Qualifications:

• Skill level: Senior
• Experience with Node.js
• Experience with AWS
• Experience with DynamoDB/NoSQL
• Experience with modern DevOps practices and tools
• Proficiency in written and spoken English
• Ability to work in an international team
• Experience with skill-sharing and mentorship of younger colleagues

Offer:

• Full-time employment or other form of long-term contract
• Workplace: Remote or from our offices in Maribor. We are flexible!

Motiviti is a software and game development studio headquartered in Maribor, Slovenia. Together with our trusted partners we form a supergroup that can take on any challenge coming from the coolest projects and products.

Our main tech stack: Node.js, AWS, DynamoDB, Terraform, Jenkins, Vue.js.

Also: Docker, Python, PHP, Unity, Java, Xcode, Android studio…

We follow the best development practices (code reviews, PR, CI, IaC, PaC, documentation etc.), use modern communication tools (Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace, Asana etc.) and provide an environment where all of us have a chance for personal and career growth.

Yes, we are excited about remote work but we also love our optional weekly get-togethers in our offices in Maribor. We are known for our Pizza-Friday and our foosball tournaments. If you’d rather work from the office – no problem. There’s a table for you.

We are a team of 10+ motivated individuals in search of new colleagues with the ambition to become a valuable “Motivitan” and add to our I-got-your-back and knowledge-sharing culture. We are an open team that values honesty, transparency, a personal sense of responsibility, friendliness and appreciates to have good fun.

If this sounds like a good fit for you, send your application with your CV and experience/Github profile to careers@motiviti.com and we’ll get back to you soon!

SGC organizers expect around 300 international attendants from the region.

When: Saturday, 26 September 2015

Where: FRI Ljubljana

Tickets: Free, but register on Eventbrite (seating is limited)

Official website: http://gamesslovenia.si/conference-2015/

We will also have an iPad or two around showing a demo of Elroy and the Aliens.

Hope to see you there!

In mere 7 days, we made it into the top 25 and received over a hundred really encouraging comments from the awesome Steam community.

We would like to thank everyone for their support and encourage you to follow our progress on Greenlight, Twitter and Facebook.

While I personally love GDC and all the events surrounding it, we chose to check out the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas instead this year.

Organized by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, DICE stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate and Entertain and brings together the top video game designers. developers and publishers from around the world to discuss important topics about the industry.

This year was no different, with speakers like Tim Sweeney, Richard Hilleman, Eric Hirshberg, David Jaffee, Tomonobu Itagaki, Todd Howard, Seamus Blackley and many more. You can check out some of the talks from DICE 2012 here.

And here is my favorite: Tim Sweeney’s thoughts on the next 20 years in gaming:

But the talks alone don’t begin to describe the true appeal of DICE – compared to events like GDC, DICE is really small and you can actually hang out with the best and the brightest in the industry at cool networking events like go-karting (which was awesome), golf, poker tournaments (welcome to Vegas) and several great parties.

I had a great time at the conference and I am definitely coming back whenever I can – and not just for the nice February weather (wearing a T-shirt while there was heavy snow back home), the classy venue (Red Rock Resort) and the abundance of high-quality shows in Vegas.

For more background on games and office work, you can check out our post on gamification and motivational design.

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report has become a constant source of inspiration for all kinds of technical and business professionals, from IT managers, marketers, directors to entrepreneurs.

The latest report includes technologies such as speech-to-speech translation, 3D printing, quantum computing and gamification.

To better understand the individual phases, here is the same graph with explanations.

Slowly but surely, games are changing the way employees and managers around the world tackle their daily tasks.

Here is a shorter version of a presentation I gave this year at the FMX 2011 conference in Stuttgart (Germany), showing some of the examples and ideas we are using with our clients.

These are surely not the only reasons, but from a psychological viewpoint, these are some of the main motivators why people play games.

Gamification, or motivational design, is all about engagement. It means using the motivation that is inherent to games for e.g. increasing someone’s productivity and for enforcing a certain behavior by integrating game mechanics and dynamics into an existing activity.

While games are a great tool for increasing engagement, in order to be effective, we have to think about the following two aspects first:

1) Are we increasing the level and intensity of an already existing behavior?
2) Do we want to initiate new behavior?

These two points do not necessarily counter one another as many businesses need gamification to meet both aspects. The “mix ratio” of these two aspects however often depends on whether people are engaging in the process of our interest in their leisure time or if they are engaging in this specific process at work.

Here at Motiviti we are researching and implementing practical applications of gamification techniques both in business environments such as call centers, as well as on websites that users often visit outside of work hours.

In reality, this means that a call center company for instance would want to give its operators additional motivation independent from their salary in order to motivate above average work results – i.e. intensifying an already existing behavior.

Owners of a website with entertaining content, however, might want their visitors to post more links to the website on social networks instead of just browsing through the content. This means initiating new behavioral patterns.

In both cases, we want to get end results that benefit our businesses but we have to bear in mind that there is a basic difference in the individual behavior of visitors of a website and workers in a call center.

The first browse the website to have fun and we want to motivate them to do something they aren’t necessarily inclined to at the moment – while the latter are performing the same work anyway because it is their job, and what we can do is infuse fun and purpose in the otherwise monotonous daily routine in order to achieve better work results.

Playing games, we experience something everyday life is often lacking – clearly defined goals, endless motivation and a constant source of challenges.

Over the last couple of years, game designers around the world have tried and often succeeded in applying principles from games in fields such as health care, education, science, productivity and even crowd-sourcing.

To better understand what it is we are tapping into, we need to know a few basics about motivation.

We distinguish between two types of rewards that keep us motivated to play – extrinsic and intrinsic.

Extrinsic rewards include points, badges, levels, progress, combos and other kinds of payment, praise or tangible or intangible feedback.

Intrinsic rewards include the feeling of achieving mastery, being part of a community, the feeling of creating something unique and other deeply-seeded motivators.

Some of the caveats of extrinsic rewards are explained in this excellent talk by Dan Pink.

It is a common belief among game industry professionals that the recently coined term gamification refers to services (especially websites) that predominantly focus on extrinsic rewards (see Just add points).

A lot of love for this trend came from Jesse Schell’s talk at DICE last year.

At GDC 2011 (taking place this week in San Francisco), a panel of distinguished game designers was even debating the proper usage of the term (see Gamasutra article).

But regardless of how we call it, we believe tapping into intrinsic motivation is key to harnessing the power of games in traditionally non-gaming environments.

Just slapping points on something does not necessarily make it more fun (although it may produce some short-term results).

Our latest project is about understanding the space we operate in and using the existing social dynamics that are already in place to achieve the goal outlined above.

And what exactly is the space? A full blown professional call center.

Hopefully, you will be able to check back in a few weeks to follow our progress!

We will be reconnecting with friends and looking for new opportunities.

If you are in San Francisco next week and interested in discussing casual & social game development, design and marketing or potential projects, contact us.

Direct contact details:

• Tadej Gregorcic (CTO / Creative Director) – twitter.com/tadej, blog: tadej.eu
• Jernej Kocjancic (CEO) – twitter.com/jerrnej
• E-mail: tadej@motiviti.com

See you next week!