How Gamification Can Help Your Business Engage in Sustainability

Paula Owen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351275583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Virtually unknown just a few years ago, gamification is fast emerging as a user engagement and behaviour change tool that succeeds where other tactics and strategies have failed. It's the new "business tech trend to watch", and is already being tested in a diverse range of sectors.Not only useful for strengthening communication and engagement and as a potent behaviour change agent, it is also being advocated as a uniquely effective tool for stimulating innovative thinking and new ideas. In the environmental sector, "eco-gamification" is showing early promise in sustainable transport, employee engagement, energy and recycling, and its potential for other sectors is clear.This book contains all the information businesses and other organizations need to make an informed decision about whether to adopt gamification as part of their own business and sustainability strategies – and the tools to get started.

Owen's expert investigation outlines the latest theory, tactics and strategies, draws together emerging best practice and points to stand-out successes in the health and fitness, medical research, and financial sectors, as well as early successes in "eco-gamification".Whether the people you are engaging are customers, citizens, employees, shareholders, executives or board members, if you're an organization concerned with enhancing environmental sustainability, and you want your efforts to make a real and lasting difference, this book is for you.

Chapter 1
Introducing Gamification: A Flash in the Pan or the Next Big Thing?

A short history of gamification

IN 2005, A US-BASED START-UP company began exploring the potential of using the established theories of social games and games mechanics, taking and translating the concepts and applying them to non-game situations and sectors. This novel approach was seen to work successfully in a variety of contexts over the following years and, consequently, a new business engagement concept was born. That company was called Bunchball⁵ and its founder, Rajat Paharia, coined the term ‘gamification’ for the first time around the year 2010 to give the concept an identity.

In just a few years, the broad concept, theories and practices of gamification have taken off in a diverse range of sectors. The business world has begun to embrace the idea to help it find new and compelling ways to engage with its customers, its staff and other stakeholders. Gamification advocates claim it offers the potential for businesses to gain competitive advantage, deepen relationships with customers and retain their custom for longer. From the employee engagement perspective it is claimed to help improve productivity, increase staff morale and lead to an increasingly engaged, more hard-working and switched-on workforce.

By utilising similar principles that make both traditional games and online social media games appealing and compelling, i.e. encapsulating a sense of fun, competition, achievement, gratification, improvement and rewards, businesses are beginning to take notice of its potential. In particular, they are looking to gamification to increase that holy triumvirate of staff productivity, customer loyalty and, of course, bottomline profitability. Crucially, it also provides an alternative way in to reach out to a younger sector of consumers, customers, clients and potential employees: basically the strata of society born around and after 1990, brought up in a wholly digital age and nicknamed ‘Generation Y’ or the ‘digital natives’, those who have never known a pre-Internet world. This sector of society is often somewhat impervious to the traditional methods of communication and advertising and requires something much more interactive, novel and challenging to engage their attention in any meaningful and long-lasting way.

Finding a single dictionary definition of gamification that is universally adopted is difficult. The gamification wiki,⁶ probably the largest compendium of information on the subject, offers the following definition:

Gamification is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. Gamification can potentially be applied to any industry and almost anything to create fun and engaging experiences, converting users into players.

The idea of turning ‘users’, a relatively reactive term, into ‘players’, a term that suggests proactive engagement, effort and activity, is a key element of the gamification process. The notion of evolving passive consumers or employees from simply recipients of products/services or commands/ orders respectively into active, engaged, enthusiastic proponents of whatever the organisation is ‘selling’ is a powerful driver for businesses. To convert both customers and staff into positive and vocal advocates for the brand has a strong pull and, indeed, marketers have been using this approach for some time. This is why, in these early days of the evolution of gamification, businesses are beginning to prick up their ears and take note of the early successes in this area.

Indeed, a Gartner report⁷ released in 2011, predicted that by 2015 more than 50% of organisations that are involved in innovation processes would be ‘gamifying’ those processes, and, it reported, in a matter of just a few years the ideas of gamification, for consumer marketing and customer retention, would be just as important as those behemoths of twenty-first century engagement and commerce: Facebook, eBay and Amazon. The main goals of gamification, according to Gartner, are increased user interaction, behavioural change, the stimulation of innovative thinking and the generation of new ideas. Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air in the increasingly rather stale world of employee engagement initiatives and other environmental improvement programmes?

Deloitte, in their Tech Trends report,⁸ devote a whole chapter to the topic, and have come up with their own snappy definition: ‘gamification is about taking the essence of games – fun, play, passion – and applying it to real-world, non-game situations’. They cite it as one of their Top Ten trends to watch over the coming years and highlighting 2012 as the year that ‘gamification moves beyond entertainment to business performance, using intuitive design, intrinsic motivation and the sense of accomplishment that comes from completing activities with clear and personal values’.

Deloitte goes on to say: ‘In a business setting, that means designing solutions using gaming principles in everything from back-office tasks to training to sales management and career counselling.’

The very idea of games, online gaming and ‘gamers’ being at the heart of the development of any seriously debated, potentially important business tool might seem anathema to some. Anyone who feels that computer or other ‘online’ games, particularly of the ‘shoot ’em up’ variety, are just a colossal waste of time may have a particularly hard time swallowing the potential of gamification as an effective business engagement technique. However, what is becoming increasingly apparent is, by exploring the pared-down principles of good games design and applying the fundamentals of game mechanics to existing processes, there appears to be a tremendous amount of potential for the business community.

The gender-based argument that any type of ‘gaming’ focused solution, business related or otherwise, would only appeal to males, and to a certain more youthful age bracket, also seems to not hold water as the average game player today clocks in at a mature 37 years old and over 40% of all game players are female (McGonigal, 2011).

Indeed, already we have seen successful gamified applications in widely diversified areas: for example, in health and fitness,⁹ where there is a whole host of online applications, such as myfitnesspal and Fitocracy, that help individuals lose weight and take up more exercise through the use of online score (calories consumed versus calories burnt) keeping, sharing successes with friends in an online community and daily challenges. In medical research¹⁰ we see the phenomenal success of the Foldit project which is discussed in Chapter 2; and on to the financial sector¹¹ where the online help tool Saveup.com, for example, allows people to more easily manage their money through making financial management into a game. Finally, there is even the ‘sexing up’ of mundane domestic chores¹² a hitherto seemingly impossible challenge overcome by a simple online game, Chore Wars, which turns completing household tasks into a challenge within household or office environments of who can score the most points, top the leader board and win prizes by completing otherwise shunned and oft-avoided tasks.

The influential US-based Pew Research Center, as part of their ‘Pew Internet and American Life project’, recently published a report into the future of gamification¹³ as predicted by a survey of over one thousand internet experts, tech analysts, critics and stakeholders. In it they concluded that experts ‘generally believe the use of game mechanics, feedback loops and rewards will become more embedded in daily life by 2020’.

They went on to predict that the results of such a ‘gamification’ process could have both positive and negative consequences. On the plus side, they said that the ‘move to implement more game elements in networked communications will be mostly positive, aiding education, health, business and training’. However, they also signed a note of caution regarding the potential for ‘invisible, insidious behaviour manipulation’ through the use of such interventions.

Indeed, already we are seeing reports of the nascent gamification industry being worth $100 million, and that is predicted grow to $2.8 billion by 2016 according to a 2012 forecast¹⁴ by M2 Research, a US-based analysis firm, that is assessing the trends in gamification worldwide.

So what does the idea and implementation of ‘gamification’ principles within a sustainable business environment entail? Moreover, how can these principles be applied to environmental improvement and engagement in sustainability generally? We discuss these questions next.

What role for gamification in educating for sustainability?

This DōShort argues that gamification has much potential as a new method for engaging people – staff, stakeholders, consumers, customers and clients – in environmental action. But how is it different to what has gone before? Moreover, can it offer new insights into the complex area of motivation, retention and action for sustainability in the longer term? To frame these questions we look back at the world of environmental campaigning and educating over recent decades.

Ever since the emergence of an organised global environmental pressure movement in the early 1970s, through the creation of pressure groups such as Greenpeace, a predominant focus of campaigns to galvanise the public into action has been on the doom and gloom, ‘act now or pay later’ style of campaigning. For many acute situations and environmental disasters, such as oil spills or deforestation, company malpractices or single issue debates, such as Greenpeace’s early focus on ‘saving the whale’, inciting a sense of injustice, anger and possibly even guilt (i.e. implying that inaction could signify a passive acceptance of the situation) worked effectively in mobilising hundreds of thousands of latent activists across the globe to take action – whether directly or through a more ‘armchair activism’ approach of monetary donations to the cause.

The 1970s and 1980s, in particular, saw the rise of the amateur environmentalist – ordinary citizens with a passion for the issues and a strong understanding of the original cause of the problem and the ultimate effect that it was having, and how they could help to solve the situation by clear, unambiguous actions. Reasonably clear-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Abstract
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• 1 Introducing Gamification: A Flash in the Pan or the Next Big Thing?
• 2 Elements of the Theory: The Lego Set of Gamification
• 3 Gamification for Sustainability: Can 'Fun and Games' Really Save the Planet?
• 4 Eco-Gamification in Business: How is it Playing Out?
• 5 Conclusion: Are You Game?
• Bibliography and Further Reading
• References