Gamification: turn any task into a fun activity

Whether for training and education or marketing, gamification is current, effective, and only going to expand into more functions and industries as the online technology that supports it improves. To gamify is to apply game elements and mechanisms to everyday tasks that we don’t consider playful to make them more fun, and as a result, improve user engagement.

Gamification was only coined as a term in 2002, but has its roots at the dawn of civilization, where ancient people would use games to train for battle, distract themselves from hardships, and broaden their understanding of various subjects. In the 20th century, war games were used as a way to help train military personnel, and the business world took note of how committed hobby athletes were to their local leagues compared to how uncommitted they could be to their day jobs, and sought to capture that idea of team spirit and competition to boost productivity. The early 2000s saw big businesses start to experiment with custom-built games for hiring, onboarding, and training staff, while commercial giants changed the marketing game with interactive campaigns that turbocharged their socials and boosted their sales.

An initial constraint of gamification in the early 2000s was accessibility – it was only the big boys that could play with it, because they were the only businesses operating at a scale where they could develop and experiment in-house. Now however, through gamification platforms like Drimify, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and educational institutions, as well as big multinational firms, have access to tried-and-tested, pre-built game engines – fully customisable to adapt to a range of business and learning objectives – to turn the boring and difficult into the engaging and exciting.

The process of creating an activity

Pretty much every transaction between people requires user engagement. One human must communicate with another to convey an idea, and if the person who they’re talking to isn’t engaged in listening, the interaction goes nowhere, and miscommunications occur and instead of a productive interaction, you’ve started a game of telephone. This applied to a teacher trying to teach their student, the same way it applied to a supervisor trying to brief their reports on a project. This is why gamification can be applied to improve every aspect of daily life, and is only limited by imagination and available technology. Already, gamification has pervaded subjects and applications as diverse as musical education, the health and fitness space, and even crypto currencies.

To create a gamified experience that really serves a purpose, that either better educates a student, better engages and incentivises a potential customer, or more effectively prepares employees in upskilling, it is important to take the time to think through and conceptualise the experience and how it’s going to work.

To do this, we have detailed all the major steps to get there:

1. Define the goal

To succeed in creating a fun activity tailored to your needs, you must first define a specific objective: do you want to find new customers? Grow your community? Recruit new employees? If you choose a specific goal, it will be easier for you to achieve it. This is the simplest step on which everything else will be built.

2. Set simple rules

Once you know why you want to create your activity, it must be structured with precise rules. Count a maximum of 3 rules to keep your game simple and easy. Remember, you’re using gamification to make something dull into a fun activity, not inventing a new sport or creating a campaign for your Dungeons & Dragons party. If your aim is educational, you don’t want to give your students something that’s more difficult to learn than the actual thing you’re trying to help them learn. Ideally, your rules should be easily summarised in a maximum of one sentence, and be easily understandable.

Obviously, if you were using a format like the Dynamic Path™ on the Drimify games creation platform to make a longer, multi-level experience, either for a gamified educational course or a marketing campaign that built up to a specific holiday, you would create several sets of rules for all the mini games or modules you include.

3. Develop your content

You will have to design gamified content that meets a double intention: to clearly make the experience fun and engaging for the player, while remaining faithful to the values and aesthetics ​​of the company, and of course, delivering the target messaging.

For some purposes, like in an educational context, learning a new language, for example, it might seem easy – just keep it all in the language they’re trying to learn, and keep the use of the learner’s native language to a minimum for exposition, but there is nuance in creating any content with a serious business or educational purpose.

The learning content (or marketing content) needs to be at a level that won’t overwhelm the target user or student. Is it basic conversational French suitable for a beginner student, for example, or is it advanced French that would fry the brain of a more advanced learner who is already conversationally fluent? If it’s from a marketing perspective for a highly technical product, is the content something the person on the street can understand, or are you tricking them into a lecture on material chemistry? Target users and target audiences, be they employees, students, or potential customers, only need to see a certain amount of the iceberg to understand what they need to understand, whether that’s enough to demonstrate value, or enough to satisfy a desired learning outcome.

4. Show creativity

To stand out from the competition, it is essential to be creative when it comes to gamification. This is the best way to attract players or motivate students, and engage them in the game you have launched. This creativity can find several means of expression: the rules of the game, the media formats you use, or even the prize system/ The more creative your content, the more you will be able to arouse surprise and curiosity in your target audience.

To gamify anything is to take a creative approach to a traditional problem, so when planning gamification projects, be ambitious, and be willing to take big swings.

5. Set up a reward system

One of the main mechanisms of games and gamification is the collecting or acquiring of a reward once a task has been successfully completed. This reward system could be integrated with a points system, with levels to complete or reach, or even bonuses to obtain.

This really is a key aspect of gamification, as the whole approach to gamifying a process into a fun activity is to deliver a fun and rewarding experience.

Use a platform like Drimify to create your next fun activity

Gamification is the modern key to user engagement. Whether it is to collect customer data, incentivise purchasing, recruit or train staff, or educate students, or anything else that requires one human being to communicate with another, gamification is how you make the humdrum and everyday into a fun, engaging activity. When an activity is fun, people retain information, and are more receptive to messaging, ideas, and conditioning.

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