Gamification is the Future

Sweet, sweet gamification. Legend Yu Kai Chou describes this method as “the craft of deriving all the fun and addicting elements found in games and applying them to real-world or productive activities.” Instead of summoning the willpower to go workout, do your job, or any task that makes you squish your eyes in disgust beforehand will be transformed into excitement and passion through the process of gamification.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is applying elements used in games to real-life situations. Picture a World of Warcraft player sitting in his chair for hours on end. He’s clicking the same buttons over and over again. Researching stats, learning strategies, and he’s enjoying every second of it! Why the heck are accountants not sitting in their desks typing away all day just as excited as World of Warcraft players?

World of Warcraft uses gamification methods to keep users engaged. Accountants don’t have the same methods.

You CAN make accountants excited to get up out of bed and run to work using gamification methods. For example, you could give accountants “experience points,” the better and more documents they do the more points they get. These experience points can be used to level up their “accountant level.” Depending on their level, maybe they get pay raises, gifts, or anything else to motivate them to level up. Awesome! This adds a competitive aspect where everyone in the firm wants the highest level, so everyone is going hard to level up.

This is one basic example of how a boring job can be made fun of using a basic mechanic of gamification. There are many different aspects to gamification. Yu Kai Chou tries to describe it via Octalysis.

According to Octalysis, there are eight different categories of gamification and within these categories are different methods and strategies. Each category can be paired with each other to make even stronger strategies.

Why Gamification is the Future

For the most part, life is pretty boring. Making the world more fun is important and gamification is a crucial step in achieving this.

Let me explain why the world is boring, it begins with school. The way schools teach is painful to the point of tears. Isn’t it weird that when in school, I couldn't care less about a given topic, but as soon as school gets out I am a learning machine?

School teaches me math, science, and business in such a boring way I’d rather be watching the local elderly playing Bingo for seven hours. Read the textbook. Boring lecture. Even if you know the subject and you’re acing the quizzes you still have to do homework. It’s machinelike, it isn’t fun. That’s why when I got home, I’d open YouTube and watch the engineer Mark Rober. He made it gamelike, and I became excited to learn. Why was I excited for work outside of school?

It’s HOW Mark Rober taught. Through gamified techniques. If everything was buttered in gamified techniques, I believe this world could be unbelievably fun.

Instead of dragging to get out of bed, learning at school, or working your job because you “have to.” Your life could be exciting and engaging every step of the way. Like living in a game, YOUR game.

Example

Let’s see how this could be used in education. Currently in public systems, children are given school books, learn from the teacher over the course of an hour, and are given work to drill in the concepts. After a while, they’re given a grade from a test to see how much they remember.

Let’s break down that structure. You want kids to sit still at a desk, listening to a presentation with undivided attention, spending extra time at home doing work, for the reward of an A on a piece of paper. That… doesn’t seem too enjoyable.

Gamification is an art, with many techniques and ways to engage people, so there are hundreds of ways you could apply gamification to a certain topic. I’ll give a tiny example of how effective even just a few gamification techniques could be.

Let’s choose a Physics class as an example.

• First, we’ll give the work that they’ll learn MEANING, rather than making them take a course without having a reason to learn it. At the beginning of the semester there is a giant tower in the room. Tell them by the end of the class you have to knock over this tower with a catapult. That gives them MEANING to everything they learn.

• Then let’s add some awesome reward systems. We could break the skills of building a catapult into sections: woodworking, mechanical engineering, calculating angles, etc. Then based on these sections, each student has a level. They start at level one. They can level up. Some will be better in other areas, but as they level up they get rewarded. Maybe they get rewarded pieces to the catapult or better ammo for their catapult!

• Next a big gamification mechanic is empowerment. Instead of making the students sit through the teachers' presentations, let them pick which sections they want to learn at what time. You can provide checkpoints, like they must be level 5 in a certain skill by the end of the quarter, but they choose what they learn and when. Little Tommy is learning mechanical engineering while Jimmy is learning woodworking. This freedom of choice gives them room to breathe and because it’s THEIR choice they feel more passionate therefore motivated. At the end of the project, they can keep their catapult and get a trophy if they knock down the tower. This gives them “ownership and possession”, a powerful gamification tool.

This class already seems more fun than normal school and would be more engaging, and man, now I want to take this class.

Overall

Gamification can be placed in EVERYTHING. Work, daily routines, education, making sure you put the toilet seat down. It makes things fun, it makes things engaging, and overall the world would be filled with happier people. Applying this to life would be amazing!