Three Principles for Successful Gamification

 “Gamification, by definition, is about applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. Tap into people’s natural desire to compete and play, and it results in high levels of engagement.” 

—“Gamification Comes of Age,” Forbes.com

Like many in this field, I have been thinking a lot about gamification recently. What a great way to hook an audience, the market, a group of passers-by. Add a few badges and a point competition and voila! everyone wants to buy your soap. As it turns out, however, successfully gamifying an activity—that is, actually tapping into that “natural desire to compete and play”—is a little more challenging.

In an upcoming post, I’ll discuss the theory of gamification. First, however, let me address that most immediately pressing question: How do you make a non-game activity “more fun and engaging?”

Here’s what I think:

Facilitate: The game needs to aid in the process: an obvious yet surprisingly difficult concept. What is your ultimate objective? Encourage flossing, educate firefighters, sell more t-shirts: whatever it is, be very clear about what it is you want to do. Then make sure the game mechanic itself actually promotes that activity.

 Incentivize: Do not assume that people will participate just because it’s a game. Make sure that everyone involved has a reason for participating in this game. “Everyone” in this case really does mean everyone: from active players, to game facilitators to innocent bystanders. How each individual participates will vary of course; this does not mean that everyone gets a prize (see below). Instead, you want everyone to have a solid, compelling reason to be involved. Incentives can include:

• Prizes
• Cash (keep this to a minimum, but having paid facilitators may be necessary)
• Social Recognition
• Sales, or potential future sales (for example, the stores participating in the Las Vegas scavenger I discussed last week hunt received extra foot-traffic)

Reward: Because this is a game, some of your participants will probably win. However you define a winner, the prize they receive must be both desirable and appropriate to the game. While badges and points may occasionally fulfill both of these conditions, often they won’t. Selecting an activity-specific, highly motivating prize is key to successful gamification.

Here’s an example. Recently, I was asked to (theoretically) gamify a sports bar.

Facilitate

First, the objective. The bar  ultimately wants to sell more drinks. They do this by bringing customers in and keeping them there. The more enjoyable, the more fun the bar is, the more drinks the consumers will purchase. So we need a mechanic that supports this goal. Again, this one sounds like a no-brainer. How many bars use lures like bingo or trivia nights? Yes, these may be successful, and consequently help a bar’s bottom line. But is it as successful as it could be? Trivia and bingo don’t maximize the gamification factor because they do not facilitate the pursuit of the ultimate objective. We want a game mechanic that will create fun in a way that aligns with the selling of drinks—and in this case, because it is a sports bar, it should also align with the watching of sports.

Let’s create a game mechanic that enables supporters of one team to bet drinks against supporters of another team—all while watching the game played live. To simplify the identification of who supports whom (and to prevent bar fights), we enable patrons of a bar in one city to bet against patrons of a bar in another city. So if the Giants are playing the Tigers, patrons of Go Giants SportsBar in San Francisco bet against patrons of the Car City Lounge in Detroit. At the end of the game, one bar or another is going to get a lot of free drinks.

Facilitate also means keep it simple. In this case, one game facilitator in each bar, be it the bartender, a volunteer, or paid staff, uses a simple interface app on the iPad to take wagers, take payment for the drinks in advance, and distribute drinks at the end of the end of the game.

Incentivize

Patrons betting enjoy the process of feeling heightened competition and have the opportunity to get free drinks. The game facilitators are also paid in free drinks. Or simply by cash from the bar.  They may also have the opportunity to get tips. Bartenders and bar-owners not only sell more drinks during and immediately after the game, but they have an added marketing hook. If the game is fun, and people want to repeat it, they now have potential future sales.

Reward

Appropriately, the winners win drinks—drinks paid for not by the bar, but by the losers in the other bar.

What do you think? I welcome any comments and/or critiques of these principals or the example above. This is, after all, a conversation.  Again, next week, I’ll pontificate a little more around the theory of gamification. Meanwhile, if you are interested, here are two useful, and opposing points-of-view on what kind of use-value gamification promises (or doesn’t promise) us.

Jane McGonigal’s influential Ted Talk on gamification

A  post from the blog of  Self Aware Games, a California game development team