Gamification at SXSW 2013 Recap

Sunday was the concluding day of the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) festival taking place in Austin Texas. SXSW is a two-week annual conference that allows start-ups, bands and filmmakers to showcase their wares and hopefully link up with brands, music labels and distribution houses respectively.

Over the past few years, the “Interactive” (or digital) component has soared combining a different kind of four p’s to inspire technological innovation: over 5,000 panels, presentations, previews and parties.

Gamification was a significant topic this year, with Nintendo even sponsoring a new “Gaming” dedicated expo for new game-oriented product launches.  More than eight panels featured gamification as the main theme and a plethora of start-ups integrated game theory into their business models.

One of the most famous and successful examples out of SXSW featuring a gamification model is Foursquare, which debuted in 2009. Foursquare let’s users “check-in” to places (bars, restaurants, events) to broadcast to their followers about where they are and what they are doing. It currently has over 30 million users worldwide and over 3 billion check-ins.

One of the darling’s of this year’s SXSW Interactive Conference is actually a take on Foursquare, but with a feminine touch: Posse.

Previously a music and concert ticket service based in Australia, Posse just moved to the US and relaunched as a web and mobile social discovery service. Like Raved, Posse solicits its users to recommend various venues – from shops and restaurants to service businesses – but instead endorsing as you go, Posse users build 'playlists' of their favorite spots, taking a cue from its musical roots. Another spin is that certain elements of Posse were designed primarily for women. Why? Before relaunching, founder Rebekah Campbell did some research on Foursquare, finding that it's usage skewed male (about 70% of the 100 users polled), and that the mechanics of 'checking-in' resonate more with guys than girls. To fill the void she sees left by Foursquare in the female market, Ms. Campbell built a different sort of game mechanic and competitive features into Posse that she hopes will resonate more with female users, such as the ability to earn points and rewards, which are tied to the proactive creation of virtual streets of favorite places that reflect users' tastes and status – as opposed to the perhaps more male-oriented behavior marking one's territory with check-ins. (http://adage.com/article/special-report-sxsw/startups-impressed-sxsw/240334/)

What we can conclude from SXSW 2013 is that with past and present darlings of the conference being centered on the application of gamification, we can expect to see more panels, presentations, previews and parties focused on the topic at SXSW 2014 and future conferences to come.

More on SXSW: http://sxsw.com/
More on Foursquare: https://foursquare.com/about/
More on Posse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0sUBjIzYv6k

Future of Gamification

In 2011 Gartner, Inc, the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, added gamification to the list of emerging technologies that are shaping the future. More on Gartner: http://www.gartner.com/technology/home.jsp


In 2012 gamification has traveled up Gartner's "Hype Cycle"1, a graphical representation of the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technology. In 2012 gamifcation's position is held at a 'peak of inflated expectations' and its expected plateau of productivity will occur in 5-10 years. 

GARTNER HYPE CYCLE 2012

So, what is the future for gamification? Some people think this innovation may disappear as non-sufficient one. In fact  Gartner predicts that this will happen it 2-3 years (2). However, a lot of different companies and organization already use gamification approach in their businesses.  
The technology itself provokes a lot of discussions and speculations. E.g.  Gabe Zichermann (@gzicherm), who is one of the biggest evangelist of gamification, believes this trend will evolve into valuable application in different areas, like education, marketing, consumer relation, research and development, etc. 

Gabe Zichermann - Gamification. TEDxKids@Brussels, June 2011

After all, are we as humans will ever stop playing games?

Reimagining Business with Gamification

Gamification is the use of game mechanics in non-game environments to increase user engagement and behavior adoption.

In simple terms, Gamification is bringing things like leader boards and point totals and scorecards into the workplaces. It gives the ability for an employee to measure how he/she is doing against his/her peer set and understand how they might need to improve. Gamification really brings together the post-digital factors of cloud, mobile, social and analytics, and allows that to actually be the user experience that one has brought together from those four factors. So our ability to play or to interact in game-like environments to solve business problems is going to be very powerful and enabled by those other technology trends. Companies are making investments in Gamification because it is all about stake-holder’s engagement to the result. If one looks at the health industry, the ability for people to monitor their health scores – whether that’s the miles that they walk on a per-day basis or their heart rate – has potential benefit in terms of an individual’s health, but then also becomes a bottom-line benefit to insurance companies. And so the ability to have a game-like score to see how you compare to others potentially has significant value in the health system.

Another element of our research on Gamification suggests that learning curves have the potential to change through Gamification. The ability to work collaboratively and to be able to solve problems in a game-like environment allows for more rapid solving of problems. Best example is the process in which reward points are issued in the modern games to unlock the higher levels/stages in the game. It’s easy to employ these game-like principles to existing processes. Some businesses, sales for example, I think fit very naturally because if you’ve looked at Testing practices in Software industry, there’s always a repository/tool that’s maintained, to show how many critical issues are reported? Did you help improving the product in a big way? Gamification has the potential to change the way organizations work. It will be technology enabled and business-led but it will very much change incentives, behavior and engagement of your work force and of your customers.

Excerpt: Innovative Technology Analysis - 2012

Gamification - The Beginning

In this blog we are going to discover the term of Gamification and understand how this phenomena can be applied in the real business world. 

According to Wikipedia, 

Gamification is the use of game-thinking and game mechanics in a non-game context in order to engage users and solve problems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification). 

Other sources also state similar approach:

Oxford Dictionaries: 

"The application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service: "gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun" (http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gamification)

Forbes:

"Gamification, by definition, is about applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. Tap into people’s natural desire to compete and play, and it results in high levels of engagement." (http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2012/07/16/gamification-comes-of-age)

So, we do expect a lot of fun during this discovery course. And hope you would enjoy it too.