Gamification has indeed made our lives more interesting and engaging. Gamification was in action in the book itself. I liked how the author titled the chapters as levels as it made me feel there was some progress and I was actually getting to a higher level intrinsically. The 3 chapters basically described how to create a gaming process. Here are the main points I got out of it.
While the player is carrying out the gamified activity, he creates something that has long lasting values. When the player begins to realize these values, the extrinsic rewards will become less important to him. The whole reward system becomes secondary and serves to reinforce the value he creates, which will become the primary motivator. Subsequently, the long term value created by the player (together with the secondary extrinsic reward) will self-reinforce the gamified activity. This creates a positive feedback loop that ultimately turns the gamified activity into something intrinsically motivating for the player.
So even though gamification doesn’t work long term, it doesn’t have to. It just has to work long enough for the player to realize the value he creates. The crucial requirement for this strategy to work is that the gamified activity must create something that has long term value to the player. In other words, gamification won’t fix your business problem, if your products and services don’t bring enough value to the customers. In fact, blindly applying gamification may even lead to adverse consequences. You may still drive a huge increase in awareness, but everyone will be aware of how bad your brand is.
While the player is performing the activity, he leaves behind many digital footprints in the form of activity data. All of these data must be recoded and analyzed, because this strategy attempts to discover the intrinsic motivation of the player through data analysis and statistical inference. Then external rewards are used only as secondary motivators to reinforce the inferred intrinsic motivation of the player.
Again, gamification doesn’t need to work long term in this strategy. It just needs to work long enough for the gamification platform to collect enough data to accurately infer the player’s intrinsic motivation. This strategy is quite challenging, and there are some basic requirements for it to work. The gamification platform must provide the player a very wide range of activity, so he can choose what he likes to do with full autonomy, and eventually discover his intrinsic motivator. If none of the activities on your platform are intrinsically motivating to the player, then clearly this won’t work at all.
I believe that gamification can’t possibly be sustainable; and therefore it cannot be a long term business strategy. It is unfortunate, but this is the fact of life: Gamification won't solve your business problem; it only solves your (short-term) engagement problem. Gamification alone will not work in the long term, especially those that use extrinsic rewards.
However, there are also tried and true strategies that employ gamification in a sustainable fashion. The key realization is that gamification doesn’t have to work long term to create sustainable value. It just has to work long enough for some other processes to take over as the primary driver of value.
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