Gamification – the use of game thinking and mechanics to engage audiences – has been one of the most talked about trends in digital communications over the past two years. Used well, game techniques can be powerful tools to engage employees, customers and the public to change behaviours, develop skills and drive innovation.

First coined in the 1990s, the term has emerged in recent years as a way to describe interactive online design that plays on people's competitive instincts. It uses rewards to drive action, including virtual prizes such as points or badges; status indicators such as friend counts or leaderboards; and experience points such as achievement data and progress bars.

Using game mechanics to create incentives is nothing new. Creating competition by offering rewards and recognition is a motivational technique that's been employed for centuries – there are even examples in ancient Greek mythology. It's argued games tap directly into the cognitive and psychological predispositions of humans to engage in game-like behaviour that they find interesting, rewarding and engaging.

But for recent generations, games are big business, generating $78 billion in revenue in 2011.⁵⁴ Each week, 3 billion hours are spent playing games.

Those in their 40s and under have grown up with gaming as a common form of entertainment. Games are now mainstream and highly sophisticated; current game thinking is the product of three generations' worth of rapidly-evolving design. It's no surprise communicators are looking at how they can use the success of games to engage with audiences.

It's a technique that's rapidly gaining traction; research firm Gartner estimate 70% of the world's top 2,000 companies will have at least one gamified application by 2014.⁵⁵

Fun is central to the success of gamification – the aim is to use the mechanics that make games fun and absorbing in non-game platforms and experiences to boost participation and engagement.

At heart the technique is simple; in the movie of the same name, Mary Poppins persuades her young charges to tidy up by gamifying the chore, telling them “in every thing that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and oh, the job's a game!” The key is understanding what is fun, by looking at the things that motivate people to participate – autonomy, mastery and purpose – and incorporating these into your communications.

Gamifying participation at DevHub

Evo Media Group's DevHub enables users to create their own sites or blogs. In 2009, they found only 10% of DevHub users finished building their site, and few users spent money on any of the add-on special features.

Evo's Chief Executive, Geoff Nuval, looked to games to increase engagement, revamping the site to give users points, coins and badges for participation.⁵⁶ The relaunched site offers a step-by-step process where users progress to the next level on completion, like completing a mission in a game, in order to build their “online empire”. Users receive virtual points for adding text or photos, or sharing with friends.

DevHub uses a handful of simple game techniques – breaking a process down into achievable tasks, providing feedback and recognition, and creating additional context – which are proven to encourage greater engagement.

Since turning the process of site-building into a game, DevHub has seen the number of users completing the process of building their site rise to over 80%. In addition, more users are subscribing to paid features and the number of users keeps growing as people are interacting more frequently with the site.

Consumer loyalty: Samsung Nation

Loyalty programmes are one of the oldest forms of gamification around. They began when small shopkeepers would reward their regular shoppers with a free item or two for their continued custom. In the 1930s these tangible rewards for loyalty gave way to alternative, less tangible means of exchange with the introduction of Green Stamps. In the 1980s came the first loyalty points schemes, spearheaded by the airline industry. These broke the link between offering things of value in exchange for loyalty; while points could (theoretically) be exchanged for flights, such schemes grew in popularity because they realized the value of status and recognition to loyal users. This trend continued to evolve and in the last decade we've seen the emergence of virtual rewards, which break the link with real-world value entirely in favour of public recognition of status.

Korean electronics giant Samsung sought to bring its loyalty programme up to date with the launch of Samsung Nation,⁵⁷ which recognizes and rewards those who engage with the brand on its website and social media sites. Users earn badges for completing activities such as writing reviews, watching videos and participating in forums, rewarding users who engage, and particularly those who advocate for the brand, with higher status.

Samsung Nation has been described as the first gamified corporate website. Using game mechanics – in particular conferring status on regular users – they've turned customers into advocates on their own website and beyond, creating powerful word-of-mouth communications.

Science: FoldIt

While games are a powerful means by which people can engage with products or brands, many believe that games can be used for social good. Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, believes games are essential to the survival of our species.

She asked how we can take some of the feelings people have when they're playing games – cooperation, commitment and problem-solving – into real-world situations. Collectively, players of World of Warcraft have spent 5.93 million years solving virtual problems in the game's world. What if, asks McGonigal, people applied that same level of commitment to solving real-world problems?

A group of scientists at the University of Washington sought to find out. They created FoldIt,⁵⁸ an online puzzle in which users participate in biochemical research by folding proteins using tools provided within the game, a process that helps us to understand their structures better.

FoldIt works because it already involved game-like elements (the puzzle solving of folding proteins) as well as intrinsic rewards (the feeling you've helped improve medicine). It was a huge success – in just 10 days game players solved a problem that had stumped scientists for 15 years. Turning the work or process into a game put complex challenges and rewards into a more approachable context, using gaming behaviour to solve a seemingly intractable puzzle.

How GiffGaff turns customer service into a game

One company which is highly successful in gamifying work is GiffGaff, the fastest-growing mobile phone company in the UK. The network, whose tagline is “the mobile network run by you”, provides game rewards to its user community in order to incentivize peer-to-peer customer support and word-of-mouth marketing.⁵⁹ Points are awarded for recruiting new customers and providing helpful answers to questions.

GiffGaff uses both monetary reward – points can be converted into account credit – and recognition of status in order to encourage speedy and helpful responses to common customer queries. The results are extraordinary; in 2010 the user community provided 100,000 answers to 10,000 customer queries, with an average response time for questions of just 90 seconds.

The network employs less than 50 paid staff, relying on the user community and its growing pool of user-generated knowledge to power customer service instead. The customer loyalty this generates is remarkable; in a recent customer satisfaction survey, members rated service levels as 9 out of 10, and they had a Net Promoter Score of 73% – higher than that of both Apple and Google.

Snake Oil 2.0?

Industry researchers caution communicators to beware of overblown claims, warning that gamification is currently being driven by novelty and hype. Gartner predicts that by 2014, 80% of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives because they're badly designed.⁶⁰

Game designers, in particular, have been scathing about the adoption of game techniques by communicators and marketers, with some calling the trend “snake oil 2.0”.

Research vice president Brian Burke elaborates: “The focus is on the obvious game mechanics … rather than the more important game design elements, such as balancing competition and collaboration, or defining a meaningful game economy. Many organisations are simply counting points, slapping meaningless badges on activities and creating gamified applications that are not engaging for the audience.”

Much of this criticism is fair. Adding the ability to gain points or badges – what some call “lameification” – can be a successful tactic in the short term, but unless it's intrinstically rewarding for the player, the behaviour it drives is rarely sustainable. A spike in engagement can result from even the most rudimentary “pointsification”, but that spike will drop back to where you started if your audience realizes you've offered them nothing of value.

It's healthy to be sceptical about a technique that promises to solve a problem as complex as motivating people. Making a success of gamification means thinking beyond the buzzword and using game features to reward desired behaviour, create more intensively participative processes, track group progress and establish feedback loops that reinforce and accelerate desired outcomes.

How should communicators use gamification?

When designing game-based communications, it's essential to think about why someone would be motivated to engage or participate, and how the game can increase motivation.

Traditional thinking on motivation assumes people are driven by money and reward. But a number of studies – most notably those pulled together by Dan Pink in his book Drive⁶¹ – reach a different conclusion; people are motivated to participate in play or discretionary work by autonomy, mastery and purpose.

The future of gamification

Some argue gamification is a fad. And they might be right; adding points and badges as a means of making boring things interesting is a trend that's unlikely to succeed, or to last very long. On the other hand, incorporating game mechanics into campaigns so that those engaging with them find them more intrinsically rewarding – that's a trend that's as old as the hills, and likely to be around for good.

In a world where distinctions between work and leisure time are increasingly blurred, creating rich game experiences has enormous potential to build engagement between organizations and audiences. But for this to be successful, these need to be well designed.

As shallow engagement gives way to well-designed game-like experiences, we may well see the term (an ugly neologism) replaced with the core of the technique: designing for motivation. Gamification is not a single strategy or toolbox, but rather taking inspiration from successful game design in order to create campaigns which invite greater participation and engagement.

Biography

Sharon O'Dea (@sharonodea) is Senior Online Communications Manager at Standard Chartered, a global bank headquartered in London, where she advises on web and social media strategy. Before moving into financial services she worked in communications for a host of well-known public sector organizations, most recently the Houses of Parliament.

An early adopter, prolific blogger and longtime geek, she's been using social media in one form or another for nearly 20 years. In 2007 she was a contributing author to the Independent Guide to Facebook, a consumer-facing guide to the then-new platform.