Who Cares About Gamification?

A lot of buzzwords get tossed around the Internet nowadays: engagement, community, viral, crowdsourcing, leveraging, optimization, synergy…should I keep going? Recently for me, Gamification has snuck into that list and the more and more I study, apply and research it, the more and more it shows up. It’s kind of like when you meet a person who works in your building you’ve never met before and then you see them everywhere or like the first time you notice a car model and then it’s the only one you notice for a few weeks.

Anything seems big and important when you’re engulfed in research about it and hang out in places where it’s discussed. Over that past few weeks, I’ve been making a case for Gamification to be important to you and your business here on JoeyStrawn.com. I’ve talked about the basic ideas and importance of it, introduced you to the Bartle Test and even gave you a Glossary you can refer to when dealing with Gamification, but then I got to thinking, “Who really cares about all this Gamification talk?”

Sure, it’s interesting to me because I’ve been a gamer my whole life and have been interested in what makes games fun for quite some time now, but that doesn’t mean you give two shakes of a lamb’s tail about it for your business. Let’s take a look at some reasons this “fad” is going to be around for a while and why you should start caring about it.

Experience Economy

I’m stealing the term experience economy here from Harvard Business School researchers James Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine. They believe, as I do, that most people are exhausted by the overload of choices regarding material junk and generally find greater rewards in the memories and transformations that result as the “products” of experiences in our lives. An example would be that you would garner much more lasting pleasure and happiness from the memories you receive spending a weekend skiing with your family than you would buying a nice pair a skis to use on that weekend.

Aristotle once said, “The end of labor is to gain leisure,” implying that experiences and leisure, not material goods, drive people to work and be prosperous; and that’s all well and good except that it’s historical name-dropping and can easily be disregarded as fluff. It’s a good thing that Thomas Gilovich and Leaf Van Boven got together to research whether or not that idea is true. In 2003, Gilovich and Van Boven gathered data to see the effects of material goods on happiness at different income levels. Instead of having you read the whole report, the crux of what they found can be seen in this chart:

Basically what they found is that happiness reaches a point of diminishing returns for the act of purchasing material goods as someone’s income increases, whereas experiences like going to movies, playing games, going skiing, and the like will continue to lead to increasing happiness over time. Aren’t numbers fun?

Gamification Is All About Creating Experiences For Your Customers

So experiences are awesome and make people happy. So what? Well, in business we try to make our customers happy so they will continue to pay us for things and make us happy. Gamifying aspects of your business to create those experiences  will lead to customer happiness which will lead to…..you see where I’m going with this.

So, who cares about Gamification? Apparently all your customers, even if they’re not calling it that, so sayeth the research. I’m not alone in this thinking, either. According to the Gartner Group, by 2015, 70% of all the Global 2000 (the biggest companies in the world) will be actively using gamification in their business and 50% of their innovation process will be gamified. They seem to care about Gamification too.

But Does It Work?

That, to me, is a dumb question considering the research just presented, but I get asked it all the time. There are hundreds of examples of companies using game thinking and techniques to grow empires and businesses, but I’d like to share two of my favorite examples from recently.

1. Speed Camera Lottery – In 2010, Kevin Richardson created a the Speed Camera Lottery. He leveraged game theory and mechanics to help one town in Sweeden with their speeding problem. Like many areas in the United States, Sweeden has traffic cameras that take pictures of speeders’ license plates and then tickets them for their crime. Richardson looked at this overly negative experience and decided to take means to both punish and reward people driving in the area. He called his idea The Speed Camera Lottery (follow the link for a video of it).

Richardson recommissioned a speed camera to take pictures of everyone that drove by and instead of just punishing the speeders, anyone driving under the speed limit was entered into a lottery to win the proceeds from those that were speeding. It was a brilliant design and actually won him the Fun Theory Contest being put on by Volkswagon.

The best part of the whole thing was that the speed in that area dropped by over 20% after setting up the lottery.

2. Gamified Learning – Ananth Pai lives in Minnesota. He’s an accomplished businessman and when his kids started school he decided to go back and get his Master’s in education. He began teaching in one of the elementary schools and decided he wanted to change things.

Mr. Pai eliminated the curriculum set up by the school for his third grade class. He replaced it with a game-based curriculum of his own design and gave all his students Nintendo DS’s and computer games built around learning language and math. Not only do his students enjoy coming to class because they say he “makes learning fun”, but in 18 weeks his class went from a below 3rd grade level in language and math to a mid-4th grade level and have vowed to be above a 5th grade level before the end of the year. In 18 weeks!

Gamified

So Gamification is popping up everywhere and in my opinion, that’s a very, very good thing. I know it may sound like a buzzword to some and seem like a passing trend to others, but if history, research and data are all correct, we can expect experience-based growth in the future of business and our lives. It’s already started with things like Foursquare, SCVNGR and Nike+, it’s just a matter of time before everyone else jumps on board too.

So, who cares about Gamification? I do, and I hope you will too.

If you want to get into Gamifying certain aspects of your business or you’re on a tight budget and know pulling in some game thinking and techniques will help you out, email me at joey [at] joeystrawn [dot] com and let’s talk about ways we can make that happen. If you’re still on the fence and you jut want to read more and talk about it, leave a comment with your questions and thoughts and we’ll go from there.

Thoughts?

Author: Joey Strawn     Joey Strawn on the Web Joey Strawn RSS Feed

Joey Strawn is a blogger, husband, entrepreneur, and general purveyor of awesomeness and currently blogs at JoeyStrawn.com. He is President and Chief Awesome Officer of Empty Jar Marketing in Nashville, Tenn., and works with local and national businesses to increase business using digital marketing strategies…. View full profile

This article originally appeared on Joey Strawn and has been republished with permission.

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