The gamification of life

You probably haven’t noticed, but you’ve been played. You were played at school, when teachers gave out gold stars for good work.

The stars would be put against your name on the wall, which we’d now call a leaderboard. This encouraged competition: ten stars might have earned you a sticker or a treat, much like boosts or pickups in a computer game.

In classes based on ability rather than age, you might even have earned enough points to “level up” to a higher class.

Quests, assignments, rewards, achievement points, levelling up: these are the mechanisms that underpin video gaming. They’re also the ones used in gamification – the use of gaming mechanisms to make real-world tasks more compelling.

Gamification is one of this year’s big technology buzzwords, and some people think it’s going to go global

Gamification is one of this year’s big technology buzzwords, and some people think it’s going to go global.

Teachers could easily swap their nursery-style system for a computer-age version. Lee Sheldon, a game designer who teaches at the University of Indiana, has already done this. He awards undergraduates on his game-design course “experience points” instead of grades, and they have to “level up” from their starting grade, which is an F.

Points are earned by completing quests or projects, which can include essays and tests. As in World of Warcraft, they can also form groups to tackle “guild projects”. Sheldon told the Australian paper IT News: “The elements of the class are couched in terms they understand, terms associated with fun rather than education.”

Jesse Schell teaches game design at Carnegie Mellon University and is chief executive of Schell Games in Pittsburgh. He used Sheldon as an example in “Design Outside the Box”, his presentation at the DICE 2010 conference in Las Vegas last year.

He said: “Class attendance is up, class participation is up, homework is turned in more often and better because it’s a better structure. It’s a better system.”

As Sheldon has pointed out, gamification can also be applied in the workplace. “As the gamer generation moves into the mainstream workforce, they’re eager to apply the culture and learning techniques they bring with them from games,” he said. “It will be up to management, often of pre-gamer generations, to figure out how to educate themselves to the gamer culture, and how to speak to it effectively.”

Points for brushing teeth

If education and employment can be gamified, so can shopping, watching TV and any other form of consumption. Examples include Air Miles, loyalty cards used by supermarkets and prizes for filling in surveys.

The gamification process is so ingrained that people gamify their own lives

The gamification process is so ingrained that people gamify their own lives, even if it’s just by rewarding themselves with drinks or chocolate bars for completing self-imposed challenges such as five-mile runs.

In the final part of his talk at DICE 2010, Schell imagined a world in which everything was gamified. After looking at Facebook and Foursquare, the “poster child” for gamification, he described a typical day in the future where users earn points for everything from brushing their teeth to watching TV ads.

In this brave new world, the government would give bonus points to people who use public transport instead of driving to work, and health insurance companies would award points to people who cycle.

Getting points for cleaning your teeth may sound odd, but it could be of interest to toothbrush and toothpaste manufacturers, as well as dental insurance companies.

It isn’t hard to imagine an electric toothbrush enhanced with sensors and Wi-Fi so it knows how often and how well you brush, which transmits the data to a cloud-based control centre.

Indeed, something similar is already happening with the Wii Fit and Nike’s connected running shoes. A US company has developed the Basis Band, which looks like a wristwatch but measures your heartbeat, temperature, movements and sweat levels, all of which can be used to gamify fitness routines.

As Schell exclaimed at the end of his talk: “This stuff is coming. It’s got to come. What’s going to stop it?”

Increased involvement

The world has changed since the days when schoolteachers made leaderboards with coloured card and marker pens. First, we now carry portable devices that identify us, such as mobile phones. Second, our movements and actions can be tracked by various means, including GPS, mobile towers, Wi-Fi logins, CCTV and numberplate-recognition cameras, loyalty cards, credit cards and contactless transport passes. Third, there are vast server farms that can harvest and analyse the data trails that we generate.

Corporations and government organisations have both the means and the motives to “gamify” the way they interact with us, to increase our involvement and direct our actions.

As a result, there’s now a growing gamification industry, and many of the participants are, like Schell, looking at things such as Foursquare and Facebook (which has Facebook Places and games such as Farmville) for inspiration.

“Foursquare is a great example of gamification because it’s familiar to a lot of people,” says Brian Blau, a consumer market analyst with Gartner, the research company that’s trailblazing the area. “You ‘check in’ at a location such as Starbucks using the Foursquare application on your mobile phone and you get a point. If you check in often enough you can become the ‘mayor’, which means you’ve won, temporarily.

“Not only is there the virtual reward of becoming mayor, but sometimes there’s a physical reward, which might be a discount or free food or whatever. It’s a very simple action and the mission is very clear, so there are a lot of game mechanisms built into Foursquare. The act of checking in is falling out of favour with consumers, but that’s not to say something else won’t replace it. You have to look beyond Foursquare to see how impactful the check-in idea might be.”

Chromaroma

A smaller British example is Chromaroma, which is based on Oyster cards, the contactless payment system used for London’s transport network, and Barclays Cycle Hire accounts, used for the city’s “Boris Bikes”.

Chromaroma players earn points for using stations, and colour-coded teams can “capture” Tube stations. Mudlark, which launched Chromaroma in November, says it’s “Risk meets Foursquare, a 21st-century twist on a classic game”.

It isn’t a real-time game because it takes 24 hours to extract the data from the Transport for London database. However, a system such as this could be used for social purposes, to change commuter behaviour.

Examples might include extra points for the quickest journeys, for off-peak travel, or for using less crowded stations. Players could also be docked points if they use their car in a Congestion Zone. Mudlark boss Toby Barnes even thinks there could be competition between cities such as London, Paris, Moscow and Tokyo.

Gamifying the workplace

Work may be harder to gamify, but some interesting projects are already in progress.

Seriosity is offering an Outlook plugin called Attent, which it describes as “an easily deployable and persistent solution to address information overload in the enterprise”.

It uses a virtual currency called Serios, which staff can use to assign values to messages based on their importance. Recipients can sort their email by value and see which ones are, literally, worth reading: one with a sales idea might be worth 50 Serios, while one about coffee mugs has no value.

Attent keeps track so you can see how much you have to spend to get someone’s attention, while for management, tracking the flow of Serios shows how the company actually works. In the UK, Idea Street has been developed by the Department for Work and Pensions. DWP staff can post ideas that other staff can back with a virtual currency called DW-Peas.

Each user starts with 25,000 DW-Peas and earns 5,000 for posting a new idea, 500 for making a comment, ten for voting an idea up or down and so on. They can also buy shares in the ideas they like, and the most successful “players” appear on leaderboards.

Heading to Idea Street

In November 2010, after Idea Street had been running for a year, a study by Gartner’s Brian Burke reported that it had “generated about 1,400 ideas, of which 1,100 are currently active and 63 have gone forward to implementation”.

The study added: “So far, the DWP has invested in projects with returns totalling £21 million in benefits.” Other Government departments are now adopting the system.

Idea Street, along with similar schemes such as the “America’s Army” video-game recruiting tool and the World Bank-sponsored Evoke game, has led Gartner to predict that “by 2015, more than 50% of organisations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes.

By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon, and more than 70% of Global 2000 organisations will have at least one gamified application.”

Wanda Meloni, founder of M2 Research and one of the speakers at the Gamification Summit 2011 held in San Francisco in January, has estimated that the production of gamification projects will be worth $1.6 billion by 2015.

It’s therefore no surprise that software companies and startups are entering the market to provide gamification software and services. As well as Seriosity, these include Badgeville, Big Door Media, Bunchball, CrowdTwist and several other firms. One of these currently small players could just turn out to be the next Amazon, eBay or Google.

Game over?

Not everyone believes the gamification hype. Professor Richard Bartle, co-creator of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), the world’s first multiplayer online game, says that gamification is currently “just a marketing view: people are doing it because they want you to buy their stuff.
When people use loyalty cards to earn points, they’re not doing it because they’re loyal, they’re doing it because they’re being bribed.”

Gamification may work for a while by “giving away points that cost nothing” to naive users, said Bartle, “but if lots of companies are doing exactly the same thing, they’ll just get tired of it. The more it happens, the less effective it becomes. This is a bubble that will eventually burst.”

Although it can be used in business, said Bartle, “one of the problems with gamification is that it can detract from what you were thinking about. Your aim becomes more to get points than to do what the points are intended to get you to do. Am I only getting an email from you because you get more points that way?”

Worse still, giving rewards can actually be counter-productive. “If you have a system where people volunteer to give blood for nothing, and you try to pay them by giving them points, they may not do it any more. The points are an insult. They weren’t doing it for the points, and now it looks as though they are.”

Backlash starts

If you have a system where people volunteer to give blood for nothing, and you try to pay them by giving them points, they may not do it any more

As Bartle points out, there’s already a “gamification backlash”, which is being tracked by Jesper Juul. This links to research that shows people are demotivated by extrinsic rewards (such as points) and do their best work when the rewards are intrinsic (they like what they’re doing).

Michael Wu, principal scientist of analytics at consultants Lithium Technologies, takes a different view based on behavioural psychology.

“When people talk about gamification, they think about game mechanics, but I’m trying to understand the fundamental psychological principles that underlie them,” he said.

Wu uses BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model, which says three factors drive human action: motivation (the player wants to do something); ability (they have the resources to do it); and a trigger, or “call to action”. According to Wu, however, “having the three factors isn’t enough: you have to have them all at the same time. That’s the key.”

Wu’s point is that merely applying gamification techniques doesn’t necessarily work: you have to design the software to drive actions. Further, if you understand the motivations that drive actions, you can develop new mechanisms for gamification.

Things such as recognition and involvement can be more important than amassing points, which, as Bartle points out, works only with a type of gamer he calls “achievers”, not “altruists” (such as blood donors) or “socialisers”. I

n Lithium’s “social CRM” software, as people rise in rank and reputation, they’re granted access to more features with more power. “Because every kind of action is recorded, we can reward whatever kind of activity the brand wants,” he said. Lithium’s customers include firms such as AT&T, Best Buy and Verizon.

Can cheats prosper

There will always be people who try to “game” the system, which is what happened to social news aggregator Digg, but “it depends how sophisticated people are,” said Wu. “If people start to game our system, we’ll have to introduce new mechanisms. There’s no perfect system. It’s a race.”

Companies want to motivate their employees in a way that is more friendly

Gartner’s Brian Blau also thinks gamification is here to stay. “Richard Bartle is right that people will get used to game mechanics, but those are going to get reborn and reformulated, and designers are going to come up with new engagement techniques. If gamification goes away, what replaces it?”

Blau points out that games had an impact before gamification, in the use of computer graphics for simulation and training, for example. “In training simulations you have challenges, a goal you have to achieve, there are multiple paths you can take, timed moves forward – all those things are familiar video game techniques.

“Right now, if you look at the impact of gamification, it’s mainly in the consumer market,” Blau continued. “In the future, I think we’re going to see more companies incorporate those techniques. Companies want to motivate their employees in a way that is more friendly, and has a better interface. We all want to have fun in our daily lives, and games have been part of human life forever.”