You probably looked at the title of this article and thought to yourself: “What is Insightful Gamification?” and though this article will explain the term, I would like to start out defining what Insightful Gamification can help solve before dwelling into the concept.
Basically, Insightful Gamification can be used as a bridge between companies and customers, through which customers will be able to engage with their favorite products and the companies will be able to gain an unbiased insight into their customers preferences.
Gamification on its own is defined as:
“The application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.”
and Insight can be defined as:
“The understanding of a specific cause and effect within a specific context.”
Thus I would define Insightful Gamification as:
“The utilization of game-design elements and game principles to investigate or solve a specific cause and effect within a specific context.”
Are you interested yet? If so, then lets discuss Insightful Gamification to give you a better understanding of how it is utilized and what it means in context.
One might say that you Gamify the way you gain Insights, but how is this any different from doing questionnaires, interviews or looking at statistics?
The problem with standardized approaches to data gathering is that most users finds it troublesome and tiring which in many cases means that the results can be biased or limited in quantity. Often the data gathering process is combined with a contest to create an incentive for the participants to participate and here’s where Insightful Gamification really shines.
The trick lies in the utilization of Game Design as the aim of any good Game Design is to establish goals, rules and challenges, which can drive player behavior through motivation and encouragement. So instead of having to add an incentive, the Game Design on its own can in many cases be enough to have your customers gladly sharing their preferences with you. The players will have fun engaging with your products and you will gain Insights based on their unbiased activities. This can be a little hard to grasp without an example, so for now you will own a fictional shopping mall.
Your shopping mall has about 70 shops and when its the malls busiest hour, some of the shops have noticed that their sales go down by 30% while other shops sales go up with 40%. It seems like a weird case as generally all shops should sell more during the busiest hours so you decide to look into the matter. Lets say you’ve hired our company Fenrir Game Studio to build an Insightful Gamification solution to get a better understanding of the issue. We develop a Game for your shopping mall in which the players use their GPS to move around a virtual shopping mall, the more you move, the more points you get. The points can then be exchanged for discounts in different shops.
From the data we gather through the game, we notice that there are actually fewer people who move all the way around the mall during rush hour. This has the side effect that most people don’t get past a certain point as the mall is simply too crowded and they end up only visiting the best placed shops.
Now we try to solve the issue with nothing more than a mere update to the app already installed. Instead of just moving to receive points, you now need to pass certain checkpoints, such as visiting a specific store, located slightly off the main path, these will work dynamically and will disrupt the normal flow and thus making the best parts of the mall seem slightly less crowded.
This change in the design of the game will encourage players to move towards the shops as they are being given an incentive in the form of discounts. And this is where it gets interesting, as the data we gather from the GPS signals can be used to change the distribution of players around the mall with Artificial Intelligence.
So to summerize, here’s how we handle our current Insightful Gamification cases at Fenrir Game Studio:
- We are presented with a case to investigate or a problem to solve
- We design and develop a prototype which will be used to discuss further development
- We develop the full polished game with goals and rules aligned with your interests
- We release the game and start gathering the necessary data
- We analyze the data and send you a report of our findings
- We use the insights to solve the problem
Insightful Gamification is by no means a perfect tool, but it relies on the best aspects of Game Design and the best practices of the Games Industry to bring you the Insights you need to grow your business, stay connected with your customers and stay ahead of your competitors.
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