You've probably heard of gamification.
It's a buzzword that peaked around 2014 and has been mostly on the decline ever since.
It may surprise you then to learn that gamification is alive and well, possibly moreso than ever
even if the word itself has fallen out of fashion.
So how are these concepts still being used today, and what are some examples of their applications?
I'll keep this definition relatively short, but the general idea with gamification is
So you can think about it in terms of sales, or in terms of employee output, or just encouraging a desired result through game design.
You can think about grade school when they had sticker charts on the walls and you were given gold stars for good behavior.
Maybe you got a streak and were rewarded. That's analogue gamification in action.
But proponents of digital gamification really started to run with the idea in around 2008
when Apple's App Store was introduced, and all sorts of gamified apps started to come out.
For example, Foursquare, launched in 2009, allowed people to check in to real-world locations,
and although the badges that they earned were mostly meaningless,
it still encouraged people to build their collection and get unique streaks.
Although it may not seem like a novel thing today, FitBit introduced their app in 2011 and had a feature called Leaderboards.
What they found is that users with friends in the app would actually take on average 700 more steps per day.
That's not insignificant, and although we can't claim direct causation, my inkling is that friendly competition really did motivate those people to go the extra mile.
or quarter mile, ish, but you get the idea.
Fast forward to 2016 and one of gamification's most successful contenders was launched, Pokemon Go.
You could walk to hatch eggs, you earned items by visiting new places in the real world,
augmented reality allowed you to see pokemon anywhere in your surroundings,
and other game design concepts like avatars, quests, streaks, and team competition
are thrown into the mix in a way that addicted millions of users and made it the fastest-downloaded app to date.
So with all these successes, why has the word "gamification" fallen out of fashion?
I think it's because there were some inflated expectations about what kind of results you would get from applying game concepts to everyday activities.
In his excellent Medium article, Chris Scicluna explains his preference for the term "motivational design."
which I agree sums it up quite nicely.
He argues that after the fad dissapointed those who realized that gamifying a task wasn't as easy as it sounds,
eventually some concepts were adopted to a point that it actually solved real-world problems, which is more or less where we're at today.
Without really seeing it, a lot of the remnants of gamification are still present in a lot of the apps that we use on a day-to-day basis.
At least, the parts of gamification that actually worked.
The Starbucks app, for example, uses gold stars as rewards for loyal customers.
What they found is that this is used for almost half of all purchases in their shops.
Duolingo is a language-learning app that practically feels like a video game.
With levels, progress points, and rewards for daily check-in streaks.
Strava, a popular fitness-logging app, allows runner and cyclists to compete against each other on leaderboards for certain sections of road.
Unfortunately, this intense competition has lead to dangerous outcomes in some cases,
with some users risking unsafe speeds while trying to break into the top spot on the leaderboard.
Which brings me to my last point which is that incentivizing behavior, for example trying to beat your last mile time, can be incredibly motivating.
But because of this, we, as designers of experiences, need to be mindful of what kinds of behaviors we're trying to encourage.
Alright that's all for today, thank you so much for watching
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Until next time, farewell for now.