How to gamificate the world

Published in

DRILL

7 min readJul 23, 2018

Nowadays, it seems mandatory to know terms like User Experience, Client Experience or Customer Centric, and apply it to our business. This is not easy, if we fail we could compromise our position in the customer mind, but contract a UX designer could not be an option.

We are going to talk about one of my favorite experience tools, responsible for the rise of a 108.000 million dollars market in the world in 2017.

Video games engage hundreds of millions of people to spend time and money, repeating useless and meaningless tasks, and they even have a word for that: Farming

Video games became among the most popular entertainment media in the world[2], so we are going to learn how to improve our client’s experience by using video game’s tools.

Do play with fire… gamification

Gamification is not to transform activities into games, but to integrate game mechanic and tools in our activities, with the objective of influence people’s behaviour.

This could be used to encourage users to adopt a mobile application, employees to work better and happily, and kids to learn more while they have a good time.

The secret of the video games

If we want to understand why people spend so much time on games… in business terms: engage. We need to understand what a game mechanics and game dynamics are.

Some cheats here: If you just want to know how to integrate it in to your business, go to the last part, but you are not going to know why this magic works!

What Game Mechanics are?

These are the rules and techniques we use to engage our users. Their objective is to satisfy the people needs. People want to know what their objectives are, how close they from are reach them, or fast feedback about how they are performing. We could resume this on… serotonin :)

Points: Fast feedback

Points are one of the most used and loved mechanic. Points offer people fast rewards based on performance and completing small tasks, this allows designers to guide them into particular behaviours and habits. We could find them in the points of games when users hit an enemy, use daily and app or complete the tutorial.

Levels: Status within community

Levels are used to indicate users and community that you reached some important goals. Users get status and respect from the community. Usually are very related to engagement and participation, because they are a strong motivation for the users. We can see them in loyalty cards, martial arts belts or position names in a company.

Trophies, Badges and Unlocks: Evidence of performance

Trophies, badges and unlocks are the rewards for users for doing a specific and difficult action, creating the feeling of achievement in the user. Habitually we give trophies or gadgets to users in return for their effort, and usually its very important to make these trophies visible to the community.

Virtual Items: Feel of control

Items are an important and complicated to design mechanic. We can give the possibility of changing some points, trophies or badges for digital items like customizations, privileges, new functions and abilities… but this can create complex relationships between old and new users, impacting directly in the engagement and the adoption ratio. This is the reason why we need to consider very carefully this. Right now, the trend in games is to relegate these Items just for esthetic customizations.

Mission: Giving a pourpose

This is one of the most powerful tools we have. Missions are very related to the story and the motivations behind the entire game. They talk to users about who they are, why they are here, and what is their role in this big scene. In a game could be conquest a castle, in an app could be complete your profile, and in a business could be selling the house to get the promotion.

Challenges and achievements: More evidence of performance

Challenges and achievement are a tool to improve the users’ experience during their missions and incentive high performances. We could ask them for selling as many houses as possible, and reward them with points(money), and a trophy (employee of the month). Design challenges and achievements is funny… and clever!

Leaderboards (Individual & team): Conecting people

We have seen how to inspire users to improve their performance, to follow the “story”, and to feel engage in our “game”. But people sometimes also need to compare their achievement with other people. Leaderboards allow users to see other users’ performance, and this has an incredible effect: turn good users into professional users.

There are more mechanics like notifications, events feed… but what you need to get here is that:

Game mechanics are the tools that designers will use to guide users to have an incredible experience.

What Game Dynamics are?

Game dynamics are the big picture, the hidden elements that will create complex emotional circuits we are activating with the game mechanics.

This is why we first need to know what we want users to experience, decide if is going to be about competition around status, a collaboration to boost performance or a community looking for something, exploring the world you created or collecting interesting items that talk to users about themselves.

You must be aware that this is all about how you feel in the “game”, and this feeling has 3important actors:

The game (narrative, constraints, emotional reinforcement, progression…),
The other player,
And “I”, the player himself and his predisposition.

Not all the players can play all the games, not all the games can be played by all the players.

Some emotions we would inspire in our users:

Collaboration, Community, Friendship, Altruism
Achievement, Collection, Progress (emotional, learning…)
Status, Competition, Rewarding
Exploration, Surprise, Self-discovery, Freedom, Curiosity

And there are many others, you just need to be creative about this.

I don`t believe in “magic tables” that link mechanics and dynamics. My “general” advise is:

First design how you user will feel in each stage of the game
Next, choose the mechanics that you think will create that experience
Finally, try the game, invite future users to try it and ask them

Do they describe an experience similar to what you were looking for? They could even give you advice and ideas, the game could evolve into another thing, bigger and more interesting…

If what you have doesn’t fit, just go back to the first step, rethink about your user, the game and the experience.

How do I integrate all of these things into my business?

That’s a great question!

There are many ways to use gamification and depends a lot on your business, your position in the customer mind, etc. But there are some “general” tips that could make the 20%-80% to your business: (Use it carefully!!)

Before we start with this, it is very important for you to establish what are going to be your (SMART) goals: get more revenues, reach a better position on the internet, etc.
Now you will decide how you are going to measure your performance: X purchases per month, X views per week, etc.
If you know that your objective is and how you are going to measure how close or far you are from reaching it, you are ready to include some gamigication in your business:

If your business has “frequent users” and a physical shop like a restaurant, a supermarket or a barbershop, you could create some swift-barriers like discounts for the next purchase, give free items/experiences/rewards to the user for purchase in your store 10 times, or give you a good recommendation…
If you have an app or a webpage… you should read the entire article and create a tailed-made experience, but some advice… could be a progress bar, decrease the number of “touches” and information that users will need to give to you in order to buy/download/whatever you want them to do, and in general, make it simple.

But in general, remember that…