a game designer - can motivate employees and customers and create engaging experiences that can transform your business. For the Win reveals how a wide range of companies are successfully using game thinking. It also offers an explanation of when gamifying makes the most sense and a six-step framework for using games for marketing, productivity enhancement, innovation, employee motivation, customer engagement, and more. In this illuminating guide, Werbach and Hunter reveal how game thinking can yield winning solutions to real-world business problems. Let the games begin!

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2012 Kevin Werbach, Dan Hunter (P)2013 Gildan Media LLC

Critic reviews

“Video games now have the dubious honour of having inspired their own management craze. Called ‘gamification,’ it aims to take principles from video games and apply them to serious tasks. The latest book on the subject, For the Win, comes from Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, from the Wharton Business School and the New York Law School respectively….[Their central idea - that the world might be a better place if work was less of a necessary drudge and more of a rewarding experience in itself - is hard to argue with.” ( The Economist)

Actionable Advice

Read this to preempt the class on coursera . Looking forward to go a lot more in depth.

Other recommended reading : Reality is Broken

Basic concepts but narration is robotic

the book is talking about fun and gamification roots, but is boring. the narrator feels rushed to complete and the book is vague on some examples. it is an old book, do that could be the reason.

it was hard to listen as the narrator was very robotic.

Pretty good

Had some useful stuff in this book! Thank you for sharing and giving me s chance to improve my products

Repetitive

I felt there wasn't much 'meat' to this audio book. There were a few examples mentioned throughout but I was expecting much more considering that I find this topic extremely interesting. I think it would have been more engaging had the author read it add I found the narration quite boring

This is THE book on gamification

Grate book if you want to learn the basics of gamification from conceptualization to implementation

An O.K. Introduction to Gamification

The book covers points, badges, and leaderboards and attempts to go a beyond these, but only provides quite limited guidelines for this. The advice is about as vague as: analyze user data, understand your customers through customer personas (or avatars), use a broad spectrum of rewards, incorporate something fun, clarify desired outcome behaviors, understand your business goals, use variation, etc. It also warns against mindless use of basic "point-ification", which is all appropriate to mention, but I didn't come across any profound insights. So the book works fine as an introduction to the field, but is only that.

The narration is rather poor. The speech is fast and inanimate, and sounds like someone trying to quickly plough through the material instead of delivering a genuine account.

An ok look at gamification

This is a short work, so don't expect too much from it. It may have some small value to those thinking about using principles of gamification in their organizations. Largely it warns about the possible pitfalls of doing so and how they can backfire. If you are interested in the topic of gamification, this isn't going to be the best one out there, but has some interesting points. It's short, so go ahead and add it to your stack of gamification books.

Provides both Tools and Insight into Gamification

Cursed with no experience in developing Games and having left the games focus life of childhood a long time ago I find myself grateful for the info. I also recommend the corresponding course !!

Overconfident, Oversimplified and Shallow

While there was some good ideas and clearly some good understanding of the topic behind the authorship, it was covered so superficially as to be all but completely useless in terms of application and understanding for somebody who doesn't know anything about the topic.

Hard to listen too

But academic and full of fluff
Not fun to listen to
But not terrible I got some ideas