Micanvas 2012 - Insight

Gamification

ABSTRACT
Gamification is slowly becoming a powerful and an important strategy for motivating and influencing large groups of people, and is bringing about an intense wave of change in a wide array of sectors. This paper surveys and situates the current uses of gamification within existing research to help explore the ways in which this concept has been and can be used to solve real world business and non-business problems. The core components of gamification are explored and various examples of how gamification has been used to achieve business goals, promote education, combat world hunger and fight corruption are explained. Similar solutions for the Indian context have also been recommended and future trends of this nascent concept are studied.

Team Name: Butter Chicken Abhimanyu Kumar, IIM Ahmedabad Girish Krishnan, NID Gandhinagar 1st November 2012

Table of Contents
Introduction What is Gamification? Definition The Elements of Gamification Gamification for Businesses Recruiting My Marriott Hotel Brand Building Nike+ Gamification for Education Quest To Learn Game-like Curriculum Design Application to Indian Context Gamification for Health Free Rice Gameplay and Game Design User Engagement Strategy Application to Indian Context Gamification for Social Good Investigate Your MPs Expenses Game Design and Gameplay User Engagement Strategy Application to Indian Context Future of Gamification Consumer Gamification Enterprise Gamification Gamification in Other Sectors Bibliography 3 3 3 6 7 7 8 10 10 11 12 12 13 14 15 15 16 16 17 17 18 19 20

Introduction
Gamification the use of game mechanics and game design techniques in non-game contexts is slowly becoming a powerful and an important strategy for motivating and influencing groups of people at the workplace, business customers or even high school students. While gamification is bringing about an intense wave of change in the business world, it is also spawning numerous applications in education, health, productivity, finance, government, entertainment media and news.

This paper surveys and situates the current uses of gamification within existing research to help explore the ways in which this concept has been and can be used to solve real world business and non-business problems. The first section defines gamification and breaks the concept down into its core components. The second section focuses on providing explanations and examples on how gamification has been used to achieve business goals, promote education, combat world hunger and fight corruption. Similar solutions for the Indian context have also been touched upon. Finally, the future trends in gamification are discussed.

What is Gamification?
Definition
The most apt definition proposed for gamification is - the use of game design elements in nongame contexts (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011). This definition consists of four parts 1. Game 2. Design 3. Elements 4. Non-game contexts` Game Gamification relates to games and not play, which is a broader and looser category of enjoyment that can contain games (Figure 1). The most significant distinction between play and games is that games are governed by rules and inherently possess a competitive strife towards completing goals. Even though games exist in a variety of forms, are playable on multiple platforms and have a multitude of genres, one unique thing that binds together all games is the way they structure a players experience.

Figure 1: Situating gamification between game and play Source: (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011)

Elements On ignoring genre differences and technological complexities, all games share four defining building blocks

Rules

Feedback system

Goal

Elements of a Game

Voluntary participation

1. Goal By continually orienting attention and inciting active participation, a goal provides the player with a sense of purpose to achieve a specific outcome in the game. 2. Rules While a set of rules defines the scope of achieving goals in the game, it also fosters creativity and strategic thinking to help the player think of new and logically sound ways to reach the same goal. 3. Feedback systems In a game, feedback systems (such as points, levels and progress bars) indicate how close the player is to achieving the goal and motivates her to complete it. For example, a real time feedback system reassures a player that the goal is achievable, and also encourages her to keep progressing through the game. 4. Voluntary participation Voluntary participation refers to every player willingly accepting the goal, rules, and feedback system of the game. A game that provokes voluntary participation can convert a stressful and challenging activity into a safe and pleasurable experience. Design There are varying levels of abstraction in the definition of game design (Figure 2). When thought about systematically and aesthetically, game design incorporates all these levels of abstraction to evoke targeted player emotions (such as curiosity, delight, pride, trust and surprise) and make the complete game experience fun and engaging.

Figure 2: Levels of game design elements Source: (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011)

Non-game Context A non-game context is a situation where a game-like activity is conducted to accomplish a larger goal, and not to just enjoy the pure entertainment value of the activity.

The Elements of Gamification

Distilling various principles of game mechanics, behavioral economics theories and user experience design research, gamification boils down to four overarching elements (Figure 3)

Figure 3: The elements of gamification Source: (Palmer, Lunceford, & Patton, 2012)

1. Progress paths By using challenges and evolving narratives, progress paths in the gamified system add clarity to objectives that are not very explicit in real-world scenarios. Moreover, progress paths increase in their complexity as the game advances, therefore making the game an engaging challenge to both novice and experienced players. 2. Feedback and rewards Since instant gratification cannot always be provided to people in real-world situations, feedback and reward systems in a gamified solution are designed to instantly indicate to a player her success in the game. Further, different users are motivated differently; therefore designing the right kind of reward is key. 3. Social connection An increase in participation and engagement levels is observed when people are allowed to gather and have conversations with each other. Social networks allow

friends to accomplish this in a quick and easy manner. Gamified solutions leverage the power of this social connection to promote competition and collaboration. 4. Interface and user experience Due to the evolution of video game graphics and webpage design, there has been a major jump in user expectations. Therefore, aesthetic interface design and cross-platform integrations should be explored to enhance the player experience in the gamified solution.

Gamification for Businesses

Even though gamification has been used in the past in various business settings, these instances did not capitalize on the fundamental human desire to compete with others and self. This desire can be incited in people only when statistics are tracked, stored, analyzed and displayed to a larger audience, and it is this visibility of statistics that increases engagement levels of both employees and customers, and improves overall business productivity. Organizations are increasingly using social networking platforms internally for collaboration, recruiting, training and workflow management and externally for brand building, product development and driving customer engagement levels. Since gamification is essentially about statistics and an environment where people intuitively share and connect with each other already exists, gamification is a natural fit.

Recruiting My Marriott Hotel

Marriott International Inc. was an early adopter of gamification techniques to help recruit new employees. The game that Marriott developed My Marriott Hotel is similar to Farmville or The Sims (Meister, 2012) (Figure 4). It is a hotel-themed online game, in which players have to multi-task all the responsibilities of a hotel kitchen manager. The players get well acquainted with the industry while earning virtual rewards, therefore enhancing the image of the industry in their minds. Additionally, the player also gets a flavor of what it would be like to work for Marriott. Marriott has been able to achieve two major recruitment objectives through this game 1. Expansion in growth markets outside USA 2. Attraction of players across the globe towards a career in hospitality

Both objectives are important from the recruitment and business growth perspectives, especially in emerging economies where the hospitality industry is not very well established.

Figure 4: Screenshots of My Marriott Hotel

Brand Building Nike+

The ultimate goal of marketing is to increase the lifetime value of the customer base, and this is issue is addressed from the purchase funnel perspective (the journey of a customer from first contact with the brand, through product consideration and finally purchase). Using gamification, marketers can help boost brand building activities and marketing efforts in the following ways

Spreading brand awareness

Changing behavior through innovation

Rewarding the prospects

Better customer engagement

Brand Building through Gamification

Encouraging sales

1. Better customer engagement When the gamified engagement is applied to any marketing activity, such as getting customers to Like your Facebook page, the customer is engaged into the activity as a significant participant and not a mere spectator. 2. Spreading brand awareness Gamification helps break down huge chunks of information into smaller and easily digestible bits by using methods such as interactive tutorial videos that prompt the user to view the complete video. This not only helps the company in imparting all the knowledge they wanted to, but also helps the user in understanding and remembering the information better, which is essentially brand recall. 3. Changing behaviour through innovation A well-designed game would generate enough of interest in the customer to make her spend enough time on it. Therefore, a gamified marketing approach has a strong chance of enhancing customer brand loyalty. 4. Rewarding the prospects Badges, points, leaderboards and challenges push a user to compete with other players in the system and progress in the game. A customers desire to keep score and compete can be used quite effectively by brands to boost customer satisfaction. 5. Encouraging sales - Game mechanics, such as rewards, can educate a customer about a brand, and also encourage her to make a purchase. Therefore, the correct triggers for targeted behaviour can direct users to intended call to actions.

Nike used gamification for brand building activities. Nike+ is a motivational game (Figure 5) that is designed to provide an added layer of intrinsic motivation, beyond the runners high and the physical results, and is quite popular amongst the running community.

An inexpensive sensor fits imperceptibly inside the sole of any standard Nike sneaker. It is activated by movement (accelerometer) and communicates with the users iPod/smartphone (via radio transmitter) to give the user real time statistics about the speed and distance of her run. After her run, the user can use the Nike+ system to upload the statistics of the run onto her online profile, where the online rewards system exists. Once online, she can earn points based on the number of miles she has run, level up, compete with friends, challenge foes and also win personal online trophies. This complete system wonderfully 1. Keeps a user engaged in the Nike world 2. Builds brand awareness with Nike+ status updates on famous social networks 3. Boosts brand loyalty by making the user spend more time on the game and eventually the Nike brand 9

4. Retains users with a rewards system that taps into peoples desire to compete with each other 5. Encourages Nike sales, as the Nike+ system is only available in Nike shoes

Figure 5: Screenshots of Nike+

Gamification for Education Quest To Learn

Quest To Learn (Q2L) is the first gamified school in the world (Figure 6). It is based in New York City, admits students from grades six through twelve and has a curriculum designed and planned by a team of educators and professional game developers. The aim of Q2L is to create for students a learning environment in which they solve complex problems in math, science, English language arts, and social studies through role-plays and game-like ways. By drawing on the intrinsic qualities of games and their design, students are engaged in a deep exploration of subject matter with twentyfirst-century learning at the core.

Game-like Curriculum Design

The Q2L curriculum, which is aligned to New York State standards, is delivered through the following central organizing structures 1. Discovery Missions (DM) These represent a unit of study that is 10 weeks long, and is designed to get students to 10

a. Reflect on what they know now and what they need to learn to complete the DM successfully b. Gather data and manipulate resources c. Create inferences d. Theorize and generate solutions e. Evaluate results 2. Quests Quests are goal-oriented challenges that equip students with necessary data, knowledge, resources and practices to solve the larger DM (a collection of Quests). 3. Boss Levels (BL) In a BL, students and teachers collaborate for 2 weeks on a capstone project that integrates the teachings of the previous 10 weeks. 4. Integrates learning within a social world While students work and engage in a wide range of game-like learning experiences, they also connect with other students in the school community and play together via the building of solutions.

Application to Indian Context

Education has been a major priority of the Indian Government ever since the Indian Constitution was finalized in 1949. Even with all the schemes that the Government has implemented, illiteracy in rural India continues to be an impediment to national development. As of 2011, the literacy rate in India was found to be 74.04%, which shows that India has a long way to go (India Online Pages, 2012). There are many reasons for the high rural illiteracy rate large rural population, lack of quality teachers, insufficient infrastructure, low student retention rates and an ill-designed curriculum.

A few organizations, such as Teach For India and Kalam Foundation, have been able to source good quality teachers. Also, the mid-day meal scheme endorsed by the Indian Government has managed to marginally increasing the student retention rates. But, the curriculum and teaching methodologies are outdated and obsolete, with stress being laid on rote-learning and basic reading and writing skills, instead of focusing on a holistic educational experience. The Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE) Project by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is trying to revamp teaching methodologies by using mobile games to impart education. In Uttar Pradesh (India), an evaluation was done where 27 students attended a one semester of an afterschool program at a village three times per week to learn English using MILLEE games, and exhibited significant post-test gains at the end of this intervention (Human Development Lab at CMU, 2011). 11

This evaluation points to the magnitude of results that could be attained when a Q2L model is implemented in an Indian context. This model could be combined with the mid-day meal scheme and good quality teachers to fun, healthy, engaging and holistic learning experience that the students would actively want to be a part of.

Figure 6: The Quest to Learn school children

Gamification for Health Free Rice

Feeling guilty about wasting time on computer solitaire? Join the growing guilt-free multitude at FreeRice.com, an online game with redeeming social value. (USA Today, 2011) This is how USA Today described Free Rice, a non-profit game to help games battle world hunger while they play.

Gameplay and Game Design

The gameplay involves answering a multiple-choice vocabulary question correctly to earn ten virtual grains of rice. Also, the better a player performs in the game, the harder the questions get. The player can stack up as much virtual rice as she wants, and at the end of the game, it gets converted to real rice. The real rice is donated to the United Nations World Food Programme by sponsors, whose online advertisements appear underneath every question in the game. On any given day, between 200,000 and 500,000 people play Free Rice, and together their efforts add up to enough rice (69,024,128,710 grains and counting) to feed an average of 7000 people per day, or approximately 10 million meals worldwide (Free Rice, 2012).

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Figure 7: Screenshot of Free Rice

User Engagement Strategy

Free Rice is irresistible because it is the perfect combination of good game design and real-world results. The main reasons for the games high engagement levels include

User Engagement Strategy Quick work

Instant visual feedback

Flow

Part of a bigger cause

1. Quick work It takes just seconds for a player to complete a task, meaning she can get a lot of work done quickly. 2. Instant visual feedback As the players keeps answering questions correctly, the count of total grains she has earned also keeps increasing simultaneously. 3. Flow - The game always functions within the players ability to progress smoothly, as the game gets easier when the player makes mistakes and harder when questions are answered correctly. 4. Part of a bigger cause - The real-world results of the game (fighting world hunger) makes the player feel that she is part of a bigger cause and the 10 minutes she spent playing the game is making a big difference.

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Application to Indian Context

According to the Hunger and Malnutrition Report released by the Indian Prime Minister during January 2012, almost 42% of the children in India (approximately 61 million) are stunted and malnourished (CNN-IBN, 2012). The report also says that one in three malnourished children in the world is an Indian. Further, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) used the global hunger index (GHI) to rank India as 14th in the list of the worlds most hunger-stricken countries (Business Standard, 2012). Even with such daunting figures, Indian policy makers are not sensitive to the fact that their agenda of liberalization is unfinished. At the same time, India has the second highest number of Internet users in the Asia 121 million (Internet World Stats, 2011) (Figure 8). Even if 1% of these users (1.21 million) were to be activated and directed towards a Free Rice game for India, that would amount to 12.1 million rice grains to start with and the subsequent results would be astounding. Hunger within India could be fought quite rapidly in this manner.

Figure 8: Number of Internet users in India Source: (Internet World Stats, 2011)

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Gamification for Social Good Investigate Your MPs Expenses

On June 24th 2009, more than 20,000 Britons joined forces through an online gamified portal Investigate Your MPs Expenses - a game developed by Simon Wilson for The Guardian) to investigate one of the biggest scandals in British parliament history (Chameleonbot, 2012). This investigation that led to the resignation of many corrupt parliamentary members and ultimately inspired a major political reform.

Game Design and Gameplay

After facing huge public oppression, the British Government decided to release records of MP expense claims for year-to-year to The Guardian. But, these records were unsorted scanned images of millions of expense forms and receipts, therefore posing a problem to quick computerized data search, validation and cross-referencing. To counter this, the editors at The Guardian decided to convert and condense the data into 458,832 online documents and allow the public to access, examine and incriminate details (an example of crowdsourcing) (Daniel & Flew, 2010). There were four major steps to gameplay (Figure 9) 1. Find a document by searching for an MP or constituency 2. Assess and decide what type of document it is (claim, proof of claim, other document, or blank page) 3. Choose whether the document was not interesting, interesting but known, interesting, or investigate this! 4. Transcribe claim data into the Guardian system 5. Make specific observations about why a claim deserves further scrutiny

Figure 9: Screenshots of Investigate your MPs Expenses

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User Engagement Strategy

With approximately 170,000 documents being reviewed in the first 80 hours, and a 56% visitor participation rate, the crowdsourcing effort was a huge success (Daniel & Flew, 2010). The elements that accounted for this unprecedented participation were

User Engagement Strategy Sense of purpose Player motivation Social incentive Part of a bigger cause

1. Sense of purpose - The goal was to find inconsistencies, therefore giving the player a clear sense of purpose. 2. Player motivation - To keep the player motivated and engaged, the game displayed how many documents the player has examined. 3. Social incentive - Real time activity feeds displayed the names of players logged into the game at any point of time, and the actions they had taken in the game. This directly translated into incentivizing the player socially and making her feel part of a bigger movement. Further, the games website also featured real-world results due to the virtual efforts of some players. 4. Part of a bigger cause - Since there were many inconsistencies to be found, there was an almost endless task list for players to complete and the player always had something to do in the game.

Application to Indian Context

According to Transparency Internationals Corruption Perception Index (CPI), India is ranked at 95 among 183 countries, therefore proving the rampant nature of corruption in India (The Financial Express, 2011). With the penetration of social media in India rising rapidly, the speed at which large numbers of people, especially youth are getting educated about corruption within the country is quite phenomenal. At the same time, this educating of citizens is very isolated and scattered, and there is no center of focus to transform it into a mass movement. This is where a well-designed online/offline gamified model, like that of The Guardians, could be used to gather large crowds and empower them with the tools to fight corruption in a fun, engaging and participative manner.

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Future of Gamification
Due to the growth of social networks and mobile games, the market for gamification has grown exponentially during 2011. M2 Research predicts that the market spend on gamification will hit $242 million by the end of 2012 (double of that in 2011) and will grow to a $2,830 million market by 2016 (Meloni & Gruener, 2012) (Figure 10).

Figure 10: Gamification Market Forecast Source: (Meloni & Gruener, 2012)

According to Gartner, by 2015 more than 50% of organizations will gamify their innovation processes. Further, by 2014 a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon, and more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application (Gartner, 2011). The market growth is consistent with the growth seen by companies in their attempt to ramp up internal efforts to meet consumer demand. Additionally, many implementations of gamification are taking place within healthcare, enterprise and educational markets, further accelerating the market.

Consumer Gamification
Consumer gamification is a mainstay for the gamification market, with it being estimated to make up for 62% ($151 million) of the total gamification market by the end of 2012 (Meloni & Gruener,

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2012). A huge benefit for consumer gamification is that consumers across the globe are constantly evolving in terms of their online social behavior. Social networks and aggregators, such as Twitter, Google+ and Facebook, are easily accessible consumer platforms that are shaping social trends and behaviors, therefore making them very essential tools for marketers. User incentives for the consumers of applications and marketer incentives for the architects of gamified applications will be the main growth opportunity for gamification. These incentives can be categorized in the following manner

User Incentives Marketer Incentives

Desire to gain popularity Desire to win Desire to collect prizes Virality Avoid scatter-shooting Competitive marketing

To elaborate on the marketer incentives 1. Facebook is almost about to hit 1 billion users in 2012. This rapidly expanding user base of various social networks provides enough room to exploit the power of virality and to deliver on the secondary goals of a gamification campaign. 2. Gamification platforms are offering the marketer a lot of options to help her customize the gamification campaign and avoid scatter shooting by targeting user groups with specific characteristics. 3. As the trend of gamification picks up, more marketers are beginning to understand how and where to exploit its advantages. This will bring about a phase of competitive marketing in which marketers will focus on differentiating their gamification campaign to grab their audiences attention.

Enterprise Gamification
Gamification within the enterprise is growing fast as a trend and is amplified by an accelerating environment of consumerism. By the end of 2012, enterprise-driven gamification is expected to represent approximately 38% ($91 million) of the overall gamification market (Meloni & Gruener, 2012). Consumerism is expected to enter a new phase where businesses will adopt gamified practices to react to industry shifts more effectively and drive competitive advantages. As enterprise 18

gamification establishes itself as a key business tool to deliver business goals, a number of areas where this concept might create a significant impact include 1. Workforce criteria - Gamification applications for the enterprise will have to sift through different education levels and age groups while remaining very accurate on the businesss desired outcomes. This does not exist in consumer gamification applications. 2. Behavioural pattern analysis - The capability to modify human psychology, motivations, desires and social patterns is expected to become a key differentiator for enterprise gamification solution providers. 3. Platform choice - The key competitive factor here will be flexible platforms that deliver customization flexibility and time-to-market features to cater to various customer needs.

Gamification in Other Sectors

Since the power and potential of gamification is being realized, it is going to be applied to a number of sectors. With government backing, existing localized endeavors that already use gamification to encourage green behaviour could be built upon to create new participatory systems of sustainable living. This means gamification can be helpful in bringing about self-willed change in the habits and attitude of the general public. Due of its exploratory nature of play, gamification can be helpful in the social sector for gaining public empathy and understanding as well as raising awareness about neglected causes. Not to mention, how gamification is expected to grow in the education and health sectors.

Word count (excluding Abstract): 3996

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