Gamification at Work – Interactive media grows up

Toby Beresford, co-founder of www.pailz.com, explains gamification, interactive media, and ‘eating your own dog food’…

When Farmville hit an audience of 80 million users early last year the techno elite sat up and listened, or rather got online and farmed.

Later, in June, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg told us on his visit to London, that video games were his most important vertical. He was especially referring to the casual, work-for-rewards type ‘social games’ of which $20 billion valued Zynga is the medium’s master.

All this gaming had to have an effect on the wider web. And so we all spotted a clever feature in Foursquare which rewarded real-world place ‘check-ins’ with points and badges. The user benefited from the presumed social status associated with the badges, while Foursquare created a places database to rival the Yellow Pages, all without lifting the telephone.

This classic ‘win-win’ technique that Foursquare and Farmville both have in common is called ‘gamification’ – the use of game play mechanics for non-game consumer technologies (thanks Wikipedia). And it is a technique that others have since copied, most recently Google + who added ‘check-ins’ to their trendy new service.

Break it down for me

Gamification is best understood through its basic building blocks:

• Points – small actions build up points (often shown as in-game cash). Moshi Monsters calls its points ‘Rox’ and they look much like diamonds..
• Rewards – the old catchphrase ‘points make prizes’ has never been truer. Exchanging points for functional or aesthetic benefits, for example new crops in Farmville
• Achievements – earned with a series of actions. Like good boy scouts, we can improve our standing amongst our peers by showing off our badges of honour.
• Levels – with experience comes a higher status and often the ability to do more. Discussion forums like StackOverflow use the number of comments made by individuals to promote them to be able to moderate the comments of others.

With these building blocks, many services can be ‘gamified’ – bringing the user clear benefits that make it come alive.  Much is, of course, not that new. For a coffee shop that practices simple gamification by offering a free coffee for every sixth visit, the question is whether gamification techniques like achievements and social sharing can take it further? The answer is yes and their pursuit of audience retention and engagement, will resonate as a subject close to the MediaTel community’s heart.

Benefits we can expect

Often it is best to start with the benefits we want, and work backwards. I’ve characterised a few of these on my Gamification Of Work blog and they are summarised as:

• Spread – sharing success with family and friends,
• Transparency – knowing exactly what you need to do to
• Progress – being able to track progress towards a goal
• Visibility – seeing how friends and colleagues are progressing
• Accountability – calibrating one’s own input by seeing how much others have put in

Accountability will sound like a good thing if you’re working in a team and you’re not sure the guy next to you is really pulling his weight. On the other hand tracking progress would be rather useful if you were working in sales and wanted to see if you were going to hit your monthly target.

Sounds very similar to work?

Tech thinkers have seen the similarity between games and work – in the game you have a “level” while at work you have a “job title”, your score is your salary and seeing your stats is much like a performance review (if a rather numerical one).

Now in 2011, new tools  are fast arriving on the scene  that will let us apply gamification to the way we work. Among them is Pailz, my own startup which through a web form at MinuteNow enables you to produce meeting minutes and chase up the actions by rewarding those who do their tasks on time.

Tell me why it matters to us in media

As our audience continues  its migration from passive to active media, so we must apply interactivity techniques to our media properties or risk extinction. The best mechanics we know, have been fine tuned for years in video games, so it comes as no surprise that it is games that are now teaching us how to make our media interactive.

Okay, it sounds interesting, what do I next?

I come from a software business culture where if you want to develop something, the first thing to do is try it on yourself. A technique we lovingly refer to as ‘eating your own dog food.’ If you’re reading this and wondering where to start with gamification, then perhaps its best to start trying it for yourself: Get onto Farmville, download Foursquare or maybe write up a few meeting minutes with MinuteNow.  I’ll meet you there.