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.

Professor Game Podcast is a business podcast hosted by Rob Alvarez, with 464 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Rob Alvarez hosts Professor Game Podcast, a business show with 464 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #464

  Nine Years, 400+ Episodes, and I'm Changing Three Things | Episode 464

  Sep 27, 20262 min

  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 the Engagers, his core community, to get early previews, private launch details, and an exclusive reward before the public announcement. Listeners learn how to join the early access group ahead of the early November relaunch and which Core Drives are shaping the new format. About the Host Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker , he founded and hosts Professor Game , the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School , EFMD , and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Key Takeaways Professor Game turns nine in early November 2026, and for the first time in over 450 episodes, a single Monday will carry multiple episodes instead of one. Rob is changing at least three things about the show's format, revealing them one at a time between now and the relaunch instead of all at once. The Engagers, Professor Game's core community, get early previews, private details on how they can join the launch, and an exclusive reward before the public reveal. The relaunch design itself draws on Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning), Core Drive 5 (Social Influence and Relatedness), Core Drive 2 (Achievement), and CD7 (Unpredictability and Curiosity). Signing up at professorgame.com/relaunch takes about 30 seconds and puts a listener inside the early access group before the relaunch goes public. Topics Covered 0:00 — Something Rob's never done in over 450 episodes 0:21 — At least three things are changing 0:40 — Exclusive access for the Engagers first 1:17 — The Core Drives behind the relaunch 1:40 — How to join before the public reveal 1:56 — Game over, for now Free Resources and Get in Touch Core Drives in the Wild: Professor Game Free Guide Get Daily Value on Your Email Let's chat about your gamification project YouTube LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Start Your Community on Skool for Free Ask a question

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #463

  Personalization Is Overrated, with Kristen Berman | Episode 463

  Sep 20, 202633 min

  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 onboarding test with Headspace where asking new users a few questions and then recommending the same Basics course to everyone doubled course enrollments, outperforming both the personalized recommendation and the version with no questions at all. She is just as direct about the limit: enrollments doubled, yet people did not meditate more, because the rest of the product never reinforced that first commitment. Listeners come away with a barriers-and-benefits lens for any signup flow and a clear order of operations: get the fundamentals of human decision making right first, then layer personalization on top. About the Host Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker , he founded and hosts Professor Game , the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School , EFMD , and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Key Takeaways Headspace's onboarding experiment with Irrational Labs doubled course enrollments by asking new users a few questions and then recommending the same Basics course to everyone, with no personalization behind the answers. Personalization pays off when the match is right and loses the user when it misses, and a handful of signup questions rarely reveals enough to get it right. Kristen Berman's advice: design first to avoid getting it wrong. Doubling Headspace course enrollments did not get more people to meditate. The enrolled course sat at the bottom of a list instead of on the Today tab, which shows that fixing one step of the funnel does not fix the next one. Forced choice beats a Continue button: in an Irrational Labs experiment, showing Accept or Decline led more people to accept, because the cost of saying no becomes visible instead of staying hidden behind an X. A meta-analysis from around 2020 found no effect of personalized health feedback on behaviors ranging from smoking to physical activity. With reminders, whether you send them and how often matters far more than small copy changes. Duolingo times reminders to the hour a user signed up, and Netflix improved its recommendations by moving from five stars to thumbs up or down so more people rated. Past behavior is the most reliable personalization signal. Topics Covered 0:00 - Doubled enrollments, no more meditation 0:13 - Meet Kristen Berman of Irrational Labs 2:56 - Where irrational decisions cost the most 5:06 - Why game designers get to be paternalistic 7:48 - Forced choice: accept or decline beats continue 10:02 - Friction versus motivation in fintech and health 13:58 - The Headspace onboarding experiment setup 17:45 - Non-personalized questions doubled course enrollments 19:46 - Why more enrollments did not mean more meditation 22:21 - Pre-commitment, lost streaks and why willpower fails 25:24 - AI personalization and the health meta-analysis 28:44 - Reminders, Duolingo timing and Netflix ratings 32:08 - Where to find Kristen Berman 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 About Kristen Berman Kristen Berman is a prominent behavioral scientist and the CEO and co-founder of Irrational Labs , a leading behavioral design firm in Silicon Valley. Irrational Labs partners with top companies such as Intuit , LinkedIn , Airbnb , Meta , and Microsoft to drive behavior change for the greater good. Kristen's expertise in behavioral economics began as a founding member of the behavioral economics group at Google , where she worked with over 25 teams to launch innovative interventions, and she went on to co-found Duke University 's financial decision making lab, Common Cents . She also publishes Product Teardowns , a Substack where she takes apart a popular app in about five minutes to show how a behavioral scientist thinks about design, pricing, incentives, and loyalty. Find the Guest Online LinkedIn kristenberman.com Product Teardowns on Substack Irrational Labs Irrational Labs case studies Mentioned in This Episode Lessons on habit formation from an experiment with Headspace Headspace onboarding experiment recap by Purchasely, the third partner in the study BJ Fogg's Behavior Model (motivation, ability, trigger/prompt) Ulysses contracts and pre-commitment Forced choice (Accept or Decline versus Continue) Meta-analysis on personalized health feedback (circa 2020) Duolingo's reminder timing, Netflix's move from five stars to thumbs, and Uber Eats notifications Core Drives in the Wild guide Free Resources and Get in Touch Core Drives in the Wild: Professor Game Free Guide Get Daily Value on Your Email Let's chat about your gamification project YouTube LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Start Your Community on Skool for Free Ask a question

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #462

  Everyone Did Their Job Right and the Product Still Broke | Episode 462

  Sep 13, 202619 min

  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 regional sales dashboard at Procter & Gamble where each region had picked a defensible and incompatible way to count sales, a client engagement where technology decision rights sat with a team that carried none of the consequences, and a project where several functions held contradicting views on what the design should optimize for. The argument is that functionality degrades gracefully under that fragmentation while motivational design does not, because the effect lives in the loop between Core Drives rather than in any single mechanic. Listeners learn where organizational seams show up inside the product and how to test for alignment before any design work starts. About the Host Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker , he founded and hosts Professor Game , the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School , EFMD , and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Key Takeaways Melvin E. Conway argued in Datamation that organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs that copy their own communication structures, which is why a product built across four departments reaches the user as four products. At Procter & Gamble, every region had chosen a defensible way to count sales, with its own aggregation rules and its own view of the target, so a single regional dashboard failed on reconciliation rather than on SKU volume or technical complexity. When the team that picks the technology carries none of the consequences of that choice, the decision optimizes for minimizing spend rather than for the problem the product owner is accountable for delivering. Functionality degrades gracefully under organizational fragmentation, because a fragmented dashboard is still a working dashboard. Motivational design does not degrade gracefully, because the effect lives in the loop, so reordering or removing pieces collapses it. Contradicting business metrics across functions is the failure that stops a project rather than slowing it. Business metrics are the first input to the design, so changing them after delivery means redesigning a significant part of the experience. Before any design starts, ask four people from four different departments what this product should optimize for. Matching answers mean design can begin. Different answers mean the alignment work comes first. Topics Covered 0:00 - Opening hook, everybody did great work 0:30 - The single sales dashboard problem 1:35 - Where Conway's Law comes from 2:18 - First case, every region counted sales differently 5:06 - Second case, decision rights sat elsewhere 8:34 - Why functionality degrades gracefully 9:05 - Why motivational design does not 11:29 - Third case, contradicting business metrics 14:53 - Comparing the three failures 16:30 - Specialization and owning the whole result Mentioned in This Episode Conway's Law, from "How Do Committees Invent?" by Melvin E. Conway, Datamation, 1968 The Octalysis Framework and the 8 Core Drives Core Drives in the Wild, the free Professor Game guide Free Resources and Get in Touch Core Drives in the Wild: Professor Game Free Guide Get Daily Value on Your Email Let's chat about your gamification project YouTube LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Start Your Community on Skool for Free Ask a question

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #461

  Monobank Gave Away 5 BMWs by Accident | Episode 461

  Sep 6, 202629 min

  Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD 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 50-hidden-lemon prize draw for one BMW spirals into five cars given away and a 10,000X spike in server requests, plus the AI bot cheating problem now hitting leaderboard-based games. Listeners come away with a concrete framework for building an exit plan into any gamification mechanic before it becomes impossible to remove. About the Host Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker , he founded and hosts Professor Game , the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School , EFMD , and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Key Takeaways monobank's Lemon Hunt event, a 50-hidden-lemon scavenger hunt tied to a BMW prize draw, drew 3.5 million users within days and forced the bank to give away five BMWs instead of one. The viral spike caused a 10,000X increase in requests to some services, breaking uptime and pushing monobank to redesign how it allocates server load across the whole app instead of service by service. monobank's embedded banking-app games now face a new failure mode: AI bots that can top leaderboards undetected, which is why Mykhailo Rogalskyi says never attach a valuable prize to a leaderboard that AI can exploit. When monobank retired its badge system for a cat-avatar dress-up feature, it faced months of user backlash, a reminder to plan an exit strategy for any gamification mechanic before removing it. Keep any in-app game mechanic explainable in 15 to 30 seconds, Rogalskyi says, since over-complication is the most common mistake gaming-industry veterans bring into product gamification. Topics Covered 0:00 — Opening hook 1:35 — monobank hits 11 million users 3:04 — Splitting the day between banking and AI 5:32 — The Lemon Hunt event that broke the app 10:01 — A supply chain lesson in distributing risk 11:28 — Why Lemon Hunt couldn't become permanent 12:51 — Embedded games and the AI cheating problem 16:32 — Offline finals level the playing field 17:25 — Lemon Hunt's viral aftermath and brand offers 19:47 — Best practices: simplicity and a sunset plan 22:12 — Badges backlash after the cat avatar swap 24:05 — Duolingo, a book pick, and Walkable Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD About Mykhailo Rogalskyi Mykhailo Rogalskyi is a Ukrainian entrepreneur and finance professional, best known as one of the co-founders of Fintech IT-Group, the company behind monobank, Ukraine's first neobank. With his involvement, monobank grew into a major digital fintech product with 11 million users, while its developer company evolved into Fintech IT-Group, a holding that attracted investment and received a valuation of over $1 billion, becoming Ukraine's first fintech unicorn. Find the Guest Online Website: https://fintechitgroup.com/en/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogalskiy/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rogalskiy TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rogalskiy Mentioned in This Episode Some links below are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Proposed guest: someone from the Duolingo team Recommended book: Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara Favorite game: Walkable , Mykhailo's own city-walking app Free Resources and Get in Touch Core Drives in the Wild: Professor Game Free Guide Get Daily Value on Your Email Let's chat about your gamification project YouTube LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Start Your Community on Skool for Free Ask a question

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #460

  Your Customers Don't Remember What You Think They Do | Episode 460

  Aug 30, 202614 min

  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 dinner placed near the end of the trip, and a deliberately overinvested farewell, mapping each to Core Drives 1, 5, and 7 from the Octalysis Framework. Listeners learn why the remembering self, not the experiencing self, drives repeat purchases, how to cap sessions while desire is still climbing, and where the ethical line sits between honest peak design and covering up a bad experience. About the Host Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker , he founded and hosts Professor Game , the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School , EFMD , and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Key Takeaways In Kahneman and Redelmeier's 1996 study, deliberately extending a painful colonoscopy so it ended on milder discomfort increased total pain, yet those patients remembered the procedure as less bad and returned for follow-ups at higher rates. The remembering self, not the experiencing self, makes the decision to come back, and it is a terrible statistician: it keeps two data points, the peak and the ending, and discards the average entirely. Cruise lines run the peak-end rule as a business model: nightly raffle dinners built on Core Drive 7 (Unpredictability and Curiosity) and Core Drive 5 (Social Influence and Relatedness) rewrite a mediocre day with a manufactured high. The captain's dinner adds Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning and Calling) near the end of the trip, and disembarkation is deliberately overinvested because cruises live off travelers who rebook every year, not first-timers. A concrete design move: cap the session while desire is still climbing, so the last memory is "I wanted more" instead of "I was starting to get bored." The ethical line: peak-end design is honest when the peak and the ending tell the truth about the experience, and manipulative when those two moments are used to cover up an experience that was genuinely terrible. Topics Covered 0:00 — The peak-end rule and a painful paradox 1:34 — Inside Kahneman and Redelmeier's 1996 study 2:55 — Experiencing self versus remembering self 4:07 — Rob's reluctant cruise vacation 5:47 — How cruises manufacture nightly peaks 7:38 — Overinvesting in the ending on purpose 9:55 — Cap the session while it's climbing 11:26 — The ethical line of designed memories 12:11 — Diagnostics: did you design your ending? Mentioned in This Episode The peak-end rule Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier's 1996 study on patients' memories of painful medical procedures The Octalysis Framework and the 8 Core Drives Core Drives in the Wild: Professor Game Free Guide Free Resources and Get in Touch Core Drives in the Wild: Professor Game Free Guide Get Daily Value on Your Email Let's chat about your gamification project YouTube LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Start Your Community on Skool for Free Ask a question

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Professor Game Podcast. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.