More than 50 percent of organizations that manage "innovation processes" for problem-solving will gamify those processes by 2015, according to a report from research firm Gartner.
More and more companies have embraced gamification, or the use of game-like mechanics in non-game applications (e.g. offering points or achievements for completing tasks), in recent years, employing the approach in a variety of different settings.
Gartner says gamification can help drive engagement, change behaviors, and stimulate innovation by accelerating feedback cycles, offering clear goals and rules of play, presenting a compelling narrative, and making its tasks challenging but achievable.
The group also predicts that by 2014, gamified services for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will be as important as online services like Facebook, eBay, and Amazon. It says over 70 percent of Global 2000-ranked organizations will have at least one gamified application.
Gartner points to Idea Street, a recent innovation game created by the U.K. government's Department for Work and Pensions meant to "decentralize innovation and generate ideas" from its 120,000 members, as an example of organizations adopting gamification.
Idea Street attracted around 4,500 users who generated 1,400 ideas -- 63 of which were eventually implemented -- in the first 18 months after its introduction. Gartner also called the U.S. military's recruitment game America's Army another example of gamification intersecting with innovation.
"Enterprise architects, CIOs and IT planners must be aware of, and lead, the business trend of gamification, educate their business counterparts and collaborate in the evaluation of opportunities within the organization," says Gartner analyst Brian Burke.
"Where games traditionally model the real world, organizations must now take the opportunity for their real world to emulate games. Enterprise architects must be ready to contribute to gamification strategy formulation and should try at least one gaming exercise as part of their enterprise context planning efforts this year."
OK, before everyone jumps in with expressions of horror, it's worth noting some additional facts about this research. It's sponsored by a firm called "Gartner" that recently held a Summit on Gamification. The details of the survey can be found here: http://blogs.gartner.com/brian_burke/ but the actual paper and case study of Idea Street cost something like $95 each.
Gartner is a for profit research firm so it's very hard to judge the quality/nature of their research without further (costly) information.
I'm not saying their research was good or bad, I'm just saying it's hard to tell from their press releases.
I can see why this completely accurate assessment of Gartner's profit motives might indeed dampen our inclinations to jump in with expressions of horror.
There needs to be a new buzz-word here. As a core gamer, Gamification implies, to me, more than what the term really means to convey: using industrial organization psychology techniques to increase motivation to persist at and complete some task (be it work or purchasing a product). There is nothing inherently "game" like to these activities. Games have been utilizing well-studied psychology research to inform their designs to much success. I think other industries have picked up on the success of the game industry and are trying to incorporate those same policies.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that, and I'm looking forward to the end-result. I just wish it was called what it is: motivational psychology. Then again, that's not a catch buzz-word. =P
If the goal is to manipulate people into buying more of a product, then yeah, it's insidious. But if the purpose is to increase productivity of employees, it's a good thing. I'm speaking more to the "gamification" of the work place, not a store front.
Now, gamification of store fronts isn't all that different from the loyalty reward programs already in place. The more you shop at a single place, the more loyalty rewards you receive to that store. Gamification just converts the accumulation of loyalty rewards into something more explicit in the hopes that we build some psychological dependency to consistent gratification.
@Cedric
The gamification process applies not to individual product purchases, but to the decisions process used to determine where you will shop. If you have someone willing to spend 100 dollars on a product, you want to do what is in your power to ensure they purchase the product from your store. This is where the concept of loyalty programs came from.
A loyal customer is more than just repeat business - they are free advertising in a social network you (as a seller) don't have direct access to. By giving these loyal customers certain perks (free/discounted product promotions), you create the incentive for them to act as trustworthy advertising partners in their social network.
Gamification in the advertising space is a way to attract teenagers/young adults to your brand or store. The same product can be sold at multiple stores, so loyalty programs end up differentiating the stores. Gamification programs are simply a loyalty program tailored for people immersed in gaming culture.
You can't eloquently put ads in games, but you can certainly make a game out of your ad.
"if the purpose is to increase productivity of employees, it's a good thing."
Sorry, but with all due respect, when did we go around arguing for ways to help employers? There's already a great way to incentivise worker productivity, and it's got a great track record and sustainably scales up with the success of the innovations.
It's called higher bloody wages.
Infantalising the workplace - which is what this is - will lead to a increase in disillusion and a increase in the all important jobseeking game.
What's disturbing about these articles is that to date, nobody who isnt a self-styled gamification expert or consultant thinks it's going anywhere. Just how naked does an Emperor have to be?
Higher wages only work to a point. There was a study done in the states last year that showed once you hit ~$80k USD, money stopped being as big a motivational force. Regardless, let's be clear on something. Society isn't all that concerned with motivating the McDonald's employee, or any service industry person, to work harder. This is about people in offices that spend half their day surfing the Internet or hanging by the water cooler instead of working. Or to put it another way, it's about people that do not have a proper work ethic. If I'm paying someone for 8 hours of work a day, I expect to at least get 5-6 hours of decent work out of you, on average.
Anyone that realistically thinks you could turn the normal work day into something like a MMO raid is probably on crack. But let's actually look at what that would mean. You have a group of people that have to work together in a highly competent manner in order to meet some large objective. Gamification of the work place should never be about making work a game, it should be about studying how the social dynamic in games allows people to successfully complete a shared goal.
By dismissing this phenomenon you would willfully ignore legitimate research questions. In it's current form, yeah, it's nothing but a silly buzzword used to manipulate money out of investors. But there is something worth studying there. Our task is to cut out the legitimate research from the rest of the filth being spouted.
The Emperor isn't naked, he's just wearing clothing that is only visible in a spectrum you can't see right now. :)
Uhhh...I wonder how many people here would be happy to test the theory of getting motivated beyond $80K per year. Given that I'm aiming for a quarter of that, I know I'd love to participate in that experiment.
I honestly don't know what to say. :"Society isn't concerned with motivating McDonald's employees or service industry people to work harder." I think its fair to say thats incorrect. We are invested in a massive global experiment in making people work harder for fewer wages.
But if we're genuinely talking about 80K jobs being given to people who sit around the water cooler and talk shit all day, gamification isn't the solution, its the problem. Office jobs are full of infantalising, demoralising stupidity borne out of the managerial class's overwhelming and epoch-defining uselessness.
We are not consultants and so we can speak about the truth.
Gamification: buzzword used by oily, skanky marketing douchebags to advance the idea of dressing up crappy marketing in a third rate suit and calling it a "game".
Aren't everything from capitalistic success to psychological "payoffs" to psychiatric dopamine stroking already examples of "incentivizing"? Why do we need to paint an artificial veneer on it?
You made a profit! Here's some points!
You did an ethically comfortable thing! Here's some points!
You triggered a pleasure center in your brain! Here's some points!
Not only is that redundant, it says the same thing twice.
When your company uses gamification - it will be innovative; because most companies are still scratching their heads trying to figure out what the term means.
And I agree with Dustin above, just call it what it is: motivational psychology. Gamification is a terrible term.
oh Heidegger.... when you coined standing reserve, I didn't realise you meant this;
"Gartner says gamification can help drive engagement, change behaviors, and stimulate innovation by accelerating feedback cycles, offering clear goals and rules of play, presenting a compelling narrative, and making its tasks challenging but achievable."
All is forgiven (apart from the Nazi bit).
I for one shall resist this system of stockpiling players, protocols and groups into a closed system of meaningless achievement.
It is clear that at all times, we should distinguish between achievements and privileges...
Maybe Gartner should start encouraging gamification by offering points to companies that start gamifying their services. Wouldn't you like to have more Gartner points than Amazon?
When are we going to see the dark flip side of all this: Decrementing point totals (negative reenforcement?) Minus 2 points! No air-conditioning for a week!
If I were to take this seriously, I'd focus on the phrase 'organizations who manage innovation processes will implement gamification', to ask for clarity. Either this is talking about using gamification to encourage more customer/audience/player/user feedback, which translates to more raw materials with which use during innovation; or this is talking about actually using gamification in the innovation process itself, in which case, Dan Pink would have a clear counterpoint to make. (Laterial thinking is inhibited by either reward or punishment)
You're absolutely right. Since we work and study in a frivolous entertainment medium we definitely not care about anything less frivolous, like the managerial business culture shift away from real wages increases to "incentives"...
Buzzwords are annoying. Trends are annoying. Gamification is annoying. To equate the latest marketing fad with a monumental shift toward the end of workers' rights and wage increases is overly dramatic.
Real wages haven't gone up for thirty years, and that's not because of gamification. Why get raged about things with silly names.
Life already has a points system. It's called money. You can exchange it for some really great rewards.
But seriously, something about "innovation companies" and "gamification" just blends together the goofiness into a chunky slurry of wishy-washy hand waving and trend bandwagonism.
I think a better example of consumer valued "gamification" is Foursquare's use of Achievements and Leaderboards (no improved upon by Yelp check-ins). Not all such moves are designed to get you to pony up more money.
While the exact term is not great (bad technobabble buzzword associations), the game association of the term is valid for me from a systems design standpoint that is tied to user reward, replay and user retention.
Higher salaries are the best incentive. Higher salaries increase productivity. Life has a points system called money. Clearly then, people make a big deal about a nonproblem called CEO compensation. These employees are merely rewarded for being the highest-performing employees in their organizations. Please note the sarcasm.
Is it because CEO's receive supernatural amounts of money that they become the "highest-performing employees" ? Under this rational we should all be glad that the corruptive influence of this "motivator" is kept to a minimum, ensuring our roles in organizations are kept noble and just...
"Gartner also called the U.S. military's recruitment game America's Army another example of gamification intersecting with innovation."
Huh? America's Army is a game. Sure there is a hint of simulation underneath, but it is a game nonetheless. Can a game be gamified? Has the gamification fad sprouted Inception-like powers perhaps so this is all a game within a gamified game?
America's Army was clearly innovative. But is it an example of gamification? Why? Because it may inspire people to learn more about the army? Are the Civilization games gamification because people may be inspired to learn about history. Or God of War, mythology? The game Alone in the Dark inspired me to run out to the store and buy Danse macabre by Saint-Saens. Does that make it gamified (and perhaps therefore "fucking insidious" as per Ian?) I would seriously doubt it.
In the end, I am sure my complete disconnect with the above statement is a huge AJ-Ayer-Problem-Of-Knowledge cosmic semantic divergence from my expectation of the term as referring to "incentivizing people in non-game situations via traditional game mechanics and achievement systems" to the observed usage of describing anything and everything to do with early 21st century marketing schemes. As many have stated above there needs to be a new term (or several) to enapsulate what "Innovation Companies" among others are trying to express as they beat the hell out of that poor stupid word.
By way of protest, we should gamify the word gamification. Anyone who says it or writes it gets a -10 to all abilities until the end of their next turn and a sustained -20 to Charisma (saving throw ends). And, on the flip side, anyone who can socialize more useful and meaningful terms - such as the delineation between gamification when applied to the storefront as opposed to the workplace as Dustin mentions - gains +5 temp HP against forum flame attacks.
Gartner is a for profit research firm so it's very hard to judge the quality/nature of their research without further (costly) information.
I'm not saying their research was good or bad, I'm just saying it's hard to tell from their press releases.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that, and I'm looking forward to the end-result. I just wish it was called what it is: motivational psychology. Then again, that's not a catch buzz-word. =P
Other than it being fucking insidious, no.
But if the goal is to make the user complete some tasks and profit from it, I think it should be called Human Computation.
If the goal is to manipulate people into buying more of a product, then yeah, it's insidious. But if the purpose is to increase productivity of employees, it's a good thing. I'm speaking more to the "gamification" of the work place, not a store front.
Now, gamification of store fronts isn't all that different from the loyalty reward programs already in place. The more you shop at a single place, the more loyalty rewards you receive to that store. Gamification just converts the accumulation of loyalty rewards into something more explicit in the hopes that we build some psychological dependency to consistent gratification.
@Cedric
The gamification process applies not to individual product purchases, but to the decisions process used to determine where you will shop. If you have someone willing to spend 100 dollars on a product, you want to do what is in your power to ensure they purchase the product from your store. This is where the concept of loyalty programs came from.
A loyal customer is more than just repeat business - they are free advertising in a social network you (as a seller) don't have direct access to. By giving these loyal customers certain perks (free/discounted product promotions), you create the incentive for them to act as trustworthy advertising partners in their social network.
Gamification in the advertising space is a way to attract teenagers/young adults to your brand or store. The same product can be sold at multiple stores, so loyalty programs end up differentiating the stores. Gamification programs are simply a loyalty program tailored for people immersed in gaming culture.
You can't eloquently put ads in games, but you can certainly make a game out of your ad.
Sorry, but with all due respect, when did we go around arguing for ways to help employers? There's already a great way to incentivise worker productivity, and it's got a great track record and sustainably scales up with the success of the innovations.
It's called higher bloody wages.
Infantalising the workplace - which is what this is - will lead to a increase in disillusion and a increase in the all important jobseeking game.
What's disturbing about these articles is that to date, nobody who isnt a self-styled gamification expert or consultant thinks it's going anywhere. Just how naked does an Emperor have to be?
Higher wages only work to a point. There was a study done in the states last year that showed once you hit ~$80k USD, money stopped being as big a motivational force. Regardless, let's be clear on something. Society isn't all that concerned with motivating the McDonald's employee, or any service industry person, to work harder. This is about people in offices that spend half their day surfing the Internet or hanging by the water cooler instead of working. Or to put it another way, it's about people that do not have a proper work ethic. If I'm paying someone for 8 hours of work a day, I expect to at least get 5-6 hours of decent work out of you, on average.
Anyone that realistically thinks you could turn the normal work day into something like a MMO raid is probably on crack. But let's actually look at what that would mean. You have a group of people that have to work together in a highly competent manner in order to meet some large objective. Gamification of the work place should never be about making work a game, it should be about studying how the social dynamic in games allows people to successfully complete a shared goal.
By dismissing this phenomenon you would willfully ignore legitimate research questions. In it's current form, yeah, it's nothing but a silly buzzword used to manipulate money out of investors. But there is something worth studying there. Our task is to cut out the legitimate research from the rest of the filth being spouted.
The Emperor isn't naked, he's just wearing clothing that is only visible in a spectrum you can't see right now. :)
But if we're genuinely talking about 80K jobs being given to people who sit around the water cooler and talk shit all day, gamification isn't the solution, its the problem. Office jobs are full of infantalising, demoralising stupidity borne out of the managerial class's overwhelming and epoch-defining uselessness.
We are not consultants and so we can speak about the truth.
You made a profit! Here's some points!
You did an ethically comfortable thing! Here's some points!
You triggered a pleasure center in your brain! Here's some points!
Not only is that redundant, it says the same thing twice.
For instance, mechanical elevators are not used if they are next to musical stairs.
And it doesn't have to be redundant with a pleasant success, a random effort (maybe unpleasant) should be useable.
When your company uses gamification - it will be innovative; because most companies are still scratching their heads trying to figure out what the term means.
And I agree with Dustin above, just call it what it is: motivational psychology. Gamification is a terrible term.
"Gartner says gamification can help drive engagement, change behaviors, and stimulate innovation by accelerating feedback cycles, offering clear goals and rules of play, presenting a compelling narrative, and making its tasks challenging but achievable."
All is forgiven (apart from the Nazi bit).
I for one shall resist this system of stockpiling players, protocols and groups into a closed system of meaningless achievement.
It is clear that at all times, we should distinguish between achievements and privileges...
... that's if I took this seriously.
Yeah, that affects nobody anyway...
Real wages haven't gone up for thirty years, and that's not because of gamification. Why get raged about things with silly names.
But seriously, something about "innovation companies" and "gamification" just blends together the goofiness into a chunky slurry of wishy-washy hand waving and trend bandwagonism.
While the exact term is not great (bad technobabble buzzword associations), the game association of the term is valid for me from a systems design standpoint that is tied to user reward, replay and user retention.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/knowledgebase/cgi-bin/2007/09/15/financial-incenti
ves-can-create-bad-employee-behavior/
Huh? America's Army is a game. Sure there is a hint of simulation underneath, but it is a game nonetheless. Can a game be gamified? Has the gamification fad sprouted Inception-like powers perhaps so this is all a game within a gamified game?
America's Army was clearly innovative. But is it an example of gamification? Why? Because it may inspire people to learn more about the army? Are the Civilization games gamification because people may be inspired to learn about history. Or God of War, mythology? The game Alone in the Dark inspired me to run out to the store and buy Danse macabre by Saint-Saens. Does that make it gamified (and perhaps therefore "fucking insidious" as per Ian?) I would seriously doubt it.
In the end, I am sure my complete disconnect with the above statement is a huge AJ-Ayer-Problem-Of-Knowledge cosmic semantic divergence from my expectation of the term as referring to "incentivizing people in non-game situations via traditional game mechanics and achievement systems" to the observed usage of describing anything and everything to do with early 21st century marketing schemes. As many have stated above there needs to be a new term (or several) to enapsulate what "Innovation Companies" among others are trying to express as they beat the hell out of that poor stupid word.
By way of protest, we should gamify the word gamification. Anyone who says it or writes it gets a -10 to all abilities until the end of their next turn and a sustained -20 to Charisma (saving throw ends). And, on the flip side, anyone who can socialize more useful and meaningful terms - such as the delineation between gamification when applied to the storefront as opposed to the workplace as Dustin mentions - gains +5 temp HP against forum flame attacks.
( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ )
Can someone please give me my 90's back ? :s