Gamification:
the new company’s e-learning process

Do you want to know if Gamification is part of buzzwords?  Try the following “one-minute-experiment”: ask your desk–neighbours whether they know the Gamification. Are they nodding, right? All right, let us now take a step further: try to ask them the big question.

What is Gamification?

Probably, their answer will get close to this one: <<Gamification means changing serious activities in leisure activities>>. 

In this meaning, the presence of the ‘game’ covers a trick: when we are ‘gaming’ an activity, we are not talking about a real game, but we use typical gaming features in order to make enjoyable all intrinsic (belief, pleasure, view) and extrinsic (approval, property, awarding) motivations of a critical activity. 

In this regard, Gamification is more than a game: it becomes an organisational transformation asset that allows to digitise the key-processes about the employee and the customer journey, by increasing their efficiency and effectiveness. 

According to today’s digital technologies, Gamification is not the only assignment of points, badges and rankings.

What does Gamification need?  

Gamification is an activity that wraps users to 360 degrees: it can be the mentor-mentoree dynamic of a community, the exclusive pass for a company’s club élite, or the cognitive challenge to solve problems. 

Gamification can be the exploration and discovery of a website, an educational path, an Easter Egg in a platform, or the acknowledgement of expertise shared by a community.   

Let’s make a concrete example by looking at one of the most classical organisation processes of our modern society: the educational system. 

Our school systems, just like our e-learning platforms, usually use the following structures: guided path, scores, final acknowledgement, timing, quiz.  

School systems are almost the same thing: study, grades, exams, students’ ranking, individuality and homework. With these premises, learning is an extremely essential “gamified” system: it uses many extrinsic motivations (grade, award, the final certificate-graduation-degree, the fear of the rejection), and less intrinsic motivations (discovery, surprise, community acknowledgement). 

A proper playful analogy with a classic e-learning path is Supermario: a single character (or a couple) who follows a forced path full of obstacles and monsters to save the Princess (final level), get your scores and finish the game.  

The Gamification challenge as we imagine it is to make e-learning paths very similar to Warcraft, one of the most popular online videogames of the last decade.  

Warcraft allows you to climb ranking and “badge” by putting them together in order to be explored and lived: a world where players can move, test, discover, create a virtual community, help each other (cooperation), make relationships and leaderships (mentoree and mentor).   

So, Gamification is a changing element that goes through the construction of an experiential matryoshka that “catches” the user, “hooks” him and leads him towards an adventure where he can “grow-up”.