Welcome Gamers and Players,

today I’ll write a little about relationship between Gamification and new tendencies. I’m talking about full customer engagement and crowdsourcing.

As I’ve written before, I think that the actual gamification is a sort of “simplified version” of what Gamification could be. Actual gamification take some advantages: it allow to release gamification platform ready-to-use, it’s easy to understand for Ceo level, it uses marketing and social marketing models to calculate Roi.

However Gamification can be far more than that. It’s the opportunity to have people do things for you while they having fun. It’s the perfect driver for crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing has some problematic key point: needs a lot a brand strength to push people participating, has an issue about monitoring quality of the work, can make people suspicious about “working for you for free”.

To this and other key question, gamification is the perfect answer. It allows to improve participation and engagement regardless of brand strength (in fact, the brand can also do not appear at all – this is impossible in actual gamification); it allows to monitor and compare quality of the work on a very solid basis (see Socket Puncher as an example – in this case it’s the competition the driver that allows to compare different outputs); it gives reward to players in term of fun to keep them playing.

My statement is that any kind of resources you need, you can successfully gamify it, and then let the crowdsourcing do the rest. This can involve technical/computational resources (as for the old Seti wallpaper program: do you remember it?), human resources, idea, creativities and so on.

Do you think it’s hard to believe or to figure out how? See and example: can a game helps to test protein combination to cure cancer? Yes, a game can. And here you can download it.

The very important starting point to develop this kind of gamification it’s a very good analysis on business needs and resources that you wish to outsource and collect. A game can create a great amount of data, but the game structure itself makes this data easily usable (structured) or more difficult to use (unstructured).