What is Gamification?

Gamification is the use of game design elements or creating game-like emotions in a non-gaming environment. Gamification is widely used in marketing and getting more popular in other fields, including education. The main purpose of gamification is to increase the users' (or learners') motivation to keep on doing what they have started. From one hand, gamification has a positive impact on our activities, for example by supporting us to focus on learning. On the other hand, gamification can be seen as a method used by salespeople, whose primary objective is to keep us consuming their product and services (negative from the clients' perspective).

No matter what is the primary need for it, gamification is one of the today’s buzz words. It is trendy to talk about gamification and often this concept is mixed up with similar approaches like game-based activities or serious games. In fact, gamification is a more lightweight method, as it does not require the creation of an entire game, but using only some of the game elements. This again encourages gamification designers to create solutions where mostly points and scoreboards are used and the main emotion is generated by competition. Unfortunately, competition is engaging only for some users and although scoreboard provides feedback to users, it is mainly based on extrinsic motivation – after a certain level of points motivation disappears. In some cases, extrinsic motivators can have an opposite impact to the expected results.

In addition to extrinsic motivators that are relatively easy to implement, gamified services should support intrinsic motivation. Unfortunately,  it’s more complex to design internal motivation, as people are different and motivated by different things. Some people are not even aware of what motivates them. In games, the biggest motivation is coming from challenges. All payers like challenges simply because they enjoy testing their abilities and skills. That means gamified products or services should provide some game-like challenges. And again, creating those challenges is interesting, but complicated, because we never know what is meaningful and challenging for our users. The only possibility for finding that out is to create prototypes and test them with real people.

Finally, don’t expect that others will motivate you by gamifying your life. By expecting that, you'll end up in brainless consumerism. We can all can increase our inner motivation by loving and searching challenges and increasing our concentration abilities in order to solve challenges. At the end of the day it’s not important, how many points and badges you collected, but how joyful was your experience.

If you would like to learn more about gamification, then there is a short course offered at Tallinn University's International Winter School.

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