Gamification - the new way to think

Gamification - the new way to think

First time I have heard about gamification and gamified systems it at once got my attention. It's a new way of thinking. A new philosophy of life. According to gamification.org, gamification can be defined as:

The concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging.

It means, that you can take any object in your life make it more fun and engaging. For example if you have boring task to do, you can add some game elements to it like scoring, badges or leader boards and you might already have much more fun while doing this task. There are many great examples in the world where gamification made a huge impact to performance and quality to very different tasks, starting from phone-marketing companies to online social networks like LinkedIn.

I am going to show you how some of the techniques, that designers use in games like World of Warcraft , can be applied to problems in business, education, health and other fields. That's a technique what I call gamification.

Gamification introduction

Gamification is about learning from games. Gamification is not just learning about games themselves but understanding what makes the game successful. It is understanding what makes the games engagement, what games can do, why they have power. After understanding gamification we can take some of those techniques and thoughtfully apply them to other situations that are not themselves games.

An example - Samsung Nation

Samsung Nation is something, what Samsung has on it's corporate website. It is a system, which is using game elements and game mechanics to solve Samsung's business problems. They want more people to come to their site and do things on there. Interact with their products, write product reviews, watch videos, to find out more and register products they already bought.

So Samsung build a website using simple elements, that they developed from games. Things like leader-boards, badges (to reward achievements) and point systems. They taken these and applied to situation, which is not a game. Situation is "Samsung wants you to spend time and do things on their website, so that you will buy more products".

That's an example of gamification. It's not the only kind of example of gamification, as you'll see is by no means limited to this kind of contents you see here, but it's a good example as a starting point of we are talking about.

Gamification example in business