I recently served on a panel about Gamification at Cisco’s Social Media for Savvy Marketers event where the panelists debated the usefulness of the term gamification and if we are overusing the term because it’s trendy. We on the panel all knew the textbook definition, but admitted that we were not completely satisfied by it. I personally feel that I often have to follow the use of the term with a longer explanation involving a particular customer use case. Ultimately, what I describe is a user experience with a feedback mechanism based on positive behavior psychology that reinforces a desired behavior from the end user. (That was a mouthful…What did I just say?)
Caroline & other gamification panelists at Cisco’s “Social Media for Savvy Marketers”
I decided to ask my colleagues from different departments at Badgeville to share their perspectives on the topic.
My colleague Zack Bodnar tells me that instead of contemplating a concise definition of gamification, he focuses on designing an experience that positively impacts user behavior:
“For this I need a definition that guides me in the process of ideation and design, so the definition of gamification that I’ve come to rely on goes something like this: Good Gamification (because why would I worry about gamification that’s not good?) uses models from areas like psychology, loyalty design, neuroscience and game design to apply key feedback loops at the appropriate time in the appropriate context to drive user behavior.”
Zack confesses that his definition is definitely more of a mouthful than the conventional definition, but it highlights the importance of the theoretical models that must go into a good gamification design.
So, do some of us wrestle with the term gamification because we lack one word to describe various theoretical models that drive the multiple use cases in the market? For example, gamification of customer loyalty, e-learning, e-commerce, community management, compliance, performance management…the list keeps going. Badgeville’s Senior Game Designer Tony Ventrice believes it’s a matter of market immaturity:
Language is market-driven: plenty of nuanced distinctions are already available but the market isn’t educated enough to handle them. Behind closed doors, gamification vendors are using a much more complicated vocabulary and each house probably has its own way of talking about the same concepts. When will the business establish a lingua franca? Somewhere in between when the vendors figure out how to make complex ideas succinct and when the market warms up to the overall concept.
In his blog post about game mechanics, Andrzej Marczewski points to the need for more mature language:
“…as gamification matures so should the language used to describe it. It is fine to steal ideas and phrases for other disciplines, but as we abuse them they begin to lose their meaning.”
During the Cisco panel, as we were describing the various use cases of gamification, one of the panelists challenged us to consider if a feedback mechanism is always gamification. It is an important distinction. No, not every feedback mechanism is gamification. There are biological feedback mechanisms such as hiccups and muscle spasms that I would never call gamification. Feedback mechanisms are not equal to gamification, but are a method used by gamification to elicit a response.
My colleague Paul Hearing says non-game environment is the most important part of the definition:
“You’re not developing a game. As long as you understand that boundary, you begin to understand the scope and skills required to develop a gamification program—a program that increases engagement in your existing environments. It’s natural to pull from other disciplines to enhance the program; you can’t be focused on the strict definition of game mechanics alone.”
Badgeville Marketing Director Adena DeMonte says no one should design a program with the goal of “gamifying” it…
“I’ve always thought of gamification as part of the next generation of user experience. This is a natural evolution of seeing how people interact with websites and mobile applications. In the first generation of user experience online, we were excited to just view content. Then, we entered an age where we could interact with that content, adding our own images and ideas. In the modern era of computer interaction, we have numerous opportunities to create real-time, engaging, contextual experiences based on the specific things we do. Gamification is the layer of design that motivates those interactions using game mechanics. Gamification as a term may disappear, but the next generation of data-centric, contextual user experience will not.”
VP of Worldwide Marketing Chandar Pattabhiram took a similar position (to both Adena and Zack) — that regardless of the term for the industry, the key is what the industry creates:
You’re either in the business of making candles or in the business of creating light. The critical factor for gamification isn’t what it’s called but what it does. Gamification gets people to do more stuff, more often. It helps create customer advocates (who spend an average of 10x more than regular customers) and create loyal, motivated employees who have longer average tenures than other employees. If it does these things successfully, the name won’t matter.
So are we overusing the term gamification? Perhaps some people are. I think the most important question is, are we satisfied with the definition of gamification? For now, it’s the best we have in terms of what is recognized by the market. Does the definition need refining? Of course. I think this happens overtime as the market matures. What do you think? Tell us in a comment below.
(Special thanks to Adena DeMonte, Chandar Pattabhiram, Paul Hearing, Tony Ventrice and Zack Bodnar for sharing their perspectives.)