Gamification of the Business

If you have not come across the term "Gamification" before, think of it as a kind of rewards or loyalty scheme in which the rewards are generally social, not material in nature. For instance, completing a particular task in a software application results in earning points or badges which are visible to your peers, and earn you kudos in the user community around that software.

Gamification essentially exploits the fact that social status is an incredible motivator, and if the right social rewards are available, it is possible to get people to do the dullest of tasks with gusto. As Daniel Pink explains in this video, traditional carrot/stick incentives are highly flawed for any reasonably cognitive task:


 Take FourSquare for example. FourSquare asks people to install a mobile phone application and periodically press a button to tell FourSquare where they are (using built in GPS functionality in many modern phones). This would be completely dull and unlikely attract much success, if it wasn't for the fact that FourSquare have completely "gamified" the experience, and have millions of users happily sending frequent location updates without any financial incentive.

All FourSquare had to do was to introduce an element of fun into the application by giving users game rewards. An example: A user becomes "mayor" of a locality when they have visted (and updated FourSquare) from that locality more times than anyone else. You can become "mayor" of your local coffee shop, for example,  by going there and updating your location in FourSquare more times that anyone else. Users also earn points which accumulate as their overall reputation score.

Another noteworthy example is StackOverflow. StackOverflow is a question and answer site for computer programmers. Ask your question, and have it answered by a community of experts who work for nothing. The site is a raging success with over 16 million unique visitors per month, and growing rapidly. It attracted US$6 million in VC funding in 2010. So how did they get thousands of skilled software people to work for free? You guessed it - a form of gamification involving a repution score and a system of badges that reward the very members that contribute back the most to the community in terms of quality answers, and by acting as moderators to keep the site free from irrelevant content and spam. (As an aside, this is my StackOverflow profile).

"Stack Overflow has many overtly gamelike elements, but it is a game in service of the greater good – to make the internet better, and more importantly, to make you better." - Jeff Atwood

I have found myself using StackOverflow as a resource, asking and answering questions. It has become an invaluable resource to my work, and it truely breaks new ground on the web by providing an experience that has not been achieved on any basic (non-gamified) forum-style site before.

Wikipedia was perhaps one of the first major endeavours to exploit the community, in a good way, to encourage everyone to get involved as contributors. Wikipedia's system of reward is perhaps more subtle, perhaps even unintentional. Contributors gain nothing but the pleasure of knowing that they have helped articulate and perhaps even shape a part in the greater sum of human knowledge. This, judging by the success of Wikipedia with its 23 million articles and growing, must be a powerful incentive, to say the least.

Can we use the success of gamification in other areas of software? What about business software? Most business software depends upon top-down business pressure to get its users to use it, and to use it correctly, and at the right times. Timesheet entry software is a classic example - my observation is that people generally hate using it, and do so only under duress. The organisation has to provide considerable pressure, and waste valuable time and resources to ensure timesheets are done on time, and that time is coded correctly. It isn't too hard to imagine a successful self-governing group of timesheet users that are rewarded with points or badges for accurate and timely completion of timesheets.

We, (and by this I am mostly referring to business managers) have typically assumed that people are motivated by things like money, and big sticks. Social rewards are an exteremely powerful motivator that is frequently overlooked.

It would seem that we have only just scratched the surface in terms of what can be achieved when we draw people together to form a community that rewards its contributors. I sense there's a whole new field opening up here - we may well be drawing upon anthropologists and social psychologists, as well as software people to help shape software development in the future.

From what I've seen of these early adopters, there are huge opportunities to gain people's loyalty and voluntary contributions through the use of gamification.