Skip to main content

Gamification – so what?

Gamification – applying the mechanics behind gaming to achieve behavioral goals – is everywhere at the moment. From boosting upselling in fast food restaurants to encouraging faster recovery amongst stroke patients, its appeal seems almost endless. In Gartner’s Gamification 2020 report, they predict that at least a quarter of everyday business processes incorporate elements of gamification by now. That number rises to 50% for organizations who use formal innovation management processes.

As emerging leaders in the field of game-based learning for IT professionals, the Simulcation team have been working with gamification techniques for some time. We believe it can transform education, empowering more confident, resilient professionals in a variety of roles. Let’s lift the lid on the theory behind the technology…

What is gamification?


Gaming remains as popular as ever – and it’s not just for teenagers. The average game player today is 37 years old, with 42% women. Gamification takes the key elements of gaming – play, fun and reward  – and applies it to non-game settings. Progressing through achievement levels, winning points and bonuses can all be powerful incentives for behavioral change, encouraging users to improve their performance and learn new skills. Quests and missions can structure tasks so users achieve a finite goal. In business, they have been used to design solutions in everything from learning and development, to career counselling and sales techniques.

Gamification is constantly evolving as increasing investment promotes more research into theories and applications. The balance appears to be tipping further away from entertainment towards business performance, harnessing user experience design principles, powerful motivation, and the sense of accomplishment that comes from achieving goals that have an obvious personal value.

What’s the value?


According to a Deloitte report into emerging tech trends, gamification’s benefits to organizations include:
  •       Enhanced employee and customer engagement
  •        Collaboration, interaction, learning and awareness
  •        Using a medium (gaming) that’s already harnessed by a significant proportion of the population. The mechanisms and tropes will be familiar and most millennials already use gaming, social media and emerging technologies as part of everyday life. Schools are also developing gamification learning technologies.
  •        Promote compliance, accountability and transparency by ‘playing by the rules’.
  •        Develop a loyal customer following and be more competitive in recruiting, retaining and training talent.
These might sound appealing, but the ‘so what?’ for today’s businesses lies in finding the right mix of gamification techniques that will resonate with your specific stakeholders to achieve the right goals.

We’ve taken popular elements of competitive gameplay, including missions, point-scoring and leaderboards, to create a virtual world where IT professionals, sales teams and students can experiment to find their optimum mix of hardware, software and services. Called Simulcation Datacenter, it applies the science that says we learn better by experiencing, by doing.

Find out more and preregisterfor an account now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why having fun deserves to be taken seriously

Gaming is often blamed as a source of distraction, putting our children (and us) off doing something more productive or educational. But, according to numerous studies and experts in the emerging field of ‘edutainment’, what actually makes games enjoyable is the built-in learning process . The theory is that when we are actively engaging with a game, our minds are grappling with its parameters – and that this is true of everything from Angry Birds , through World of Warcraft and FAA-approved flight simulators. You don’t have to look far to see this principle in action. I was helping my son – then eight years old – with his homework one day. The weather was glorious and he was struggling to focus on his work, protesting that he wanted to go and play outside instead. And that was it: the gap between learning and play; the divide between what seems unengaging and laborious and what’s fun and engaging. That really started us on our journey to creating simulations that aid pro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Simulcation Datacenter launching to selected IBM employees and Business Partners

I’m very proud to announce that Simulcation Datacenter will launch this Wednesday May 17 th at an IBM TSS education event in Radolfzell, Germany. It marks the culmination of all our efforts as a team, and I couldn’t be more excited to see the first users create their own virtual datacenters. It’s been a long road that’s brought together an incredibly diverse team, in close collaboration with our partners IBM. The first users will be a small group of IBM employees and Business Partners who will experience a sneak peek at our technology before we go on to roll it out to more Business Partners and – later this year – the general public. It’s all part of our ambition to transform professional education for datacenter managers and IT staff, allowing them to safely model their complex purchasing decisions to find the right mix of hardware, software and services, whilst also having fun. Learning doesn’t have to be laborious, and technology has advanced to the point where we’re a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gamification in 2017 – so what now?

Coined first in 2002 and then popularized in 2010, ‘gamification’ has been steadily on the rise ever since. Used to define the way developers were incorporating social and reward techniques from gaming into other types of software, it caught the eye of venture capitalists the world over and was reportedly mentioned in half of presentations by software application companies seeking funding. So, nearly a decade on, where are we now? Where has gamification taken us, and where will it go next? A short past One of the organizers of the first conference on gamification, Gabe Zichermann , predicted: ‘in a gamified future, I don’t think many companies, including the government, will be able to avoid becoming part of this trend. I think consumers will increasingly expect and demand that experiences become more fun and engaging. We can never ever go backward. People’s expectations have been reset. This will be the new normal.’ Gamification as a conscious technique has b...
Post a Comment
Read more