Constraints and limits of gamification

Over the last 20 years, as technology has advanced to realise its potential, gamification has become more and more popular. Why has it become so popular? Because motivating and engaging individuals en masse represents a challenge to businesses. Getting potential customers to pay attention to your products and services is a challenge. Getting the best performance out of your employees can be a challenge. Motivating students and learners to really connect with desired learning outcomes, in the education system and in corporate training environments, can be a challenge.

The list of business functions requiring innovative solutions goes on seemingly infinitely, but they all have a common hurdle to overcome: audience engagement. Through gamification: the application of game design principles, gaming elements and mechanics to these less playful contexts, you can foster greater engagement than traditional marketing and training materials and techniques. When you make something a game, you stoke the competitive fire within a person, you tap into their primaeval desires to discover, and to succeed.

However, some companies may find it difficult to apply gamification effectively, as there are still some constraints and limitations to the use of games that can be avoided.

Gamification must be tailored and developed to its exact needs

If gamification programmes are not well adapted to the business and the values of the company, they can potentially become counterproductive. Above all, the different gamification approaches must be relevant and consistent with the content proposed (or the nature of the campaign to be implemented) to deliver the desired efficiencies and improvements. There is no limit to creativity or theme, but it is important to have a game design that reflects your image and is consistent with your values and corporate culture.

If a gamified experience is too complicated, no one will be motivated to participate. Similarly, if a gamified experience is too simple, the players will quickly abandon it. It’s like any game. The right amount of challenge is required for it to be a productive experience. Playing chess against a grandmaster for a casual player who has a solid grasp of the rules and understands a little theory but doesn’t play very often would be demoralising. Equally, that same player playing against a child who learned the rules of chess the day before would find the latter “challenge” comedically easy. Nothing would be gained in either scenario for any player.

There is an acceptable scale of difficulty to gaming that yields a productive experience, and keeps a participant in the “engagement zone,” and when gamifying a business process, or creating a learning game for your employees or for students, this acceptable scale of difficulty must be adhered to so the project can deliver on desired outcomes. The player needs to be taken out of their comfort zone through the gaming experience, but not thrown into the metaphorical sea to see if they come up swimming. This is key to the user experience, and imperative to successful gamification.

Not everyone’s a player, and not every game will carry universal appeal

Quite simply, gamification may not be for everyone. Some people don’t necessarily like playing games. If you try to get them to do certain tasks, the experience may not suit their personality or temperament. While we talk in general terms, and appeal to the typical user, typical employee, or typical student, the human condition is a complex one, and some will need to be approached on an individual basis with individual needs.

You really need to consider the type of audience you are targeting before deciding whether gamification is right for your project or what game elements to put in place. It is important to design gameplay elements that are both effective and enjoyable for current players, but also future players. Most of the time, gamification is the right course of action, as people that don’t respond to games and play tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

Possible constraints of gamification

While gamification can solve many problems, particularly those of commitment and motivation, care must be taken to avoid creating new ones when implementing it.

Cost of gamification and the means to deliver it effectively

Applying a gamification strategy often raises the question of budget and material constraints. It’s true that without the right tools games may not deliver on their full potential. In addition to this, there are also budgetary constraints for companies that cannot invest in high-performance tools, even though a gamification project can be implemented with little money.

In truth, this constraint’s relevance has been diminished by improvements in technology and the emergence of gamification platforms like Drimify, which offer flexible pricing policies to allow companies to customise existing game engines to their exact gamification needs. The days of needing inhouse coding knowledge, or breaking the bank employing 3rd-party contractors to build a bespoke gamified experience. Such platforms have put the superpowers of effective gamification into the hands or small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), levelling that part of the playing field when it comes to matching large multinationals with bottomless pits for budgets.

The need for a reward

A gamification project must also include some kind of reward, whether material or virtual, as this will motivate the user. If there is no incentive to do something, people may not do what is expected of them. In fact, players, whether they are employees in training, or online customers, will not find it worthwhile to participate in serious games or marketing games if they do not get something in return. The simplest example of this would be a paid online competition. If there’s not a big, top tier prize to entice people to enter, why would they play?

The potential pitfall that could, in some cases, arise from this scenario is that the reward may overshadow the message of your campaign. The choice of reward system is therefore crucial to find an incentive that is big enough to keep the player engaged and motivated, but that does not take anything away from the objective of the operation. Perhaps the most startling example of this is the Pepsi fighter jet scandal, where a points promotion based on how many units of Pepsi you purchased could be exchanged like a virtual currency for real prizes: mostly Pepsi merchandise, as well as sunglasses and jackets on the upper end. However, including a Harrier Jet for a joke to give their advertising campaign some extra oomph, and advertising that at what turned out to not be an unattainable amount of points led to a lawsuit, a scandal, and a Netflix documentary.

Creating competition that gets in the way of teamwork

The psychological levers on which games and video games rely can also generate certain constraints. In business and at work, a high level of competitiveness can lead to individualism among your teams and cheating by your audience. Consider when salesmen undermine each other in the hunt for commission, and potentially even erode trust in the customer relationship by putting their own requirements first.

Overuse of gamification, leading to diluting outcomes

Overuse of gamification can also lead to the addition of unnecessary features that make it less effective and less engaging for desired audiences. In fact, many failed gamification efforts fall short because all the effort was focused on the gamification itself, and not enough on the user. If we apply these principles to education, we need to remember that the goal is to engage students in learning activities, rather than trying to get them to learn something in order to give them “badges” or “points” or “rewards.” Innovation – and gamification is innovation – is only justified by its ability to solve a problem, help a business meet certain requirements, or make things easier. Innovation for the sake of innovation serves no purpose.

Taking a 1-time approach to gamification

This one is easy to avoid.

In terms of gameplay and game design, games that seemed sophisticated at the time of their launch can seem outdated even a few years later, and this can give the audience the impression that the content is also outdated even if it is not. If you ever see a webpage that has been left dormant, it looks like the digital equivalent of an abandoned house, as different features stop being supported and links die, and the general functionality has fallen dramatically out of step. This isn’t unique to gamification – anything left to time will fall victim to it, and audiences ultimately want fresh meat.

It is therefore important to renew gamification offerings you’re sharing, and keep up to date with what the target audience is looking for. The beauty of a year-round approach to gamification when using a platform like Drimify is that you’re collecting user data in realtime, and you’re collating all sorts of useful KPIs, like engagement rate and participation rate, so one gamification project can inform the next. Whether you’re educating, training, marketing, or making processes more efficient, gamification gives you the tools to continually evolve and fine-tune your approach.

Take control of the superpowers of gamification

The added value of gamification mechanisms is tangible, provided you know how to use them wisely. Gamification can be a real asset for your company when it fits with your strategy and objectives. It is also important to listen to your users and your target audience, to make improvements and changes if necessary.

Because we are able to support and assist you at every stage of your project, Drimify has created support services to meet your different needs and objectives.

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