Welcome Gamers and Players.
Today I’ll talk a little about the past. Sometimes it happens that you are sure about something you can’t already prove, or try some predictions related to the future. The best of Internet, from this point of view, is that you can easily find out what you’ve written months or years ago for a reality check.
Some time ago, Gartner release a statement very critical on gamification solutions. Here the full release. On LinkedIn, there is a growing buzz about poor game design, gamification related risk and so on. This topic sounds familiar to me, but I have some difficulties to find my old related post.
Yesterday I understand why: it is because my old post was in Italian, my very first one on this blog. Today I will translate that, because I think it’s funny to see how a game fan can figure out, a year and half before analyst, what will happen in future…
The original post is linked here below. Translation probably will miss some rhetorical figure, but keep the main meaning of post.
You can’t do what you can’t imagine
I start this blog with a suggestion, the very first one I found when I start to be interested in gamification.
Today, if the game ever meets business, the game itself is thought only as social gaming or gamification.
In first case, line of business are interested in customer engagement, brand reinforcement and / or sponsorship and direct revenue by selling game feature.
Second case is smoother: look out a contact with customer, draining some indirect value as behavioural analytics, marketing empowerment and / or other advantage waiting to be discovered and structured in a useful way.
Anyway…
Talking about “games”, the kind of games proposed today are sadly few. Basically, a couple of ones. Indeed, also if the phenomena is exploding, the game structure used are the simplest ones, those “easy to understand” in terms of business and return of the investment.
The gaming itself, instead, has developed during years a great numbers of systems, structure and ideas, enormously more refined, smart, functional and useful than the games used today in business.
The co-creation of content, the shared governance on process and results, cooperative rivalry and a number of other solutions are trivial and almost old, if you are a pure gamer: indeed they are the “state of the art” or “mind-blowing ideas” if correctly applied to business.
Now there is space and time to work into business starting from gaming… what is needed now is something to put into this blue ocean.
To keep this focus is our will, with perseverance and passion. Good work and good game to everyone!
Games & Business 