Gamification

Gamification techniques work by leveraging people's desires for socializing, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, and closure, or simply their response to framing a situation as a game. Players are engaged using competition and rewards for completing tasks. Rewards can include points, badges, levels, filling a progress bar, Meaningful choice, onboarding tutorials, increasing challenge, and adding narrative == Game elements ==

Game elements are the building blocks of gamification applications. They commonly include points, badges, leaderboards, performance graphs, meaningful stories, avatars, and teammates. Points Points are basic elements of a multitude of games and gamified applications. They are typically rewarded for the successful accomplishment of specified activities within the gamified environment and they serve to numerically represent a player's progress. Various kinds of points can be differentiated between, e.g. experience points, redeemable points, or reputation points, as can the different purposes that points serve. Badges Badges are defined as visual representations of achievements and visibly show their accomplishment of levels or goals. Earning a badge can be dependent on a specific number of points or on particular activities within the game. Badges can influence players' behavior, leading them to select certain routes and challenges in order to earn badges that are associated with them. Additionally, as badges symbolize one's membership in a group of those who own this particular badge, they also can exert social influences on players and co-players. As such, leaderboards can help determine who performs best in a certain activity and are thus competitive indicators of progress that relate the player's own performance to the performance of others. However, the motivational potential of leaderboards is mixed. Werbach and Hunter However, these positive effects of competition are more likely if the respective competitors are approximately at the same performance level. Performance graphs Performance graphs provide information about the players' performance compared to their preceding performance during a game. A story can be communicated by a game's title (e.g., Space Invaders) or by complex storylines typical of contemporary role-playing video games (e.g., The Elder Scrolls Series). Avatars Avatars are visual representations of players within the game or gamification environment. Teammates Teammates, whether they are other real players or virtual non-player characters, can induce conflict, competition or cooperation. == Game element hierarchy ==

The described game elements fit within a broader framework, which involves three types of elements: dynamics, mechanics, and components. These elements constitute the hierarchy of game elements. Dynamics are the highest in the hierarchy. They are the big picture aspects of the gamified system that should be considered and managed; however, they never directly enter into the game. Dynamics elements provide motivation through features such as narrative or social interaction. Mechanics are the basic processes that drive the action forward and generate player engagement and involvement. Examples are chance, turns, and rewards. Components are the specific instantiations of mechanics and dynamics; elements like points, quests, and virtual goods. == Applications ==

Marketing In November, 2011, Australian broadcast and online media partnership Yahoo!7 launched its Fango mobile app/SAP, which TV viewers use to interact with shows via techniques like check-ins and badges. Gamification has also been used in customer loyalty programs. In 2010, Starbucks gave custom Foursquare badges to people who checked in at multiple locations, and offered discounts to people who checked in most frequently at an individual store. Gamification also has been used as a tool for customer engagement, and for encouraging desirable website usage behaviour. Additionally, gamification is applicable to increasing engagement on sites built on social network services. For example, in August, 2010, the website builder DevHub announced an increase in the number of users who completed their online tasks from 10% to 80% after adding gamification elements. On the programming question-and-answer site Stack Overflow users receive points and/or badges for performing a variety of actions, including spreading links to questions and answers via Facebook and Twitter. A large number of different badges are available, and when a user's reputation points exceed various thresholds, the user gains additional privileges, eventually including moderator privileges. Gamification can be used for ideation (structured brainstorming to produce new ideas). A study at MIT Sloan found that ideation games helped participants generate more and better ideas, and compared it to gauging the influence of academic papers by the numbers of citations received in subsequent research. Health Applications like Fitocracy and QUENTIQ (Dacadoo) use gamification to encourage their users to exercise more effectively and improve their overall health. Users are awarded varying numbers of points for activities they perform in their workouts, and gain levels based on points collected. Users can also complete quests (sets of related activities) and gain achievement badges for fitness milestones. Health Month adds aspects of social gaming by allowing successful users to restore points to users who have failed to meet certain goals. Public health researchers have studied the use of gamification in self-management of chronic diseases and common mental disorders, STD prevention, and infection prevention and control. In a review of health apps in the 2014 Apple App Store, more than 100 apps showed a positive correlation between gamification elements used and high user ratings. MyFitnessPal was named as the app that used the most gamification elements. Work Gamification has been used in healthcare, financial services, transportation, government, and others. Game elements, such as experience points (XP), badges, and other progress indicators, have been shown to enhance user engagement and productivity in business learning programs. Gamification can enhance employee engagement, motivation, and skill development by incorporating elements such as challenges, progress tracking, and rewards. A 2023 meta-analysis of 41 studies involving 5,071 participants found that gamified approaches produce a large effect size on learning and engagement outcomes (Hedges' g = 0.822, 95% CI: 0.567–1.078) compared to traditional methods. Google Trends data from 2019 to 2026 shows that search interest in workplace gamification for employee engagement reached an all-time high in early 2026, suggesting accelerating adoption across industries. However, gamification can also build resentment and drive unsafe personal behavior in the workplace, such as workers skipping bathroom breaks. The ESP Game is a game that is used to generate image metadata. Google Image Labeler is a version of the ESP Game that Google has licensed to generate its own image metadata. Research from the University of Bonn used gamification to increase wiki contributions by 62%. In the context of online crowdsourcing, gamification is also employed to improve the psychological and behavioral consequences of the solvers. According to numerous research, adding gamification components to a crowdsourcing platform can be considered as a design that shifts participants' focus from task completion to involvement motivated by intrinsic factors. Since the success of crowdsourcing competitions depends on a large number of participating solvers, the platforms for crowdsourcing provide motivating factors to increase participation by drawing on the concepts of the game. Education and training Gamification in the context of education and training is of particular interest because it offers a variety of benefits associated with learning outcomes and retention. Using video-game inspired elements like leaderboards and badges has been shown to be effective in engaging large groups and providing objectives for students to achieve outside of traditional norms like grades or verbal feedback. Online learning platforms such as Khan Academy and even physical schools like New York City Department of Education's Quest to Learn use gamification to motivate students to complete mission-based units and master concepts. There is also an increasing interest in the use of gamification in health sciences and education as an engaging information delivery tool and in order to add variety to revision. A 2016 study found that gamification can help students learn more effectively, especially when they are motivated by curiosity or enjoyment of the learning itself. One study found that students who were more intrinsically motivated tended to benefit more from gamified learning, while those focused mainly on external rewards didn't respond as strongly. With increased access to one-to-one student devices, and accelerated by pressure from the COVID-19 pandemic, many teachers from primary to post-secondary settings have introduced live, online quiz-show style games into their lessons. Gamification has also been used to promote learning outside of schools. In August 2009, Gbanga launched a game for the Zurich Zoo where participants learned about endangered species by collecting animals in mixed reality. Companies seeking to train their customers to use their product effectively can showcase features of their products with interactive games like Microsoft's Ribbon Hero 2. A wide range of employers including the United States Armed Forces, Unilever, and SAP currently use gamified training modules to educate their employees and motivate them to apply what they learned in trainings to their job. According to a study conducted by Badgeville, 78% of workers are utilizing games-based motivation at work and nearly 91% say these systems improve their work experience by increasing engagement, awareness and productivity. In the form of occupational safety training, technology can provide realistic and effective simulations of real-life experiences, making safety training less passive and more engaging, more flexible in terms of time management and a cost-effective alternative to practice. Additionally, the combined use of virtual reality and gamification can provide more effective solutions in terms of knowledge acquisition and retention when they are compared with traditional training methods. Technology design Traditionally, researchers thought of motivations to use computer systems to be primarily driven by extrinsic purposes; however, many modern systems have their use driven primarily by intrinsic motivations. Examples of such systems used primarily to fulfill users' intrinsic motivations, include online gaming, virtual worlds, online shopping, learning/education, online dating, digital music repositories, social networking, online pornography, and so on. Such systems are excellent candidates for further 'gamification' in their design. Moreover, even traditional management information systems (e.g., ERP, CRM) are being 'gamified' such that both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations must increasingly be considered. As illustration, Microsoft has announced plans to use gamification techniques for its Windows Phone 7 operating system design. While businesses face the challenges of creating motivating gameplay strategies, what makes for effective gamification is a key question. One important type of technological design in gamification is the player centered design. Based on the design methodology user-centered design, its main goal is to promote greater connectivity and positive behavior change between technological consumers. It has five steps that help computer users connect with other people online to help them accomplish goals and other tasks they need to complete. The 5 steps are: an individual or company has to know their player (their target audience), identify their mission (their goal), understand human motivation (the personality, desires, and triggers of the target audience), apply mechanics (points, badges, leaderboards, etc.), and to manage, monitor, and measure the way they are using their mechanics to ensure it is helping them achieve the desired outcome of their goal and that their goal is specific and realistic. Authentication Gamification has also been applied to authentication. Games have been proposed as a way for users to learn new and more complicated passwords. Gamification has also been proposed as a way to select and manage archives. Online gambling The merging of gambling and gamification referred to as "gamblification" has been used to some extent by online casinos. Some brands use an incremental reward system to extend the typical player lifecycle and to encourage repeat visits and cash deposits at the casino in return for rewards such as free spins and cash match bonuses on subsequent deposits. == History ==

The term "gamification" first appeared online in the context of computer software in 2008. Gamification did not gain popularity until 2010. Even prior to the term coming into use, other fields borrowing elements from videogames was common; for example, some work in learning disabilities and scientific visualization adapted elements from videogames. The term "gamification" first gained widespread usage in 2010, in a more specific sense referring to incorporation of social/reward aspects of games into software. The technique captured the attention of venture capitalists, one of whom said he considered gamification the most promising area in gaming. Another observed that half of all companies seeking funding for consumer software applications mentioned game design in their presentations. argues for a connection to both the Soviet concept of socialist competition, and the American management trend of "fun at work". Fuchs points out that gamification might be driven by new forms of ludic interfaces. Gamification conferences have also retroactively incorporated simulation; e.g. Will Wright, designer of the 1989 video game SimCity, was the keynote speaker at the gamification conference Gsummit 2013. In October 2007, Bunchball was the first company to provide game mechanics as a service, on Dunder Mifflin Infinity, the community site for the NBC TV show The Office. Badgeville, which offered gamification services, launched in late 2010, and raised $15 million in venture-capital funding in its first year of operation. Gabe Zichermann coined "funware" as an alternative term for gamification. Gamification as an educational and behavior modification tool reached the public sector by 2012, when the United States Department of Energy co-funded multiple research trials, including consumer behavior studies, adapting the format of Programmed learning into mobile microlearning to experiment with the impacts of gamification in reducing energy use. Gamification 2013, an event exploring the future of gamification, was held at the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus in October 2013. == Regulation and policy ==

A March 2022 consultation paper by the Board of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) questions whether some gamification tactics should be banned. == Reception ==

The majority of scientific studies on gamification find it has positive effects on individuals. However, individual and contextual differences exist. == Criticism ==

University of Hamburg researcher Sebastian Deterding has characterized the initial popular strategies for gamification as not being fun and creating an artificial sense of achievement. He also says that gamification can encourage unintended behaviours. Poorly designed gamification in the workplace has been compared to Taylorism, and is considered a form of micromanagement. In a review of 132 of the top health and fitness apps in the Apple app store, in 2014, using gamification as a method to modify behavior, the authors concluded that "Despite the inclusion of at least some components of gamification, the mean scores of integration of gamification components were still below 50 percent. This was also true for the inclusion of game elements and the use of health behavior theory constructs, thus showing a lack of following any clear industry standard of effective gaming, gamification, or behavioral theory in health and fitness apps." Game designers like Jon Radoff and Margaret Robertson have also criticized gamification as excluding elements like storytelling and experiences and using simple reward systems in place of true game mechanics. Gamification practitioners have pointed out that while the initial popular designs were in fact mostly relying on simplistic reward approach, even those led to significant improvements in short-term engagement. This was supported by the first comprehensive study in 2014, which concluded that an increase in gamification elements correlated with an increase in motivation score, but not with capacity or opportunity/trigger scores. The same study called for standardization across the app industry on gamification principles to improve the effectiveness of health apps on the health outcomes of users. Heather Chaplin, writing in Slate, describes gamification as "an allegedly populist idea that actually benefits corporate interests over those of ordinary people". Jane McGonigal has distanced her work from the label "gamification", listing rewards outside of gameplay as the central idea of gamification and distinguishing game applications where the gameplay itself is the reward under the term "gameful design". "Gamification" as a term has also been criticized. Ian Bogost has referred to the term as a marketing fad and suggested "exploitation-ware" as a more suitable name for the games used in marketing. Other opinions on the terminology criticism have made the case why the term gamification makes sense. In an article by the Los Angeles Times, the gamification of worker engagement at Disneyland was described as an "electronic whip". Workers had reported feeling controlled and overworked by the system. == Ethical Concerns ==

Extremism and Mass Violence Some extremist websites have used gamification elements, such as points, status levels, and avatars, to encourage participation in their online forums. The website 8chan has also been criticized for gamifying violence. In 2019, three mass shooters, starting with the Christchurch attacker, posted to 8chan before launching their attacks. The Christchurch shooter livestreamed his attack using a helmet cam and soundtrack, making his livestream reminiscent of a first-person shooter video game. The Poway and El Paso shooters copied elements of this attack, including posting to 8chan prior to their attacks. The Poway shooter also attempted to livestream. Since the Christchurch attack, users on 8chan have discussed mass shootings in gamified terms, referencing bodycounts as high scores to beat. == See also ==