You have probably browsed websites such as Samsung Nation or Yahoo! Answers that had point systems, badges to earn and leaderboards to compare yourself with others. Or perhaps you tried out the FourSquare app for iPhone and earned achievements for logging it at UBC. You might have also participated to GreenPeace’s new game elements.
Wherever you have been on the Internet in the past two years, there’s a fairly high chance you have encountered one of these things. This process, known as « gamification »,contributes to making users more motivated and engaged in the services they are using.
As someone interested in both video games and business, I find gamification fascinating. The goal of gamification is to add game-like elements, such as points, quests, badges, leaderboards, achievements, competition, teamwork and more to non-game environments. The objective is to increase the motivation and interest of the « players ».
Gamification actually works, and is becoming more and more popular. It is now at the core of most successful web-based businesses and services. It makes people more interested, participate more, learn better… and it makes employees more productive, too!
It is more complicated than it seems, though. I can’t explain it all here, but if you are interested, I invite you to check out this article by The Economist or Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter’s new book, For The Win. I discovered gamification through a very interesting set of lectures on Coursera.
