Gamification, its benefits and some real-life examples
Hey everyone, I welcome you all again to my blog, and today we will be looking into Gamification and its benefits including real-life use cases. It is a great opportunity for me to share this vital information here and for that reason, I would like to know your feedback and your thoughts on my content in the comment section below this article. So without much ado, I would like to delve into today's discussion topic.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is a process that describes the usage of game mechanics, principles, and elements and incorporates them with non-game contexts and everyday activities so as to enhance the engagement between the users. Gamification can be employed in areas such as voter engagement, businesses, physical activities, customer loyalty programs, and education. Basically, gamification is aimed at inspiring users to engage with the content published. It can also enhance the engagement between customer and employee which will lead to a reduction in cost and improve sales. So, in general, we say that gamification involves using game elements to lure customers or consumers for them to engage in content.
At workplaces, gamification can be introduced and in so doing, employers will be encouraged to work hard by setting goals and working towards achieving them in the near future. It can also help workers trace their performance and engage in competing with their colleagues workers which can lead to productivity at the workplace. Education is not an exclusion here, gamification can really encourage and motivate students to learn especially when there is a challenge that rewards users as they level up in the game.
Let's look at some examples of game mechanics that are being used in gamification;
Goals: this is where users are made to accomplish certain tasks and get rewarded and also earn points or badges for their accomplishment.
Education: This involves the involvement of quizzes, tricks, and tips during the process to test students and encourage them to learn more.
Status: This includes the leaderboard and when it is made clear to users, it encourages those behind to work harder to also aim at the topmost positions.
Rewards: Users are awarded and these rewards include, gift cards, coupons, and other useful rewards just to motivate users to be more serious in whatever they are doing.
Community: this involves putting users in groups so they can come together and solve a particular problem or complete certain activities or objectives.
Benefits of Gamification to Organizations
There are a lot of benefits that an organization can get from the implementation of gamification and they include the following; finding and fixing knowledge gaps, good connection with employees and promoting team building, staff trained on new technology, good learning culture, effective employee onboarding process is created, more energy is kept in training programs that are boring to attend, the learning of products become effective and fun at the same time, training process is kept in shape, and many others.
Benefits of Gamification in the Workplace
These include the following; onboarding of new employees, increasing compliance at the workplace, improving the skills of employees, helping to retrain employees, staff getting the chance to learn new software, and also employees being taught new products.
Benefits of Gamification to Corporate Training
These include the following; improving the training results of employees as they tend to have fun as they are training and this motivates them to train much better than before. Also, training routines are made interesting and fun to employees and this leads to the engagement of every individual involved in the training. Lastly, onboarding of new employees becomes easier and faster than before.
Before I draw the curtains to this post, let's look at some of the real-life gamification examples that have been successful after their launched. One of them is the Siemen. They used storytelling in teaching plant managers how t harness the and operate plants by incorporating it with a game called Plantville. In that game, the players severs as the plant manager and they have to solve problems by performing tasks to allow the running and functioning of the plant. These really got a great attention and a lot of plant managers were engaged and involved in the game.
Another real-life example of the use case of gamification in education is the Duolingo game. This game allow players to perform daily tasks and and it rewards its users with points in order to level up in the game. Furthermore, Nike+ Run Club is a mobile application that allows users to engage in fitness routine and through the implementation of leaderboards and winning of badges and trophies, participants took it serious and the engagement was good which help trainers to check on their personal improvements everyday.
Lastly, let's look at the Swedish Speed Camera Lottery application. So this app was developed to help in tracking the speed of drivers to ensure they drive at a minimum speed. Anyone that is found driving over the speed limit of the application pays fine to the speed laws. This really helped a lot as drivers were now scared of paying fine all the time so they have to cooperate and drive at slow speed, especially in Stockholm's where the speed ranges from 32 to 25km per hour.
Conclusion
With all the benefits that gamification provides, it also come along with risks such as the game becoming so addictive to users to the extend that it diversifies their attention from their work and only concentrates on playing to earn from the game, thereby consuming more time in playing games other than doing their work. Lastly, the selection of the right mechanics and metrics is sometimes challenging to do because you have to make sure that what you are bringing on board, will be in line with what the consumers or customers like.
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