Professor Game Podcast
#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 in gamification, game design, and behavioral strategy, plus solo episodes where Rob breaks down practical frameworks you can apply in your team, classroom, or product. Join the movement to make engagement, motivation, and loyalty truly meaningful — with stories and strategies that transform the way people learn, work, and play. 💡 Listen. Learn. Apply Play to Your Strategy.
Episodes
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD
Episode Summary
Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe, co-founder and CEO of Trophy, a gamification layer that powers features for around two million consumer-app users, makes the case for rewards beyond points and badges: rewards people earn instead of rewards they are handed. He walks through a gym guest pass that nobody...
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD
Episode Summary
Rob explains subtraction neglect, the tendency of teams to fix problems by adding features, programs and pilots while rarely considering what to remove, using his own decision to stop publishing Professor Game on video as the case study. He walks through the 2021 Nature study by Adams, Converse, ...
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD
Episode Summary
Rob breaks down adoption target difficulty, showing why login counts cannot tell you whether a goal is set right. He covers a 2026 Journal of Marketing Research study of the Australian micro-investing app Raiz Invest and a randomized test in a popular free-to-play puzzle game, drawing on both to ...
Want in before anyone else? Join the Engagers and get early access to the November relaunch: professorgame.com/relaunch
Episode Summary
Rob marks Professor Game's ninth anniversary by announcing the biggest format change in over 450 episodes, moving from one episode a week to several episodes on the same Monday, all answering a single question. He reveals the first of at least three changes coming to the show and invites t...
Don't experiment on your own revenue with broken game mechanics. Get our guide "Core Drives in the Wild" to learn how to apply real behavioral science to your product: professorgame.com/WildCD
Episode Summary
Kristen Berman, behavioral scientist and CEO and co-founder of Irrational Labs, argues that personalization is overrated in product design, and she brings the experiment to back it up. She walks through a published on...
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD
Episode Summary
Rob breaks down why a product can feel stitched together even when every team involved did excellent work, using Conway's Law as the lens: organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs that copy their own communication structures. He walks through three real cases, a region...
Episode Summary
Mykhailo Rogalskyi, co-founder of Fintech IT-Group and the fintech unicorn behind monobank (11 million users), shares how a viral in-app scavenger hunt called Lemon Hunt turned into the bank's biggest gamification win, and its costliest infrastructure failure. He walks through what happens when a...
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD
Episode Summary
Rob breaks down the peak-end rule, the finding from Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier's 1996 study that people remember an experience by its most intense moment and its ending, not its average. He walks through how cruise lines engineer both moments with nightly raffle dinners, a captain's di...
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD
Episode Summary
Dan Shapiro, author of Decoding Genius: The Unexpected Lessons of After-School Chess Club, shares how a father-son hobby turned into a study of why chess has held people's attention for more than 1,500 years. He walks through Miguel Najdorf's feat of holding 45 blindfolded chess games in his head...
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 for the field. He covers ...
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 personalized, adversarial learni...
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, a Fortune 500 rewards pro...
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 bonus patterns that produ...
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 product line, including the...
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 project with Procter & Ga...
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 thinking tools he now uses...
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 work during a break, includin...
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 (Social Influence &...
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 second. He walks through real...
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real corporate cases: professorgame.com/WildCD
Episode Summary
Rob breaks down why enterprise AI adoption stalls even with paid licenses and training, while a group of students beat a locked, proctored exam with ChatGPT and no support at all. Reading both cases through the Octalysis Framework, he shows how the exam accidentally stacked Core Drive 8 (L...
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