“Gamification” — a passing fad or a phenomenon here to stay?
I will start by trying to answer the primary question, What is Gamification?
“Gamification describes the broad trend of employing game mechanics to non-game environments such as innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change,” said Brian Burke, an analyst at Gartner. Simply put, it is just about picking out features from Games which make them so very much addictive, and then using them in different other scenarios to help drive user loyalty, retention and engagement.
All of a sudden, the world has woken up to the immense potential of Gamification as can be noted from the buzz in the online world. The question though is, is Gamification, the new poster boy of the internet space, just a passing fad or a phenomenon here to stay.
Consider this, over the past few years, organizations in domains as diverse as brick and mortar retail, e-commerce, defence forces, space exploration, educational institutes, airlines and many more have used Gamification to improve user retention and brand loyalty, and yet, most of it is not explicitly visible to us.
Think of the loyalty programs of retail stores or frequent flyer programs of airlines, where as you get more and more engaged with the brand, you are rewarded with a better goody. A platinum tag on our flight luggage, or an extra 2% return on your shopping bill along with a brightly colored ‘Diamond Customer’ Card, not to add the extra bragging rights that comes along with it. All of this is Gamification, you move ahead if you attain certain milestones along your journey.
We humans are by nature competitive, and any opportunity to compete and prove ourselves is something we are bound to love. That is why games are so very addictive to us. Interestingly, the biggest market for casual games is not teenagers, but 30+ women, which proves that games are not something that only the youth enjoy, but is equally enjoyed across age groups and genders. And that is why, Gamification is something that is here to stay. It gives us a way to nurture our natural instinct to challenge others, and lets us enjoy the happiness of earning something extra by being better at something competing against our peer group.
What has changed though, and is bound to change further, is the focused approach to Gamification that organizations have now adopted, with product and strategy teams spending significant time to build in Gamification into their products. Gartner predicted that by 2015, 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes. Even though the numbers look high for now, the trend definitely points north.
Soon, every day during your morning jog, you will compare the number of calories burnt against your best buddy, travel to office earning points for how safely you drove, meet your boss who will rate you against your peers to give you the “Best performer” tag, celebrate your success with friends over lunch at your favourite restaurant, getting a “Super Customer” discount card for your loyalty, drive back to office on a cab booked from some Cab-aggregator app which will reward you with a upgraded cab for using their service, shop online for your next office party where your favourite e-commerce site will roll out a treasure hunt to help you with deals at Rupee 1, come back home to watch a cricket match where answering more questions during the game will make you a “Super fan”, and finally go back to sleep after updating your score for the number of steps walked to reach the “Perfectly Healthy” category of users.
If some of this already sounds familiar to you, VOILA, you life has been GAMIFIED.. :)
