What are the key features of gamification

Gamification applies game mechanics and other game elements to non-game activities or contexts in order to increase user engagement, create a sense of fulfilment, and foster customer loyalty. Gamification works by providing the user with proactive guidance and feedback through those applied game mechanics.

The design of a gamification project as part of a broader gamification strategy can be manipulated to help with a number of different objectives, across sectors and across business functions. Non-exhaustively, these include:

• Marketing purposes, by engaging users with your products and services, and incentivising them to become customers
• Education and training, by turning learning into a game, learners, or players, are more motivated, as their competitive spirit and hunger for discovery are tapped into
• Recruitment and onboarding, for shortening the hiring cycle by giving employers an extra tool to separate candidates, and encouraging new recruits to play through interactive experiences as they settle into your company

These are just some commonly applied examples of how gamification can be used, but the practice is spreading, and being used in more and more creative ways in different businesses and industries.

The game mechanics that ultimately form and dictate the nature of a player’s experience can be described as being the key features of gamification.

The game mechanics and how they work

Basically, game mechanics are the nuts and bolts of the game engine, the way participants engage with a gamified piece of content, move through levels and get instant feedback on their achievements, all to come to the intended conclusion, be that to learn something through their training or education, or to be incentivised to make a purchase or submit personal information. The elements that make up gamification work in the same way as the mechanics of traditional games that have existed since the dawn of time, with earlier attempts to gamify tasks posing more constraints, though modern gamification mimics modern video games so is far more sophisticated.

A gamification strategy is then built around different game mechanics to achieve specific objectives and generate engagement through elements that drive the action forward. The game sets an objective to be reached with a notion of competition or cooperation that will encourage potential players to participate and share their experience, particularly on social networks and the internet.

Cleverly designed gamification projects tap into brain chemistry

Gamification experiences, like video games, are designed to give us feelings of excitement and satisfaction. They do this by constantly rewarding our efforts through different mechanics, which causes us to produce dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter in the brain.

Therefore, if a person or player becomes excited while playing, the brain associates this activity with fun and pleasure, and the brain’s reward centre automatically releases dopamine. Gamblers, for example, then develop a strong urge to seek that same pleasure again and again by continuing to play. Note that competitive games tend to release the most dopamine because they are full of excitement and fast action. The mechanisms of a gamified experience, to be effective, need to be applied precisely to pull on certain psychological levers.

The 5 key mechanisms of gamification

As mentioned, these will be familiar to anyone who has ever played video games, mobile games, or has knowingly or unknowingly used gamified apps to help them in different areas of their lives.

1) Points

Points-based mechanics are easy for players to get their heads around. You receive points for making progress in a game, and get awarded different numbers of points depending on the actions completed.

What’s slightly more complex, from a game creation perspective, is how you weight a points-based system over a long-form gamified course. How do you dictate how much one level will be worth compared to another? How do you make it fair? Think about how Gryffindor whimsically gets all the points they need to just pinch the House Cup at the end of every year. From a user experience (UX) perspective, if you were in Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff, you’d be furious! The parameters upon which the Hogwarts House Cup points system works is to be avoided at all costs in your own gamified experiences.

When you customise long form learning pathways or training games through Drimify’s Dynamic Path™, you get guidance through our support materials on exactly how to weight different modules or levels, to deliver a cohesive, exciting user experience.

2) Badges

Badges are a virtual reward that can either simulate unlocking a specific achievement, or could be awarded when a player reaches a certain number of points. It acts as recognition of a player’s progress and indicates their status in the game.

3) Progress bars

Giving players some context of their progress is essential in keeping them involved in an experience. It’s ultimately easier to keep a streak going than to start from scratch, so by showing someone how far they’ve come, or how much they’ve progressed, you’re helping them make the easier, and more productive option.

4) Levels

Levels could be indicative of how many points a player has earned, or could refer to which level of the game they have progressed to. A higher level could represent experience and achievements in the individual, or it could represent new worlds to play in, and introduce variety to an experience.

When customising a Dynamic Path™, be it for marketing or training purposes, you have access to every game in the Drimify catalogue to create different levels, modules, or steps. This is key to creating a constructive and effective learning or training pathway as the variety serves to keep your user engaged in the experience, and some levels can reinforce learnings from others.

5) Leaderboards

Leaderboards stoke one of the driving forces behind all game play: competition. The competitive spirit within all human beings is one of the psychological levers you are trying to pull by enabling a leaderboard in your gamified experience.

Showing someone they are close to the top, or within striking distance of making a top 10 is hugely motivating for more competitively minded players. Including a leaderboard option is often a good idea, particularly when creating marketing games, as you’re often looking for repeatability to get target users to engage with your content as much as possible.

How gamification works

The objectives of gamifed experiences are to make things more fun, generate engagement, build audience loyalty, optimise learning and training through serious games, or collect important data on target customers.

In other words, gamification helps to embed behaviours in our brains in a fun, playful way, and helps us to find solutions to various problems. Dopamine then stimulates three major reactions:

Motivation

The energy that drives us to achieve goals, whether consciously or unconsciously. The dopamine produced by the reward system in response to play stimulates our motivation, and encourages us to complete tasks.

This is so key to so many gamified concepts. Language learning apps, activity tracking apps in the sports and fitness space, fem-tech, etc. It’s long been understood through gamification that people are far more motivated to keep a streak alive than start something new. It’s the same mechanism that encourages people to fall into the sunken cost fallacy – seeing time committed to an endeavour as justification to continue and for it to be worth something. However, while it might be a sunken cost fallacy, say, if a series of books you were reading started to rehash the same old storylines, in contrast, by continuing with any kind of learning streak or personal development streak, the user is being productive.

This is one of the great advantages of gamification, as it gives a structure to keep people motivated and on-track. It creates quantifiable accountability for users.

Repetition

Our bodies instinctively tend to repeat actions or situations that give us pleasure. With gamification, it is possible to add pleasure or satisfaction to activities that are not naturally fun, thus encouraging the brain to repeat them. This can help greatly with a number of the challenges gamification is leveraged to solve.

In training scenarios, for example, being encouraged to repeat an experience through the careful design and arrangement of game elements allows for better retention. It can almost become a case of interactively revising. Instead of running through the same chapter in a textbook again and again ad nauseum, imagine playing through a fun game, where all the details, which you need to succeed at the game, are embedded in the content. You will just gradually pick up more information and better your understanding of a topic, and because your brain is engaged in the interactive element, it’s less taxing.

Learning

The acquisition of new patterns of behaviour through practice is linked to the real and virtual rewards we receive when we perform them. Dopamine is released after performing redundant actions, which encourages our brain to perceive them as something positive.

This is especially useful in creating most marketing games. Ultimately, most of the time it’s just going to be a fun experience. A customised game of Connect 4 or Pacman that promotes certain products and services and offers a shot at a prize or reward serves the player in the moment, but can give the business, or game designer, valuable personal details and a channel through which to distribute purchasing incentives. In the case of a tailored Product Recommendation Quiz, it’s slightly different, as while this is still marketing, it’s more informative and constructive for the user.

Use gamification mechanisms in your next campaign

Applying gamification mechanisms to different areas of your business offers many benefits, both internally and externally. Gamification mechanisms in the context of a well-designed experience are intuitive for participants and, through gamification platforms like Drimify, simple to implement in a business strategy.

More and more organisations are deciding to make improving the user experience stakeholders have with them a priority, both for their employees and applicants, and with customers from a marketing perspective. The results, depending on how the key features of gamification are applied and to which challenges, are increased productivity, better employee motivation and engagement, and KPIs indicative of greater loyalty.

Want to know more?