The general and commonly accepted description of gamification is taking something is not actually a game and making it a game by applying game mechanics. The concept of gamification is becoming an important agenda of corporate companies. Naturally, this situation raises bunch of new questions: Why do companies need to gamify their businesses’ values and trainings? Could it be somehow distractive? What is missing in old fashion orientation, learning and productivity methods?
Let’s start by discussing the misconception of gaming. It is actually not what many people think. Games include certain set of goals that takes long term efforts to achieve; complex scenarios that require analytical thinking skills and lastly they require patience and follow up to level up, build and take control over things. Although, gaming can seem prejudgementally immature and an open door to run away, achieving things with a little imagination and feeling fulfilled by something does not bring a solid benefit is not as harmful as people think. Combining this motivation with the real world’s goals and values may be one of the brightest ideas of our century. For instance, think about your first day at work, powerpoint presentations you receive from your manager, jammed rectangles on slides to explain your workflow and the way things are. Isn’t it frustrating? You will probably remember nothing or the information you read becomes blurrier and blurrier day by day. Most likely what will happen is you will learn these things by asking many people afterwards while you are drowned into lots of work. In the worst case, you may not able to wholly understand the extent of your work. It is simply inefficient and frustrating. The reason why companies were looking for a way to engage their employees efficiently and permanently to the work. The answer were there: Let’s gamify our business!
Hereby, we intend to discuss the concept of gamification, how it exactly works, in what extent it can be used, what its challenges are and lastly its current and upcoming impacts. Let’s dive into this!
What Is Gamification?
We have mentioned the situation which revealed the need for gamification. To understand the concept, we should have a glance on the theory. Nick Pelling defined the term as
“Applying game-like accelerated user interface design to make electronic transactions both enjoyable and fast.” in 2002. Simply, it has a stimulating effect on users that make their experience amusing thanks to the surroundings in gamified system. In other words, gamification is the application of typical elements of game playing such as point scoring and competition to other areas of activity. There are a few key points that differentiates gamification from conventional learning and performance methods. Firstly, it is actionable. When you include someone to a story which stimulates he or she with its fiction, the person is more likely to take initiative and complete the mission in an effective way. Secondly, it is interactive. The action that you take during the game immediately causes something else and a new story comes to actuality. Being autonomous and sense of reality makes the user sincerely embrace the task. It is quite different than looking to presentations and spreadsheets. Isn’t it? Briefly, there is a big difference between staring at the screen and getting involved in a storyline. This is basically what gamification is: it involves users into a task, motivates them and eases their engagement.
What Are the Game Dynamics?
There are some certain fame dynamics to engage users and enhance the efficiency of the gamified task. Before diving into essential dynamics of the concept, let’s understand the basics first. Gamification is based on proactivity on the contrary of conventional learning methods. Incorporating the users into the task and letting them being autonomous can be described as what makes gamification successful. Based on this understanding, here are the essential dynamics of gamification.
Goals: To make the most fun of it, a game must has its goals! This goal does not ought to be a business goal; on contrary it can be something totally irrelevant. For instance, it could be finding a white rabbit or collecting treasures. What matters more than the goal itself is the journey that users experience while they are trying to reach this goals; the tasks and challenges they get through.
Status: As we have mentioned above, games are based on future goals that highly require analytical thinking and it can be very self motivating. The idea of status is quite encouraging due to the fact that it allows you to gain a higher position amongst your peers. The “level-up” mechanics can be applied in various ways, you can check your stats from leaderboards or you can be entitled with certain denotations. The point is making this progress ongoing and motivating the users with the idea of continuous status achievements.
Reward: Status mechanism can be considered as a reward as well; however there is a different between them. Rewards are more impulsive than status mechanisms. Commonly known rewards consist of badges, points and features that helps you to the next status. Rewards make the gamified learning and training environment more dynamic and they enhance self-motivation as well.
Community: This gamification functionality encourages teamwork to achieve desired outcome. Teamwork may be one of the hardest ideas which is hard to solidify in corporate environment. However, it becomes easier to work on a project together once you catch the white rabbit with your work-team. Thus it is one of the crucial and effective functionalities of gamification.
Education: The education mechanic consist of tips and trick that make users navigate easily and accomplish the task that they have been given. Education methods like quizzes can be added to gamified scenario to enrich the learning experience.
How Does Gamification Work?
Learning process is a complicated process which includes many components such as attention, perception, selection, organization and integration. As we mentioned above, it is hard to store lots of presentations in your long-term memory.
Our brains process the information with two channels: visual and auditory; thus if the given information stimulates both channels, it is more likely to keep this information in long-term memory. The reason why fashioned ways which are produced by gamification technology makes integration and organization of information easier.
By giving instant feedbacks, sudden rewards; gamification improves integration and engagement. Also the social element of gamified learning encourages brain functionality as well as social and intellectual engagement.
An ideal gamification experience appeals the user’s emotions and helps them to demonstrate it easily; creates mutual goals that enhance individual and group motivation at the same time.
How Gamification Can Help to Solve Business Challenges?
Gamification brings innovative solutions to business challenges. One of them is engagement and loyalty. Generic and static contents can bore the employees easily and no one wants to spend hours by clicking this kind of content. Game mechanics such as leaderboards, badges and experience points offer an exciting and meaningful development process for employees and enhance their loyalty and engagement this way. Gamification also allows its users to see their contribution, shared goals and achievements. This also prevents lack of engagement problem.
To sum up gamification is helping business to reduce their training costs, enhance the extent of cultural capital they hold, employee loyalty and engagement. From the perspective of employees, it provides more self-motivating and learning and development process due to the fact that a gamified environment does not dictate the values or information; it helps you to experience them in an exciting way!
YourGamify: Enkronos’s solution for your gamification needs
Your Gamify is a user friendly, step-by-step app developed by Enkronos that gives you the opportunity to build your own landing page with simple or chained competitions. All that without any prior knowledge about web pages or competitions!
With Your Gamify you can create entertaining competitions and in addition acquire new users interested in you and your products and services.
You can register freely to our Enkronos Apps and start to create your gamification from Your Gamify App.
For easier understanding you can also see some interesting Use Cases.
You can find out more about Your Gamify on www.yourgamify.com or you can check out some of the Your Gamify features we have listed here: https://content.enkronos.com/your-gamify/
Enkronos Marketing Team
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