Gamification involves using game design elements in non-game contexts to motivate behavior change. The document discusses the growth of the gamification market and provides examples of how Coca-Cola and Siemens have successfully used gamification. While gamification can be effective, the document cautions that poor game design is a common reason why gamification initiatives fail to meet business objectives. It emphasizes identifying business problems and designing effective game elements and mechanics to drive desired behaviors.
2. Today, we see a lot of hullaballoo around Gamification.
Enterprises around the world have realized the power
of gamification and it's widely being adopted to
improve business outcomes at various levels.
According to Forbes-The overall market for
gamification tools, services and applications is
projected to be $5.5 billion by 2018. Gartner reported
that 70 Percent of Global 2000 Organizations will have
at least One Gamified Application by 2014. While
Gamification is certainly a powerful concept the
effective implementation of game elements in a non-
game context is acid test for any organization.
This whitepaper will help readers to understand
gamification, game elements and benefits of
gamification for the Enterprise through use case.
What is Gamification?
The term "gamification" was coined in 2002 by Nick
Pelling, a British-born computer programmer and
inventor. As defined by Gartner “Gamification is the
use of game design and game mechanics to engage a
target audience to change behaviors, learn new skills
or engage in innovation.” The target audience may
be customers, employees or the general public, but
first and foremost, they are people with needs and
desires who will respond to stimuli.
If we simplify this Gamification means use of game
elements and game design techniques in non-game
context. Now let's understand the definition by its
components:-
Game mechanics describes use of game elements
such as points, badges and leaderboards that are
common to many games.
Game Design describes the journey players take
with elements such as game play, play space and
story line.
The goal of gamification is to motivate people to
Introduction
change behaviors or develop skills, or to drive
innovation and when organization goals are aligned
with players' goal, the organization achieves
its goals as a consequence of players achieving
their goals.
Is Play vs. Game same or
different?
It is important to distinguish the concept of play &
game as both of them are important for doing
effective gamification.
Play as described by American thinker George
Santayana “Play is whatever done spontaneously
and for its own sake” i.e. Play is freedom and you are
free to do whatever you want under some structure
which is either virtually exists or defined by the rules.
While Game as defined by Tracy Fullerton & his team
“A game is a closed, formal system that engages
players in a structured conflict, and resolves in an
unequal outcomes” i.e. Game is a path where you
are free to choose a path which will lead to a
meaningful outcome.
3. So, why GAMIFY?
Gamification is near the peak of Gartner hype cycle
but do we really require gamification in some
serious business environment or it's just a fancy
term businesses are adopting as a part of the
branding strategy.
To understand it better let's take example of a
company DodgeBall, which is a location based
services around SMS using google maps. If a person
use this app and pin a location, it broadcast your
location to entire friend list. Second interesting
feature that DodgeBall adds is Crushes. If a crush is
within a 10 block radius of you at the time you
check-in, the system will send you a message letting
you know that a crush is nearby.
Now let's look at the fundamentals of Gamification
and try to see where the gaps are:
Engagement gap - The app doesn't engage the
user, the system is unitary and after a point of
time there is no fun in the process
Choices - Limited options, you don't have
many things to do in the application
No progression - tracking the previous check-
ins are not available
Social - Yes, the application enable users to see
your friend's activity
(Screen Shot of Dodgeball UI)
Now let's look at Foursquare the successor of
DodgeBall, who used the concepts of Gamifications
in the same application:-
Now look at the User Interface of both the
application; the second one is much more
interactive, visually appealing and simplified.
Foursquare added the Game mechanics by
introducing different levels of Badges and Score
cards which enable users to have a lot of choices to
play around with the application. Presently,
Foursquare has 20 million registered users, a
valuation of 600 million USD and successfully
overcome challenges of companies like Facebook &
Google who operate in location based market place.
4. The Psychology behind
Gamification
To understand the psychology behind Gamification,
I refer to BJ Foggs Behavioral Modeling (FBM)
outlining the 3 factors: - Motivation, Ability, and
Trigger; that need to converge at the same time for a
behavior to occur.
Motivation - the person wants to perform the
behaviour (because of pleasure, pain, hope,
fear, acceptance, rejection)
Ability - the person can carry out the behaviour
(factors can be time, money, physical effort, brain
cycles, social deviance, non-routine)
Trigger - the person is triggered to do the
behaviour (i.e. he is cued, reminded, asked, called
to action, etc.)
In a Game design or in a Gamification scenario this
theory acts as a guide to identify what stops people
from performing behavior that's is expected from
any activity. For example, if users are not performing
a target behavior, such as taking a survey on a travel
web site, the FBM helps designers see what
psychological element is lacking.
Building blocks of
Gamification
Till now we covered basic concepts of Gamification,
need for gamification and psychology behind
gamification. This section is aimed to provide
building blocks of Gamification
Business Use Cases of
Gamification
As gamification is increasingly getting adopted by
companies of different scale and size, there are
certain trends being observed:
Smaller Startup companies want their product
or application gamification. The companies
expect a winning solution which provides
addictive experience, where players naturally
want to keep playing.
Mid-sized companies invest in marketing
gamification to attract potential customers and
engage existing customers in brands and
products.
Fortune 500s and large companies usually shift
their focus on workplace gamification. Their
motive is often to train employees and to
cultivate a greater sense of solidarity within the
internal team.
Use case on Gamification
Coca-Cola Company
My Coke Rewards is a customer loyalty marketing
program for The Coca-Cola Company. Customers
enter codes found on specially marked packages
of Coca-Cola products on a website. Codes can also
be entered "on the go" by texting them from a
cell phone.
5. Coke used gamification as a powerful tool to change
its loyalty program from a transactional activity to
one that was inherently personal, social, and
engaging, and would help the brand connect with
new, younger consumers at scale. Presently
company has 20 million lifetime members in its My
Coke reward point.
Siemens Plantville
Siemens Industry, Inc. recently launched Plantville, a
new online gaming platform that simulates the
experience of being a plant manager. Players are
faced with the challenge of maintaining the
operation of their plant while trying to improve the
productivity, efficiency, sustainability and overall
health of their facility.
Plantville is an innovative, educational and fun way
for Siemens to engage customers, employees,
prospects, students and the general public while
driving awareness of Siemens technologies
and brand.
Gamification is being widely adopted across
organization at different levels and the process is
adding value but now is the time to understand and
evaluate this important trend. According to the
Gartner Inc. “80 percent of current gamified
applications will fail to meet business objectives
primarily because of poor design”.
“The challenge facing project managers and
sponsors responsible for gamification initiatives
is the lack of game design talent to apply to
gamification projects,” said Brian Burke, research
vice president at Gartner. “Poor game design is
one of the key failings of many gamified
applications today.”
It's advisable for the companies to first identify what
exactly is the business problem and then work out
on the game design rather being carried away by the
fun element or engagement.
“Everybody raise your hand. Now raise it a little
higher. Take that same idea and wrap it around a
sales behavior, service behavior, whatever it may be,
and that's the idea [of gamification] right there.” –
Bob Marsh, CEO, LevelEleven
I would like to acknowledge Brunchball, for their
outstanding work in this area and the Coursera
course of Professor Kevin Werbach, University of
Pennsylvania. They lead the game in Gamification.
Sources:-
Behavior Model.Org
Coursera Gamification Lecture
Bunchball.com
Plantengineering.com
BunchBall.com - CocaCola
Forbes.com
The Gamification market is estimated to grow from $
421.3 million in 2013 to $5.502 billion in 2018. This
represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of
67.1% from 2013 to 2018.
In the current scenario, the ‘consumer goods and retail’
vertical continues to be the largest adopter of
gamification solutions. In terms of regions, North
America is expected to be the biggest market, followed
by Europe and Asia-Pacific.
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