What is it?
You may or may not have heard about it, but chances are you have participated in ‘gamification’. With the term being coined back in 2002, gamification has since then played a growing part in our lives.
So what is it exactly..? It’s the thing that allows you to add music to your instagram story, it’s the counter on your iPhone telling you how much footsteps you’ve made compared to last week. It’s the interactive (digital) elements you are implementing into your daily routine that motivate you.
You’re ‘gamifying’ your non-game, real life.
Applying Gamification
Gamifying parts of your business or marketing can be successful and fun. It’s in our playful human nature to engage in games and as a gift, we get dopamin. Who doesn’t like dopamin?
Here are some top notch examples of gamification:
Fresh Desk is a helpdesk software platform and actively engaged their helpdesk agents by setting up a gamelike interface with achievements, daily goals, and a team scoreboard. Employees stayed engaged on the workfloor and were having fun in the process!
The Nike+ running app started implementing gamification through in-app challenges which would only be available for a limited number of time. This way users felt an urgent need to complete the tasks and compete with friends and other users of the application
And lastly, Duolingo realised that learning a whole new language can be a challenging task, so they associated language classes with game-like tasks to help users truly retain information. Gamifying the entire learning experience with points, badges, learning streaks, social functions, rewards and more, helps build momentum and motivation for users in their studies.
