Gamification

Gamification is the use of game play elements for non-game applications (also known as "funware"), particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications. Gamification works by making technology more engaging, and by encouraging desired behaviors, taking advantage of humans' psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.

Techniques

Early examples of gamification are based on rewarding points to people who share experiences on location-based platforms such as Facebook's "Place" feature, Foursquare (social network), and Gowalla. Some of the techniques include:

• achievement "badges"
• achievement levels
• "leader boards"
• a progress bar or other visual meter to indicate how close people are to completing a task a company is trying to encourage, such as completing a social networking profile or earning a frequent shopper loyalty award.
• virtual currency
• systems for awarding, redeeming, trading, gifting, and otherwise exchanging points
• challenges between users
• embedding small casual games within other activities.

Applications

As of September 2010, gamification was used by marketers and website product managers as a tool for customer engagement, and encouraging desirable website usage behavior. Gamification is readily applicable to increasing engagement on sites built on social network services. One site, DevHub, increased the number of users who completed their online tasks from 10% to 80% after adding gamification elements.

Business applications for gamification are just beginning to appear as well. RedCritter Tracker incorporates gamification elements such as badges, rewards, leaderboards and ribbons into project management. Gartner Group predicts gamification will be a key trend that every CIO, IT planner and enterprise architect must be aware of as it relates to business.

Gamification is used on Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer site for programmers, and on all of its sister sites for other topics (including the non-Q&A careers site Careers 2.0). Users receive points and/or badges for performing a variety of actions, including spreading links to questions and answers via Facebook and Twitter. A large number of different badges are available, and when a user's reputation points exceed various thresholds, he or she gains additional privileges - including at the higher end the privilege of helping to moderate the site. Points and badges do not generally carry over between sister sites, because a user's expertise in one topic (such as programming) may be unrelated to their level of expertise, or lack thereof, in another topic. However, one exception is that a user gains 100 reputation points for linking their accounts on sister sites together, if they have at least 200 points on one of them.

Some other applications of gamification include:

• Employee training programs,
• Wellness and other personal activities
• Financial services websites. and
• Online and in-person shopping.
• Primary education.
• Extreme sports.
• Project management.

Experts anticipated that the technique would also be applied to health care, financial services, transportation, government, employee training, and other activities.

Alix Levine, an American security consultant, described as gamification some techniques that a number of extremist websites such as Stormfront and various terrorism-related sites used to build loyalty and participation. As an example, Levine mentioned reputation scores.

Microsoft announced plans to use gamification techniques for its upcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system design.

Companies and organizations

The term may have been first coined by Nick Pelling in March 2004 for his gamification consultancy startup Conundra Ltd. More recently, the technique captured the attention of venture capitalists, one of whom said he considered gamification to be the most promising area in gaming. Another observed that half of all companies seeking funding for consumer software applications mentioned game design in their presentations.

Gamification Vendors

In addition to companies that use the technique, a number of businesses created platforms and consulting operations for others to add gamification elements to their own services.

In October 2007, Bunchball, backed by Adobe Systems Incorporated, was the first company to provide game mechanics as a service, on Dunder Mifflin Infinity, the community site for the NBC TV show The Office.

In September 2010, Badgeville, backed by Norwest Venture Partners, El Dorado Ventures, and Trinity Ventures, launched at TechCrunch Disrupt as the first company to offer social game mechanics as a service. Badgeville won the TechCrunch Audience Choice Award when it launched. Badgeville raised $15M in venture funding in its first year of operation, and has 75 customers including Deloitte Digital, The Active Network, Universal Music, Beat the GMAT, Bluefly.com and NBC.

Founded in June 2009 by Keith Smith and Jeff Malek, BigDoor is a Seattle-based startup dedicated to making the online world more rewarding by providing gamification technology to non-gaming websites.

Several other angel and venture-backed companies emerged in late 2010, including IActionable , BigDoor and Reputely (inactive as of 2011). {{citation}}: Empty citation (help)

Related Companies

San Francisco startup Gamify offers a universal gamification platform Gamify has created the Gamification Encyclopedia to document trends in this topic and, together with the SETI Institute, a contest called the "Gamify SETI & Prosper Challenge" to increase participation in its SETI program through gamificaton.

One company, Seriosity, was created to offer gamification consulting. UserInfuser is the first open source gamification platform provided by CloudCaptive.

An organization, Gamification.Co, organized the world's first conference devoted to the phenomenon, held in San Francisco in January 2011.

Critique

The term "gamification" and the practices it describes have received negative attention from game industry professionals, business consultants and executives, academics, and communications professionals. A Stanford professor, in a book on the subject, suggested that the gamification of businesses and virtual worlds is creating an expectation among people that real-life interactions follow simple mechanics, and some disillusionment when they do not.

Some critics dismiss gamification as a buzzword, and note that many of its techniques have been in place for a long time. Other critiques include:

• gamification elements are already present in everyday activities such as happy hours, loyalty programs, etc.
• for business purposes, gamification is invalid, faddish, exploitative, an oversimplification, or a renaming of existing practices.
• adding to and preying upon the confusion among business decision makers about the meaningful distinctions between games, videogames, social games, gamification, game mechanics, etc.
• the negative consequences of making simple game-like consumer interactions an end in themselves, rather than designing either high quality games or full product designs.
• gamification sometimes misses elements such as storytelling and experiences which are central to what make games effective, or that gamification has mistaken the addition of points for the application of genuine game mechanics.

See also

• Serious game