Objectives: the purposes of gamification

Gamification borrows principles from video games to deliver improved efficiencies and promote better engagement across multiple business and educational functions. If you haven’t heard of it, you’ll certainly recognise it, as you will likely have come into contact with this innovative practice through your own working life.

Over the course of this article, we’ll look at the main objectives of gamification. We’ll also be discussing how gamification can subsequently benefit your business, as well as some key principles to consider when implementing it.

Defining gamification

The term “gamification“ refers to taking mechanics and elements specific to games and incorporating them into various and varied fields. These are typically for educational, managerial, or marketing purposes.

The aim of gamification is ultimately to make an action or task more fun, and as such, more efficient. By doing this, you can encourage commitment and motivation within employees, students, customers, or whoever your target audience may be. This can be done by adding progress bars or awarding points for a good action in order to urge users towards desired outcomes.

The main objectives of gamification

As a means to engage audiences in marketing campaigns

Gamified experiences promote engagement by making a process, activity, or action more fun. This rewards and motivates users by appealing to their desires for competition, recognition and ultimately, their sense of accomplishment. Through gamification and the scenarios you can create within a gaming environment, players receive recognition based on improvement, or are rewarded for completing desired actions. The rewards, and the experience taken as a whole, can lead businesses to achieving their objectives.

For example, in marketing, online competitions can be organised where participants are motivated to submit personal details and play through an experience for a shot at a grand prize. Through the number of entries, the business gains more than they give. Perhaps the objective is to gain user data to augment their contacts list. Perhaps the objective is to incentivise purchasing by offering every entrant a discount code that makes them more likely to buy. If the game is appropriately marketed, and all details have been thought through in the development process, the game will have a good chance at delivering the desired outcomes and satisfying either or both of those objectives.

Improving employee performance and skills

Developing job-specific skills and boosting an employee’s performance are common gamification objectives in business.

By creating a multi-game pathway you can set employees on a virtual learning journey. The Dynamic Path™ format gives you access to every game engine available on the Drimify Gamification Platform. This means you can customise a series of Quizzes, mini-games, and video content that serve to create immersive job specific scenarios to challenge your teams. They can be used to introduce new concepts, reinforce learning points from more traditional corporate training, and allow them to apply all of the above to job-specific scenarios in a low pressure environment.

Gamification applied to corporate training allows for quick quantitative feedback on how effective employee training is proving to be. While not as serious as a formal exam, by having learners answer questions through the customised Quizzes, you can see how they’re performing in real-time in your dashboard. This allows you to make any necessary adjustments to different employees’ personal development plans.

Shortening the recruitment cycle and facilitating employee onboardings

Interactive games allow companies to dramatically modernise corporate recruitment by shortening the hiring cycle. By having candidates play through a customised Quiz, or even a series of customised Quizzes, you can quickly assess job specific knowledge, how effective they are at applying job-specific knowledge, and even aptitude. This ultimately leads to less man hours debating CVs and personal statements.

While the CV and covering letter are still essential components of testing a candidate’s ability to express and represent themselves, the game elements deliver on the objective of quantifying candidates efficiently. You can rule out a lot of applicants who fall short of applying job-specific knowledge appropriately. This means you’re only bringing the best of the field to the interview stage, and saving time.

Deeper into the process, if candidate A beat candidate B on every Quiz, while their CVs, covering letters and interviews offered little separation, you just saved time debating among your hiring panel. You came to a decision faster, and have the numbers to show you made the right one.

Engaging learners and empowering educators

What goes together better than video games and kids? From the arcades of the 80s malls to the high performing games consoles and dedicated gaming PCs of today, kids from primary school or kindergarten right up to young adulthood are, generally, into playing video games. It’s a storytelling medium as valid as books and movies. As its validity has increased, so too has the adaptation of game mechanics and gaming principles increased in acceptance as an educational tool.

By customising games, such as the Dynamic Path™, around specific learning outcomes, teachers have powerful tools to reach their students with. Making subjects like history, or even maths into a game can recalibrate a student’s relationship with learning. By moving the subject matter into a more familiar medium, and manipulating the game mechanics to make what could be delivered in a dry way fun, numerous learning objectives can be achieved.

Not only can teachers engage every member of a class with a gamifed experience, but they’re also getting feedback on how every student is engaging with the material. Through their Drimify dashboard, they can see participation rates, engagement rates, and how each student is answering each question, or interacting with proposed simulations. Whether this identifies students who need more attention, or even areas for improvement with the learning game, this is information gained at no labour cost. The engaging nature of well designed gameplay also frees up a teacher’s time to address those students who need a little more attention, or take care of other pressing matters they might not have had time for before. If your objective is to have a more efficient classroom, gamification in the form of learning games makes a compelling solution.

Best practices for implementing your gamification project

For your gamification strategy to help you achieve your objectives, and to mitigate any of the easily avoided limits of poorly planned gamification projects, the first steps in designing your games are extremely important. All initiatives and actions must be linked to the needs of your company and your market.

All demographics and types of people can be reached in one way or another by gamification, as human brains are conditioned, by evolution and upbringing, to develop through play. However, there exists nuance within that statement. From demographic to demographic, target audience to target audience, customer to customer, and employee to employee. Understanding how your users prefer to play is the crucial thing to consider when using gamification for your business if you want to achieve your objective.

Choose the right game mechanics and appropriate rewards

You should define in advance the most appropriate game mechanics to customise and rewards to offer. These are not trivial choices. The gamified experience must be tailored precisely to your requirements in order to meet your objectives. Currently, points, badges and leaderboards are considered to be the most successful reward systems, or manners of measuring progress, in a short period of time as they allow users to see how they’re faring immediately. They are also easy to understand, and will be familiar concepts to any audience.

It should be noted here that gamification must be inherently social, as this is a key aspect of successful gamification. This is easily achieved through the Drimify platform, as every game in the catalogue can be easily integrated with social media. This gives users a way to not only share their rankings and achievements, but also motivate their peers, or instil an element of FoMO (fear of missing out).

If there’s a grand prize, or even just attractive incentives like discounts or merchandise for taking part, that will motivate engagement. Similarly, gamifed apps that promote healthy behaviour or constructive behaviour (like fitness or language learning) encourage people to show off and collect kudos for putting together good habits. This works because people look at say, running a marathon or learning Latin is being hard, perhaps even impossible tasks, but seeing that this person can do it, or that person can do it, makes things look achievable. As much as anything else, this stokes people’s desire for competition.

Focus on simplicity rather than complexity

Complexity is not an ally of gamification. There is often a tendency to add as much as we can to a gamified experience, but when designing your game, fight this temptation. The old adage rings true for gamification as much as anything else: less is more. Creating a game that is simple for everyone to understand limits frustrations, keeps players involved and captivated in the experience, and just makes for a better user experience (UX).

You can still set up different levels of complexity to create competition and challenge, but the experience should always remain fun and motivating for the player.

Measuring the success of your gamification strategy

The objective of this phase is to analyse the various data sets collected over the entire period of your project. You’re essentially using KPIs to calculate return on investment (ROI), and identify areas of improvement in your ongoing gamification strategy.

You will also gain user insights that can inform other areas of your business.

Achieve all your objectives with gamification

The benefits of gamification are undeniable. However, it is important to determine which objectives you want to achieve or focus on to make your project successful and reap those benefits. There is no one predefined technique or strategy that works every time. You need to find what works best for your target audience based on your objectives, and make adjustments over time.

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