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Create a website After a debilitating concussion in 2009, game designer Jane McGonigal was desperately striving to get back to her normal life. She couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t work, and even get out of bed. This could have lasted endlessly if not for a magic potion she "cooked" on her own — a resilience-building game SupperBetter. Today, it has been played by more than half a million people. Research by the National Institutes of Health has shown SupperBetter helps players get stronger, more positive, and healthier. This is but one example of how gamification can improve one’s life.
What is gamification?
Gamification takes place whenever you turn a task into a game to motivate yourself. You apply the fun and addicting techniques from game design to real-world activities. The aim is to accomplish the task easier or faster.
How does it work?
While playing a game, we perform actions that excite our brain and release dopamine in the so-called reward pathway. This happens, for instance, when we get points or achieve new levels, when we explore new quests or start new challenges. Dopamine boosts our motivation making us further chase a reward.
In other words, we love games because they appeal to certain psychological drives. In his book Actionable Gamification, Yu-kai Chou calls them "core drives" and lists eight of them:
Games make us believe we’re taking part in something bigger than ourselves by giving us a mission (save the world, for instance).
We’re wired to love a challenge. And if the challenge is followed by a reward, it brings a sense of accomplishment often missing in real-life tasks. Our mission in a game is broken down into stages and we can see our progress (points, levels). As a result, the feeling of getting closer to the goal is more acute than in real life.
We feel good when we have a chance to bring our imagination to life. Game designers use this craving in various ways. For instance, by providing visual themes we can customize.
Virtual goods and money appeal to our intrinsic desire to accumulate wealth.
People need to connect and compare with one another. In games, we can invite friends, take part in group quests, and communicate with mentors.
We want things we can’t have. We’re wired to intuitively seek for anything scarce. In games, we get goals that are difficult, but not impossible, to obtain.
Injuring your character, losing coins or lives activate our fear of loss.
Variable rewards motivate players to move forward and seek a new reward, mostly to satisfy their curiosity. This is how slot machine gambling works. One more way to appeal to this drive is by using the so-called Glowing Choice technique. Whenever a player feels in doubt about what the next Desired Action is, a character or object is highlighted with a glowing exclamation point or question mark, which makes the player continue.
What is it in gamification that "ordinary" games don’t have?
We can’t take our video game accomplishments to real life. By contrast, when you gamify everyday tasks, you get tangible rewards, like a clean house or a slimmer body. And this is the main difference between games and gamification.
With gamification, the process of moving towards your aim, which can otherwise be tiresome, becomes fun in itself. In other words, we leverage the power of games to achieve a breakthrough in the real world.
Become the game master in your life!
Have you ever felt that however hard you try you don’t get closer to your goal? Have you ever longed for a motivation boost? Try turning boring tasks into a game. You can use apps to help you or opt for what we call retro-style gamification, where you don’t even need a device.
Retro-style gamification
Here’s how you can gamify your life without special apps.
Whenever you tick off an item from a checklist, your brain gets a dose of dopamine. To get more of this mechanism, indulge yourself with custom rewards every time you complete one or several tasks: have an additional break or a walk, watch a movie, etc.
Write down rewards on pieces of paper. Use the dice to choose one of the rewards whenever you tick off a task from your to-do list.
Setting a time limit is a proven way to help your mind achieve a state of flow. Break your working time into smaller sessions, for instance using a Pomodoro timer. When you compare your performance in each session, you start competing with yourself.
Share a list of five major tasks you want to accomplish by 7 pm. At 7 pm, exchange messages saying what you’ve done. For each task you haven’t completed, your friend is punished, and vice versa. Think five pull-ups, for starters.
In a video game, characters go through several new worlds. In real life, you may change your job, move to a new country or do something else to bring you out of your comfort zone.
Gamified personal productivity apps
There are a lot of productivity apps, but only a few consistently use gamification. Here’re some of them.
Do It Now
The task planner resembles a classic RPG. First, you create your virtual character and make up a list of tasks. Then you move forward to perform the tasks in real life. While doing so, you upgrade your character’s skills and features and level up. In this way, the app helps you track your real-life progress. Having performed a task, you get some "gold" to buy rewards, for instance, "Watch a movie".
Habitica (HabitRPG)
You set goals of three types:
• "habits" (things you wish to do more often or stop doing)
• "dailies" (daily goals)
• "to-dos" (tasks that need to be done once)
While tackling your tasks, you level up your custom avatar. Also, you can earn something: a mount for your character, gold to buy new equipment or custom rewards. Whenever you fail to do a task, you are penalized. For instance, your character’s health worsens. You can invite friends to battle monsters together.
The downside of Habitica is that it doesn’t let you break a challenge into smaller stages. So, it hardly suits larger projects.
SuperBetter
The game is designed to fight depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and post-traumatic stress. It helps stay positive and resilient in spite of obstacles. The range of potential goals is very diverse, from improving a skill to strengthening a relationship. You can use the app while looking for a new job, going through a divorce, or surviving the loss of a loved one.
You may opt for pre-loaded adventures or add your own goals. Obstacles you meet in real life are visualized in the form of "bad guys," while your daily efforts are presented as quests. For completing the quests, you get rewards and power-ups. You can invite friends to cheer you up through the built-in comment feature.
Forest
A gamified way to beat phone addiction. You plant a seed, and it grows into a tree in 30 minutes. Yet, if instead of working you check your social network accounts or play a game, the tree turns into a rotting log.
At the end of a productive day, you’ll enjoy the view of a young forest, in which each tree stands for half an hour of work. You can invite friends to compete or just show them your forest.
Productivity Challenge Timer
The app based on the Pomodoro technique helps you concentrate while working. It breaks working sessions into smaller sprints and gives you a short break at the end of each sprint. Gamification is used in the way your statistics are displayed: the system gives you a rank (what about "Unrepentant Slacker," for starters?) and sends humorous messages.
LifeRPG
Having chosen your goals (missions), you then break them down into smaller sub-missions and create custom rewards. You also have a chance to assign skills to your mission and watch them level up. You may sort your missions by your energy level and date.
EpicWin
One more to-do list performed in the RPG style. With every task you tick off your list, your virtual character is upgraded. You improve stats, gain coins and rewards from one level to another. You can schedule repeated tasks and assign events to specific days. If you’re in doubt whether you want to consider a certain task, there is a "Someday" list for it. This feature will appeal to fans of the classic personal productivity system Getting Things Done, which also suggests a "Someday/Maybe" list.
Life Strategy
The app puts an emphasis on the bigger picture. Its mission is to help you answer the question "Who Am I?". The app visualizes your personal growth with each task you complete.
The basic scheme is pretty familiar: you set goals in various areas of life and choose deadlines for them, use a task manager and habit-builder. One of the unique features is the "Life lessons" category, which gives you a chance to reflect on your actions.
Thirty — Get Inspired
You create 30-day challenges and take steps to achieve them every day. While doing so, you connect with your friends:
• share with them whether you’ve actually completed your daily challenge
• take a photo or record a video in evidence
Fortune City
Fortune City is more about financial productivity. The app gamifies bookkeeping by giving you a chance to "build" your city. While you’re moving forward, Financial City provides you with new challenges and levels.
Gamification for business
Here’re some of the benefits creators of gamified experiences promise to business owners and managers:
Ways a business may use gamification depend on the company’s type and size, among other factors.
Product gamification
When a product gets gamified elements, it becomes more compelling. As the result, customers want to keep playing. Product gamification is often chosen by startups.
Marketing gamification
Here, gamified experiences are included in marketing campaigns. The experiences attract new customers and engage them with the brand or its products.
A classic example is a Chock! Chock! Chock! Campaign by Coca-Cola. People who downloaded the app could win discounts and prizes by shaking their phones in front of the TV when a Coca-Cola ad was broadcast. Just 24 hours after the release, the Chock app hit the number one download spot in China. A month later, it was downloaded over 380,000 times.
Workplace gamification
This approach is used mostly by larger companies. It’s a fun and effortless way to train employees or help them grow into leaders.
Fligby, which is an example of workplace gamification, has been used by such brands as Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Tesa, UniCredit Group, and Otpband, to name just a few. Fligby is a simulation of a small company. The player becomes the General Manager of a Vineyard in California called "Turul Winery." Their aim is to turn it into a highly profitable winery and a good place to work. On the way to their aim, the player goes through sensitive situations and answers 150 questions. When in doubt, they may turn to an online library containing a lot of background material.
Another popular goal of workplace gamification is to motivate employees to use certain technologies or tools. For instance, the Verint company, which specializes in actionable intelligence solutions, used gamification to encourage salespeople to leverage the company’s CRM system. According to Verint, behavioral factors most relevant to the project grew by 300% on average.
Microsoft used workplace gamification for its Consumer Support Services, which includes a global network of support centers and thousands of agents. The project had several goals, from boosting the agent’s performance and business outcomes to providing better training and knowledge retention.
Gamification era is in full swing
There is a fundamental demographic premise for further spread and development of gamification — the rise of Millennials. Also called Generation Y, Millennials are people born between 1981 and 2000. The first tech-savvy generation can’t imagine their life without social media, online resources, and, of course, games. In three years, every second employee will belong to Generation Y, so we can expect that interest in gamification will grow.
Modern gamification platforms still have certain constraints. The player’s feedback is limited, and there’s a lot of room for cheating. You still don’t have a chance to develop your mimics or body language in an effective way, which can be crucial in real-life tasks.
The gamification landscape keeps changing. We’re waiting for a new generation of gamified products to solve these issues. Stay tuned!