Are you concerned about the performance of your employee? Are you not getting the results you want from your company? Let’s give the gamification strategy a shot. It will increase employee engagement and produce positive marketing results. Check out the detailed benefits of Gamification in increasing productivity and improving e-learning.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is a type of game application. This is based on game-designing components and principles in the context of a non-game. This is combined with processes and activities to solve various problems by utilising the characteristics of game-elements. Gamification typically focuses on the game’s design elements.
This improves learning, user engagement, crowdsourcing, flow, organisational productivity, system utility, voter apathy, employee evaluation and recruitment, traffic violations, and physical exercise. The majority of gamification research findings show that it is beneficial to individuals. Although there is always a distinction between contextual and individual.
Gamification strategy
The existing applications are the focus of the gamification strategy. Gamification entails the use of certain gaming techniques to increase long-term engagement and consistent participation. It focuses on the implementation of various gaming techniques and their impact on employees. It aids in the long-term monitoring of employee performance and motivation to engage with their work.
Everyone Social, a business software, assists in product usage monitoring. It is useful for tracking how much or how frequently clients and customers use the products and services. A higher level of engagement implies a higher level of success for both the clients and the companies.
Few things need to keep in mind before applying the gamification strategy.
- Don’t over-focus on the rewards
- Have a long-run view
- Don’t pamper the best performer only
- Maintain a framework
- Keep tracking and maintain the record of the process and results
- Make the rewards creative
Techniques
Gamification techniques are used to increase people’s interest in learning, competition, socialisation, mastery, status, accomplishments, altruism, and self-expression. Previously, gamification strategies included rewards to increase player engagement.
They received the reward for meeting the goal. Among the most popular gamification techniques are the achievement of levels or badges, the provision of virtual currency to users, the filling of the progress bar, and the accumulation of points. Other players were able to see the rewards, which encouraged their participation and interest in the game.
Addition of narrative, the addition of meaningful choices, increase the level of challenge, and introducing tutorial are few other gaming techniques. These also increase the interest of the gamer.
Elements of game designing
These elements are the basic foundation of a game. Leader-board, points, avatars, performance graphs, teammates, badges, and meaningful stories are elements of game designing.
Leader-board:
It assigns the gamer a rank based on their relative success. This also assesses users against various success criteria. This element aids in determining the best performance of the gamer. The gamer can keep track of their own performance and compare it to that of others. In the context of a leader-board, the motivational potential is mixed.
This can sometimes serve as a demotivator. When gamers discovered their names at the bottom of the list, they typically lost motivation to advance to the next level of that game. The competition created by the leader board creates social pressure to increase the users’ gaming involvement, participation, and learning process.
Points:
These are the fundamental components of a gamified application and gaming magnitude. Users earn points for completing the goal of a level in a specific game. This is a numerical representation of the player’s performance.
There are various utilities for the points, such as reputation points, experience points, and redeemable points. This element’s primary function is to provide feedback. This also allows for the monitoring of gamers’ in-game behaviour.
Avatars:
This serves as the gamer’s visual representation within the gamification environment. The players select or create them based on their preferences. Avatars can be easily created using simple pictograms or complex 3D techniques and animation. They give each individual player a distinct identity within the gaming environment.
Avatars allow gamers to take on the appearance of various avatars. This enables the games to become a community-part of the cooperative game for an extended period of time.
Performance graph:
This is commonly seen in strategy or simulation games. This allows the player to monitor his or her performance and compare it to previous performances. The leader board compares the performances of different players, whereas the performance graph compares a gamer’s self-performances.
Performance graphs generally highlights the individual reference standards. This focuses on the player’s performance by displaying a performance graph for a specific time period. This is extremely beneficial to learning.
Teammates:
They are actual players taking parts within a game. This develops cooperation, conflicts, and competition within a game. Form a player-group. They perform together towards a common and shared objective.
Badges:
This is a graphical representation of the player’s accomplishment. These can be collected and earned while playing a game. They ensure the player’s target accomplishment, merit, and achievement. Only after completing the game’s target point or specific activities can the player earn a badge.
This serves as a virtual status symbol for the player. This also provides feedback about the player’s performance. The badges influence the player’s behaviour by presenting different challenges and altering the path to the game’s goal. The badge holder influences the co-players to improve their performance, especially when the goal is difficult to achieve.
Meaningful stories:
It has nothing to do with the player’s performance. The stories can be incorporated into the game titles. Aside from that, they are communicated through a convoluted storyline. This is an important aspect of gamification applications because they have the ability to alter real-world activities by incorporating various narrative overlays. For example, a zombie haunting while jogging.
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Applications of gamification
Now a day the applications of gamification gain popularity in almost every field. US army uses America’s Army as a recruitment tool. Eye’s Spy was launched in 2013. This improves the user’s involvement in a fun-based way totally. Educational institutes use GPA (grade point average) to evaluate and rank the students. Job applications sometimes involve gamification in the context of hiring employees. During such a hiring process, recruiters assess the employees by mini-games and set questionnaires.
Inspiration:
Gamification is extremely beneficial for the brainstorming process. This is also helpful in generating new ideas. Few studies show that players of such games develop more unique and new ideas than common academic students. Such games improve the exploration capacity of an individual.
Authentication:
The authentication process also uses gamification. ‘Guitar hero’ improves the learning skill of a password implicitly. This game explores the capacity of unique, complicated, and new password creation skill. This game increases the password strength. Gamification also manages the archives. Wynbox, an Australian company, successfully introduce a gamification application to the hotel-booking procedure.
Terrorist groups and politics:
According to a consultant of American security said that terrorist groups use the extremist gamification application. Reputation scores and Stormfront are few of the example of such gamification applications.
The government of China introduces a gamification application, ‘social credit system’, to give the citizens rating based on their trustworthiness. This gamification application will give the citizen loyalty point based on their educational attainments, good behaviour, and payment attitude.
Online casino:
Online casinos also use this. Several online casinos (such as Casumo & Casino Heroes) provide incremental rewards for extending the lifecycle of the player. This also encourages repeat visits to the platers. The players spend more cash to get more reward such as cash-match bonus and free spins on their spending.
Work:
Gamification applications are used to enhance financial services, employee productivity, government, healthcare, and transportation. Enterprise gamification links game-based components and thoughts along with the working atmosphere. This integrates the gamification with the information system or existing business in a strategical way. These methods help to improve organizational outcomes and employee performances.
Education:
Gamification is widely used in the training and education sectors. Microsoft uses a game called Ribbon Hero 2 to improve office productivity. They also use it to train employees effectively. This is the most popular office lab gamification application produced by Microsoft. ‘The Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation’ and ‘McArthur Foundation’ provide funds to the New York City Department of Education. They founded a school ‘Quest to Learn’ to enhance and promote game-based education and learning. This helps the new generation to engage more intensely in education in relevant and modern ways.
To increase the sustainability of the employees, different sectors use SAP. Uniliver and US military also use the gamification applications in the training procedure. Khan Academy involves the gamification applications in their online education process.
In the corporate sector, gamification is used to boost up the level of motivation. This helps the employees to apply the learning outcomes from the training process into the field of job. It significantly improves the performance of the employees. According to a survey, the gamification training approach improves the employee’s motivation by 78 per cent. Also, 91 per cent of employees improve their performances in productivity, engagement, and awareness.
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Crowdsourcing:
The University of Washington develops a game, Foldit. It enhances the crowdsourcing method in a significant way. The ESP game produces image metadata. Google uses Google Image Labeler to generate its metadata. The University of Bonn releases a research report. According to this, wiki contribution has been increased by 62 per cent after using the gamification application.
Health:
QUANTIC and Fitocracy are two popular gamification applications. This promotes exercising habits widely. Users get points after achieving certain levels of workout. The also get badges by achieving exercise milestones. The researchers of Public Health state that the use of gamification applications improves the self-management of infection control and prevention, STD prevention, mental disorder, and chronic diseases.
The apple app store published a review in 2014. According to that review, more than 100 gamification applications showed a positive correlation among the high rating of users and gamification elements. Pokemon Go is a location-based gamification application.
This uniquely promotes physical exercise. This changes the regular walking pattern. A survey report showed that the Pokemon Go users add a minimum of 194 steps extra than their regular step-count. That is 26 per cent above their regular walking habit. Ingress is almost similar to Pokemon Go.
Zombie Run involves running to collect essential items to survive the mission. The users need to follow the voice instructions to uncover different mysteries. These exergames are mobile-base, serious, and context-sensitive. These games aim to improve health and sporting spirit.
Marketing:
Gamification applications are widely used in marketing to facilitate customer retention and marketing strategies. In 2011 Yahoo!7 launched the Fango, a mobile application. The users can participate through badges and check-ins within this gamification interface. Gamification is widely used to monitor customer loyalty. Starbucks introduced Foursquare badges to their customers who checked-in at different locations. They offer special discounts to their regular customers. This gamification application was come into operation by Starbucks in 2010. Gamification marketing is categorized under 4 heads. They are,
Advergames:
Temple run and Candy crush are two such mobile-based advergames. The Wix platform recreates these games again. Through social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, these games become popular.
Brandification:
Videos, messages, and images appear during a running game. Electronic Art involves ‘Burnout paradise’ and ‘Madden 09’ to facilitate in-game billboards. Players vote to encourage such activities.
BTL (Below The Line) and TTL (Through The Line):
This kind of advertisement is done through the text below, above, or side of the main game.
Transmedia:
Let’s take an example of ‘Nintendo’s 007: GoldenEye’. To promote the original movie, they created this game. This video and promotional game earned more money than the actual film.
Gamification is the best tool to increase customer engagement. Gamification facilitates site-engagement based on social media services.
Statistical data shows how does income through gamification app increasing day by day.
Data source: Google
Legal restrictions on gamification
Gamification functions as a data aggregator. Gamification is gaining its popularity and adoption along with time. Due to its nature and adoption frequency, several legal restrictions might apply to gamification. Labour law, data protection, and data privacy apply to gamification as some of the applications use virtual assets and currencies. The fraudsters, money launderers, and criminals use these virtual currencies to continue their anti-social activities.
Gamification is a popular strategy to enhance the learning experience. This is a versatile approach to improve the application and experience of learning. It facilitates the behavioural changes to the employees and motivates them to give their best performances. It helps to increase the involvement and engagement of the users in job and education.