White Paper by Rohan Agnihotry

Today, we see a lot of hullaballoo around Gamification. Enterprises around the world have realized the power of gamification and it's widely being adopted to improve business outcomes at various levels. According to Forbes-The overall market for gamification tools, services and applications is projected to be $5.5 billion by 2018. Gartner reported that 70 Percent of Global 2000 Organizations will have at least One Gamified Application by 2014. While Gamification is certainly a powerful concept the effective implementation of game elements in a non-game context is acid test for any organization.

This whitepaper will help readers to understand gamification, game elements and benefits of gamification for the Enterprise through use case.

What is Gamification?

The term "gamification" was coined in 2002 by Nick Pelling, a British-born computer programmer and inventor. As defined by Gartner “Gamification is the use of game design and game mechanics to engage a target audience to change behaviors, learn new skills or engage in innovation.” The target audience may be customers, employees or the general public, but first and foremost, they are people with needs and desires who will respond to stimuli.

If we simplify this Gamification means use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game context. Now let's understand the definition by its components:-

Game mechanics describes use of game elements such as points, badges and leaderboards that are common to many games.

Game Design describes the journey players take with elements such as game play, play space and story line.

The goal of gamification is to motivate people to

Introduction

change behaviors or develop skills, or to drive innovation and when organization goals are aligned with players' goal, the organization achieves its goals as a consequence of players achieving their goals.

Is Play vs. Game same or different? It is important to distinguish the concept of play & game as both of them are important for doing effective gamification.

Play as described by American thinker George Santayana “Play is whatever done spontaneously and for its own sake” i.e. Play is freedom and you are free to do whatever you want under some structure which is either virtually exists or defined by the rules. While Game as defined by Tracy Fullerton & his team “A game is a closed, formal system that engages players in a structured conflict, and resolves in an unequal outcomes” i.e. Game is a path where you are free to choose a path which will lead to a meaningful outcome.

So, why GAMIFY? Gamification is near the peak of Gartner hype cycle but do we really require gamification in some serious business environment or it's just a fancy term businesses are adopting as a part of the branding strategy.

To understand it better let's take example of a company DodgeBall, which is a location based services around SMS using google maps. If a person use this app and pin a location, it broadcast your location to entire friend list. Second interesting feature that DodgeBall adds is Crushes. If a crush is within a 10 block radius of you at the time you check-in, the system will send you a message letting you know that a crush is nearby.

Now let's look at the fundamentals of Gamification and try to see where the gaps are:

Engagement gap - The app doesn't engage the user, the system is unitary and after a point of time there is no fun in the process

Choices - Limited options, you don't have many things to do in the application

No progression - tracking the previous check-ins are not available

Social - Yes, the application enable users to see your friend's activity

(Screen Shot of Dodgeball UI)

Now let's look at Foursquare the successor of DodgeBall, who used the concepts of Gamifications in the same application:-

Now look at the User Interface of both the application; the second one is much more interactive, visually appealing and simplified. Foursquare added the Game mechanics by introducing different levels of Badges and Score cards which enable users to have a lot of choices to play around with the application. Presently, Foursquare has 20 million registered users, a valuation of 600 million USD and successfully overcome challenges of companies like Facebook & Google who operate in location based market place.

The Psychology behind Gamification To understand the psychology behind Gamification, I refer to BJ Foggs Behavioral Modeling (FBM) outlining the 3 factors: - Motivation, Ability, and Trigger; that need to converge at the same time for a behavior to occur.

Motivation - the person wants to perform the behaviour (because of pleasure, pain, hope, fear, acceptance, rejection)

Ability - the person can carry out the behaviour (factors can be time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, non-routine)

Trigger - the person is triggered to do the behaviour (i.e. he is cued, reminded, asked, called to action, etc.)

In a Game design or in a Gamification scenario this theory acts as a guide to identify what stops people from performing behavior that's is expected from any activity. For example, if users are not performing a target behavior, such as taking a survey on a travel web site, the FBM helps designers see what psychological element is lacking.

Building blocks of Gamification

Till now we covered basic concepts of Gamification, need for gamification and psychology behind gamification. This section is aimed to provide building blocks of Gamification

Business Use Cases of Gamification

As gamification is increasingly getting adopted by companies of different scale and size, there are certain trends being observed:

Smaller Startup companies want their product or application gamification. The companies expect a winning solution which provides addictive experience, where players naturally want to keep playing.

Mid-sized companies invest in marketing gamification to attract potential customers and engage existing customers in brands and products.

Fortune 500s and large companies usually shift their focus on workplace gamification. Their motive is often to train employees and to cultivate a greater sense of solidarity within the internal team.

Use case on Gamification

Coca-Cola Company

My Coke Rewards is a customer loyalty marketing program for The Coca-Cola Company. Customers enter codes found on specially marked packages of Coca-Cola products on a website. Codes can also be entered "on the go" by texting them from a cell phone.

Coke used gamification as a powerful tool to change its loyalty program from a transactional activity to one that was inherently personal, social, and engaging, and would help the brand connect with new, younger consumers at scale. Presently company has 20 million lifetime members in its My Coke reward point.

Siemens Plantville

Siemens Industry, Inc. recently launched Plantville, a new online gaming platform that simulates the experience of being a plant manager. Players are faced with the challenge of maintaining the operation of their plant while trying to improve the productivity, efficiency, sustainability and overall health of their facility.

Plantville is an innovative, educational and fun way for Siemens to engage customers, employees, prospects, students and the general public while driving awareness of Siemens technologies and brand.

Gamification is being widely adopted across organization at different levels and the process is adding value but now is the time to understand and evaluate this important trend. According to the Gartner Inc. “80 percent of current gamified

applications will fail to meet business objectives primarily because of poor design”.

“The challenge facing project managers and sponsors responsible for gamification initiatives is the lack of game design talent to apply to gamification projects,” said Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner. “Poor game design is one of the key failings of many gamified applications today.”

It's advisable for the companies to first identify what exactly is the business problem and then work out on the game design rather being carried away by the fun element or engagement.

“Everybody raise your hand. Now raise it a little higher. Take that same idea and wrap it around a sales behavior, service behavior, whatever it may be, and that's the idea [of gamification] right there.” – Bob Marsh, CEO, LevelEleven

I would like to acknowledge Brunchball, for their outstanding work in this area and the Coursera course of Professor Kevin Werbach, University of Pennsylvania. They lead the game in Gamification.

Sources:-

Behavior Model.Org Coursera Gamification Lecture Bunchball.com Plantengineering.com BunchBall.com - CocaCola Forbes.com

The Gamification market is estimated to grow from $ 421.3 million in 2013 to $5.502 billion in 2018. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 67.1% from 2013 to 2018.

In the current scenario, the ‘consumer goods and retail’ vertical continues to be the largest adopter of gamification solutions. In terms of regions, North America is expected to be the biggest market, followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific.

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