Respecting the “G Word” — Why Gamification is Here to Stay
Recently, I attended the Digital Shoreditch event here in London, a popular event for the region’s technology industry. Specifically, I attended the PLAY day, which focused on “gamification.”  While themes of the day varied, the one constant was that gamification isn’t a word. Few attendees could look past the word itself to get at the value it actually delivers, or how the industry, according to analysts, is growing to $2.8B by 2016.
It is as if all of a sudden, everyone that has dropped a quarter or pressed a start-button game has become an expert on not just game design, but in the English language itself.
Odd, because these are the same people that have no problem using the term ‘freemium’ when discussing their business plan –a bizarre portmanteau if ever there were one.
If you say you are putting your data in ‘the cloud’, no one looks at you like you’ve 2-heads, despite the fact that ‘the cloud’ is actually a server in a closet somewhere.
If you don’t know something, no one looks it up any more, they ‘Google’ it.
6-years ago, no one ‘tweeted’ anything.
Yet gamification gets zero respect and it amazes me. At what point does a word get respect? Is it when the leading company in the industry earns more than 200 customers, the majority of whom are Global 2000 brands?
Maybe when that company raises $40 million to drive the industry beyond badges and trophies and in to legitimate, measurable returns?
How about when a leading global consulting firm names gamification one of the top trends of 2012?
What about when Gartner says that over 70% of Global 2000 companies will have at least one application that leverages these technologies?
If that doesn’t do it, what about when M2 Research and several others believe that gamification will be a $2.8 billion (yes, billion) market by 2016?
To put that number in perspective, $2.8B is:
- 2X Microsoft’s SharePoint revenues
- That is the same revenue that Salesforce will do this year
- That is 3x Twitters projected revenue for 2016
- It is 75% of Facebook’s revenue this year
A $2.8 billion market is not trivial. It is not an insignificant number at all.
The reason that analysts and top global consultants are jumping on this is not because that this is some bandwagon buzzword, but that there are real business results being shown very quickly. It is not uncommon for our customers to see a seven-figure ROI.
Since I now live so close the Globe Theater, I’ll paraphrase Shakespeare from Romeo and Juliet:
Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not Gamification.
What’s Gamification? it is nor app, nor game,
Belonging to an industry. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Gamification would, were it not Gamification call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which it owes?
My advice, call it anything you want, but focus on the key business results that you want to attain. If I could tell you that you could cut your costs in half, but that the company doing it for you was Clown College Consulting, would you hear them out, or would the name prevent you from even investigating that claim?
Just one of the differences between “gamification” and the other words you compared it to — Google, fremium, tweeting — is that those words actually *represent* a fairly well-defined concept. Even “cloud” is not THAT vague compared to gamification.
But gamification has been applied far too broadly and in ways that even the leading consultants, vendors, and “experts” do not universally agree on, let alone everyone else that has an opinion.
Even those with a seemingly crisp definition (applying game mechanics to non-game things) still end up referring to absolutely anything that is — or was — or might ever one day become — the least bit playful, fun, or, if NOT fun, as long as it has feedback it still counts as gamification.
There is no meaningful way to have a productive conversation about anything labeled “gamification” as long as the word is so broadly abused. Basically, it means almost anything today including actual games.
You have a choice to either try and narrow the definition and stop everyone ELSE from diluting it, or you choose another word. The interesting thing is that you are more amazed by people finding entirely made-up words as more usable (or at least respected) than “gamification”. But usability practitioners in UI and API design have long known that it is MORE difficult for people to accurately learn and understand something that evokes something they already know than it is to learn something entirely made up /arbitrary. Gamification, among other problems, *sounds* like games, so of course you get serious games and advergames and basically ANY game potentially lumped in as gamification.
But I am even more concerned about the *opposite* end, where gamification is broadened to include things like every consultants example: the Linked in progress bar. While gamifiers consider anything that could ever influence behavior, whether “fun” is in the equation or not, as representative of gamification, the word is toast.
Some believe it can be rehabilitated. I have had this argument with other people about *other* words in the past… Words I felt could be revived and taken back, but it seems like gamification is way past hope if for no other reason than it simply is way way way too broad.
Saying “gamification works” or “gamification does X” is like saying “software works”. Without context, it is semantically empty. You will forever be having to explain what YOU mean. Even gamification proponents are already beginning to add qualifiers such as “SMART gamification” or “MEANINGFUL gamification” to help distinguish their specific version, definition, or implementation choices.
I will add that expressing barely concealed disdain for those who diss the word is perhaps not the best path for a vendor. These are your potential customers and partners. It is worth considering that something IS wrong with the word. Even if it is simply a matter of perception, since when was the customer’s perception not respected and valued? You do not have to agree with their perception, but it IS real for them. A sarcastic, cynical post about those who dislike the word is not the high road. Oh, and amount of VC investment money in something has never been a good indicator of whether something is respect-worthy. One might even view a VC frenzy as yet another reason to be wary…