Games, Gamification & Design

In the last 2 years that I've been associated with the field of gamification, it seems to be changing its meaning every quarter or so. At times PBL is the core and soon it is called as the biggest sham of all. It has been a while it has hit the Gartner hype cycle, still many are even questioning if this term makes sense also or not. But my personal take is that gamification looks pretty much here to stay in one form or the other.

But yes, maybe its time that gamification has to now move to the next level of evolution. And that would be its assimilation as a core component of "Design". This would have far reaching changes on the delivery mechanisms for gamification and those offering gamified solutions. Already, I have worked on over 30 deliveries involving gamification and not once has the client come to me who did require a gamified solution. All they wanted was to get a business process solution.  Yes, at times, a few of them had heard of this new buzz word and wanted to "gamify" their apps without even entirely understanding what it meant. As long as their business aims were met, they absolutely did not care.

Time and again I felt that people like me who were working on gamification, oversold the concept to each and every person we ran into; at times unconsciously. Its only now, after having delivered "gamified" projects from fields as diverse as compliance, learning, performance management, sustainability, innovation (amongst others) I have come to believe that all I was doing was designing user experience.

Certainly, this much I must give to gamification that it does take user experience to the next level. User experience as defined by ISO 9241-201 is - "a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service". Simply put it is the experience that a user has while interacting with a product or service. A system intending to give a great user experience must thus have the following -

1. Clearly defined context and interface

2. User being aware (or quickly on-boarded) to the system requirements, expectations & limitations

3. Extremely effective & efficient feedback system to guide and course correct user towards desired output

And while business and customer solutions were and are struggling to get the above components rights, something very different had it innately baked into it since ever. And they were - Games.

It might sound a little surprising, as it was for me when I first started having these ideas. But the more you think about it, it starts becoming more and more obvious. Any popular game has a single central context (it could be scoring goals or pinning your opponent to the ground) and the entire game rotates around it. It does not try to throw everything available at the user, just because it could be done. Like any great system, the central figure is the player who is playing the game and the rules/system defined as per him and never the referee (usually its opposite, at least in enterprise systems where the admins derive all the requirements). The rules/requirements/limitations are as per this context and well communicated to the user. And finally, it’s the third component that are diametrically opposite between games and systems (at least enterprise systems). Whereas the games are superbly great in giving feedback - at all instances, at all levels & via all preceptory channels, it is commonly most ignored component while designing systems (and this is not by chance, but the effort and importance given to feedback while designing games).

(In fact this forms the first part of the training I give on gamification , where I split applied gamification into three levels - thinking, styling & MDA. This is a very large topic and I've been grossly unfair in explaining the same, so I'll pick up in detail in another blog post. )