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G00210219

Gamification Primer: Life Becomes a Game Published: 24 January 2011

Analyst(s): Brian Burke

Gamification is the application of game mechanics to nongame environments to motivate people and change behavior. Business managers must understand this trend — how it may be leveraged in their organizations and how it may affect their industries.

Key Findings ■ Games often model the real world. Increasingly, real-world activities are starting to look like a

game.

■ In the past year, gamification has emerged as a recognizable trend. Rarely does an emerging trend impact so many areas of business/society.

■ Given that the goal of gamification is to change human behaviors, there are many opportunities and risks.

Recommendations ■ Gamification is a business issue that is enabled by technology — business managers must take

the lead in driving gamification efforts.

■ The application of gamification approaches is very diverse. Focusing on specific goals is critical to success.

■ Gamification is an emerging trend with inherent risks and opportunities. Only organizations with a high risk tolerance should attempt to broadly exploit this trend today; organizations with a lower risk tolerance should watch this trend develop and/or begin small pilot applications.

Table of Contents

Analysis..................................................................................................................................................2

Opportunities — Where Can Gamification Be Applied.......................................................................2

Shift From Games Modeling the Real World to the Real World Emulating Games.............................3

Understanding Game Mechanics and Gamification...........................................................................4

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Why Do People Play Games?...........................................................................................................5

Who Plays Games?....................................................................................................................5

People Are Motivated to Play Games for Different Reasons........................................................6

Challenges and Risks.......................................................................................................................7

What Is the Role of IT in Gamification?..............................................................................................7

Recommended Reading.........................................................................................................................8

List of Figures

Figure 1. Google Trends Results for the Term "Gamification"..................................................................5

Figure 2. Player Types............................................................................................................................6

Analysis Suddenly, games are popping up everywhere. Foursquare received nearly 150,000 check-ins from users at Starbucks locations in a recent week. The U.S. military uses "America's Army" — a video game — as a key recruiting tool. The World Bank-sponsored Evoke game crowdsources ideas from players globally to solve some of the most difficult social challenges. The U.K.'s Department for Work and Pensions created an innovation marketplace game to develop ideas into projects. These represent just a very few examples of a much larger trend. The opportunity space for gamification is very broad and includes innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change — anywhere there is an opportunity to improve results through higher levels of engagement and changed behavior of participants.

This research explores the trend of "gamification" — using game mechanics to influence human behavior in nongame environments. It does not attempt to inventory and categorize the many applications of gamification. Subsequent Gartner research and case studies will explore more deeply the opportunity spaces and specific cases of gamification.

Opportunities — Where Can Gamification Be Applied

In the broader world of gamification, there are many opportunities to change behavior and increase engagement — from crowdsourcing solutions, to challenging problems, to training a workforce in a particular skill, or improving the productivity of employees. There are as many opportunities as there are challenges that require changed behavior and increased engagement. In a specific example, the U.K.'s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has used game mechanics to create a market game called Idea Street for developing innovations from ideation to a business case in an engaging, human-centric environment. Within the first 18 months, Idea Street's 4,500 users had generated 1,400 ideas, of which 63 had gone forward to implementation, resulting in benefits of £21 million (see "Case Study: Innovation Squared: The Department for Work and Pensions Turns Innovation Into a Game"):

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■ Innovation — Crowdsourcing innovation using challenges and innovation markets (such as DARPA Network Challenge, DWP's IdeaStreet and Foldit)

■ Marketing — Increasing brand awareness and customer engagement (such as Foursquare and SCVNGR)

■ Training — Developing skills in virtual worlds using game mechanics (for example, America's Army)

■ Employee performance — Improving employee performance management using game mechanics (such as Bunchball)

■ Health — Using game mechanics to inspire healthier lifestyles (for example, Nike iPod Sports sensor)

■ Social change — Using game mechanics to change social behavior (for example, Evoke)

Shift From Games Modeling the Real World to the Real World Emulating Games

Games have modeled real-world experiences for thousands of years. Chaturanga is the ancestor of modern chess, developed in the seventh century in India. Chaturanga and its modern equivalent — chess — are games that model war. Many games model real-world experiences, if somewhat fantastically. Games provide a low-risk environment for experimentation, a compelling narrative and constant feedback on performance. In modern video games, players are presented with a wide array of immediate indicators of performance, ranging from badges, leader boards and health meters to sounds indicating that good or bad things are happening. In games, the rules are explicit. Gamers feel empowered and positive when playing.

Conversely, real life doesn't often provide immediate indicators of performance. In real life, goals, milestones and rewards tend to be staggered at great distances, lagging or absent. In real life, we don't get the same positive feedback. Challenges often appear long, arduous or unattainable. Real life is about long periods of hard slogging punctuated by a few successes or failures. The intent of gamification is to turn everyday, real-world activities into more pleasurable experiences by recreating the stimuli that occur in game worlds. The intended result: increased engagement and changed behaviors in real-world activities.

The following describes a few of the characteristics from games that are being used to change behavior and increase engagement in real-world activities:

1. Accelerate feedback cycles — In the real world, feedback loops are slow — (for example, annual performance appraisals) with long periods between milestones. Gamification increases the velocity of feedback loops to maintain engagement.

2. Provide clear goals and rules of play — In the real world, goals are often fuzzy, and rules are often selectively applied. Gamification seeks to provide clear goals and well-defined rules of play to ensure players feel empowered to achieve goals.

3. Provide a compelling narrative — Real-world activities are rarely compelling. Gamification seeks to build a narrative that engages players to participate and achieve the goals of the activity.

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4. Provide tasks that are challenging but achievable — While there is no shortage of challenges in the real world, they tend to be large and long-term. Gamification seeks to provide many short- term, achievable goals to maintain engagement.

5. Recognize status — In the real world, status and achievements are not normally displayed; they are often downplayed. Gamification seeks to provide highly visible symbols of status to reward achievements and increase social recognition.

Understanding Game Mechanics and Gamification

The term "game mechanics" is often used to describe the rules, objects, actions and space that are at the core of a game. All games include game mechanics that describe the playing area, the players, the rules of play and how play proceeds. Game mechanics set up the challenges and rewards that make game play enjoyable. Even the simplest games, such as Tic Tac Toe, employ game mechanics. In Tic Tac Toe, there is a game space (usually a 3 x 3 grid) where two players take turns placing X's and O's on the spaces in the grid until one player aligns three in a row or until all the spaces are filled. Game mechanics is the core of game design.

The term "gamification" is used to describe the application of game mechanics to nongame environments. The intent is to gain a higher level of engagement from the "players" of these "games." The nongame environments include innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change, among others. The most-cited example is Foursquare, which awards mayorships and badges for visiting places. With enough visits to a sponsored location, players can earn prizes like free coffee or pizza. The core idea is simple enough and not entirely new: Loyalty programs have applied game mechanics to change behavior for decades. Three factors have made gamification a trend:

1. Depth of understanding of game mechanics — Loyalty programs and contests have used game mechanics for a long time. What's happening that is different is a change in the way people are looking at the problem. In the past, the question was: How can I get customers more engaged? The answer was to use points and rewards. The question has changed to: What game mechanics can be applied to increase engagement and change behavior in this problem space? The focus has shifted to understanding how games motivate people — and then how can those motivational techniques be applied to a business problem. In other words, the focus has shifted to how deeply game mechanics can be applied to a particular problem space.

2. Breadth of application of game mechanics —As game mechanics are being identified and detached from games, a large number of new areas of application are being explored (for example, marketing, innovation and training).

3. Connectedness that makes it possible — Many gamified applications would not be possible without the ubiquity of connected devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Applications such as Foursquare and SCVNGR are reliant on connected devices to be viable.

The term "gamification" has appeared recently to describe the broad trend of employing game mechanics to nongame environments. While the term appears to be gaining popularity (see Figure

1), the longevity of the term is uncertain. 1 In the corporate environment, a whimsical term such has

"gamification" may not be the best term to use in a proposal to invest hard-earned cash into a new

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opportunity, at least until the term becomes part of the corporate lexicon. In this and other research, Gartner uses the term "gamification" because it provides an accurate description and appears to be gaining traction.

Figure 1. Google Trends Results for the Term "Gamification"

Search Volume Index Google Trends

News reference volume

0

5.00

10.0

0

Apr 2010 Jul 2010 Oct 2010 Jan 2011

Source: Google Trends

Why Do People Play Games?

The question of what exactly makes games engaging continues to be hotly debated in the game design world, but there are some well-established facts and theories on the topic. Researchers published the results of a study in the May 1998 issue of Nature that demonstrated that video game players experienced regular releases of dopamine during game play. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that signals pleasure rewards for food, sex and addictive drugs, such as cocaine. This and subsequent studies have proven that playing games stimulates pleasure centers in the brain. People are hard-wired to enjoy games.

Who Plays Games?

Video games continue to increase in popularity, and players are a wider demographic than most people assume. According to the Entertainment Software Association's survey of U.S. gaming, the

average video game player is 34 years old and has been playing for 12 years. 2 Forty percent of

game players are women, and 26% of gamers are over 50. While garnering a lot of attention, video games are not the only games we play. Add to this sports games, board/card games, gambling, party games, pub games and the many other types of games, and it becomes apparent that people from a very broad demographic derive pleasure from game play.

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People Are Motivated to Play Games for Different Reasons

In 1996, Richard Bartle published a paper examining the motivations for players of multiplayer

online games titled: "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDS." 3 (MUDs are

"multiuser dungeons," named after some of the earlier multiuser online games, although the term is applied today to more generally describe multiuser online virtual world games.) The paper concludes that there are four types of players in these games — achievers, explorers, socializers and killers:

■ Achievers are motivated by gathering as many points as possible.

■ Explorers are motivated by understanding the game space and mechanics.

■ Socializers are motivated by relationships with people in the game.

■ Killers are motivated by imposing themselves on others.

Bartle mapped the four player types on a 2 x 2 graph that exposes distinctions in the source of player interest between acting or interacting, and the emphasis on the game space (world) or players. While there are many criticisms of the Bartle test, it does show that there are multiple goals that game players seek simultaneously, and that many players do not "play to win" as is commonly assumed, but they are, in fact, enjoying social aspects of the game or exploring the game space itself (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Player Types

Killers

ExplorersSocializers

Achievers

Acting

Interacting

WorldPlayers

Source: Richard Bartle

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We can conclude that: (1) gamers come from a broad demographic; (2) game play elicits a pleasure response in the brain; and (3) game play is not solely motivated by winning, but serves other motivations as well. When looking at applying game mechanics to nongame environments, it is critical to understand why games motivate players if we are to leverage that motivation to change behaviors in real-world environments.

Challenges and Risks

Loyalty programs have demonstrated the opportunity of applying game mechanics to real-world activities over many years. Successful loyalty programs are an effective way to identify, grow and retain customers. Loyalty programs are early examples of gamification and provide insights into the opportunities for a very specific problem type. In the film "Up in the Air," Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney, sets his goals on accumulating airline miles, and he demonstrates total commitment to that goal. In the real world, most people are far less engaged with loyalty programs. Gamification seeks to raise the level of engagement by adding fun to rewards.

As with any early-stage trend, the risks are significant. There are a number of significant challenges moving forward:

1. Lack of experience — Both in successful models to emulate and in a shortage of people who understand game design. Some organizations are experimenting with gamification with varying success. Some vendors are introducing platforms for gamification. But broadly speaking, game design experience has not intersected with typical business functions, not even IT.

2. Creating a successful game is not easy — In the game world, where the only motivation is entertainment, there are many more failures than there are successes. Creating an engaging entertainment experience is not easy. Trying to add fun to an activity that has another purpose is more difficult still. One fact that does seem clear is that simply adding points, badges and leader boards is not going to make engaging with an organization more fun.

3. Not "one size fits all" — Generally speaking, games do appeal to large slices of the population. It's different games that appeal to different people for different reasons. While gamifying some activity may engage part of the stakeholders, it is not likely to appeal to all stakeholders.

4. Not aligned with corporate culture — In many corporate environments, the very notion of building "fun" into any activity will be a nonstarter. The idea of "fun" can seem very trivializing/ superficial/not what grown-ups do. Selling "gamification" in these organizations will be very difficult.

5. Gaming the system — Turning an activity into a game invites players to try to game the system and may result in unintended consequences.

What Is the Role of IT in Gamification?

Gamification is being applied to solve a wide array of business problems. In almost all cases, gamification initiatives require IT engagement to provide solutions. CIOs, IT planners and enterprise architects must be aware of the trend of gamification, and they must educate their business

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counterparts and collaborate in the evaluation of opportunities within the organization. CIOs and IT leaders must also recognize that gamification is primarily a business trend that is supported by IT, and as such, gamification initiatives must be led by business managers. It is also important to note that IT is part of the business, and as such, gamification can be applied to internal IT processes in the same way that it can be applied within other business units. For example, Michelin used Second Life to create a training environment for enterprise architects (see "Case Study: Michelin Uses Virtual Environment to Teach Complex Material").

Gamification is in its early stages and remains a high-risk endeavor with many opportunities for failure. In organizations that have a lower risk tolerance, business managers should become aware of the trend, understand the impact of the trend on the industry and move to small pilot projects. Organizations with a higher risk tolerance should evaluate the risks and opportunities that gamification provides for specific initiatives. Organizations that initiate gamification projects should recruit or consult experienced game designers to help understand how game mechanics can be applied to their specific challenges. As mentioned previously, there are very few resources with expertise or successful models to emulate in this area. Some pundits are already predicting the demise of gamification, but with many trends, these dire predictions are a signal of a step change in adoption.

Recommended Reading Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"Case Study: Innovation Squared: The Department for Work and Pensions Turns Innovation Into a Game"

"Case Study: Michelin Uses Virtual Environment to Teach Complex Material"

"Market Insight: Lessons and Trends From the Evolution of Video Games"

"Play to Win: Crowdsourcing Innovative Future-State Enterprise Architecture Models Through Game Play"

Evidence

1 Google Trends "Gamification"

2 Entertainment Software Association (www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp)

3 "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDS," Richard Bartle, 1996

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