Megatrend: Gamification part 2.
Gamification — applying the mechanics of gaming to nongame activities to change people’s behavior — is an important and powerful new strategy for influencing and motivating groups of people. The business community is just starting to realize the power it has to improve customer engagement, build loyalty, and incent employees and partners to perform at high levels. And the concept has the potential to solve a variety of problems outside the business world as well, in areas such as:
• Health & Wellness: healthcare cost containment, obesity programs, smoking cessation…• Education & Training: e-learning, corporate and vocational training, online testing…• Public Policy & Government: education reform, climate change, welfare reform…
• Education & Training: e-learning, corporate and vocational training, online testing…
• Public Policy & Government: education reform, climate change, welfare reform…
Definition of Terms
We’ll expand each of the following definitions in greater detail throughout the whitepaper. As an introduction, let’s give a brief overview of a few key terms that are central to this paper.
Gamification
At its root, gamification applies the mechanics of gaming to nongame activities to change people’s behavior. When used in a business context, gamification is the process of integrating game dynamics (and game mechanics) into a website, business service, online community, content portal, or marketing campaign in order to drive participation and engagement.
Participation and Engagement
The overall goal of gamification is to engage with consumers and get them to participate, share and interact in some activity or community. A particularly compelling, dynamic, and sustained gamification experience can be used to accomplish a variety of business goals.
Game Mechanics & Game Dynamics
These two terms are closely related and sometimes used interchangeably. For our purposes, game mechanics are the various actions, behaviors, and control mechanisms that are used to “gamify” an activity — the aspects that, taken together, create a compelling, engaging user experience. The compelling, motivational nature of this experience is, in turn, the result of desires and motivations we call game dynamics.
Game mechanics include:
• Points • Levels • Challenges • Virtual goods and spaces • Leaderboards • Gifts and charity
Game dynamics include:
• Reward • Status • Achievement • Self-expression• Competition • Altruism
Games Are Everywhere
Humans have been playing games in various forms since the days of the caveman, and competition is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Fast forward to the modern era with the significant free time that people have today, and gaming has become a hugely popular and tremendously profitable industry, on the order of $60 billion per year. Given this wide acceptance of gaming and the emergence of the internet, people have become more open to game mechanics in other parts of their lives. As a result, “gamification” is becoming a powerful tool through which organizations teach, persuade, and motivate people. Many different activities that people do today incorporate game mechanics – things that you might not think of as games at all. Let’s examine a few.
Nike+ and the iPod
The world’s largest manufacturer of athletic footwear and apparel worldwide has “gamified” exercise with the launch of Nike+ in 2008. Over 1.8 million runners are currently using Nike+ to capture data such as distance, pace, and calories burned using a GPS sensor connected to their iPod. The Nike software loaded on the iPod will then ”reward“ users if they reach a milestone — for example, runners hear Tour de France cycling champ Lance Armstrong congratulating them if they beat their five-mile distance record. After workouts, runners go online to upload their data, track their statistics, set goals, join challenges, play with an online “alter ego,” and connect with fellow runners in the Nike community and other social networks. Nike+ has allowed the company to build a huge and active fan base — for instance, over 800,000 runners logged on and signed up when Nike sponsored a 10K race simultaneously across 25 cities.
Tracking Statistics Drives Participation
At its core, gamification is all about statistics. If two people play Monopoly every day for a week, it’s going to get boring pretty quickly. But if they start capturing and displaying statistics — how many times each person won, how many dollars each winner had, which properties were most profitable — then the experience becomes more interesting.
These statistics create another level to the game and motivate people to play more. In essence, the statistics become the game. Can you become the #1 ranked Monopoly player in your group of friends, in the state, in the country? Can you own Boardwalk and Park Place five games in a row, and thus win a special trophy? Can you earn Monopoly Points for every dollar you end the game with, and collect those points toward some ultimate reward?
By capturing statistics, communicating standings, and rewarding accomplishments, we create a new method to drive participation. Even though individual games (or other activities) may have lost their initial excitement, each episode becomes an entry into a larger game, one that creates a desire to make return visits in order to reach these new goals.
Who Is Participating?
Gamification is a strategy for influencing and motivating the behavior of people – any people, whether they are customers, employees, students, fans, constituents, patients, etc. And while it uses techniques from game design, it is not a new way to reach the gamer market. The audience for gamification is anyone you want to engage repeatedly in order to elicit a particular behavior.
Use Cases of Gamification
The following examples illustrate some of the applications in which gamification can be used to create business value.
Building and activating a community of members or fans
A common business goal is to pull together and engage a group of people with a common passion or interest, and then to “activate” them to purchase. In particular, many marketers have been looking to leverage online social networking for this purpose, but the results have been mixed. Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, has projected that over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. But 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures.1 And Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang concludes that “…many brands are wasting their time, money, and resources to reach communities in social networks without first understanding that the use case is very different than a microsite campaign.”
Through gamification, organizations can take back control of the brand experience by engaging users, encouraging them to join a community, driving active participation, sharing with friends outside the community, and even recruiting friends to join the community. Gamification enables you to turn customers into fans, and fans into evangelists.
Building your brand
In the long run, the goal of marketing is to maximize the lifetime value of customer base by increasing the average selling price and frequency of purchase. The traditional way that marketers look at this process is the “purchase funnel,” a model which describes the theoretical customer journey from the moment of first contact with your brand (awareness) through product consideration, to the ultimate goal of a purchase. Using gamification, marketers can help increase brand awareness, affinity, and purchase intent by driving their audience to spend more time on a website or related social media property and come back more often. The more users interact with a site, the more valuable and loyal they become and the less incentive they have to click away to another source.
Driving engagement and loyalty
Loyalty has evolved beyond earning points for purchases to deeper customer engagement. Traditional redemption-focused loyalty programs created clever points systems and offered gifts or discounts in return for purchases. These marketers assumed that the best consumers will “burn” what they’ve earned, be satisfied with the reward, and come back to the brand in the future. Savvy marketers now realize that they must differentiate themselves from this foundational model, primarily because the rewards given by most loyalty programs offer far less competitive advantage in the age of the internet and global commerce. Using gamification, loyalty programs can significantly increase their effectiveness by adding more intrinsic motivators to the “earn” (points) aspect of the loyalty experience.
Earning points mimics the elements of a game, including competition and the pursuit of a goal. Fun, compelling and addictive game play generates exciting emotions that add to the player’s experience, whether the competition is solitary or involves others. An effective loyalty program views the entire “earn” experience as a game, one wherein the “play” is just as fun as the “winning.” Adding leaderboards and tiered-achievement levels will enhance the gaming aspects because people often desire the challenge of working for a reward. Essentially, the right level of challenge arouses and excites the brain. Setting and hitting milestones result in a repeated sense of accomplishment and boosts self-worth, leading to the ultimate satisfaction of reaching the goal and “winning the game.”
Game Mechanics Motivate Behaviors
The addition of game mechanics to a site or application allows you to layer compelling user experiences into existing activities. These gamified activities satisfy basic human desires, creating the addictive user experiences that motivate users to take certain actions. But what are these game mechanics?
Game mechanics are tools, techniques, and widgets that are used as building blocks for gamifying a website or application. Using them individually or together, it’s possible to build a highly motivational user experience around existing website functionality or content. Some of the most common game mechanics include the following:
Points
People love points. They love to earn them and to achieve them. This makes points incredible motivators. Points can be used to reward users across multiple dimensions, and different categories of points can be used to drive different behaviors within the same site or application. Points can also be used as status indicators, users can spend them to unlock access to content, or spend them on virtual goods and gifting. Studies done at IBM Research and the University of Chicago describe the dramatic effect that earning points can have on user behavior, even if there’s no monetary value associated with them. People just love to be rewarded and feel like they’ve gained something.
Levels
Levels are different classes in frequent-flyer programs, colored belts in martial arts, job titles in industry: an indication that you’ve reached a milestone, a level of accomplishment in a community and should be afforded a certain amount of respect and status. Levels are often defined as point thresholds, so that users can automatically level up based on their participation, or use levels to indicate status and control access to content on the site.
Challenges, Trophies, Badges, Achievements
Challenges (aka trophies, badges, or achievements) give people missions to accomplish and then reward them for doing so. Challenges give people goals and the feeling like they’re working toward something. The general approach is to configure challenges based on actions that you’re tracking, and reward your users for reaching milestones with trophies, badges and achievements.
Trophies, badges, ribbons, etc. are the visible recognition of having reached new levels or completed challenges. One of the keys to making levels and challenges effective is providing a forum for users to show off their achievements, like a trophy case or user profile page that displays their badges. These have counterparts in the real world as well, as in Scouting merit badges, colored credit cards that indicate high spending limits, or colored frequent flyer cards that indicate member status.
Virtual Goods
For a game economy to be effective over time, it helps to have a place to spend points, provide an incentive to earn more, and offer the ability to customize something that reflects a personal identity. Virtual goods help achieve all of this and are a great vector for creativity, competition, and self-expression in the community. Virtual goods are non-physical, intangible objects that are purchased for use in online communities or online games. Users purchase virtual goods like clothing, weapons or decorations to create an identity for their virtual self while comparing and “showing off” with their friends. Virtual goods can also be used as a revenue center, by selling users virtual goods for real dollars.
Leaderboards
Most of the successful games ever created have wisely implemented a “high-score table.” They bring aspiration, “fame,” and your name in lights. They also indicate “how am I doing” against friends and against everybody else. In the context of gamification, leaderboards are used to track and display desired actions, using competition to drive valuable behavior.
Competitions
Competitions enable your users to challenge each other to get the high score at some activity. Once everyone has done the activity, the user with the highest score wins a reward while all the losers get a consolation prize. This is great for “multiplayer-enabling” one-player games and other single user experiences. For example: “I just scored 500,000 points at Asteroids, I dare you to beat that!”
Game Dynamics Satisfy Desires
Why are people motivated by game mechanics? Because of game dynamics.
People have fundamental needs and desires — desire for reward, status, achievement, self-expression, competition, and altruism among others. These needs are universal, and cross generations, demographics, cultures, and genders. Game designers have known for years how to address these needs within gaming environments, and gamification now enables these precepts to be applied more broadly. By wrapping the appropriate set of game mechanics around your website, application, or community, you can create an experience that drives behavior by satisfying one or more of these human needs:
Reward
Human beings are motivated by receiving rewards — something of value given for some kind of action. A reward, tangible or intangible, is presented after the occurrence of an action (i.e., behavior) with the intent to cause the behavior to occur again. With gamification, the primary reward mechanism is through earning points or the equivalent (like frequent-flyer miles). But obtaining virtual goods, leveling up, and even completing achievements also satisfy this desire.
Status
Most humans have a need for status, recognition, fame, prestige, attention and, ultimately, the esteem and respect of others. People need to engage themselves in activities to gain this esteem, though. All elements of game mechanics drive these dynamics, with leveling-up (such as getting a gold or platinum credit card) being one of the primary motivators.
Achievement
Some (but not all) people are motivated by a need to achieve, to accomplish something difficult through prolonged and repeated efforts, to work towards goals, and to win. People motivated by achievement tend to seek out challenges and set moderately difficult (but achievable) goals. Their most satisfying reward is the recognition of their achievements.
Self-expression
Many people want and need opportunities to express their autonomy and originality, to mark themselves as having unique personalities from those around them. This ties into the human desire to show off a sense of style, identity, and personality and to show off an affiliation with a group. Using virtual goods is a common way for players to create their own identity, whether they are earned through rewards, received as gifts, or bought directly with real currency. A person’s avatar can often serve as a rich focal point for expression.
Competition
Individuals can also be motivated by competition. It has been proven that higher levels of performance can be achieved when a competitive environment is established and the winner rewarded. That’s because we gain a certain amount of satisfaction by comparing our performance to that of others.
All elements of game mechanics tap into this desire, even self-expression, but the use of leaderboards is central to display competitive results and celebrate winners. Most all games provide at least a simple top ten list, and using that public display to indicate new levels achieved, rewards earned, or challenges met can be a great motivator to other players.
Altruism
Gift-giving is a strong motivator if you have a community where people seek to foster relationships. Not all gifts are equal, so in a world of free and commodity items, motivated gifters will seek out a more valuable form of expression, either through money or through time spent earning or creating the gift.
In gamification, gifting is an incredibly powerful acquisition and retention mechanic. You receive a gift from someone that pulls you into the game, and then you’re incented to send gifts to all your friends, creating a great acquisition loop. And every time you receive a gift, it pulls you back into the application to redeem it, so it serves as a powerful retention vehicle as well.
Source: www.Bunchball.com
