League of Geeks is our internal gamification, where we earn Geexperience Points (GXP) for activities during our everyday work.
Paweł Bejger, the originator of the app, was looking for a way to inspire people to share knowledge among other employees and boost cooperation. He knew that these things are crucial for achieving success and bring more benefits to other geeks. As a big fan of action RPG games like Diablo he realized that gamifying proactivity of our colleagues with points, achievements and other rewards, might motivate them to do even more than they were normally used to do. Many of our colleagues played computer games on regular basis and enjoyed it which led Paweł to the conclusion that it is worth giving it a try.
The team and the technologies
When LoG was created 5 years ago, developers used leading technologies at the time. .NET MVC, Entity Framework, jQuery and Knockout on the frontend side and for server-side Team City and Octopus.
Recently we’ve turned everything upside down and have changed everything to modern solutions. The new stack is based on .NET MVC Core, Entity Framework was replaced by Core and on the frontend side we introduced TypeScript and Vue.js. We migrated the whole application to Azure and we use Azure DevOps for deployment process (CI/CD).
Development
The first version of LoG was developed before I joined Goyello. After a year or two, we started to work on a new version. The team added a few crucial functionalities and I believe it took them a few months.
Since then, there hasn’t been a dedicated team for this application: different people have improved and modified it in small chunks. Whenever some bigger feature needed to be developed, I gathered together a group of developers who were available and willing to join.
With this approach, we introduced two new features in 2018. Currently, we are working on another big functionality which may take up to 4 months to complete. The work is never done, there is always something to fix, improve, with new requirements appearing from users. LoG must constantly change in order to serve people well.
How does it work?
At the start, users have a blank card. To develop their profile and reach next levels they need a GXP, a numerical indicator of how ‘geeky’ they are. All players start the game at Level 0.
Throughout the season, for the 15 skill-building activities assigned, players earn GXPs during their everyday worktime, and gain a position on the leaderboard, calculated in real time. At the end of the season, the leaders are given awards, based on all GXPs gathered. Geeks can also be granted achievements, badges and GCoins, our internal currency.
The purpose of it all
The main aim of the game is to have a good time. League of Geeks mission is to reward proactive behaviors that are beyond the geeks’ daily duties and to recognize exceptionally well-done work. An emphasis is placed on internal co-operation and bringing benefits to other geeks. What is more, the league promotes physical activity throughout the organization, and is connected to the Aspire Power Club.