As I’m typing this, I’m on my way home from an invaluable trip to Distilled’s SearchLove in London (I know, this post has been on the shelf for quite some time). I must say I enjoyed every single one of the presentations, but one really appealed to me. This was the one from SEOgadget’s Richard Baxter on Gamification: Gamification is the concept of using game mechanics to turn otherwise “dull” activities into something users actually enjoy doing. There is an abundance of examples where this tactic is being used successfully, which will help me illustrate different levels of gamification.

Reward Mechanisms

We all use LinkedIn and we all remember being motivated in filling everything out by a simple progress bar, right? They are not actually giving you anything tangible, but the feeling of satisfaction you get when reaching “100% profile completeness” is enough of a reward in itself for most of us (or at least I would imagine so, because as you can see, I’m still on 85%).

Dropbox gives away a tangible reward in return for completing certain actions: more free storage space on their servers. Part of this checklist is referring a friend. If that friend completes the checklist as well, another person joins Dropbox. If everybody loves checking off things from a list as much as I do, Dropbox might just reach world domination in the cloud-storage market, don’t you think? Another example:

I’mOK. Before SearchLove, I actually never heard of this initiative and since I do not have kids, I can’t be sure about this, but it seems genius: parents create a private network and invite their children. Said children score points by checking in on a map and even more when they include a picture, a message, etcetera. Parents can include their own rewards for a certain number of points, or the children can make suggestions of their own. In short: your children are competing for a reward, while you know they are safe.

Fitocracy uses gamification to motivate us to complete and log our workouts, or that’s what I’ve heard. If anyone has an invite for me, please let me know.

Loss aversion

The above rewards are part of something else as well. When a user has fully filled out his profile page, how likely is he or she to switch to a similar service from a competitor? The same goes for Dropbox: someone could have put a lot of work in gaining extra storage space, so switching to a different cloud based storage provider means throwing away all that work. This is called loss aversion. It is in our nature to keep hold of (and over-value) things we already have, which can be used to our advantage:

Codecademy uses loss aversion as an incentive to sign up. I’ve just finished the very first lesson without having an account. On completing this lesson, I received a badge. Now I know that if I leave the website without registering, this badge is lost. So let me take a break from typing this to actually sign up for Codecademy.

"But what does this have to do with me?"

How could you implement gamification in your online store? Just spitballing here, but how about a point system for buyers reviewing products, with coupon codes for free shipping as a reward at certain levels. Or access to a shopping spree half an hour before the rest? How about referring friends resulting in points as well? Or giving customers the chance to gain points for giving others product support? Don’t forget getting points for the simple act of creating an account.

What would happen if a certain online game were to work together with online stores in such a way that the points received in the latter can be used in the former to buy land, outfits, etcetera? If a person playing said game would have to choose between two shops offering the exact same product at the exact same price, but only one of them offering these points, which one would he choose?

I would like to hear your ideas in the comments.

Final Remarks

• I’ve just read that Gartner predicts that by 2015 more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will have gamified those processes.
• Fun examples of gamification in non-internet settings: Thefuntheory.com
• For more in-depth information on gamification, read “Gamification by Design” by Gabe Zichermann & Christopher Cunningham.