Video Games have gone from being a geeky past time to a multibillion dollar mainstream industry with revenues that surpass Hollywood’s.
The term gamification was coined by Nick Pelling in March 2004 for his gamification consultancy startup Conundra Ltd.
Gamification is the use of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. It encourages people to learn, adopt or utilize processes and tasks in a game-like environment that reflects the non-virtual space by taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to play.
In order to boost engagement, fight boredom while working with repetitive tasks while making processes more user friendly and generate a positive feedback loop (based on rewards), companies are adopting techniques and the logic that govern video games.
If you work for a Fortune 500, there’s a fairly high chance that you’ve run into gamified processes, trainings or perks such as:
- Badges for achieving milestones
- Virtual Currency
- Leaderboards
- Simulators now being deployed as actual tools
- Corporate trainings in the form of board or other type of games
Another successful case is business software vendor SAP AG. Recently, a virtual game that represented a whole plant as a perspective game (just like Simcity) with the only difference that actions in the game have real implications outside of the virt-world. What happens in the game, is also happening in real life, in real time, with real consequences.
If you want to know more about gamification, here’s a TED Talk by Jane McGonigal:
Article by Fernando
The guy in charge of this blog - husband, Psychologist, former Manager, Blogger, Job Coach, Recruiter and Information Junkie. Yes, I am all that.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Twitter: SarviSolutions
August 26, 2012 at 12:32 pm
Nice post, Fernando. I wasn’t aware of the term “gamification”even being a gamer myself. First of all thanks for increasing my GK. Secondly, I really liked the way you explained the difficult process of gamification. I’ve been through this process although never found it so simplified as you explained.
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Twitter: ftarnogol
August 27, 2012 at 10:10 am
You are welcome; and thank you :)
Boredom is the number 1 problem of each and every employee in a company. Yet, some company management disregard this factor. Actually, some of them even ban social networking sites in their network because they find it as a distraction to their employees. The implementation of this might be helpful in a corporate set-up.
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Twitter: ftarnogol
August 27, 2012 at 10:10 am
Hey Christian,
Yup, a receding trend nonetheless. Hopefully within the next few years, companies will realize that distractions, when used responsibly, are not necessarily a bad thing