Gamification
How Gamification Motivates the Masses
What’s new about gamification? Organizations have borrowed
elements such as points and badges from games and used them to motivate people
for a long time. Weight Watchers, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and military
organizations have been using this approach to motivate people for a half
century, a century and millennia (respectively). Of course in those days,
engagement was limited to the physical world. What’s new about gamification is
that by means of a digital engagement model, motivation can be packaged into an
app or device and scaled to engage an audience of any size at a very low
incremental cost.
But not all companies are making the leap. As is often the case,
some old guard companies will be blindsided by the transition to digitally
delivered motivation. Others will stumble in their attempts to transition from
what works in the physical space to the digital arena.
Weight Watchers provides a case in point. The popular weight loss
program has historically relied on meetings to engage its more than 1 million
members. But meetings are resource-intensive, requiring Weight Watchers to
employ 56,000 people. In contrast, MyFitnessPal uses a digital engagement model
to help people lose weight and exercise, and it supports 50 million users with
approximately 75 employees. That’s the power of digital business. With a costly
physical engagement model, Weight Watchers has struggled. Over the past two
years, its meeting revenues have been declining along with its share price, and
the CEO departed. Among other factors, the company blames its poor performance
on “increased competition from Internet, free mobile and other weight
management applications, activity monitors and other electronic weight
management approaches.”
GAMIFYING GLOBAL
YOUTH EVENTS
On the other hand, Craig and Marc Kielburger, founders of Free the
Children, took a massive physical gathering and used gamification to extend
engagement over time. The brothers’ mission is to inspire youth to act for
global change. They created We Day, a series of events designed to “empower and
enable youth to be agents of change.” We Day events, held in nine cities in
Canada and three in the United States, bring together tens of thousands of
youth in a stadium for a day of education, engagement, and inspiring speeches
and performance focused on critical local and global issues.
While these massive events have become powerful opportunities to
engage and inspire youth, the Kielburgers wanted to extend their mission even
further. As Craig Kielburger explained, “Now the challenge, of course, is that
We Day is one day. Our dream is to take that spirit and feeling of connectivity
and empowerment and education that we see at We Day, and make it something that
is far more constant in your life, and far more empowering — because you can
connect on a daily basis with that energy and live that same spirit 365 days a
year.”
To answer this challenge, Free the Children partnered with Telus
to introduce We365, an app that digitally engages and motivates youth
throughout the year. We365 uses gamification to motivate youth to complete
challenges, track and verify volunteer hours, and be part of a larger community
of people who are taking action for social good. We365 is exemplary of what
gamification is really about — it is a way of packaging motivation into a
digital engagement model and inspiring people to act.
MOTIVATION AT
SCALE AND COST
While we should never underestimate the motivational power of a
real-world pat on the back, there are many advantages of using digital over
physical engagement — most notably scale and cost. Digital engagement models
scale to virtually any number of participants at very low incremental cost,
while physical engagement models have much higher incremental costs for each
new participant. The result is that gamification provides the opportunity to
package motivation into a digital engagement model and scale it at a much lower
cost than a similar physical engagement model.
Nike builds
gamification into products like the FuelBand to achieve the same thing
— packaging
motivation into a digital engagement model
— even if the
audience and the goal are different, the method is the same.
As Stefan Olander,
Nike’s VP of digital sport, states, “The more people move, the better it is.
So, we have products that can inspire and enable everyone to be more active.”
Gamification can be used to package motivation and engage many
different audiences in many different activities. Organizations like DirecTV,
NTT Data and the U.K.’s Department for Work and Pensions are using gamification
to motivate employees. Companies like Barclaycard, Vail Resorts and BBVA are
using gamification to motivate customers. In all these cases, the common
denominator is the same — packaging motivation into a digital engagement model.
There is no magic in gamification — it uses the same motivational
techniques that have been around for centuries. Building self-esteem and
re-enforcing it with peer recognition is a powerful means of unlocking
motivation. Gamification leads players on an experience to help them to achieve
their goals, and while that’s important, it’s not entirely new. The real news
with gamification is the digitalization of motivation, and in the near term it
will become a key part of every organization’s digital business strategy.
Gamification harnesses the
power of games to motivate
Walk through any public area and you’ll see people glued to
their phones, playing mobile games like Game of War and Candy Crush Saga.
They aren’t alone.
·
59% of Americans play video games, and
contrary to stereotypes,
·
The US$100
billion video game industry is
among the least-appreciated business phenomena in the world today.
But this isn’t
an article about video games. It’s about where innovative organizations are
applying the techniques that make those games so powerfully engaging: everywhere
else.
Gamification is
the perhaps-unfortunate name for the growing practice of applying structural
elements, design patterns, and psychological insights from game design to
business, education, health, marketing, crowdsourcing and other fields. Over
the past four years, gamification has gone through a cycle of (over-)hype and
(overblown) disappointment common for technological trends. Yet if you look
carefully, you’ll see it everywhere.
TAPPING INTO
PIECES OF GAMES
Gamification involves two
primary mechanisms. The first is to take design structures from games, such as
levels, achievements, points, and leaderboards — in my book, For
the Win, my co-author and I label them “game elements” — and
incorporate them into activities. The second, more subtle but ultimately more
effective, is to mine the rich vein of design techniques that game designers
have developed over many years. Good games pull you in and carry you through a
journey that remains engaging, using an evolving balance of challenges and a
stream of well crafted, actionable feedback.
A Khan Academy user profile
with lots of stats and achievement medals to spur learning. Khan Academy
The
differences between a gamified system that incorporates good design principles
and one that doesn’t aren’t always obvious on the surface. They show up in the
results.
Mastering spanish becomes like a game with the thoroughly gamified
app Duolingo. Tim Bonnemann, CC
BY-NC-SA
Most of the initial
high-profile cases of gamification were for marketing: for example, USA Network
ramped up its engagement numbers with web-based gamified
challenges for fans of
its shows, and Samsung gave points and badges for learning
about its products.
Today, organizations are using
gamification to:
·
promote health and wellness activities,
·
improve
retention in online learning,
·
help
kids with cancer endure their treatment regimen, and
·
teach people
how to code, to name just a few examples.
Gamification has potential
anywhere that motivation is an important element of success.
GAMIFICATION
HARNESSES INNATE DRIVES
The surface dimension of
gamification is motivation through rewards: Earn some points, top the leader board,
get a badge, win a prize and repeat. Behaviourists such as the legendary B F
Skinner called this operant conditioning, and it does work … to a point. If
there’s really no point to the points, users lose interest. That’s apparently
what happened to marketing-driven Samsung Nation, one of the most prominent
early gamification examples. Today it’s nowhere to be found on the Samsung
website.
Shallow gamification can even
be harmful, if it’s used to manipulate people toward results that aren’t truly in their interest,
or if it suggests
that rewards are the only reason to do otherwise intrinsically engaging
activities.
The systems that avoid these
pitfalls take games seriously. In a good game, the points and the leader boards
aren’t what really matter; the true reward is the journey. Gamification systems
that emphasize progression, provide well designed informational feedback, and
look for ways to surprise and delight their players can remain engaging for the
long haul.
Leveling up? Esther Vargas, CC
BY-SA
Gamification
tools motivate workers
but
not as much as money
A new
report indicates that gamification tools effectively motivate and engage
employees at work, but money and promotions are still the most effective
rewards.
Employees
enjoy corporate gamification tools and techniques designed to entice them to
complete tasks for rewards, but they are still more motivated by money,
according to a new survey of more than 500 workers from
gamification software company Badgeville
and facilitated by Instantly,
a provider of consumer insights tools. Specifically, 78 percent of workers say
their companies use gamification tools, and 91 percent say gamification
improves their work experience. However, 70 percent cite money as the most
powerful tool for engagement.
What if we were able to show you a blend in of Gamification with
Rewards & Badges & Monetary effect that has an average improvement by
25% in service, work quality and performance!
The
top benefits of corporate gamification include an increased desire to be at
work and feel engaged (30 percent) and the inspiration to be more productive
(27 percent). Team building (83 percent) and training (64 percent) are the
areas in which gamification is used most often, according to the report.
GAMIFICATION MEETS IT
Steve Sims, chief design officer at Badgeville, says
gamification is becoming more common in the corporate world, and IT departments
play important roles. "IT can expect to be asked to partner on
implementing these [gamification] initiatives in a wide variety of areas, including
sales and service performance management, communities, learning and development
and innovation," he says. "We are seeing that IT itself can benefit
from gamification in a wide range of areas, including compliance, code
cleanliness, timeliness of project delivery, and other optimizations."
Lower
on the list are collaborative team goals or challenges (45 percent) and
internal software collaboration tools (27 percent).
Money
was also cited as the top motivator in the workplace (31 percent) followed by
good performance (27 percent) and personal satisfaction (14 percent).
Modern
workers want to use gamification systems, but they don't want to be forced to
use specific tools. The majority of people polled expect modern companies to
have gamification systems (63 percent), but more than half (58 percent) say
they are required to use the tools provided to them. And nearly half (48
percent) of the people surveyed say they use between three and four different
systems.
Beyond
the hype
5
ways that big companies are using gamification
For sure, gamification – or the use of game
mechanics in non-entertainment contexts – is one of the most overhyped and
misunderstood subjects in enterprise today.
Yet from humble beginnings in 2010, M2 Research
projects that companies will spend upwards of $2 billion on gamification
services by 2015. By that same point, Gartner Group’s Brian Burke forecasts
that 70 percent of the Global 2000 will employ gamification techniques, but
that 80 percent of those projects will fail unless they’re designed
thoughtfully. To meet these needs, we believe U.S. companies will need 5,000 certified
gamification designers over
the next three years to infuse every aspect of their operations with the
science of engagement.
For in the book, “The
Gamification Revolution”, we looked at hundreds of leading companies
that have successfully leveraged gamification in the enterprise to see how they
found success. Here are the top five areas where companies are using
gamification to find efficiencies and gain a competitive advantage:
RECRUITMENT AND HIRING
Companies have used games to recruit for some
time, but with social and game technologies it’s become more effective. Most
famously, Google posted a billboard in Silicon Valley with a tough math
question that led users through a series of game-like challenges, and
eventually to a special job application queue; those who could solve the puzzle
were “pre-screened” in a fun way.
Companies like Quixey have
adapted Google’s approach (sans billboard) and recruit using a reality TV-style
game that yields qualified engineering candidates for under $4,000/each –
compared to $20,000-plus using traditional recruiters. The U.S. Army-developed America’s
Army game has
brought millions of potential recruits to the attention of the armed forces and
has become its most cost-effective recruitment strategy (and one of the world’s
most popular games on the way).
On a larger scale, Domino’s Pizza developed a
game called Pizza Hero where
you can pretend to be a pizzaiolo and make pies the way you like. The app lets
you order pizza for delivery based on your design and apply for a job at your
local Domino’s – if you’re good enough.
EMPLOYEE TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
Like Domino’s, Marriott needs to hire upwards
of 50,000 people per year to fill positions in its hospitality division – and
those employees also need training. So the company developed a game called My
Marriott Hotel that lets you play various hotel roles, develop a basic
understanding of how they work and apply for a job. The simplicity of My
Marriott Hotel led to over 25,000 players joining in the first week, and is
part of a major growth cycle of similar training games that are as easy to play
as Angry Birds.
Several other major multinationals are finding success too:
·
Siemens use its online game Plantville to train plant operators;
·
GE Healthcare’s Patient
Shufflegame teaches health care workers how hospitals work; and
·
Sun Microsystems built an adventure game to
replace its stuffy new-hire onboarding training.
For
many companies, gamified training has lowered costs and raised engagement by
over 50 percent.
EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK
The lack of adaptability of employee feedback
has led many leading organizations to question the structure of the annual review.
Enter gamification-based recognition systems like Work.com (formerly
Rypple), DueProps and
PropstoYou.
They use gamified approaches to persuade employees to provide feedback
instantly on their mobile device. This peer recognition is turned into social
achievements (like badges and leader boards) that are shared throughout the
organization, and typically replace direct cash bonuses or “spiffs.”
Companies like LivingSocial, Spotify and
Facebook have embraced the approach, replacing annual reviews in many cases.
The fun, instantaneous feedback loops have driven employee engagement to over
95 percent on an opt-in basis at many installations. Early successes led
Salesforce.com to buy Toronto-based Rypple for a reported $65 million after
just two years in operation, rebranding it as Work.com late last year.
HEALTH AND WELLNESS
One critical approach to increasing employee
performance is by helping to improve their health and wellness. Besides having
the effect of improving cognition, it also results in reduced absenteeism (and
thus health insurance costs, too). NextJump, a New York-based
employee-incentive startup, has gotten international attention for its gamified
approach to encouraging employee fitness.
Using team-based competition and peer support,
over 80 percent of the company’s employees currently go to the gym two-plus
times a week without a mandate. Similarly, to help others gamify workplace
health, startups like Keasdeliver “wellness as a service” (WaaS?)
to customers like Pfizer and Reed Elsevier.
CREATING NEW PROFIT CENTERS
As gamification’s power to change the
enterprise has grown, it has also become a profit center for early adopter
organizations. IBM developed a game-based BPM (Business Process Management)
simulator called Innov8 that has spawned several B2B products,
including a game called City Manager aimed at municipal executives.
Today, the Innov8 platform is used by over
1,000 institutions to teach BPM, and has become the company’s number-one lead generator.
Similarly, global consulting giant NTT Data has built a platform called GO!
that enables its 60,000 worldwide employees to gamify BPM and professional
development, helping the company close and retain clients.
So where are you in the trend in developing a
more system mathic gamification well being filled of challenges and rewards
system for your company and team. Investment can be minimal to the maximum
based on how detailed you would want it to be.
We are on the clash of generations in X, Y, Z
& Millenial. Gamification would bring the best in all and creation of “GENERATION
K”.
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