#1 Gamification Podcast | Insights and Real-World Strategies to Boost Engagement, Loyalty & Retention. Professor Game helps innovators, product leaders, and educators use gamification and game thinking to create engagement that lasts. 🎙️ Hosted by Rob Alvarez — TEDx Speaker, consultant, and host of the #1 Gamification Podcast — each week brings you practical insights, case studies, and frameworks from 400+ global experts and proven real-world examples. Expect interviews with top practitioners…
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down Gartner's prediction that 40% of large warehouse operations will adopt gamification by 2028, showing why the definition attached to that number (points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards) is the setup for the White Hat to Black Hat drift rather than a win…
Recently funded and aiming for sustainable retention? Intro chat (no sales pitch): professorgame.com/chat Episode Summary Travis Clapp, co-founder and CEO of Coursebox AI, joins Rob to explain how AI is reshaping course creation and delivery for a platform used in 180 countries with over 300,000 courses built on it. He walks through Coursebox's "Break My Brain" feature, an AI mode built for…
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real engagement programs: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down behavioral debt: the borrowed motivation hiding inside every legacy points, discount, or bonus program, showing why cutting an engagement program off cold is the fastest way to blow it up. He walks through JCPenney's collapse under Ron Johnson,…
Real cases pulled apart through the Octalysis Core Drives, sent to your inbox over a few days. Get the free guide: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down why the same reward can pull a team forward or quietly wreck it, using three cases where the design decided the outcome. He walks through a school in Caracas where escalating fines for late pickups made lateness worse, the sales…
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Frédéric Guitton, who leads sales and marketing at iTargetGolf after a career across banking, startups, financial services, and investment firms, explains how driving ranges are turning dead space into an interactive, gamified experience. He walks through the company's…
Want a sharper read on motivation design? Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, real cases decoded through this exact framework, one short email a day: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob argues that Black Hat motivation, the urgency and scarcity most designers treat as the villain, is the on-ramp that gets people to act at all. He breaks down the Octalysis Group's award-winning…
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Michael Lukich, a marketing analytics leader with more than 20 years across consulting, data, and strategy, explains why the fix for a struggling team is almost never more effort. He walks through the closed-loop trap he built early in his management career, the systems…
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products, with one real-world example in your inbox each day: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down why disconnecting on vacation is so hard for driven people, and why it is a motivation problem rather than a willpower one. He maps the specific Octalysis Core Drives that keep high achievers tied to…
These engagement failures, and how to fix them, map directly onto the Octalysis Core Drives. Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down why Amazon shut down KiroRank, the internal leaderboard that scored staff on raw AI usage on its Kiro developer platform. He shows how stacking Core Drive 2 (Development & Accomplishment) and Core Drive 5…
Struggling with retention, churn, or adoption in your product, service, or program? Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide and see how to apply real behavioral design to your engagement: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Alan Yeats, CEO of Pocket Sized Hands, a co-development game studio in Dundee, Scotland, explains why the best learning games start with play and add the curriculum…