It’s a word that pops up a lot, but what does it actually mean? And how exactly is it used? Rob Leane investigates gamification…
You might have heard the term ‘gamification’ bandied about a fair bit in recent years, especially if you work in the realm of technology. It might one day be a household term, but for the time being you could be forgiven for not quite understanding what it means or what the point of gamification is.
It’s changing the world in some interesting ways, though, so now’s the time to learn more.
The basic concept is simple – adding gaming elements to mundane tasks to make them more interesting. These can include scoring points, setting targets and entering competitions with others. By making things a bit more like videogames, they can become more engaging and appealing.
British programmer and inventor Nick Pelling coined the term gamification in 2002, and the prevalence of gamification really took off in 2010. However, the idea of adding gaming elements to various sorts of project predates the actual term by some distance. Charles Coonradt, who found the consultancy firm The Game Of Work in 1973, was retroactively dubbed “the grandfather of gamification” by Forbes Magazine, in 2012.
The concept of gamification has developed over the years and has been used in various fields. At the moment, it’s changing the way we think about healthcare, fitness and education to name just three. To get you fully clued up, then, here’s our run-down of some of gamification’s most world-changing implementations…
Business
Countless companies have used gamification to liven up their working processes. So much so that companies like Bunchball, Badgeville, PlayGen and InsideSales.com have cropped up to offer creative gamification solutions to businesses and other clients.
If you’re in charge of recruitment for an exciting workplace, gamification can help you show off exactly what you’re offering. A prime example of this is the American military, who began developing their first “virtual army experience” as far back as 1999. By 2008, they had four transportable games units touring shopping centres and public events. Members of the public could come and test their military potential in a virtual environment, making the recruitment drive much more interactive and interesting.
Rewarding customer loyalty is another popular way to integrate gamification into business. Mobile phone manufacturer Samsung was an early adopter of this method, bringing in a game-style system, where customers are rewarded for reviewing products, watching videos or engaging in online forum discussions. Levels of achievement and a series of winnable badges are among the prizes.
Gamification can be used to engage with potential employees and keep customers happy, then. It can also be used to motivate your workplace team and discourage slacking – such is the goal of Keas, a website best described as an ‘employee wellness platform.’ On Keas, companies and their employees get access to statistics about their performance, can comment to encourage their peers towards targets, and are rewarded for getting jobs done.
Proof – from Mindbloom – has a similar remit to Keas, allowing users to set seven-day challenges for themselves and then provide video evidence to ‘prove’ when they’ve completed them. Progress can be tracked via smartphone, and adding in targets can provide an extra level of motivation. The 8-bit gaming-style graphics are a nice touch too.
Education
Before you even have a job, gamification can help. For example, online coding academy Treehouse offers points and badges as rewards for completed training tasks, and it keeps a log of all your achievements to showcase your skills to potential employers.
Kaplan University (which offers courses online and in several American cities) also utilises gamification, via Badgeville, using targets and badges in order to encourage engaged participation in its curriculum. Apparently, it saw higher grades and reduced rates of students failing to complete their courses after introduce the online scheme.
Learning languages has also been tackled by gamification. Duolingo is a crowd-sourced collaborative community website where students are progressed through various levels of translation tasks. As they spend more time on the website, they’ll gradually be given harder and harder assignments. Students can also vote on the quality of their peers’ translations, adding an edge of competitiveness to proceedings.
Microsoft has also dabbled in educational gamification usage. For Office 2007 and 2010, the company offered a free-to-download to game, Ribbon Hero, to help explain Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The game’s various levels (including a memorable Ancient Egypt stage) are all addictive and fun, as well as offering a greater understanding of the programs that it’s embedded within.
Gamification doesn’t just assist adult learning, either; it’s also been implemented in school classrooms. ClassDojo is a notable example, acting as a classroom management system, where each pupil gets a virtual avatar. These can easily be displayed to children to give quick ‘feedback points’, reinforcing good behaviour and encouraging kids to compete to earn the most points.
Big topics can be explained to school pupils through gamification too. The World Peace game, created by education expert John Hunter, is one such example. It’s not digital, but a highly competitive board game. In The World Peace Game, children must try to broker peace in a world consisting of five countries. Social, economic and environmental issues come into play, and the class must find a way to set things right.
In the online realm, there’s Evoke, which serves a similar purpose in a slightly more modern way. Produced by The World Bank, Evoke encourages young people to tackle issues like hunger and poverty, using a series of targets and rewards to keep young people in the game. The World Bank also offered seed funding, mentorship and scholarships to the original winners (those who fared best in the year of Evoke’s launch, 2010).
Physical Health
The world of medicine has also benefited from the integration of gaming features. Once such example comes from the developer Ayogo, which created the app Empower.
Designed specifically for patients with chronic conditions, Empower aims to help these people improve their health and stay active.
Daily, Empower will suggest games, surveys and small activities as a way of tracking each user’s behaviour. The aim of the game is make these physical and mental activities a habit rather than a chore.
The app Reflexion Health is all about physical therapy. It aims to try to make habilitation exercises more fun, because otherwise patients might not complete the activities in their own time.
Reflexion offers a virtual platform, where an animated instructor will guide them through their exercises every day, with feedback offered to users via motion sensors and full statistics sent to their physicians for further analysis.
Gamification doesn’t just help those already affected by injury or illness; it’s also being used to try to tackle disease itself. Cancer Research UK has developed Play To Cure: Genes In Space, the world’s first free mobile game to utilise its players as a way to analyse real genetic data.
Play To Cure visualises medical data as a science fiction shoot-’emup game. While playing, you must pilot your spaceship and collect the scattered parts of ‘Element Alpha,’ the in-game visualisation of the cancer cells.
This saves the Cancer Research UK researchers hours of time, because you’re picking out the cells on their behalf and finding the quickest route to get to them. Over time, this could be invaluable work. And you’re doing it by playing a game.
Puzzle game FoldIt served a similar function to AIDS researchers in 2009; players of FoldIt found a solution regarding the structure of the M-PMV virus in just ten days. Fantastic, isn’t it?
Mental Health
Gamification is also changing the landscape of mental health research. Dr Tracy A Dennis created the app Personal Zen as a way to reduce anxiety and stress, which puts well-established strategies to tackle these issues into the palm of your hand.
Personal Zen – which offers a variety of games in several different environments – was named the third best health app of 2014 by CNN Health and has received several positive reviews from industry experts. The team behind the app are planning to develop apps that support those who suffer from depression and addiction.
Other apps have already tried to explore issues of depression. One of these is Depression Quest, which is all about increasing awareness.
Depression Quest attempts to reflect the experience of depression to its users, so they can better understand those who suffer from the condition. It uses pictures, static, questions and story to try to represent what depression is like. Not all the reviewers are positive, but it’s certainly an idea that could help a lot of people.
SuperBetter is an app that attempts to offer the full package, aiming to help build up our core strengths of mental, physical, emotional and social wellbeing. The game asks you to set yourself big life challenges as well as smaller targets to help you along the way. These small achievements can help you stop the ‘bad guys’ of the game – those being your emotionally stressful experiences.
On a less drastic level, Lumosity aims to improve your “core brain abilities – and empower users to live better, brighter lives.” Luminosity is reminiscent of Nintendo’s Brain Training games for the DS, offering a series of mini-games to help strengthen your remembering capability and attention span.
There’s a game in development that attempts to educate children about mental health too – the excellent MindLight from The PlayNice Institute. Turning on the lights is one of the aims of the game, as is overcoming your fears and saving your nan. You won’t be able to play this one on your phone (it requires a headset), but it’s a truly wonderful idea and a great example of how games can help make the world a better place.
Fitness
Fitness is an on-going struggle for a lot of us. There’s hardly a shortage of fitness apps, though, and on a base level, they all sort-of represent gamification. Apps like Runkeeper (or Caledos Runner on the Windows Phone) help record your activities, encourage the setting of targets and allow you to compare your results with your peers’ efforts. Those are all features that you get in videogames too. However, some fitness apps take the gaming connection to the next level.
One of these that particularly excites us here at Micro Mart is Run An Empire (still in the testing phase), which reimagines your local jogging community as a Game Of Thrones-style battle for regional power.
You can claim an area by running there before anywhere else. Others can steal it back from you if you don’t run there for a while and they do. You can scout out cunning routes to get revenge. The app apparently rewards determination, not just your running speed, meaning professional athletes and the like won’t be the only ones to control your local empires.
This isn’t the first app to turn jogging into a game. There’s also Zombies, Run!, which – as you might have guessed – turns your casual runs into an apocalyptic showdown against the undead. As you activate the app, it’ll give you a mission. If you don’t move quickly, you’ll die (AKA failing the mission). There are bonuses available for collecting supplies, which can help you out of tight spots when need be. If you a) wish your life was more like Zombieland and b) would like to get in better shape, then Zombies, Run! is probably the app for you.
There’s also a fitness app offering rewards in our so-called ‘real’ lives, combining the elements of gamification with tangible treats. If ‘fantasy’ empires and zombie uprisings don’t get you off the sofa, perhaps you could try Runnit, which gives out vouchers, discounts and freebies as prizes for fitness targets that you reach.
Local Rejuvenation
Speaking of real life, there’s been a push in recent years to rejuvenate cities and towns with interactive experiences. In 2009, Volkswagen sponsored a project to turn a Stockholm subway station staircase into a working piano.
This not only livened up a dull area, it also encouraged people to use the stairs rather than the elevator. Volkswagen also made a bin that makes funny sounds when you put your rubbish in it, adding a little excitement to the world and discouraging littering at the same time. These are just two small examples of how tech can be used to make the mundane parts of life exciting and do a little good.
In July 2015, British city Bristol played host to a new digital project dubbed Hello Lamp Post. The idea was to make the city playable, to install gamification anywhere possible and liven up the city a little, and connect people in an interesting new way.
The idea came from research and design studio PAN and specifically included residents communicating with everyday street furniture like lamp posts, post boxes and bus stops.
Prior to the event, these objects were coded up to give them identity numbers. Residents could text each object’s ID number to ‘wake it up’, and then they could start a conversation with it. You would then have to answer a few questions – where you were, what you could see, and so on.
When the next person came along, they’d have a different conversation because of the answers the last person had given. As a result, little stories and opinions would filter from person to person, complete strangers connected by inanimate objects.
Compared to gamification apps and websites, the gamification of towns and cities is at a fairly early stage, then. However, given time, we could all be interacting with our local areas in new interesting ways on our phones, computers and in real life.
In Conclusion
Just to wrap things up, then: there are many ways that elements of gaming technology are being incorporated into other areas of our lives. Undoubtedly, gamification is changing the world.
Digitalised goals, targets and rewards have been brought into businesses, education and fitness, while games are also being built to help with our fitness and health on mental and physical levels. Going forward, gamification could be coming into our towns and cities too, with interactive features bringing mundane objects to life.
We imagine there’ll be more and more advancements in this field in the coming years, and we’ll be sure to keep you up to date as we hear about them. It’s far from game over on this one.