Angry Birds, Call of Duty or online bingo? Whatever your preference, games have become part of many people’s leisure, so it was only a matter of time before someone found a way to transfer it to the world of work. “Gamification is when video games and business have a baby,” says Mario Herger, founder of consultancy Enterprise Gamification. The common definition is “using game design elements and principles in a non-game context”.
Gaining in popularity over the past few years, the point of gamification is to make mundane, difficult or time- consuming tasks more fun so we do them more effectively. It works, Mr Herger says, by tapping into our natural curiosity and sociability, desire for mastery and having fun.
Some games also use the “flow” principle, where a game’s difficulty is carefully matched to skill: initially, it is kept simple but as soon as you figure out how the game works, the difficulty notches up. Importantly, the immediate and constant feedback that online games give, whether cheering birds — as in Angry Birds — or the allocation of points, is being incorporated into the work version.