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Everybody Wins

What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love

From the visionary force behind EA Sports, The Sims, FIFA Soccer—basically, all your favourite video games and apps—the first must-read game design thinking book for gamers, entrepreneurs, and techies.

Video games are the biggest entertainment industry in the world—and they have a lot to teach us. How can we recreate the satisfaction we feel playing games in day-to-day life? How can we harness that feeling to make better products?

These are the questions Bing Gordon has been trying to answer over his 40 year career in tech. Affectionately known as the godfather of the video game world, his influence and canonized “Gamification Checklist” have shaped the companies we engage with every day: Amazon Prime, Zynga, Spotify, Audible, Twitch, Duolingo, and Cameo, to name a few.

Gamification, as explained by Bing, is motivation with rules and scoring mechanisms. It’s a framework for amplifying productivity and building social capital, leading to improved relationships, self-satisfaction, and professional achievement.

Everybody Wins draws on Bing’s Gamification Checklist and decades of fascinating in-the-room, behind-the-scenes stories to tell readers how to make products that people love—including a few life lessons along the way. Each chapter delves into one of the eight concepts on the Checklist, such as Wow Moments, Invest and Express, and Retention Hacking, to explore why we come back to certain products and games again and again.

With candid, first-person narration and Bing’s signature wit, Everybody Wins helps readers level up their products and services by understanding that what makes video games so fun, so easy to emotionally invest in, is the gold standard we should strive to replicate everywhere.

Bing Gordon is one of the greats in the tech world. It’s impossible to imagine our modern lives without his influence. In Everybody Wins, he finally shares his magic for creating the kinds of products that change the world. A must-read for product developers, game designers, entrepreneurs, and anyone hoping to add a little video game joy to their lives.

Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive Global

About Bing Gordon

Bing Gordon is a video game man. He was the Chief Product Officer for Kleiner Perkins, a consultant to Amazon, and an advisor and mentor to dozens of gaming and social-tech start-ups. Before wading into the buttoned-up world of venture, Bing was co-founder, Chief-Creative-Officer and long-time executive at Electronic Arts, from its founding in 1982 until his “retirement” in 2008. Bing was awarded the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, and he held the game industry’s first endowed chair in game design at The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He has an MBA from Stanford and a BA from Yale. Bing’s favorite games of all time are World of Warcraft, The Sims, Diablo, Pogo, Civilization, and FarmVille.
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Details
  • Imprint: Ebury Edge
  • ISBN: 9781529147230
  • Length: 304 pages
  • Price: £18.99
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