NEWS RELEASE – VANCOUVER, CANADA – JULY 19, 2018 – ELO is pleased to announce that Yu-kai Chou, the world’s #1 gamification guru, will be speaking at the ELO Forum in Vancouver, Canada on Nov 7th.  He is the original creator of the gamification framework, Octalysis, and the author of Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. Chou will be speaking on, “Faith in Silicon Valley:  Changing the World Through Gamification.” 

Chou is the Founder of The Octalysis Group and has been a regular speaker/lecturer on gamification worldwide, including at organizations like Google, Stanford University, LEGO, BCG, TEDx, SxSW, Gamified India, Huawei, the Innovation Center in Denmark, Kingdom of Bahrain, and many more.  His TEDx Lausanne talk has been viewed over 146,000 times.

“Gamification” is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. Gamification commonly uses game design elements to improve user engagement, organizational productivity, learning, crowdsourcing and employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use. 

Chou’s cutting-edge role in gamification has been widely acknowledged.  Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, commented that, “Yu-kai is at the cutting edge of the field of behavior design.”  Michael Wu, Chief Scientist, Lithium Technologies, noted that, “Yu-kai’s reputation precedes him in the field of gamification, so I know him professionally before I know him personally. Professionally he’s as efficient and effective as a black hat hacker. But personally, he’s as kind and passionate as a white hat artist. Yu-kai himself is the perfect embodiment of his Octalysis framework. You may have only seen some aspect of him; but believe me, he has all 8 sides of the octagon, plus the center—he’s sensational.”

Chou was one of the earliest pioneers in gamification, starting his work in the industry in 2003. In 2015, Yu-kai was rated #1 among the “Gamification Gurus Power 100” by RISE and was also awarded “Gamification Guru of the Year Award” for both 2014 and 2015 by the World Gamification Congress based in Europe.  He has helped a variety of companies, from seed stage start-ups to Fortune 500 companies such as LEGO, Accenture, eBay, Huawei, Fidelity, AIG Japan, Verizon, HP, Ericsson, Cisco, Wells Fargo, and more. His work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The World Journal, Business Insider, PBS, and many more.

This past year, according to Chou, “has been an absolute blessing while being exuberantly crazy.” Some highlights are as follows.  Now more than 500,000 people a year study his work in Gamification and the Octalysis Framework.  His company The Octalysis Group continues to grow internationally with dozens of Fortune 500 companies and cool start-ups as clients.

His work has now empowered over one billion users' experiences (note: this is not one billion unique human beings since the same person could be a user of eBay, Volkswagen, Microsoft, Lego but that can be counted as 4 separate "users").  Chou explains that, “Through my clients on safe driving and safety in factories, I also believe my work has actively saved some lives too, which is gratifying to think about (it's a bit difficult to verify how many people prevented a loss of their lives because of our work...).”

Chou is a sponsor of his own eSports Team - Team Octalysis.  He explains, “When I wrote about the eSports industry in my book a few years ago, the industry was not known by the majority of people. Now more and more people are aware of the eSports Industry, where professional video game players/teams who practice full time to compete against each other for prize money on top of their salaries.”

Chou is also a Christ-follower and has thought deeply about meaning and purpose in life and how to integrate his faith with his work.  He is based in Silicon Valley and previously lived in Vancouver for a couple of years.