Social Studies on Gaming and Gamification Around the World
According to a specialised team in a UK University, people spend a massive three billion hours per week playing video games.
Lead researcher, Dr Andy Przybylski, expounds: “A game can be more fun when you get the chance to act and be like your ideal self. The attraction to playing videogames and what makes them fun is that it gives people the chance to think about a role they would ideally like to take and then get a chance to play that role.” It is human nature to combine relaxation with enjoyment and playing games is also the perfect way to unwind, beat stress and keep the brain fit and healthy. Now, it’s time to introduce gaming and gamification and how it relates.
Enter Gamification
There was a time when games were games. Work was work but around the end of the 20th Century people started seeing games as a way to increase productivity in the workplace. In 1912 the company Cracker Jack started putting toys in all their products to make sales more fun and to drive better results. In 1980 Dr Richard Bartle, a notable game designer and researcher collaborated on a project called MUD, a text based game designed for university computer networks. Recorded as the first online multi player game and the world’s oldest virtual game, the term Gamification was used.
Examples of Gamification in Business
Microsoft
Before Microsoft releases new versions of software, it needs people to test them. The goal is to find and fix bugs. In the past, Microsoft employees were invited to test new versions of software but the uptake was very low. They realised that people are generally very busy. It takes time to download the new versions, install, and run the software. When Microsoft gamified the testing of one of their new operating systems, uptake went through the roof. In a simple process, Microsoft published the names of employees on their intranet, gave people progress bars and created a leader board to show who completed the most tasks and provided the most feedback.
Bluewolf
Bluewolf, a small consulting company, wanted to encourage employees to use more social media, build their own brands and develop themselves as subject matter experts and thought leaders. Even though the company knew that a bigger social presence would generate new leads, it struggled to make people do it. To encourage participation, they started to use their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to track the blog posts people wrote, the amount of times people shared information on Facebook and Twitter, the amounts of reads, likes and comments people got. Each of these tasks would earn people points, which allowed Bluewolf to create dashboards with rankings and leaderboards. It worked! Employees became very social and not only did traffic triple to their website from social media, but they saw eight times increase in their blogger community.
DevHub
By implementing a few simple game like features into its platform, such as awarding badges (called devatars) for completing certain tasks. Forbes reports that the percentage of users who completed projects jumped from just ten percent to eighty percent.
People love playing games. Successful games such as Candy Crush Saga have millions of passionate players, who on average spend thirteen hours a week playing games. Deep inside we are all still children who crave fun, achievements and rewards.
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