Use gamification to create a digital treasure hunt

A customised digital treasure hunt can as easily be used to boost employee engagement and teambuilding at your corporate events as it can to reinvigorate your online marketing operations. It also offers educators the possibility to bring numerous academic subjects to life for students to help them better engage with their learning.

Such an experience is an example of gamification – the application of game mechanics and video game design elements to tasks and processes that are typically less playful. Think marketing, education and training, or any sector or business function where audience engagement is at a premium, or user motivation can be found wanting. Gamification has gone from something being coined in 2002, to literally improving every aspect of our lives. Look at all the numerous health and lifestyle apps using gamification techniques to motivate the right behaviours, and the application of game mechanics to popular language learning apps and fitness apps, and even commercial games designed to deliver musical tuition.

You make something into a game, or you find a way to add an element of challenge or competition to it, and as if by magic, everyone is coming out of their shells and giving it 110 per cent. Playing games is human nature, a natural medium by which people learn and come together, and nearly every modern member of society is at least familiar with (or highly receptive to) video game formats.

An original experience for your brand and your company

Games for marketing and corporate purposes are easily created on the Drimify games creation platform, which is designed to make game creation simple and autonomous, with numerous game engines ready for use – to be fully customised to your specific business needs. However, should you require any help, you have numerous assistance packs where you can benefit from our agency services for as much or as little help as you need.

For use in corporate premises orientation

Using a gamified digital treasure hunt has already demonstrated its value through a client’s premises orientation project. An energy supplier had just moved into its new modern site, and was looking for a connected and user-friendly solution to help its employees discover the services offered in their new work space.

With Drimify, the company was able to use the power of gamification to achieve their desired results by setting up a digital treasure hunt. For employees to complete the game, different stages had to be completed that related to areas and functions throughout the company’s new premises. For example, some stages required authorisation from a code that could be located in different places of the new building. This code then gave access to a discovery game related to the relevant part of the premises. This could also be riddles to solve, and Quizzes relating to different departments and the new work spaces available.

Each employee was then invited to complete the course and the puzzles at their own pace, according to their availability, taking them all around their new offices. Think in stark contrast to how this sort of thing would traditionally be implemented. A dry, one-off tour, lacking in detail, and then an ineffective game of telephone anytime someone needs to know where X, Y or Z was located, or where they could go for this service or that service. Such a game can also then be rolled out as part of onboarding new hires, so they’re given an autonomous way of finding their feet at their place of work. The digital treasure hunt customised to this sort of task only requires the most minor of updates to reflect departments moving or services changing, or even the addition of new offerings, like an onsite gym or barista.

Boost your online marketing strategies

Organising an online treasure hunt can also make for an excellent opportunity to interact with your customers, and be used to increase their engagement with your website or app.

Digital treasure hunts are best made using the Dynamic Path™ format on the Drimify gamification platform, which means your project can, if needed, utilise any game engine from the entire catalogue to create different levels. The creation of a treasure hunt with a succession of mini-games can be tailored to encourage your customers to browse your strategic pages and perform desired actions, such as creating an account or subscribing to a newsletter. You can use the game engines to send your customers through several pages of your site to find the answers and clues to riddles you have posed that can unlock new levels of the Dynamic Path™. When players reach the end of the experience, you can offer them an instant win competition as a reward.

Bring learning to life for your students and make it experiential

As well as marketing and team building, the digital treasure hunt format can be a profoundly effective way of either reinforcing learning for students, or introducing more fun aspects of a subject to field trips or homework assignments.

If there’s one thing you hear people say about their school days, it’s nearly always, “I should have worked harder,” but no matter how many generations go through the traditional schooling system, the older generation nearly always fails to effectively motivate the next generation to do better than they did. A significant proportion of shy kids, the less outgoing kids, or kids who get off to a bad start, still inevitably fall off the education conveyor belt before they’re supposed to, and too many go through the motions and fall short of their potential because traditional schooling just doesn’t engage them.

This is where gamified education can offer a better way. In much the same way that the energy company created a treasure hunt to run their employees around their new premises, think about how a museum could create such content to entertain and educate specific age groups around their artefacts. Think about how a school could bring a challenging but fascinating aspect of science to life for students, connecting the seemingly dry learning of the periodic table with the dream of working on a space programme.

The key to all gamified learning lies in immersion

In the same way that when people lose themselves in a good book or movie, they retain a lot of the plot, the themes and the characters, so too does the key to learning and educational games lie in immersion.

When creating gamified experiences for your students, you need to think like a storyteller. As much as you’re manipulating their desires for competition and discovery, to get to that point, you need to get them to suspend their disbelief and entertain different premises and scenarios.

As technology continues to evolve, the functionality on the immersion side will be heavily supported by increasingly accessible virtual reality. The more real the experience seems, the more effective the learning experience. For example, in sports, training is training, but game day is something else entirely – nerves, pressure, and action under duress are much more about having done something for real once than having simulated it 10 times over. Virtual reality combined with gamification will deliver experiences so real that they will essentially be the equivalent of simulated experience, probably not a million miles away from the Sparring and Agent Training Programmes in The Matrix.

Gamified treasure hunts deliver across sectors and business functions

Whether it’s for learning and training for corporate interests or educational purposes, to promote better employee collaboration through team building, or for capturing the imagination of your target customer base, the digital treasure hunt offers the gold standard in modern, accessible gamification.

The digital treasure hunt is the multi-level or module experience that users can play to numerous, predetermined ends. They give businesses and institutions multiple opportunities to deliver on key messaging and capture valuable user data for insights and analytics. Because they work on any modern web-enabled device, you have a highly versatile tool that works in people’s homes, on the move, and at physical location events.

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