Gamification

I’ve spent a lot of time studying the gaming industry over the last year, but more intently the social gaming arena.   There are almost 30,000 apps on Facebook, with a good deal of them centered around gaming.  A few brands have taken advantage of this by either advertising with in a Game to build brand awareness.  An example of this some movies tie an advertising campaign to the release date of a movie.  Kong Fu Panda did this on Cityville.  Some other hold sweepstakes, just as Carnaval Cruise Lines “Where Have You Been Sweepstakes”. Yet others like Fedex launched a trivia game as a stand alone site for their Fedex Cup Sweepstakes Promotion, but had tie ins with mutipul social media networks.  So will advertising trends continue toward gamification and is there an easy way to get in on the trend?

First off, What is Gamification, and why should you care? Gamification is the integration of Game Mechanics in non-game environments to increase audience engagement, loyalty and fun.

I/We have built systems from scratch in the past. These have been pretty labour intensive endeavors.  It is always more fun for the geek in me to build things from scratch, but budgets and timing do not always allow for it.   I decided to take a look at what “Out of The Box” systems might already be out there.

 

With the recent buzz with social media I was not surprised I found a number of companies out there building systems for this, and I found a lot of problems with most of them.  They are all over the place in terms of their capabilities.  Some are really well thought out packages.  There are a couple that were so bad I will not even mention them.  I think the low barriers to entry are creating a very fragmented market, and some of these companies are just rushing to get something, anything out the door.

In my view a good “Out of The Box” system should have the following attributes:

• Challenges Trophies Badges Achievements: give people missions to accomplish and then reward them for doing so
• Points: people love to earn them and to achieve them
• Levels: hitting a milestone, a stage of accomplishment
• Leaderboards: how is a user doing against his friends and everybody else
• Virtual Goods: gives users a place to spend their hard earned points
• Groups: join one or more groups to collaborate and compete
• Competitions: enable your users to challenge each other to get the high score at some activity
• Notifications: message your users in real-time, in the browser, in response to their actions on your site
• Social Media Integration: being able to tie your effort into other social media platforms, example if you are running your promotion on Facebook, allowing the users to seamlessly post to twitter.
• Comments: enable your users to leave comments for each other
• Friends: track your users friend relationships, including managing invites & accepts,
• News Feeds: Surface and cross-promote all the content and activity on your website

Other nice to haves would be:

• Virtual Goods: The ability for users to use credits for purchase of virtual goods
• Toolbars:  Not sure if people will use this or not.  My feeling is a small percentage may.

I am not about to write a comprehensive review on every single company.  I decided there are 4 companies I should mention.  Instead of writing a lengthy review of each I came up with a simple Rating system

E: Exceeds the expectation I would have for an out of box solution.

M: Meets a good number of needs and could work depending on use

F: I have no idea what they are even trying to sell

Bunchball.com Nitro Platform

Rating: E

This is the most comprehensive package I found out there.  I believe it actually does more then I would expect out of a package…

BigDoor

Rating: E

Again, a very comprehensive package.  I think you would need to tailor game play a little around the systems capabilities.

Badgeville

Rating: M

Pretty good comprehensive package and gives good examples of industry usage.   I thought it just missed a couple of key features I would want to see, but all in all a good system

Iactionable 

Rating F

Really hard to tell what they are offering and what you actually will get.  I believe they say the system is more flexible then others, I just think it is only half defined which means more time and money to impliment.

 

I’m sure others will know more systems out there then I have taken a look at.  Let me know.