A quick definition of gamification is to add game mechanisms to services that aren’t games in order to increase consumer/costumer engagement, adoption and loyalty to a brand.
According to LearnBrite gamification can be described as:
- Make it fun and exciting to be part of an experience
- Reward audiences for participation, knowledge retention and engagement
- Encourage pass-along and recommendations
- Build loyalty and sales through repeat visits and purchases
Gamification is the use of game design techniques[1] and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes (also known as “funware“)[2], in order to encourage people to adopt them. Gamification works by making technology more engaging[3], by encouraging users to engage in desired behaviors[4], by showing a path to mastery and autonomy, and by taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.[5] The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, filling out tax forms, or reading web sites.[3] Available data from gamified websites, applications, and processes indicate potential improvements in areas like user engagement, ROI, data quality, timeliness, or learning.[6]
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Techniques
Early examples of gamification are based on rewarding points to people who share experiences on location-based platforms such as Facebook‘s “Place” feature, Foursquare (social network), and Gowalla.[7] Some of the techniques include:
- achievement “badges”
- achievement levels
- “leader boards”
- a progress bar or other visual meter to indicate how close people are to completing a task a company is trying to encourage, such as completing a social networking profile or earning a frequent shopper loyalty award.[8]
- virtual currency
- systems for awarding, redeeming, trading, gifting, and otherwise exchanging points
- challenges between users
- embedding small casual games within other activities.[3]
Applications
As of September 2010, gamification was used by marketers and website product managers as a tool for customer engagement,[9] and encouraging desirable website usage behavior.[8] Gamification is readily applicable to increasing engagement on sites built on social network services. One site, DevHub, increased the number of users who completed their online tasks from 10% to 80% after adding gamification elements.[10]
Business applications for gamification are just beginning to appear as well. RedCritter Tracker incorporates gamification elements such as badges, rewards, leaderboards and ribbons into project management.[11] Gartner Group predicts gamification will be a key trend that every CIO, IT planner and enterprise architect must be aware of as it relates to business.[12]
Gamification is used on Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer site for programmers, and on all of its sister sites for other topics (including the non-Q&A careers site Careers 2.0). Users receive points and/or badges for performing a variety of actions, including spreading links to questions and answers via Facebook and Twitter. A large number of different badges are available, and when a user’s reputation points exceed various thresholds, he or she gains additional privileges – including at the higher end, the privilege of helping to moderate the site. Points and badges do not generally carry over between sister sites, because a user’s expertise in one topic (such as programming) may be unrelated to their level of expertise, or lack thereof, in another topic. However, one exception is that a user gains 100 reputation points for linking their accounts on sister sites together, if they have at least 200 points on one of them.
Some other applications of gamification include:
- Employee training programs,[13]
- Wellness and other personal activities[14]
- Financial services websites.[4] and
- Online and in-person shopping.[15][16]
- Primary education.[17]
- Extreme sports.[18]
- Project management.[11]
- Enhancing loyalty programmes.[19]
- Social Networks.[20]
- Surveys.[21]
- Sustainability.[22]
Experts anticipated that the technique would also be applied to health care, financial services, transportation, government,[23] employee training,[24] and other activities.[25]
Alix Levine, an American security consultant, described as gamification some techniques that a number of extremist websites such as Stormfront and various terrorism-related sites used to build loyalty and participation. As an example, Levine mentioned reputation scores.[26][27]
Microsoft announced plans to use gamification techniques for its upcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system design.[28]
Companies and organizations
The term may have been first coined by Nick Pelling in March 2004 for his gamification consultancy startup Conundra Ltd. More recently, the technique captured the attention of venture capitalists, one of whom said he considered gamification to be the most promising area in gaming.[2] Another observed that half of all companies seeking funding for consumer software applications mentioned game design in their presentations.[8]
Gamification platforms
In addition to companies that use the technique, a number of businesses created platforms and consulting operations for others to add gamification elements to their own services.
In October 2007, Bunchball,[29] backed by Adobe Systems Incorporated,[citation needed] was the first company to provide game mechanics as a service,[30] on Dunder Mifflin Infinity, the community site for the NBC TV show The Office. Bunchball customers have included Playboy, Chiquita, Bravo, and The USA Network.[citation needed]
In September 2010, Badgeville[31] launched at TechCrunch Disrupt SF[32]. Badgeville is backed by Norwest Venture Partners, El Dorado Ventures, and Trinity Ventures, and is the only company to offer Behavior Management services, a suite of services including Gamification, Loyalty, Reputation Management, and proprietary social networks. Badgeville raised $15M in venture funding in its first year of operation,[33] and has more than 75 customers in less than one year of operation, including customers Deloitte Digital, Samsung, The Active Network, Kings Hawaiian, TechCrunch, Universal Music, Beat the GMAT, Bluefly.com and NBC.
Founded in June 2009, BigDoor is a Seattle-based startup dedicated to making the online world more rewarding by providing gamification technology to non-gaming websites.[34][35][36]
San Francisco startup Gamify offers a universal gamification platform.[37][38] Gamify has created the Gamification Encyclopedia[39] to document trends in this topic[40] and, together with the SETI Institute, a contest called the “Gamify SETI & Prosper Challenge” to increase participation in its SETI program through gamification.[41][42]
In July 2011, Mountain View, CA based Gigya, a social integration provider for websites, added[43] Game Mechanics to its suite of social applications. A number of Gigya’s 400+ clients have launched with the company’s Game Mechanics solution including Pepsi, which leverages Gigya’s technology to power Pepsi SoundOff. [44]
Several other angel and venture-backed companies emerged in late 2010, including IActionable,[45] BigDoor[35][36] and Reputely[46] (inactive as of 2011).
In December 2011 Salesforce.com announced the acquisition of the social performance platform provider Rypple, which uses gamification for employee performance and HR.[47]
Related companies
An organization, Gamification.Co, organized the world’s first conference devoted to the phenomenon, held in San Francisco in January 2011.[3][48][49]
One company, Seriosity, was created to offer gamification consulting.[17] UserInfuser is the first open source gamification platform provided by CloudCaptive.[50]
Enterprise-Gamification.com is the first organization to offer gamification consulting and workshops for organizations with applications and processes tailored for non-consumer players like employees or business partners.[51]
In August 2009, Gbanga launched the educational location-based game Gbanga Zooh that asked participants to actively safe endangered animals and physically bring them back to a zoo. The game encouraged players to maintain virtual habitats across the Canton of Zurich in order to attract and collect endangered species of animals. Through the gaming component, real-world walk-in customer were created for the client Zurich Zoo.
Gamification in Organizations
Business software vendor SAP AG is actively working on Gamification of processes in Enterprise. Recently, a virtual game that represented whole plant as perspective game just one would play SimCity just with the difference that each of the actions happen in real.[52][53]
Beside SAP, also IBM, Deloitte, Microsoft, LiveOps and other companies have started using gamification for consumer and non-consumer facing applications and processes.[54][55]
