Exploring gamification

It’s not all fun & games

Before embarking on my FMP journey, I took a moment to reflect on the DMC tools covered throughout the course and had a few ideas in mind. My past projects involved experience design, dating apps and gamification. I had just returned to Hong Kong and knew that for the sake of primary research and my pre-existing cultural awareness, it would be most feasible to base my project around my locale.

Asking myself what I wanted to do was a challenge in itself. I decided to weed out what I didn’t want to do instead: an app. Product. Business venture. These were all things I had no interest in, so after a little reverse engineering, I decided to brain dump a few ideas on gamification, and even came close to an idea: I even came up with initial HMWs for how I saw my FMP heading. Much of it was centralised around a postpandemic society, relationships, connection and hyper-digitalisation. Although I initially felt strongly about these concepts, I later realised how broad it was at this stage, and the challenge of exploring a post-COVID world would be purely speculative.

Regardless, exploring the idea of gamification was both insightful and inspiring. As someone who is highly competitive especially in video games, I find game incentives to be particularly motivating even when I’m faced with challenge. Knowing that my FMP will deal with a challenge of some sort (though this is still blurry at this point), I continued to look at gamification and how examples have been applied in areas such as business, marketing, HR and even social innovation.

KEY INSIGHTS > The more active a social community, the more eager and willing customers will be to share participation levels and success.

TESTING DUOLINGO: GAMIFICATION THOUGHTS

ACCENTURE INTERACTIVE: UX DESIGN PRINCIPLES

The idea of ‘player-centred design’ also intrigued me. From human-to-user-to-player, I considered how the role of the audience we were designing for changes when their roles vary. The idea was simple, and a lot of game principles accounted to the production of dopamine as an favourable outcome:

� Define the goal � Prioritise behavioural changes � Gamify mundane tasks � Explain purpose � Tailor specific rewards for users Also looking at key insights from companies like Accenture, I was driven by the rising trend of experience consumerism and how the market was now changing from product to service to experience. I explored the needs and pitfalls of gamification through game principles and looked at how existing products and services have utilised gamification for their own needs.

An example would be Duolingo, which was a language learning app that I tested out for a week. Using badges and rewards to motivate the player to continue learning the language, I found that positive reinforcement wasn’t a sustainable solution that worked for me. I felt more motivated via intrinsic motivations to learn Spanish.