cOMMUNITY GAMIFICATION: the good, THE BAD, THE UGLY It is a truth now universally acknowledged that a community of a certain size and age is in need of gamification. Toby Beresford, Head of Client Engagement - Veneficus (UK)
G
amification is the art and science of using gamelike features to encourage greater participation in your online (and sometimes offline) community. Gigya noted back in 2013, for example, that introducing gamification drove a 13% increase in commenting amongst community members. Since then, gamelike features have been integrated into most online community platforms: vanilla forums gamification features for example allows managers to “reward members with ranks” and offers user profiles that “display a member’s reputation, badges and recent activity.” If you’re a fan of King.com’s smartphone megahit “Candy Crush Saga” you might have come across these features when interacting with other candy crushers in their forums. Powered by Vanilla, you can see how King have taken the basic “vanilla flavour” gamification and pimped it up with Candy Crush style badges. Which player wouldn’t want to be in the “Jelly 1 Million Club”?
The Good
One company that has crystallized the value of community gamification is Stack Overflow. Founded in 2008, this tech led Q&A community now serves over 100 million users a month making it one of the top 50 websites in the world. Stack Overflow has gamification in its very DNA, despite founder Joel Spolsky describing it as a “dusting of gamification”, it is self-evidently highly gamified; as you can see from my own Stack Overflow profile which includes reputation points and badges:
Toby Beresford Profile on Stack Overflow
Typical user profile, betchiegrl29, on the Candy Crush Saga community
For platform provider Vanilla, the Candy Crush Saga community is “an excellent example of gamification done right.” But is it really? And how do we tell the good and the bad from the merely ugly? 10
COMMUNITY LEADERS
DEC 21
Indeed, Spolsky is surprised by his own success: “To be honest, it was initially surprising to me that you could just print a number after people’s handles and they would feel rewarded. Look at me! Look at my four digit number! But it does drive a tremendous amount of good behavior. Even people who aren’t participating in the system (by working to earn reputation) buy into it (e.g., by respecting high-reputation users for their demonstrated knowledge and helpfulness).” he writes on his blog. The market agrees it’s a success, earlier this year Spolsky sold
