Gamification

Playing while working, studying, exercising or using the web

Those of us who have been or are gamers know that the idea or concept of gamification has been hovering around forever (at least, about 3 decades). Remember old phrases like, learn by playing! lose weight while having fun! etc. Now, although the concept is old, the term was coined thanks to a computer programmer named Nick Pelling in 2002, but in reality, the concept has begun to attract attention only in recent years.

Lately, I have met many people who use dazzling terms such as “game mechanics”, “game dynamics” or aims to establish as something complex and laborious the implementation of the concept, confusing the basic idea of gamification with complex marketing campaigns and big data. Certainly, you can create a sophisticated gamification implementation, but based on my experience involved in multimedia development teams since 1998, I can say that a lot about implementing gamification is just common sense.

Without being or pretending to be an expert in gamification, below I share some ideas, terms, and approaches that I’ve learned over time:

What is gamification?

There are lots of sites where you can get nice definitions about what gamification is, but to save the trip to Wikipedia, this is its definition:

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. Gamification commonly employs game design elements to improve user engagement, organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, traffic violations, voter apathy, and more. A collection of research on gamification shows that a majority of studies on gamification find it has positive effects on individuals. However, individual and contextual differences exist. Gamification can also improve an individual’s ability to comprehend digital content and understand a certain area of study such as music.

Did you understand that? Basically, it means, turns a task into something more interesting by adopting the logic of a game. The simplest way would be giving some sort of reward for doing some activity. The prize can be as obvious as a trophy or as vague and subjective as simply seeking to offer fun while doing a specific task. But of course, there’s much more that can be done, especially when human behavior is considered.

But to meet the cliché, this is my personal definition:

Gamification is the application of the metaphor of gaming to common or compulsory tasks to influence behavior, giving more motivation and increasing involvement, preference or loyalty.

Are video games useful?

For some years I was a World of Warcraft player, a very popular video game with millions of users, which I think is a great example of how these games can be related to the real world. Within World of Warcraft, one of the objectives is to make money. This money can be obtained in several ways, but most of it is completing quests (missions). As a result of solving the missions you get gold, which the player uses to obtain different things like buying clothes, weapons, materials, improvements, information for new missions, etc. (Does this sound familiar?), this is the basics of any business and an important part of life. Day by day World of Warcraft players spend their time making goods, offering services and fulfilling missions. In the real world, we do the same, we earn money to obtain some achievement; We spend that money on buying new things or we invest in something that allows us to earn more money or do something more efficiently or comfortably.

A valid question would be why these players are so willing to spend so much time doing what they could do in real life? The answer is easy: because it’s fun.

Adopting the idea

At this point It’s important to clarify that not everything is about video games, we will not see in the immediate future someone willing to play the latest game of Microsoft Project or Word (although, you never know 😉). What we are trying to do is take ideas from games and insert them into some routine task, so these tasks don’t have to be boring to death.

With all the above in mind I have to be honest, despite the relatively recent popularity of the idea of gamification, not everyone knows what it is, not everyone is interested, it seems that to get hear and understand the term is required of some curiosity, wanting to know what is in vogue about developing, UX, etc., or just having a little bit of geekness. All this makes selling the idea to or in an organization is not as easy as it might seem (at least not here in the third world).

Recently I participated in a project where customer asked my team, to propose “innovative” ideas (another oversold term) to improve the technological proposal of an organization, as part of this I eventually proposed the idea of incorporating some initial and modest strategy of gamification, giving some overall but concrete examples including just enough detail, not exactly as something “innovative” but as something that only intended to “update” the technological solution implemented at the time. Surprisingly, although the organization which I was working with, develops technological solutions, 90% of those involved did not know what the hell I was talking about (shame on you Infotec); I had to explain the idea to business analysts, deputy directors, directors, contractors and developers without much success (nobody is a prophet in his own land, but I like to think I threw some light on lost souls).

I have to add that the word gamification is weird English and the translations into Spanish sound even worse, so the word doesn’t help too much to sell the concept, as a result of this experience I came up to the conclusion that in order to adopt the idea more easily, we must use words such as Productivity, Behavior Changes, Motivation and Preference (or engagement if you prefer the marketing jargon).

Points, Medals, Trophies, Position Tables

As responsible for a project some time ago, I needed to make a quality assurance in a series of contents for courses, with a lot of information to review and very little time, I told the members of my team, that the two people who found more errors would earn a big coffee every day for the next week. Suddenly a game was on.

Fortunately, we do not always need to resort to real physical awards in all cases. The management of information that users provide their organization, website or mobile application can be used to award prizes in different ways, the most common are:

Points
Medals
Trophies
Levels
Position Tables
Challenges
Achievements

En un sitio o sistema web, por ejemplo, el concepto es utilizado ampliamente para que sus usuarios hagan más dentro del sitio o estén más tiempo expuestos a determinada información. Algún sitio donde se hacen trámites, puede hacer del llenado de sus formularios algo más ameno dando alguna especie de puntaje o jerarquía relacionada con un progreso por cada paso completado. Un sitio de ventas puede dar trofeos o medallas por las reseñas que un usuario coloca acerca de algún producto.

These examples are certainly very simple since only seek to motivate more users to carry out a task, and of course, they leave much more to exploit the concept, but they’re a good starting point to explore the benefits of gamification.

Not everything is about money

A strange and limited argument that I came across when I proposed gamification, is that accordingly with someone’s assumption, gamification was about giving economic incentives in the form of cash, coupons or discounts, which of course is not necessarily true, and falling into that assumption usually creates concern and even rejection from the sponsors of any project or production chain. Money is a good motivator for a user (it always is), but there is a word that you will find very often in blogs and books about gamification and also I already mentioned, this is engagement, this means that money will always motivate you doing some task but won’t necessarily “hook” you to it nor will make the activity enjoyable.

What else?

If you start to delve deeper into gamification issues, you will eventually realize that there is much more than just depending on incentives and certainly much more than relying on money. You will be using human behavior and the famous reptilian brain, that is, use in your favor something that is within human nature itself, play. Using gamification you will be appealing to feelings of pride and need for recognition, with which you could achieve even more than offering money in exchange.

In conclusion

I’ll share with you a couple of videos about some educational projects where I was involved and I used gamification (they’re old but still valid to understand the concept) and some bibliographies that I found useful and interesting:

Books:

Videos:

Risk Prevention

Mexico’s Economic Development

English Learning Card Game

Thanks to @Mordred77M for the English translation, he’s not a natural English speaker and he´s still learning so don’t be grumpy and help him to improve 🙂