Nabh's Hierarchy of Gamification Techniques

Gamification has been in the news lately and most of it revolves around making user perform certain activities in exchange for some type of reward. While this is useful, gamification can be applied to produce a lot more business value than motivating users to perform simplistic activities. This blog post looks beyond activity-based rewards and identifies other forms of gamification that provide far better value; especially when used as part of enterprise social strategy.

Gamification is the application of game design principles to non-game applications to motivate users in accomplishing real life tasks. At its core, gamification is about creating a fun, engaging experience that encourages users to perform tasks that they might otherwise find tedious or common place.We have identified four different approaches to gamification as depicted in the following figure.

Activity-Based Rewards

This is the simplest form of gamifying user experience. This approach works very well when the objective is to simply maximize the amount of user activity. Examples include boosting the number of “Likes” on your facebook property, sharing a link to your site with friends, etc.

Rewards on Validation

Sometimes it is not enough to know that a user has completed an activity, but that the use has completed it successfully. For example activity-based points can be awarded when a user completes a training course, but you probably want validation from the system that the user has passed the training course successfully. In fact one could also award points in proportion to user’s score in the training course. This is obviously harder to implement since it integration with external systems but it also introduces more accountability by requiring validation that the user has completed a task satisfactorily.

Emergent Gamification Metrics

Awarding points and badges after validation is better than pure activity based rewards but it still a simplistic approach to gamification. As the novelty of completing tasks and getting badges wears off, these techniques cannot be used to incentivize users in the long run. A more sophisticated form of creating user leaderboard ranking is to analyze the individual’s contributions to a community and examine how the community as a whole is reacting to the individual contributions. Reputation or connector rankings produced based on social network analysis is one example of this type of gamification. Typically the rankings and points earned in the manner are based on a recursive analysis of the community interactions and are bound by a time window. This makes it much harder to game, incentivizes users to continue provide meaningful input, and is a much better form of motivation since it is a form of peer recognition.

Turning Play into Work

Serious games help organizations solve complex problems through collaborative play. This is clearly a technique that requires different designs to address different business objectives and cannot be generically applied to an enterprise social community. This is however the best form of gamification since the players create business value by playing the game itself. Idea markets like the once I developed and deployed in Cisco's I-Prize competition is a great example of this. Players collectively provide a much better ranking of ideas by investing virtual money in the ones they believe would succeed. A product design game created by Social Lair is another example. This game requires players to design products by balancing benefits, price, costs, and risks. The resulting mix of features are much better indication of what should go into the product as compared to the tradition method that pits competing factions that only look at the upside.