At The Gamification Summit earlier this summer, the main question being posed by press, pundits and even the participants and sessions attendants was the same: Is Gamification for Real?
I get this question all the time from – well just about everyone: end users, executives, consultants, systems integrators, and even other analysts. I use three answers: Yes, No, and Depends. After all, I am an analyst and depends is always the right answer, right?
Let’s start with the first answer, yes.
Gamification is for real. Leveraging gaming mechanics to influence and entice behavior is something that has been around for quite some time now. Although initially called Behavioral Economics, and it studied how to influence behavior with financial consequences – like buying something, the concept gained new strength in the past 20 years or so when we found out that using gaming mechanics it was far easier to influence behavior than through manipulation and deception (the preferred methods until then). These past two decades brought about a lot of research about the discipline we call Gamification – including a few pioneers and trailblazers that applied the concept to business situations, and got decent results. That was the birth of what we today call Gamification – a term that nay three years ago did not exist or even entered the enterprise.
Second answer, no.
Gamification is defined by Wikipedia as the use of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. In that definition, and looking at implementations of Gamification we have seen so far, it is not for Real. We would love for it to be for real – to leverage gaming techniques and thinking to affect non-gaming issues – but we cannot.
We focus so much on gaming applications and gaming theory and dynamics that we forget the follow-up: how to measure and track, how to make sure that the results from the gaming applications we implement have business value. We lack the right designers and techniques and we don’t event understand the tools and frameworks. We are also missing purposefully-designed platforms, integrated data models and databases, and the infrastructure to make sure we can implement, measure, track, analyze, understand, and report on the successes that gamification provides. While the reporting and the work done with gaming applications is real and has repercussions – we are unable to track them fully for lack of infrastructure, technology and data flows to understand the business value, hot is affects the outcomes, and how to leverage the lessons learned better.
Final answer, and my favorite, it depends.
This is the answer I use most every day when people ask for an honest opinion on Gamification; all others get the above answers depending on where they are coming from and what their agendas are. I truly think that the existence of Gamification varies based on the value the inquirer wants to assign to Gamification. If someone asks me about it and their slant or bias is towards Gamification solving all their problems, being easy to do, and merely consisting of gaming application I tell them that in spite of what they might’ve heard, Gamification is not real, it is just a bunch of games to bring people to a web site but no more than that. I also say that those games are cute and fun but provide no business value whatsoever and that the occasional sale that may be sparked by accident is not a justification for Gamification. I end the “rant” with a spirited discussion on the business value that gamification can bring, and how they should be open to a different way to do it – and how in that case, it would become real.
Those that ask with a keen interest in how they can leverage core components of gaming dynamics to bring people to the site or the event, then use behavioral economics to understand the cause and effect of what they did, and end up looking for easy to measure and correlate to business KPI or strategies, then I regale them with my view of using Gamification to drive or enhance business value. We then proceed to have a discussion not of what Gamification is, but how it can become an effective tool, among others, in driving a business strategy forward and measuring the success of the business. We end discussion how implementing a good gamification strategy for an organizations results in measurable, as-intended actions with goals, objectives and results.
Your turn, what group are you in? Are you hyping gamification as a solution while looking at games? Or are you looking at Gamification as a potential tool in your arsenal to make your business better?
Well?