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 pro...