Brainstorming

Welcome Gamers and Players,

first of all, apologies for my chaotic updating of this blog. Unfortunately (or luckily – I’m not still sure) I’ve been involved in a lot of meeting with different operators from marketing, communication and media market: about gamification consultancy offer.
Talking to them I recognize a common pattern: they are really interested in gamification as a “concept”, but what will make the difference is always the practical example.

I’ve discussed with a marketing consultant, that expose to me some engagement problem he has. The solution, hypothetically, is easy: gamify. But how to do this? How to gamify a focus group, or a market research, to collaborative create solution for a client? This is hard, for a number of problem I list here below:

1. Gamification and game means users will have a motivation to participate. Sometimes players can easy pushed towards gaming, sometimes no. See also my last post about this topic.
2. A game system should be very good to avoid “cheating” or to use it into game mechanics, as I stated here.
3. To avoid problems in real-life interactive game, you can create the role of Referee, (or Major, Narrator, Master, Manager or any name you want to call him). This allows to drive game and mechanics, to avoid problem listed before: this role, however, need that you or a skilled and trained person will lead the game.
4. Calculating income or Roi of these activities can be hard. If you’re lucky (as for market research activities) getting more and better data can be enough. Otherwise, you have to calculate Roi. Here are some hints about game designing, but it’s better you also think about how to calculate Roi from marketing and social interaction (a complete list can be found also in “Hot topic“).
5. Other possible application problems, depending on what kind of business you are trying to gamify.

So, is gamification so difficult? I think we only have to think “out of the box“: the rewarding approach of gamification got the strong point to create a connection between gamification strategy and metrics/analytics (this is the reason for its growing success: any other aspect is well-known from years, probably decades).
This is pretty useful to target big society, that “talks the language of metrics”: but it fails when you have to be more creative, something I like to call “real” gamification. This is building business application tailored on client needs.

So, my advice to reinforce your offer and create a believable products is to brainstorm without fear when selling gamification solutions. If you’re skilled, show that you have what is needed to transform an idea into a real project: this is a must all companies and people interested about gamification are seeking for.
To anyone you will talk, someone already told them  about how gamification can advantage them: what they need is to understand how practically you can help them!