Examples of gamification across various fields

Play is a key method of learning for human beings. Children play to learn how to be adults by playing. They learn what they’re good at through competition, learn what they enjoy through practice, and learn how to interact and play with others through the social aspects of gameplay.

While the adult world, be that in the corporate sector, the education sector, marketing, and even leisure, has for the longest time picked up the need to be taken seriously, since the early 2000s, that’s started to change in a big way. Advances in internet and mobile technology, experimentation from thought leaders and innovators in different industries, and a better general understanding of human psychology, as well as a few willing disruptors, have led to a dramatic overhaul in how we think about generating user engagement and making processes more efficient. Play, in the form of gamification, is finding itself back on menus. It’s available for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and it’s being served everywhere.

Who can use gamification?

Everyone. Gamification, which is the process of applying game mechanics and game elements to different processes to motivate users, ultimately boils down to being a highly sophisticated audience engagement tool. Who needs to engage audiences? Everyone. Do you run a customer-facing business? You need to engage your customers. Do you run a business-to-business (B2B) operation? You need to engage those other companies. Are you an educator? You need to get your students’ attention and keep them motivated throughout their learning journey. Are you a business owner? A consultant? A marketer? You get the idea. Your content, whatever it is and whoever it’s aimed at, needs to hit its target. A gamification strategy could be thought of as being a scope or laser targeting system in this regard.

For society to function, and for businesses within that society to thrive, audiences need to be engaged. Attention needs to be captured. Intrinsic motivations need to be harnessed and appropriately directed for the sake of productivity and forward progress.

Modern gamification solutions essentially mimic a lot of elements of popular video games, so are built around a highly familiar format to nearly everyone in the developed world. They can be played on modern smartphones, tablet computers, as well as laptops and desktops, making them versatile tools that can work on target audiences commuting as easily as they can bridge the gap between the office and the home office for hybrid and remote working.

Every sector can benefit from gamification and game mechanics

In this article, we’ll run through some of the fields where gamification is already being used for audience engagement with great success, alongside either an example of successful gamification, or an idea about how it could be utilised to certain aims, as jumping off points for you to develop your own gamification ideas.

Marketing and communications

Gamification is an effective digital marketing and communication tool that any brand can use to promote its products or services, increase brand awareness, and build relationships with customers and prospects to foster loyalty. By integrating game elements, brands and companies can create unique and engaging customer and user experiences that add value to their marketing campaigns, and they can put these experiences in the forms of gamified mobile apps, or content that can be interacted with more broadly through web-enabled devices.

Small and medium-sized businesses to large, international corporations are already using gamification to achieve various marketing and communication goals with great success.

To stand out at events

Gamification can be used by businesses to massively enhance the event experience for attendees, and help their stand or event space stand out amongst their competition by delivering a superior user experience.

Consider the reality of large events for attendees. Let’s say it’s an expo at one of the big international marathons, or a job fair where various businesses are looking to court soon-to-be graduates in a highly desirable field like STEM. You have a very large, captive audience physically within sight, but you will also have a lot of companies vying for attention. To labour an aphorism, they might be in some sense, fish in a barrel, but you’re not the only one standing over that barrel with a gun. Once a stand starts to draw a lot of attention, other people follow, and you can quite quickly find the day becomes a roaring success as you’re swarmed with interested people, or a depressing dud that’s cost you more than you’ve made from setting up. Gamifying your stand is one of the most effective ways of ensuring you leave having had the roaring success than the big dull dud.

Example: gamify your event to generate engagement

If you incorporate some sort of gamified app as part of your stand, you’re just so many times more likely to attract attention. For a start, people can be quite nervous at such events, and will know people will be trying to sell to them all day, so having a game can serve as an instant ice-breaker. Secondly, incorporating terminals at your stand automatically draws the eye as people walk past. “Why do they have those? What are they for?” If you have a scoreboard up at your stand too, you can automatically tap into people’s desire for competition. People see the game, and see the scoreboard, and prize or no, there’s a level of pride in being at or near the top.

For our hypothetical example, let’s say you’re retailing at a convention for a genre that’s highly collectible and can be something of a passion project for people – something they take pride in being an expert in. You could be selling collectible figurines or rare memorabilia at Comicon, or have a business selling customised sneakers at a shoe collectors event. You could build a customised quiz on the subject, and invite people to take their best shot at it for a chance at the grand prize – in our examples, maybe it’s a rare issue of a comic book, or a free pair of customised Jordans, but something that people would genuinely be excited to win. At this kind of event, knowing the most about such a subject offers a level of social currency for being the recognised expert, so as long as it was challenging enough to truly separate the experts from the casuals, people would be drawn to compete.

By customising the quiz on a game creation platform like Drimify, you can use all your own branding and company’s graphic design style, and, crucially, ask people for personal information, such as an email address through which to boost your mailing list. You could also include some extra incentives for people to opt-in to your newsletter, such as promotional codes to incentivise purchasing, or even a chance to be entered into a raffle, or offer the play of an instant win game (which you can again, design on Drimify, and distribute through email via a link or QR code for people to play on their phone).

For media and website publishers

In order to reach and engage a target audience, it is crucial for media and web publishers to constantly look for new communication channels, and to keep updating the sort of content they’re offering. Investing in gamification and game marketing can do a lot of legwork for advertising campaigns by helping to maintain and increase user engagement over time.

Depending on your objectives, unique marketing and promotional game experiences can be utilised to provide entertaining and immersive experiences for the users who make up your media or website audience, and make play part of your advertising campaign. Regardless of the media or medium, gamification allows for an increase in exposure, as more engaging campaign content is more shareable on social media.

Example: incorporate gamified content to enrich your offering

Really, gamification has been involved in publishing since long before gamification as a term was coined, and long before people consciously put together the idea of using games to bring a sports team mentality to the office.

Early forms of crossword puzzles began appearing in newspapers and publications as early as the 1800s as a way to add to the offering of news outlets – essentially enriching the content being sold to readers, or users, and adding value, and creating a habit. In the early 1900s, the modern crossword was born, and by the 1950s, people were mad for crosswords, with the trope of someone doing the crossword in your newspaper before you get to it being especially poor form in sitcoms and dramas.

With modern gamification platforms like Drimify, you can easily create not only Crossword Puzzles and Word Searches, customised to your branding and liking, but also other mini games, and even Surveys or Quizzes, to get feedback from your readers (or viewers) and strengthen that connection with your audience. This could be through an online link for your web pages, or as a QR code in your print magazine. Consider if you were reporting on a news story, for example, say a major sporting event was set to bring an estimated 1,000,000 to your country. You could customise a Photo Contest and encourage your audience to submit their best photos relating to the event in order to win a sports-themed prize.

For human resources departments

A playful framework is also increasingly used in corporate settings to motivate employees, reward good behaviour, and increase engagement at work. From gamified recruitment programmes to training and onboarding in the workplace, gamification and gaming in business can boost productivity in the long term by enhancing employee engagement and motivation

Example: recognising employee performance

Through the use of competitions in a benefits programme, companies can increase their retention rate of high performers. Employees who feel motivated to work hard will stay longer and produce better quality work than employees who do not receive any kind of recognition for their performance. The game also encourages employees to take pride in their achievements, which will result in a higher quality of output. By giving participants incentives and rewards, they will naturally go above and beyond to succeed on behalf of the company.

For training and education

Training and learning can sometimes be a complicated process. When a student or trainee is learning something new, it is easy to get bored, lose concentration, and give up. Smashing your head into a dry textbook, or getting annihilated by a boring slideshow can be demoralising. However, everyone loves to play because, as we discussed earlier, it’s human nature.

Because play is the default method to learn something, gamification is incredibly effective in keeping people engaged in education and training. Using gamification in education and training is a way of making learning not only more fun, but can also get the most out of students and employees, as they can be motivated by the challenge, and exhilarated by competitive aspects to dig deeper.

Example: adding new dimensions to language learning for high school students

Working with Drimify, a school created a series of French language quizzes for students across a range of ages. Each lesson taught had a corresponding Quiz which served as a low pressure way to ensure that students had understood the lesson. Given that subjects in schools don’t tend to change very much, and similar lessons will be taught year-on-year, these sorts of games are easy to update and improve with minimal labour.

The same school also utilised Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ format to create a longer, multi-module learning experience to accompany students through each term. These were made up of Quizzes, themed-mini games, and informative content focused on different Francophone cultures in French speaking countries. By delivering this more culturally focused side-quest, it can serve to inspire students, fire up curiosity, and make the more mechanical elements of language learning (conjugating verbs and gendering objects) seem more necessary. It’s a way of delivering the more exciting parts of the notion of learning a new language, to make the nuts and bolts parts more bearable.

The same principle could be applied to geography, to history, to literature, and even STEM subjects. A gamified learning pathway that connects users to the glorious, most interesting elements of a subject, which can motivate them through some of the less fun aspects of acquiring knowledge and developing skills.

Serving nonprofits

The nonprofit sector, like all organisations, is evolving, digitising, and diversifying. This evolution and its changes translate into the need for nonprofits to obtain more visibility and recognition in order to advance their causes and initiatives. They do this by improving the capacity for engaging users: their staff, their target audience, and their existing communities.

The nonprofit sector is not just charities, it also includes churches, branches of government, hospitals, unions, and research institutes, among others. While all these organisations will have different missions at their heart, they all need to captivate audience attention to further those missions.

Example: attracting business partners through an informative Quiz

A community customised a Quiz with Drimify to highlight entrepreneurship issues, but customised the questions and content to highlight business benefits of establishing operations in their geographical area.

With it being promoted through the right intermediaries, this Quiz-based campaign contributed to several requests from companies wishing to bring business to their area.

By highlighting certain user advantages through the content of a game, and highlighting not how the targeted other party can necessarily help you, but how your nonprofit can benefit them, you can massively increase your appeal to partner businesses.

Other nonprofit examples

The nonprofit sector is so diverse, it’s worth listing another couple of generic examples of how you can use gamification to serve your organisation.

If you’re a charity, or a nonprofit championing a particular cause, you can create gamified fundraising content. This could take the form of an educational Quiz to highlight your issue and explain why it needs your audience’s support, or could take the form of a Survey to assess your audience’s awareness or feeling regarding a particular issue. Either way, you can include a call to action (CTA) at the end of the experience that links the user to your donation page, and also asks for contact details and for people to opt-in to additional communications on your customised data collection forms.

If you were a branch of government, you could use gamified formats as a 2-way communications channel. You could create long-form learning games to educate constituents on the political process, or elements of it, such as the budget, or upcoming bills, or use customised Surveys to canvass public opinion on certain matters. Both are great methods to boost civic engagement.

A gamification solution for every sector and field of activity

Whatever your sector, field of activity, or company size, and wherever you might be in the world, there are many ways to use gamification to engage and motivate users, and many game mechanics that will meet your needs and objectives. There are also probably numerous examples of successful and innovative uses of gamification that were created to overcome challenges with similarities to your own, and countless more opportunities to use gamification in even more creative ways yet undiscovered. It’s a growing field, and one that will continue to see wild innovation as technology advances and becomes more accessible.

The most important thing is to make sure that the project and strategy you decide to implement is appropriate for your audience and your business. With so much variety in how gamification has been and can be implemented, it’s easy to get caught up in gamification for gamification’s sake. Your message and your target audience come first, gamification is the method of delivery – it’s a tool that must be customised to your needs to be effective.

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