It's a game changer

Craze of the summer of 2016, Pokémon Go was played by 500 million people in its first year. Fast forward two summers on and I’m still a player—much to most people’s disbelief.

I didn’t really think about it—I just like the cute little pocket monsters—but when a friend came to visit Abu Dhabi and shared how getting out and about on Pokémon Go saved him from the depths of his depression, I started to wonder if it hadn’t helped me too.

Without realizing it, this silly little game in my phone was getting me outside every day for a short walk or two; a little jaunt to the nearest Pokéstop — which happened to be a nearby park — and then a half hour sit in the sunshine to catch whichever Pokémon chose to make an appearance. Most days there’d be a ‘research task’ or ‘mission’ to complete; something easy enough to give that boost only small successes can bring.

Amazing what a little sunshine and fresh air can do for your mood. But most importantly, it was something to return to, something to do every day that didn’t feel like self-care, didn’t feel like a conscious effort to make myself better. It was just a game.

Gamification is the process of taking something that already exists and integrating game mechanics into it to motivate participation, engagement and loyalty. A shared sense of purpose, challenge and reward from personalised experiences, rankings and progress bars combine to make gamification work because it triggers real—and powerful—human emotions.

Happiness, intrigue and ambition are all positive experiences which create a feedback loop: do the thing, succeed at the thing, want to do the thing again. One of the simplest forms of gamification is a loyalty card for your local coffee shop: collect ten stamps and you earn a free drink. Leader boards, progress bars or circles, and loyalty points are all tricks that tap into our psyche and exploit our natural predilection to competition, exploration and curiosity.

Psychology impacts everything we do; which means gamification can be applied to almost every aspect of life.

Gamification is the simple idea of taking the principles of play—the things we’ve learned in three decades of video games—and using them to make real world activities more engaging. For the most part, this is great!

On the big picture, gamification could be the solution to the biggest problem the world faces: apathy. In the face of climate change, threats to democracy and financial crises that feel way out of our control, it’s easy to bury your head in the sand and ignore it. What if the mechanics that make you spend far too long watering crops in a Facebook game could convince you to water actual plants in your actual neighbourhood park?

Then there’s the fact that as our play becomes more engaging than ever, we’re less inclined to turn our attention to the necessary dulls—why spend time sorting your finances or doing your job when a distraction awaits at the click of a button? A reward for 30 days in a row without a customer complaint or for completing 30 algebra problems in a single night reliably ensures people don’t give up on day 20 or problem 25: the basic principles of progress and success we find in video games pushing us to just finish this level can be applied to increase productivity and engagement in the real world too. Workers can be immediately rewarded for working more productively, students find themselves more engaged in their education, and patients can be encouraged to take their medications on time reliably.

This is just the beginning of the net positive gamification can bring.

Developers at HopeLab launched the 2007 Re-Mission game which encouraged children with cancer to actively fight against tumour cells: structurally, it was a basic shooter game but in the real world, it led to a ‘significantly higher reliability’ that the children who played it would take their medicine. Proof that a virtual environment can influence mindset and behaviour in the real world.

And this is just the beginning.

An online puzzle game devised by scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle invited players to help them further scientific study: the users were encouraged to configure the structure of an enzyme associated with the AIDS virus. Tracking their competing scores through shared leader boards, players solved the problem in three weeks when it had stumped scientists for 15 years.

Vermontivate is an online game for players in Vermont, designed to help people of all ages take meaningful action on climate change. Players can be individuals or part of a school, community or workplace team. Points are awarded for completing suggested climate-friendly tasks and a progress bar shows the collective impact the players are having.

Various apps are helping save the world one tree at a time.

In another move to save the planet, Forest is a productivity app in which users trade using their phone for growing a virtual tree. If you can resist using your phone for the duration of the tree’s growing process (as long as you want to focus for), your tree will survive and become part of your forest, earning you a healthy pretend tree and a bunch of pretend coins. Spend those coins in game and you pay for a real-life tree to be planted by the Trees for the Future organisation. A little visual stimulation and incentive leads to increased productivity and a greener planet.

A Chinese mobile payments platform gamifies going green by rewarding users who engage in activities with a low carbon footprint. Walk to work or use public transport and you can collect ‘energy points’ through an animated interactive mobile game: earn enough points and the parent company Ant Financial will plant a real tree in Inner Mongolia or Gansu province. By the end of 2017, the company had planted 13.1 million trees as a result of activity on the app.

Microsoft included Solitaire in its release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 to help acquaint users with the new click-and-drag functions of the mouse

Gamification is nothing new—Microsoft included Solitaire in its release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 to help acquaint users with the new click-and-drag functions of the mouse. Alcoholic Anonymous rewards sobriety with milestones and chips; Slimming World rewards weight loss with certificates and social recognition; Weight Watchers makes food choice a balancing act for getting the most points value for your intake. Subtle forms are employed by social media sites: when you post a picture to Instagram, you are rewarded with likes. The little red love heart or the thumbs up constitutes a psychological reward that keeps you coming back for more. The real winner is the site who keeps engagement and user numbers high. Rewarding users at each stage of their journey reinforces what you want them to do. It’s Pavlovian.

Gamification satisfies the fundamental human desires of reward, recognition and competition. It can help create a nurturing workplace community where employees support each other; it can help forge an emotional connection to the narrative pushed by the gamified task and give work meaning; and it can relive the cognitive overload we experience as focusing on a game creates a hyper focus on an incorporated learning point.

But. Imagine if racking up debt or consuming certain products were reinforced by the same engagement techniques that keep you coming back for another round of Candy Crush?

Companies are realising that we’re no longer caught by traditional advertising methods; we’ve been so bombarded by media that we don’t even look at billboards, we flip through TV channels and radio stations when adverts start to play, and we barely even register banner ads on web pages any more. New tools need to be implemented to shape our consumption into a way that’s beneficial to them.

Starbucks has possibly the most successful gamified reward program ever: using an app, customers get a gold star every time they order coffee. Five gold stars earns you ‘green’ status which gets you free brewed coffee refills and drink customisation; keep ordering and your pixelated cup fills with little gold stars until you reach 30 and unlock ‘gold’ membership. Once you’ve started, it’s natural to want the upgraded status and then you’re hooked. On top of that, every time you earn a further 15 stars, you get a free drink. It’s a constant barrage of loyalty and consumption in the palm of your hand.

The McDonalds annual monopoly game is another. It directs you towards purchasing soft drinks and French fries—the two most profitable items for McDonalds—by putting the most ‘game pieces’ per dollar on those items. Peel off your sticker and win something—who wouldn’t go back for more?

Even Doritos got in on the act with the launch of their new ‘flavour’, Doritos Roulette. Each bag was filled with mostly normal crisps and some extremely spicy chips. Suddenly an everyday activity—eating crisps—becomes a game: there’s a set of rules (eat a crisp) and an emotional response that occurs with either immediate success (a normal crisp) or immediate failure (a spicy one).

These companies are not playing games. Leveraging gamification is serious business taking the essence of what makes gaming so alluring, decoding the mechanics involved and then applying them to provide a more compelling and tempting reason to buy.

Increasing consumption has ripple effects up the supply chain. Amazon is famous for its Prime delivery service in which buyers can expect their purchases within 24 hours—meaning fulfilment warehouse workers have quite the job on their hands. To motivate their workers—tasked with repetitive, boring and uninspiring tasks such as packing boxes or fetching items—Amazon rolled out game-centric updates that translate their progress into space, onto racetracks or into building virtual castles. The faster they work, the more they accomplish in-game. Amazon wants to alleviate worker boredom and motivate employees but there’s a hidden agenda: the company can raise the bar at any time. Making it harder to achieve virtual rewards makes employees work harder, which may be imperceptible to the user. A rise in efficiency to the detriment of the already overworked employee—and Amazon has a particularly bad reputation for its poor working conditions.

Another example of gamification gone very wrong is the laundry room at the Disneyland Resort Hotel in California. In 2008, Disney introduced an electronic tracking system to monitor the workers’ productivity in real time: how much washing an employee did would be displayed on the scoreboards placed all over the laundry facilities with employees able to compare themselves to their co-workers and have their output colour-coded according to management goals. If an employee was keeping up with the number of towels they needed to handle, they were displayed green; slow down though, and that shifted to yellow. Fall behind and your name is in red. Managers had control of the production targets and could change them at will and each machine could flash a yellow or red light at its worker if they slowed down. The workers called this the ‘electronic whip’. While a scoreboard is intended to incentivise competition and productivity, it was hugely damaging to employee morale and safety in the Disney laundry room.

Gamified systems are tools—not games. They can easily be subtle systems of social control.

For the generations of people raised on digital technology and video games, gamifying work makes sense. Who wouldn’t want work to be fun? But the modern gamified workplace enables control and micromanagement to run rampant. It puts workers at risk by encouraging them to cut corners in their bid to produce and abuses the ‘addictive’ nature of ambition, forcing people to keep striving for ultimately meaningless points or ranking. Gamers can pick and choose when they play; workers have no control over the games they are made to play. It’s dangerous and it’s disrespectful.

When people care about and are invested in their work—when they can draw a sense of purpose and identity from it—and understand themselves as integral to the greater goals, gamification is not needed. It simply treats the symptoms of a broken system: rather than fake engagement, shouldn’t we be focusing on why so many people are disengaged at work?

Clearly, it’s not all fun and games. Mandated play isn’t really play, and the novelty wears off as games get tiresome. But gamification has its merits, particularly for the individual. Combining learning with play has potential far beyond that employed by apps like Duolingo, and anything that gets people enjoying exercise can only be a positive thing. One thing is for certain: gamification’s a game changer. ■