Why Everyone Gets Gamification Wrong
Video Games have offered us more than just progress bars
Gamification is incredibly popular among most start-ups — by adding game mechanics to non-game products, they can drive participation, reward users for their actions and create loyalty by giving them reasons to come back for more.
It’s an effective strategy that has worked time and time again for the last decade. So what’s the issue with using it?
The problem is that when companies employ gamification, they hand-pick the worst parts of gaming — and ignore all other aspects that makes the medium great.
Videogames have revolutionized how we consume media through interaction, and for the past 40 years have acquired a life of their own. From their humble origins as moving dots on a screen, today’s modern games have complex worlds filled with lore, creative mechanics, multiplayer connectivity, music and art. In fact, many games today beat Hollywood in terms of world building, storytelling and technical mastery.
But when start-ups look to use gamification, they ignore all of those strengths in favor of something far different. They employ leveling up systems, point rewards, badges, leaderboards and achievements.
What do all of those have in common? They drive addictive behavior.
Not all applications that use these mechanics are inherently bad. Health apps have successfully implemented ‘traditional gamification’ to get users to continue engaging in healthier behavior, managing to strike a fine balance between increasing metrics and user benefit.
But most gamification has no concern for the user other than to keep people using a product even if it’s against their self-interest. In this case, users are not using your product because it is consistently useful to them — they’re using it because you’ve made it addictive.
But perhaps the biggest loss of all is that companies employing that kind of gamification miss huge creative opportunities to create better products. Instead of exploitative mechanics, they could be choosing to gamify their services with all the great things gaming has to offer: storytelling, striking visuals and sound, meaningful emotional engagement and creative interaction design.
A clear example of this is Where Thoughts Go — a VR social network I’m working on that’s being gamified with all the best things interactive media has to offer. The app is designed like a world with a full backstory, full of emotional exchanges, striking visuals, diegetic UI, creative interactions, music and many other elements that set it apart from anything else today.
It doesn’t look like an app, but functionality, it is one. It’s just shrouded in storytelling-driven design, gamified with gaming’s biggest strengths.
Video games have offered us much more than progress bars. The tech industry must understand that gamification can offer so much more than quick rushes of dopamine — and once they do, we’ll all be better for it.
Thanks for reading!
Lucas Rizzotto is an award-winning Immersive Experience Designer, Artist and Creator.
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