Unless you happen to be an academic, the word gamification is probably one of those million pound expressions that rarely shows up in your daily conversation. No doubt if someone has said it to you, then you’ve have had to ask for clarification. That puts you in very good company because there’s no agreement on how it’s defined. In other words, no one knows what it means, and so it turns out that it means whatever the person who says it wants it to mean.

When people use “big” words that few understand, it often makes you wonder who they’re trying to impress; and when you think about it like that, you realise that if no one understands what you mean, then no one is influenced by what you say.

This is particularly ironic because, generally speaking, the purpose of gamification is to turn something into a game so that behaviour is changed. In other words, the game becomes more than sheer entertainment.

And so whatever you do, you must make sure that those with whom you are playing the game understand clearly the meaning of it.

Not new; new

There’s a sense in which the idea of gamification isn’t new. Entrepreneurs have spoken of business as a game for years, for example, and how they’re out to win it.

In times past, we heard about the “game of life”, meaning that as you mature you discover what the rules are for getting on with others and for fulfilling your responsibilities.

Individuals and teams of all kinds have competed for prizes and will continue to do so, everything from Olympic gold medals to an honourable mention just for participating.

What could be considered as new is that organisations are now trying to use this age-old “sport” as a means to an end. They want their employees to behave in a particular way so that goals can be reached. Carrots haven’t worked; sticks made matters worse, and so now games are being tried.

Win, lose, draw

The outcome of all games are thought of in terms of some kind of solution.

Points are perhaps the most popular way of doing this, though many board games measure results in other ways.

In professional sports, points can be awarded for runs in cricket or baseball, goals in football or hockey, or according to form and difficulty in competitive diving. Choose any sport you like and you’ll find that scores matter.

In other cases, they don’t. It rather depends.

On an old television programme called My Music, we never did find out what the scores were. Steve Race would simply say that one team finished ahead of the other. Imagine what the fans would think if this is what they were told after the Premiership matches or the World Cup!

One popular radio game show reminds us that “points mean prizes”, though what that means is never specified. This, too, would not go down well in certain quarters. Try telling that to your boss or your accountant.

Business people often keep score in terms of revenue, profit, the number of new customers – all within a fixed period of time – a quarter or a year. This helps them to set new targets.

Most of the time, scores are used as a means of measurement, and the purpose of measuring anything is so that we can compare where we ended up with where we started. If you don’t keep score, then you can’t measure progress.

It’s why people weigh themselves, train for a personal best, or look at their profit and loss statements for the previous year. They want to see how they’re doing.

Gamification can also be used to get you to the next level. Once you figure out how to earn the “points” necessary to get you there, then you’ll focus on the process.

Processes can be quite complex, and sometimes they can be simplified by reducing them to a points-based system.

This method has been used in health clubs. After a fitness assessment, your “trainer” may tell you that you have to accrue a certain number of points each week for a few months in order to reach the next level. The combination of exercises you use is entirely up to you. After a bit of experimentation, you find that there is one machine that will give you the greatest number of points in the shortest amount of time.

It could be that your trainer wanted you to use that machine all along, but felt that you would be resistant to the idea. By giving you a target, you reached the same conclusion, but by a different route.

In games, scores are kept so that a winner can be easily identified. In recent years, however, it has become politically incorrect for anyone to be a loser, and so the concept of not reaching the mark has taken on various euphemisms.

Some games, by their design, are intended to make everyone win. We refer to this outcome as – wait for it – win / win.

This, too, has had a euphemistic past, but it can be a good thing if it’s constructed in a way that encourages each person or each team to give the “opposing” side the greatest chance of success.

Business breakfast groups are like this. Instead of trying to get business from one another, the goal is to get as much business for your colleagues as possible. Collectively, they all earn a great deal more than they would on their own. In a group of 40 members, for example, they each have 39 people on their sales team.

That’s how to create a win / win game.                                                           

To look at it another way, win / lose creates competition, but win / win invites cooperation. Just think how many sales could be made if companies had everyone working toward helping each other the most and rewarded them accordingly.

What is a draw? It is a game where no one wins. In other words, it is a lose / lose. It’s a game where despite the best efforts of all concerned, everyone came out worse off than they did when they started. Every November 11^th, we’re reminded of what this looks like.

Perception

One problem with gamification – making something into a game so that the behaviour of people changes – is the perception of it.

If games are being played, everyone knows it and supports it, and the outcomes are felt and not merely believed to be positive, then this approach can be successful. If, however, people feel that you’re playing games with them – manipulating them – then they will automatically assume that you expect to gain something at their expense. In other words, that they will lose.

In such circumstances, you are the one who stands to lose the most. It’s one of the underlying reasons why people resist change: they can’t see what is in it for them.

Winning is always from the perspective of the person who wins and losing is always from the viewpoint of the person who loses. To think of this another way, it’s the players of the game that matter; not the designer, purchaser, or facilitator of the game.

What that means is that regardless of your intentions, it’s the perceptions of those who play whether their experience is a win, a loss, or a draw. You have to connect the dots for them. You have to demonstrate what it is that makes the outcome of this game before and after the fact a win for them. You have to do it before to get their cooperation and after in order to keep it.

The act of explaining is called feedback, and most people need a lot of it. We all get it in different ways. The feedback has to be responsive – that is, it needs to be given close enough to the behaviour you’ve observed so that you can either correct or reinforce it.

When you commend people for good work, you encourage them to do more of it.

This is why gambling is so addictive. The feedback they get from playing is aimed directly at them, and it’s instantaneous; and they get just enough wins from time to time to encourage them to remain committed to their behaviour.

Your feedback also tells people that you’re paying attention; that you care. If you wait, then they’ll assume, and rightly so, that what they’re doing isn’t that important to you. It’s why annual appraisals are ineffective at changing behaviour.

Rewards and penalties

There are rewards that come with winning and penalties suffered for losing. It’s why winning is so important. Few want to suffer loss. In fact, research into consumer behaviour has demonstrated that people will try to avoid it more than they will seek to obtain benefit.

A good example is the train system in the UK. Successive governments have attempted to push people off the roads and onto the rails, though not figuratively. How did they get people off the roads? By continuing to increase the duty on petrol. The problem is that they failed to accommodate the extra passengers that this strategy created. And so now instead of just having overcrowded roads, they now also have it on the trains.

Rewards do not always have to be monetary. They only need to be meaningful. Some people are motivated to excel simply because they were able to achieve an earlier goal. That is a known motivator. So are opportunities to achieve more.

Money is known not to motivate. Even when the sums are large, money doesn’t motivate. Instead, what is received is seen as a reward: that is, “I deserve it because . . .”

This attitude has gotten much worse in recent years. Much of society today believes it’s entitled to rewards just for showing up.

Problems with gamification

The problem of perceptions has already been mentioned, but there is another one that needs to be discussed. It is the failure on the part of organisations to adjust their timelines according to the new game. In other words, it’s business as usual, but the rules are different.

Think about your sales people. They do things the way they do because it gets them the results that they want. Then you come along and tell them to scrap all that and do it another way, but within the same amount of time as they did before.

What that means is that sales people are expected to use a different, but less familiar and, in their eyes, unproven method to increase conversions, but to do so within the same amount of time as they had before. This means more pressure for them. It also means that they are more likely to resist the new methods.

Even those people who aren’t getting the results they want will resist you because they figure that the devil they know is better than the one they don’t. At least they have some idea of the outcome with the one that is most familiar to them.

And companies rarely leave their targets the same from year to year. Instead, they keep raising them. In other words, you could say that a new game is played every year.

School teachers face this whenever there is a new curriculum: new books, new objectives; new assignments; new everything. And a new group of students every year makes this even more of a challenge.

People have to believe that they can succeed in the game

The thing is that people need to believe – hand on heart – that they can succeed in the game, whatever it is. They have to believe that they have the ability to do it and that you want them to win.

If the targets are too high, then they’ll give up. This is why affirmation statements aren’t enough. If you’re five feet tall, and you aspire to be six foot five, all the affirmation statements in the world won’t add 18 inches to your stature.

Motivation alone doesn’t matter either. You could have your private butler stretch you out on a rack every night and still miss the mark entirely.

Even if the rewards are fantastic, a lack of ability will prevent you from reaching your goal. You have to recognize that. Most people can do far more than they realise, but a lack of the necessary ability will still keep you from winning the game.

So where does this leave us?

Gamification is a valuable tool if it is used in the right way. That means that those who play the game support the rules as well as the projected outcomes.

It means that the goal is for everyone to win, but not at the expense of compromise. You have to retain your objectivity. If everyone wins without doing anything, then you’re lying to yourself. To call a loss a win will encourage more failure; not less.

Think about the games that you play and that you would like to play. Consider how you can help all those around you to win every day; and then if no game exists that can make that happen, create one.

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