A lot of people have been trying to sell the idea of gamification as a way of using the power of games to get people to do things.
This is not a good approach.
People will sell you on their consulting services that promise higher engagement/effectiveness by adding points and badges and other “game-like” things to your product. They will work for a very small percentage of your users for a short amount of time. And that’s it.
If you want to harness what make games powerful, it’s not points and badges and achievements.
Games are about playing. Trying things out in a high-feedback, low-risk, no-stakes environment. By “high-feedback”, I mean that in games, you can wildly amplify the reward you give someone for any kind of success, or make it very, very clear when someone does something you don’t want. That’s the sort of 1st level of properly using the mechanics of games.
The higher level is that you can “re-skin” experiences in transformative ways that create new meaning. I worked on a therapy game where players had to move objects from one place to another. In traditional therapy, they’d move boxes on tables. This activity, and its difficulty, was a constant reminder to the player that they were now disabled, and simple things they’d done forever were now impossible or difficult.
We built the *same* interactions, but instead of moving boxes, you picked up little birds and put them in their nests. They’d animate, and sing, and it was a magical, Disney princess kind of moment that everyone (even gruff German doctors) found incredibly enjoyable.
It didn’t remind patients of their disability. They had fun, and they worked *much* harder, because they wanted to make the birds happy.
Games are tremendously powerful, and utilizing that power can make otherwise intensely boring or difficult experiences enjoyable and engaging. But it has almost nothing to do with points and badges. It’s not simple, it’s not fast, and it’s not cheap.
It is, however, totally worth it when you do it right. But doing it right means bringing folks on with deep, deep experience from DAY ONE in the process. This is not something you can “slap on” later, and it’s not something that some snake-oil “gamification” expert can do at all.
If you want to engage the power of games, you have to build a game development *team* from the ground up, right from the start, and it has to be a foundational part of your product.
And if you ever hear some “expert” telling you how they can give you that power fast and cheap, walk away. Don’t even wait for them to finish talking. They are *lying to you*.
Oh, and an additional thought:
Game design is a field where expertise and experience matter. A lot.
Being able to understand how to incentivize behavior, how to balance risk and reward, how to properly communicate ideas to a player, when & how to provide feedback, how to manage possibility space without exploding into unmanageable complexity… all that, on top of how to get a team of people with wildly diverse creative disciplines to all understand the core idea and work together to build it…
Yes, it’s a fun job. But it’s a complex one that has a LOT of moving parts.
A lot of entrepreneurs (and I’m speaking here from direct experience, having worked with quite a few game-related startups) think that their understanding of games, because they’ve played games, is equivalent to an experienced designer/game director.
It is not.
And most of the game-based (product) companies I’ve seen only reach out for expert help when it’s FAR too late.
If you don’t bring in game-centric expertise for a game-based product from day 1, you are dooming your product to fail. I’m serious. This is a fatal mistake, and I’ve seen company after company make it, then ask for help when they realize they’ve done it wrong, but have no money or time to make any changes. By that point, it’s *incredibly* difficult to turn things around, if it’s possible at all.
Game development is an expertise, with value. It is distinct from “playing a lot of games” and your expertise in whatever other field you’re bringing to the table. It’s often strange and counterintuitive, and while yeah, some people can figure it out, I keep seeing teams on death’s doorstep because they believed they could do it based on no experience and found out it was harder than they expected.