A Dive into Gamification

Life is a Game !

Wouldn't it just be so exciting if we start seeing the whole life as a game where there are rules set and then having a learning curve to be better at every stage to end up winning it?

Not surprisingly games existed from ages to teach the hidden meaning of life and life lessons to the people. Snake and Ladder is one of them and of course Ludo as well. Since then people have found games to be an effective way to indulge someone in the whole process that leads to the outcome.

Due to this, we do see the whole gaming industry booming but this relatively new term Gamification has gained traction over the decade. Gamification essentially means using the elements of game playing like leaderboard, points scoring, competing with others and fixed set of rules.

Why does Gamification do wonders? That's because People are incentivized for the end outcome and that makes them really involved and keeps them hooked in the whole process. The aim is to look for ways to get the desired behavior from people and to make that journey an enjoyable one. This comes in alternative to ways used to stimulate actions solely based on incentives like gifts, vouchers, rewards, etc. The point is to simply make the process a delight and an incentive by itself and that's where Gamification is doing greats.

Next, where do we get to see Gamification? Games don't count obviously!

1) Education: Education without a doubt is the first thing that pops in mind when talking about gamification. That is because the use of gamification in education is just widespread in recent times. Byju's the EdTech unicorn uses this to make the learning more fun and enjoyable. Hopefully, every child should find learning an enjoyable affair over time. Even companies like Duolingo use gamification to make better user engagement with the app.

2) Marketing: You really should watch the video below of emart. They use this concept of gamification to drive sales during their non-peak hours and yes! the results were incredible. This reminds me of another campaign of burger king where users had to scan the posters of McDonald's and they used Augmented Reality to burn the McDonald's poster and pop up the voucher code for burger king.

3) Corporate: Since onboarding of employees is a lengthy, complicated, and boring process which can even take months. Enterprises are starting to use gamification to make the whole onboarding process more engaging and faster. Companies are trying to inculcate gamification in their various processes in order to promote learning and reward quality work from employees.

4) Heath and Fitness: This includes all the fitness watches and bands, diet apps, food intake tracker apps, smartphone pedometers, etc are all under of umbrella of gamification. Even the beep that reminds you to drink water is an element of gamification. These tools enable you to build healthy habits by rewarding your achieved goals on a daily basis.

5) Fight COVID 19: We can have an app that collects data on how many contacts a person has made and show the score to encourage social distancing. There can even be a community leaderboard for this.

In order to boost the economy and ensure equalized growth in these times, we can have store locations that have fewer purchase transactions and incentivize people to purchase from these stores. Or incentivizing for achieving a goal of 4 purchases in a month at a particular store.

Conclusion

Over the years we just are going to see more and more sectors using gamification as part of their process and business. At the end of the day, life is really like a game where you go on achieving small goals which create an amplified effect over time to enable you to grab the trophy. It's also about celebrating every day with positive thinking and motivation.