Being Gamified @GamifiedIndia
Gamification, a word that Microsoft Word underlines with a red, for now, is a word that can should never stay in the red. The nexus of forces – cloud, social, mobile and data – are going through a sea of changes in the way an enterprise looks at them.
But first, what is gamification? Putting on a new lens to look at a more beautiful world? A new way of doing things? A new way of engaging with your customers, your employees, and your peers? Well, it is all of the above. And then some! At Gamified India, it is this perspective that is being put across into the minds of a big crowd of ‘future’ enthusiasts.
The session by Yu – kai Chou on Actionable Gamification started with very interesting insights. Like, “Gartner predicts 70% of Fortune 500 will use Gamification by 2014, and 80% are bound to fail because of bad design.” “So,” he asked, “Why do you have to play a game. It doesn’t solve your tax problems, nor give you money.” He then prompted the audience to wonder how could they attract people and engage with them. As is obvious, every company needs to answer this question and understand the consumer. The ROI is evident, as Yu-kai explains in his blog.
So, how do you do it? How do you get a human focused design, as opposed to a function centric one? A good solution starts with the user and his feelings to create the game elements. Yu-Kai demonstrated this in a simple fashion, through his Octalysis framework with 8 core drivers:
- Epic meaning & calling: Being a part of something bigger than yourself. After all, why do Wiki contributors spend their time to do what do they now? They understand the need to create a knowledge economy and the impact it will have in changing the world.
- Development and accomplishment: Motivating people, Leadership boards, Ebay,a nd more – beating your competition through bidding
- Empowerment of creativity and feedback: Adding value to everything you do.
- Ownership and possession: Virtual goods, My profile, My score, etc. – The more you have, the more you want.
- Social Influence & relatedness: Mentorship, Nostalgia of childhood, etc. – wanting to buy a product through your network.
- Scarcity and impatience: The grass on the other side; FB – only for Harvard Students!!
Unpredictability and curiosity: What next? - Loss and avoidance: Don’t want to lose out, though you know it will most probably happen again tomorrow – Expiry of Coupon Codes, Last date to buy, etc.
- All this can be gained through the process of:
- Discovery
- Onboarding
- Scaffolding
- Endgame
Click here to learn more on the Complete Gamification Framework by Yu – kai Chou
And this was just the beginning! The journey @gamifiedindia has taken us through is truly amazing. ‘Gamification for Preventable Blindness and the Right to Sight’ by Rajiv Vaid touched many chords and reminded us of the endless possibilities of contributing back to the society. Robert Zepeda talked of ‘Games as a Service.’ How interesting is that? Really! Then comes along Kabir, who dwells on how BYOD, Gen Y and Gamification are going to converge to create a Gamification Y platform for building civic communities – brilliant!
The audience discovered rules, choices, challenges, and progress. Observing them not as users, but as players. How do we design the player journey – Day 1; Day 20; Day 50; Day100? Further, how do you build the strategy without compromising on economics? All of this and more, had our grey cell working in overdrive!
Salt March has created a wonderful opportunity by throwing open a great new avenue to novices like us who wanted to study gamification, but didn’t know where to start. The sessions and the workshops were well planned and with a clear agenda of giving the participants something to take back, and create a better gamified journey.
3 comments
Thanks – I enjoyed reading your post 😉
Gr8 Post Anoop!!!
Yu-Kai a bigger thanks to you for a stupendous insight on gamification! 🙂
Thanks Yu-Kai .. We really came back with tons of insights.. Really appreciate the way you presented things …