Gamification — The Basics

Try to recollect the last time you got hooked onto a platform because navigating around the platform rewarded you with some points, that entitled you bragging rights among your peers. Do you remember, the survey/questionnaire/form you filled that rewarded you with a discount coupon to your favorite outlet. All these are broader examples of gamification.

What if we started to live our real lives like gamers, lead our real businesses and communities like game designers, and think about solving real-world problems like computer and video game theorists? — Jane McGonigal

Now what exactly is “Gamification”?

Gamification put simply is the process of integrating game elements for the purpose of increasing motivation, interest, engagement, and retention on platforms like mobile applications, websites, and other interactive media.

Well, to engage ‘participants’ or let’s refer to them as players shall we, into your gamified system, one needs to understand the fundamental pillars of gamification, and these are:

The Rules — every system must be governed by a set of rules, these should ideally guide the players into achieving a goal. The rules would act as a guideline to these players whilst they’re in game. Should they abide by these rules, reward them! Should they not, well they could be penalized.

The Goal — each game must have an objective, a goal. The players must navigate or play their way around the game, abide by the rules, follow the journey, and achieve a reward at the end. This could be something tangible like a coupon or money, or something intangible like a badge or bragging rights.

The Journey — to engage the players in the game, every game must have a narrative in place. This narrative could be personalized to each player or their traits to make it a highly engaging experience. Or it could be a basic story that every player must embark upon.

The Feedback — this must go hand in hand with the narrative as well as the goal. Feedback can take form of rewards or penalties, points, character upgrades, progress bars, and many other things. The main objective being, to firstly guide the player around the progression of the game, and secondly to inform them that “the game would be over when…”

Games provide us an opportunity to direct our hard work towards achieving something better or towards something that will help us develop into something better. It does so whilst engaging us, with thrill, with a challenge while using an imaginary goal like a carrot tied to a stick.

Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work. — Jane McGonigal

Now the end reward for a player, in any case should not focus on the points earned, the badges, the leader-board; In fact these should be drivers to making the player feel better, satisfied in a way that the hard work that they invested into the game, in a way has paid off. It is less about the tangible reward that a player has earned at the end of a game, and more about the intangible sweet sense of having satisfactorily achieved something that counts.

The points presented in this article are a brief summary of Gamification as a concept. I have also written an article wherein I have covered how Starbucks leveraged Gamification to make the coffee buying experience more fun and drive sales.

If you liked this article then don’t forget to clap and follow for more such articles.

Thank you!