Introduction to Gamification

Abstract

Social applications have gained traction in everyday lives, thanks to the outstanding success of applications like Facebook and Twitter. Organizations have started creating social enterprise tools—i.e. social tools that are operated within the enterprise—to cash in on the behaviors exhibited by these tools. The goal of such social enterprise tools is to cultivate a more collaborative, transparent workforce. It is a well-known fact that the age-old practices of information hoarding and knowledge silos is pinching the enterprise to an extent that further growth is being seriously hampered. Overcoming such silos has not been possible by training or by technologies—it can happen only by measuring, influencing and rewarding key user behaviors. Enter Gamification. Gamification is the process by which gaming concepts are brought to the real world tasks associated with real people. To make routine tasks (like customer support, filling surveys, reading web-sites, etc.) lively and interactive, organizations have started taking the help of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics. By doing so, employees are encouraged to work on the mundane tasks and gain productivity—such a tough task as it is designed now.