Gamification Breakout Reflection

 Yet again, the process for coming up with our breakout within our group was smooth and seamless. Upon meeting to brainstorm our breakout ideas we very quickly settled on a series of games within book genres that would make recommendations to great books within that genre... kind of like a readers advisory breakout! 

The challenge for me came in deciding what game to make for my part of the breakout. At the end of our first meeting we each volunteered for a genre and style of game to create... my genre was horror and my style of game was a scavenger hunt of sorts, which is a style of game I considered somewhat open to interpretation. In the first week I created and abandoned probably about six different games... none of them seemed appropriate for the adult audience we were looking to engage or became overly complicated in making recommendations. 

This journey and these complications led me to the Genially program, which had a number of quiz games and other formats. I settled on a "Guess the Horror Monster" type game, that gave clues to the monster entity in some well-known horror books and then gave recommendations when the correct guess was made. 

I thought this would be a really great way to engage persons outside the library because it's an interactive form of engagement and who doesn't love a little bit of trivia! I myself have wasted hours of my life on Sporcle.com playing trivia quizzes and I thought this clue scavenger hunt would be a great way to engage folks who are interested in horror books and give them some recommendations for other books they might love. 

I loved working on Genially and found that its game templates had great structures that were easily customizable. The hardest part was editing the interactivity and figuring out which page each button pointed to... essentially the flow of the game. Once I had my team test it out it was easy to figure out what needed to be fixed (there were so many buttons!) and now I feel it flows really nicely and is a quick, fun game with some cool recommendations. I think I will definitely use this in the future to create similar resources in a public library setting.