Gamification

Introduction

Gamification is “the use of game mechanics and design to drive engagement in a target audience for non-game purposes to achieve a target business outcome”. This is a powerful tool to engage employees, customers, and audience to change behaviors, develop skills, and drive innovation (1). In simple words, gamification is process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems. We believe that technology that applies gamification idea has some business opportunities, and we would like to analyze and evaluate the technology through our proposal.

Gamification technology is certainly an emerging technology, and organizations and businesses are aggressively applying this technique and technology. In 2011, Gartner predicted that, by 2015, more than 50% of organization would be applying gamification technology into their managed innovation processes, and 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified technology/application (2). Gartner also identified gamification as one of the emerging technologies in 2013, with market penetration of 1% to 5% of target audience. One of the key themes of Gartner’s 2013 annual report was the evolving relationship between humans and machines, and gamification was one of the technologies at the overhyped stage (3).

(“Hype Cycle of For Enterprise Architecture”) (3)

Gamification platform, which embeds gamification and technology, provides various tools, such as game mechanics and player analytics that can be integrated into a wide variety of solutions. Some of the top business uses of gamification technology are sustaining long-term customer loyalty and increasing customer advocacy in campaign. One famous study using this technology is the “Sp...

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...opportunity around gamification technology. Technology using gamification is definitely a hot and emerging technology that is worth investing. We strongly recommend NTV to invest in gamification platform, like Badgeville right now, especially in short term. However, as there are only a handful of games that last forever, users and consumers will eventually come to the fatigue stage and become tired of “earning points and badges”. Therefore, there is the need to renewing and redesigning to maintain the service. Since the technology is emerging and the hype cycle is at the very peak, it is difficult to predict the business for the long term. Gartner has also predicted that the plateau for gamification technology will be reached in “5 to 10 years”. Therefore, considering in the long term view, we don’t hold positive attitude unless Badgeville build new business models.