Like most of Londoners, I rely on tube transportation to travel around the city. When on the tube, I usually spend my commuting time playing video games on my smartphone. When I look around I realise that many others, like me, are immersed in trying to solve puzzles, escape from zombies, shoot pigs, and so on.
Games have been around for hundreds of years and video games are today becoming the preferred form of entertainment. If we look at the most recent statistics about online gaming, we learn that:
- The average age of a gamer is 30 and he/she has been playing for an average of 14 years
- 47% of gamers are women
- 42% of game players believe that computer and video games give the most value for their money, compared with DVD’s music or going out to the movies
- 59% of parents spend time with their children playing videogames at least monthly
In addition to that, according to recent research carried out by SDT, time spent playing online games is increasing and mobiles and tablets are catching up to PC gaming.
There’s no doubt that game mechanics have a fundamental role to making an experience ‘fun’. But that said, what is it that makes the experience meaningful to the player? What is it that makes the player play and want to play more? Is it the points we accumulate? Is it the fact we can see our name at the top of a leaderboard, or is it badges we crave for?
An interesting answer to this question comes from the field of psychology. Video games are so powerful because they have the potential to satisfy three basic psychological needs, namely autonomy, relatedness and competence. So, an activity that meets these criteria is likely to be received by players as engaging and fun.
In the past two or three years, the word ‘gamification’ has emerged in the field of business. As the word suggests you would think that it must have something to do with games. Right? In fact, ‘gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context in order to engage users and solve problems’.
In other words, gamification is not about designing games – it’s about applying the mechanics of games to solve a specific objective.
Gamification is rapidly spreading and it’s estimated that by 2015, 40% of the top 1000 global organizations will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations. Points, badges, and a leaderboard are the preferred games mechanics used in gamification.
But do they work to solve a specific problem? Are they enough to determine a desired behaviour change? Maybe not and interestingly enough, Gartner estimates that by 2014 an astonishing 80% of gamified systems will fail their business objectives due to bad design.
It’s not as simple as imitating a video game or app. For a successful gamified system a great deal of thinking is required: that entails combining rewards that can foster people’s external motivation and meet their basic, intrinsic psychological and emotional needs. I’ll continue looking at game mechanics and learner motivation in more detail in Part 2, so stay tuned.
To find out more about game mechanics, emotional investment and see some of the latest methodologies in action, visit Saffron Interactive at Stand 20 at the upcoming Learning Technologies Forum and attend our seminar.
