Gamification
Play, games, game-based learning, gaming, gamification are used interchangeably since they’re grounded in the same core concepts and are often used for similar purposes. We use play, games and gamification in our organizational change work to help your employees feel more excited about their work and, in turn, make them more productive and willing to go above and beyond.
Play
Play is any free-form activity without externally-imposed rules or objectives. There is no explicit purpose for play, which is both its greatest asset and can be frustrating for some people. We can be so conditioned to ‘achieve’ that to engage in something without a defined outcome can seem to be a waste of time.
However, time spent playing offers rewards that may not be immediately quantifiable or tangible. As author Diane Ackerman notes, “play is our brain’s favorite way of learning,” and continuous learning is an essential attribute for most occupational roles.
We’ve designed spaces and times for play to enable organizations to cultivate these attributes in and for their people. Within the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid, we’ve created ‘non-work’ activities that enable people to (re)build relationships through laughter and shared experiences. These activities can be designed to amplify in-person interactions, build deeper relationships in hybrid cultures; our inclusive and accessible approaches enable us to meet you where you are.
Games
Games are designed and structured forms of play, which often involve intellectual and/or physical stimulation. This lack of a consensus definition of game accounts for the wide range of games, with variations on number of participants and possible inclusion of observers. Defining what is and isn’t a game has been a work-in-progress for nearly a century.
French sociologist Roger Caillois, in his book Les jeux et les hommes (Games and Men)(1961), defined a game as an activity that must have the following characteristics: fun, separate, uncertainty, non-productive, governed by rules, and fictitious.
At AgileXtended, we use games for multiple purposes, including the simulation of a shared experience to generate “aha-moments” that can trigger changes in behavior and buy-in for organizational transformations. These system thinking games, like Wings: Terminal Rescue, can be customized to mimic many of the frustrations and challenges of the specific workplace and the resulting debrief serves as both the consensus and roadmap for the transformation journey.
Gamification
Gamification is the incorporation of elements of game playing, such as points, competition, badges, etc to encourage engagement from a group of individuals, usually customers or staff, typically with a product or service.
Gamification as a practice is not new but the term itself started trending online nearly two years ago and was added to dictionaries (like Miriam-Webster) only in 2006.
Since then, both the practice and the term have become ubiquitous. Knowingly or not, most of us have been the recipient of gamification, through receiving points through airline or credit card use, apps you use daily, or your smart watch.
In our case, we leverage gamification for organizational culture by fostering targeted behavior change at both the individual and collective (group and/organizational) level.
Game Design
Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. The structure, design and execution of these components determine the nature of the game, and when used in a business context, the outcome.
"When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation." Jane McGonigal
According to the Smiley Model, which is a learning game design model for building engaging learning games created by Weitze and Orngreen in 2012. Six key elements of game play that also apply to gamification efforts: Game Goals, Action Space and Narrative, Choices, Rules, Challenges, and Feedback.
Gamification provides dynamic and exciting new ways to engage people, whether it is your staff, your customers or your community stakeholders.
Explore how to implement gamification strategies that will optimize discovery, generate more insights from engagement, improve workplace learning, and enhance customer experience among other use cases.
Create space to provoke curiosity and generate unexpected insights.