Welcome Gamers and Players,

today we will approach to the end of our path regarding gamification governance, writing about analytics.

Analytics is very important actually, because it is the competitive advantage that allow to gamification to be perceived like “something new” in social and viral marketing.

Think about “fidelity card” used in supermarket, coupons and those kind of stuff. They are very closely related to gamification: in fact, they are the first forms of gamification applied to market.

Gamification can be perceived as a different field only thanks to its strict connections with analytics: this allow to monitor, right now, who is collecting your “point”, who is following your campaign and so on. This create something we can call viral gamification or social gamification, where these two fields act as booster for marketing and communications techniques that already existed.

Another important property of modern gamification is the social transparency: this means that I do not simply collect “coupon”, but I will collect badge and victory also to show them, from a competitive point of view.
This kind of motivation, obviously, born before gamification. Even in ’90, within forum and newsgroup, were possible to see similar phenomena: spamming to obtain an higher number of post, contest with no real-life rewards for graphics of writing, and much more.

So, in the end, why analytics is so important in modern gamification?

They are important, simply, because they always have been, in any field that gamification will use.

For some specific answers: here we suggest what can be player’s first reactions to your game, and how to manage it; here we show how can be set-up a playtest, and how to manage feedback, if your playtest is public, this is also the first stage of your analytics; here we make and overview upon some aspect of governance, including analytics,

So, in the end, analytics are important because they collect information. Any field you’re working in, any project you have to test, any work are you involved in, information is the key to proper play any part in modern world.