Congratulations. Reading the first paragraph of this article has earned you a badge.
If this made-up award makes you feel good about yourself, then you are on your way to understanding gamification, a business trend — some would say fad — that aims to infuse otherwise mundane activities with the excitement and instant feedback of video games.
Many businesses are using these game tricks to try to get people hooked on their products and services — and it is working, thanks to smartphones and the Internet.
Buying a cup of coffee? Foursquare, the social networking app that helped popularize the gamification idea, gives people virtual badges for checking in at a local cafe or restaurant.
Conserving energy? More than 75 utilities have begun using a service from a company called Opower that awards badges to customers when they reduce their energy consumption. Customers can compare their progress with their neighbors’ and broadcast their achievements on Facebook.
“I’m not going to lie — I hate those online game apps on Facebook. I delete them,” said Brett Little, who works for an environmental nonprofit group in Grand Rapids, Mich., and has been known to share his energy-saving progress online. “This one I really enjoy.”
Of course, people and businesses have long added game elements to parts of regular life. Parents reward their children for household work with gold-star stickers. Business travelers pump their fists when they hit elite traveler status on an airline. But digital technologies such as smartphones and cheap sensors have taken the phenomenon to a new level, especially among adults. Now, game concepts such as points, badges and leader boards are so mainstream that they have become powerful motivators in many settings, even some incongruous ones. At a time when games are becoming ever more realistic, reality is becoming more gamelike.
“We have a tendency to be dismissive about games, but what we’re learning is that games in general are wonderfully powerful tools that can be applied in all sorts of serious contexts,” said Kevin Werbach, an associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who teaches a course on how businesses can use games and recently wrote a book on the subject.
The adoption of games has found particular resonance in the workplace, where games are no longer just a way to goof off.
Employers like Reed Elsevier, the publishing company, are using a Web-based game service from a company called Keas that encourages workers to stay healthy by grouping themselves into teams of six and collecting points for achieving mental and physical fitness goals. Among the challenges Keas assigns: laughing randomly for 30 seconds. The members of winning teams at Reed each get $200 gift cards.
Restaurants are using a service from a Boston startup company called Objective Logistics to rank the performances of waiters on a leader board, rewarding the good ones with plum shifts and more lucrative tables. The company plans to add “karma points” that waiters can earn for picking up shifts from colleagues or otherwise being good teammates. Doling out badges and points has its skeptics. Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says the increasing use of games is little more than a fad promoted by marketing hucksters.
“It’s a concept being invented and mastered by speakers, conference organizers and business consultants in order to provide them with a short-lived burst of success,” said Bogost, who last year wrote an essay that, in its off-color title, bluntly dismissed gamification.
Gabe Zichermann, a gamification consultant, says he likes Bogost but has a different point of view. He says making activities more like games is a “homeopathic remedy” that can engage children who might be distracted by traditional video games.
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