GDC 2011 Serious Games Summit: Bunchball's Gamification 201 Session

The Serious Games Summit was a track within the Game Developers Conference. In 2011 it included a session called Gamification 201 - 60 Tactics in 60 Minutes, led by Molly Kittle of Bunchball. The description promised the tactics Bunchball had collected over four years of building gamification for companies of different sizes and industries, and answers to the practical questions that appear as soon as someone tries to gamify something.

Bunchball was based in Silicon Valley and founded in February 2005. Granite Ventures and Adobe Systems were among its investors. Its customers at the time included Warner Bros, Comcast, Victoria's Secret PINK, USA Network, LiveOps and Hasbro.

Nitro was the company's web service for adding game mechanics to websites, Facebook applications and mobile applications: points, levels, leaderboards, challenges and virtual goods, with analytics on top. Bunchball said the approach rested on reward, achievement, status, competition and self-expression, and on research in behavioral economics.

One example from early 2011 was a Virtual Top Chef competition for the Bravo channel's Top Chef All-Stars. The contest featured all 18 chefs from that season. Fans picked a favorite, earned points and trophies for actions on the site, and could recruit others to their team or switch teams. The winning chef's team was to be honored with the Virtual Top Chef title, and fans entered a sweepstakes for $5,000. The TV season ended on April 6, 2011.

Bunchball no longer runs under its own name. On April 3, 2018, BI WORLDWIDE announced that it had acquired Bunchball, which it called a market leader and innovator in gamification solutions. Bunchball's own web address does not work in November 2026: the plain address shows an unknown-site message and the secure address does not load in a browser.

BI WORLDWIDE still sells the product. Its gamification page describes Bunchball Nitro as the company's enterprise engagement software and as a secure, scalable gamification platform. The old Nitro product address on the BI WORLDWIDE site forwards to that page.

The conference also looks different. The Game Developers Conference site lists a 2027 event on March 1 to 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Its highlights page names tracks such as AI, Audio, Business & Marketing and Independent Games, and does not name a Serious Games Summit. The Virtual Top Chef game is listed here as unconfirmed, because no page offering it was found.