Where artificial intelligence meets gamification

Contrary to movies and popular culture, rapidly advancing technology doesn’t mean you need to start worrying about Skynet triggering Judgement Day. This just isn’t realistic. Yes, popular artificial intelligence (AI) programmes churning out essays with dubious sources, producing insta-art to predetermined criteria, and generating farcical podcasts featuring caricatures of famous people is very impressive, and for the dramatic among commentators, a precursor to us living out the plot of a science fiction dystopia, but this is categorically wrong. In fact, we’re far closer to when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov at chess than sentient machines turning on their creators when it comes to AI.

If anything, the recent upswing in what public-facing artificial intelligence programmes are capable of is actually a good thing for humanity. (Forget about your Terminators, your I-Robots and your Matrixes – the worst-case scenario for humanity as far as AI is concerned is the plot of WALL-E, where humans are helped out by robots and machine minds too much for their own good.)

Artificial intelligence is better looked at not as the seed of mankind’s unwitting doom by our attempts at playing God, but like any innovation in technology: a gift from our best and brightest that will benefit the species by widespread use. The ability to automate production processes during the industrial revolution made today’s world possible. For all its problems it’s a far safer, cleaner, more advanced, and less dangerous world than the one that existed in the 1700s. With AI in the passenger’s seat, as well as other innovative technology in the pocket, think what tomorrow’s world might look like?

What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is a collection of sciences, theories, and disciplines that are concerned with the creation of machines and computer systems that perform tasks intelligently and autonomously without requiring explicit programming. In simple terms, machines that can convey human-like capabilities. Think computer programmes that can learn through experience, recognising patterns, understanding language, and solving problems.

The development of artificial intelligence is a process of imitating human intelligence through technology. It’s the creation and application of algorithms and data executed in a dynamic computer environment to serve specific tasks. These computer programs, or machine minds, can also learn from their mistakes and improve.

A short history of artificial intelligence

The history of AI goes back to the 1940s and 1950s, but it was in the 1980s that real progress was made in creating autonomous, intelligent machines. These were able to pass the Turing test: a test of artificial intelligence based on a machine’s ability to mimic human conversation, first by playing chess, and then by learning to play video games.

At the end of the 1990s, researchers continued to push the research and development of this new technology. It was from the 2010s that AI experienced a seismic boom in progress. This was thanks to access to massive volumes of data, alongside the development of highly efficient processors that sped up the calculation of learning algorithms. In 2015, the research laboratory acquired by Google, DeepMind, developed AlphaGO, an AI specialising in the game of Go, which succeeded in beating the European and world champions of the discipline.

While we’ve been working on creating machines that can think for themselves since the beginning of the 20th century, and artificial intelligence has come a long way since its inception as a research project, the progress of AI research is still in its infancy in terms of what can, and will be achieved.

What can the combination of gamification and artificial intelligence be used for?

Gamification is the application of game mechanics and game design elements to typically less playful tasks, or what are sometimes referred to as non-gaming contexts. Think business processes, people’s jobs, corporate training, and education. If it’s something that people classically don’t want to do, or struggle with motivation for, that’s a non-gaming context.

By applying game mechanics, by which we mean points, badges, and leaderboards, among others, we can motivate engagement in users. By making something into a game, you can generally get better results out of your target audience. Be it educational to get more out of your students, for marketing to try to better connect with target customers, or based at work to improve employee performance, gamification works.

By integrating artificial intelligence into gamified content, we open up all sorts of new possibilities, and essentially eliminate a lot of the constraints of poorly planned gamification experiences that haven’t been properly executed. For getting the best out of students and employees, to delivering enormous improvements in customer satisfaction rates, AI has the potential to revolutionise gamification more than any other technological advance since mobile internet.

For the customer experience

Artificial intelligence combines the useful with the pleasant to improve the user experience (UX) on marketing and e-commerce sites. Everyone is familiar with those little windows that open when you arrive on a website page, and invite you to interact with them. These are chat boxes: computer programmes configured to perform particular tasks and provide a pre-recorded response at a particular time. Through AI, these computer programs aim to improve the user and customer experience, adding significant value to the overall customer journey.

As AI improves, the chat boxes will become more and more intuitive to human needs. Machine learning in video games has allowed programmes to repeatedly play games against themselves to learn games inside out, and then apply those learnings to demolish expert human players. By that same logic, apply more advanced machine learning programmes to the chat box function. Through its own experience, as well as information fed to it through cookies, these chat boxes will start to tailor the customer journey so that it will be as if you are interacting with a master salesperson or having your mind read. The efficiencies this will deliver in ecommerce will open up huge advantages for early adopters.

Currently, through the Drimify gamification platform, you can easily customise Product Recommendation Quizzes that ask questions and and pair a customer’s wants and needs to specific product ranges. As AI comes into the picture, and is able to automate even more of the already simple process of customising the game engine, there is potential to not just have such a quiz correspond to a single range, but potentially to integrate multiple Product Recommendation Quizzes to go right across your product range. Machine learning isn’t going to go off and teach itself to become a doctor or prove string theory, but it can be put to specific, narrow tasks, and do an excellent job within those parameters. It could well help the game creation process to make what you can achieve with a games creation platform even more efficient and even more effective.

For education through digital learning

For teaching staff, artificial intelligence and gamification are two innovative tools that allow digital learning to accompany and guide students on their learning journeys.

Currently, by gamifying a course by using something like Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ format, teachers can create an interactive learning pathway. When the narrative of such a game is well-developed, this is far more effective at engaging learners than traditional learning materials, and can be used to connect the theory and drier parts of subjects with the inherent wonder and curiosity that can make almost any subject fun and rewarding to study. This can be customised to provide students with a structured and engaging progression through specific topics, and customised Quizzes as levels or modules can serve as low-stakes assessments to measure how a student is interacting without causing the stress of a formal exam. As this format is collecting data in real time through the Drimify dashboard, it’s easy to identify where some students may need more help, and over time and at scale, allows teachers to improve their playable courses.

By incorporating artificial intelligence into education, the possibilities of this sort of gamified learning get even more exciting. Already, the Dynamic Path™ offers a low maintenance digital learning tool that frees up teachers and educators to focus on more value-adding activities, but AI can automate even more of the process. Artificial intelligence programmes may end up integrated in the Drimify dashboard to aid teachers with assessing both students and the effectiveness of a learning experience. Teachers will essentially have a digital assistant whose job and skills are perfectly crafted within the sphere of student and course improvement. It will be a teaching assistant and sounding board.

For recruitment and training

By introducing gamification and artificial intelligence into the recruitment process, companies can obtain key data and an accurate picture of a candidate’s performance and skills with far less work.

By utilising gamification in the hiring process, you can already shorten the hiring cycle significantly. By customising Quizzes, you can assess aptitude, ability, and job-specific knowledge, as well as how candidates would apply to industry-specific scenarios. This complements traditional hiring practices, but removes the reliance on sifting through CVs and in many cases, relying on value judgements and draw-out reviews. Essentially, with gamification you not only ensure you pick the right candidate, but you can pick the right candidate faster.

Throw artificial intelligence into the mix and you can make the hiring process even less labour intensive. It may well often be necessary, even with gamified hiring content doing a lot of leg work, to debate strong candidates who are hard to separate. If you can integrate machine learning into gamification, it may be able to better analyse employee performance in games, and even work as a sounding board when comparing employees. Machine learning will also operate with a personal neutrality that just isn’t possible with human recruiters. A smile, a joke, and a kind word won’t cause a machine learning AI programme to make an irrational choice. The only bias it will have is bias towards the most qualified, best performing candidate. It won’t be long before artificial intelligence programmes will be able to read CVs, and not only scan for the right words, but identify the patterns, and evidence-based writing that signify a good candidate.

The rise of artificial intelligence and gamification

Artificial intelligence has evolved significantly in recent years, and despite amazing advances in this sort of technology, the biggest possibilities are still on the horizon. Similarly, while gamification as a notion has existed for as long as mankind has, the modern discipline, or practice of gamification, and its use as a digital tool is still growing and expanding at an amazing rate.

Between the aim of gamification to boost user engagement, and the broad purposes to which artificial intelligence can be put, the convergence of these two concepts will undoubtedly revolutionise all aspects of our daily lives in years to come. It won’t be the end of days, and we’ll neither be enslaved, nor turned into batteries to power our machine overlords – artificial intelligence combined with gamification will ultimately not only make our daily lives better, but will serve to get the most out of the human race.

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