Szerkesztő:Fekete Zsombor/próbalap

A gamifikáció, vagy magyarul játékosítás során a videojátékokból megismert jutalmazási módszereket, ergonómiai megoldásokat - összefoglaló néven játékmechanikát - használjuk nem-játékos környezetben felhasználók motiválására, különféle célok elérésére, vagy problémák megoldására.

Technikák

A gamifikációs technikák azokra a módszerekre és eljárásokra épülnek, amelyek a videojátékok világában már bizonyították hatékonyságukat. Olyan motivációkat használnak fel a kívánt célok elérésére, mint a felhasználók közösségi- (versengő vagy kooperációs), teljesítmény-, illetve hatalomszükségletei, kíváncsisága, vagy a gyűjtemények teljessé tétele iránti vágy.

A gamifikáció alapelve, hogy lehetőség szerint minden felhasználói tevékenységekre visszajelzést kell adni. A visszajelzés érkezhet pontok,, trófeák, szintlépések formájában, vagy valamilyen virtuális pénz formájában is. A sikeres gamifikációhoz elengedhetetlen, hogy a visszajelzés olyan kereteken belül történjen, amelyet a felhasználó értékesnek tart.

A gamifikáció eszközeit leggyakrabban a videojátékok kínálják, így a terminológia is jelentős részben erről a területről származik. További források és eszközök: a marketing (különös tekintettel a loyalty programokra), a vezetéselmélet, illetve a szoftverergonómia. A gamifikáció gyakran használja a narratívát alapvető motivációs eszközként, a felhasználói aktivitást pedig a kihívások és a jutalmak optimalizálásával igyekszik fenntartani.

Alkalmazások

Külföldi gamifikációs legjobb gyakorlatok:

• Foursquare - játékosított geolokációs szolgáltatás, amely bejelentkezésenként pontokkal, illetve badgekkel jutalmazza a felhasználókat .
• Nike - több mobil alkalmazásban használ játékosított elemeket a sportteljesítmény motiválására.
• The Fun Theory - a Volkswagen kezdeményezése, amelyben kreatív ötleteket gyűjtöttek össze a mindennapi élet biztonságosabbá, élhetőbbé tételéhez .

Gamification has also been used as a tool for customer engagement, and for encouraging desirable website usage behaviour. Additionally, gamification is readily applicable to increasing engagement on sites built on social network services. For example, in August 2010, one site, DevHub, announced that they have increased the number of users who completed their online tasks from 10% to 80% after adding gamification elements. On the programming question-and-answer site Stack Overflow users receive points and/or badges for performing a variety of actions, including spreading links to questions and answers via Facebook and Twitter. A large number of different badges are available, and when a user's reputation points exceed various thresholds, he or she gains additional privileges, including at the higher end, the privilege of helping to moderate the site.

Gamification in ideation focuses on incentives. In the past, participants in a brainstorming session have been incented in two ways: participants are rewarded based on their individual contribution or participants are rewarded based on the group’s collective output. Neither is ideal. Rewarding participants based only on the group’s collective output encourages "free-riding"—all receive equal credit regardless of their level of participation.

In his award-winning dissertation, "Idea Generation, Creativity, and Incentives," published in Marketing Science, Olivier Toubia tackled this problem head on. In his research at MIT Sloan, Toubia examined whether carefully tailored incentives can improve creative output in ideation sessions. What he finds is that more and better ideas result when participants are rewarded not only for their own contributions, but by how much their contributions inspire others. He likens it to academia, where a publication is deemed more or less influential by the number of citations it receives in subsequent research.

Sablon:External media Education and training are areas where there has been interest in gamification. Microsoft has released the game Ribbon Hero 2 as an add-on to their Office productivity suite to help train people to use it effectively. It is one of the most popular projects Microsoft's office labs division has ever released. The New York City Department of Education with funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has set up a school called Quest to Learn centred around game-based learning, with the intent to make education more engaging and relevant to modern kids. SAP has used games to educate their employees on sustainability. The US military and Unilever have also used gamification in their training. The Khan Academy is an example of the use of gamification techniques in online education. In August 2009, Gbanga launched the educational location-based game Gbanga Zooh for Zurich Zoo that asked participants to actively save endangered animals and physically bring them back to a zoo. Players maintained virtual habitats across the Canton of Zurich to attract and collect endangered species of animals.

Applications like Fitocracy and QUENTIQ use gamification to encourage their users to exercise more effectively and improve their overall health. Users are awarded varying numbers of points for activities they perform in their workouts and gain levels based on points collected. Users can also complete quests (sets of related activities) and gain achievement badges for fitness milestones. Health Month adds aspects of social gaming by allowing successful users to restore points to users who have failed to meet certain goals.

Employee productivity is another problem that gamification has been used to tackle. RedCritter Tracker, Playcall, and Arcaris are examples of management tools that uses gamification to improve productivity.

Crowdsourcing has been gamified in games like Foldit, a game designed by the University of Washington, in which players compete to manipulate proteins into more efficient structures. A 2010 paper in science journal Nature credited Foldit's 57,000 players with providing useful results that matched or outperformed algorithmicly computed solutions. The ESP Game is a game that is used to generate image metadata. Google Image Labeler is a version of the ESP Game that Google has licensed to generate its own image metadata. Research from the University of Bonn used gamification to increase wiki contributions by 62%.

Experts anticipate that the technique would also be applied to health care, financial services, transportation, government, employee training, and other activities.

Alix Levine, an American security consultant, described gamification as some techniques that a number of extremist websites such as Stormfront and various terrorism-related sites used to build loyalty and participation. As an example, Levine mentioned reputation scores.

Microsoft has also announced plans to use gamification techniques for its Windows Phone 7 operating system design.

Gamification has also been applied to authentication. For example, the possibilities of using a game like Guitar Hero can help someone learn a password implicitly. Furthermore, games have been explored as a way to learn new and complicated passwords. It is suggested that these games could be used to "level up" a password, thereby improving its strength over time. Gamification has also been proposed as a way to select and manage archives.

History

Though the term "gamification" was coined in 2002 by Nick Pelling, it did not gain popularity until 2010. Even prior to the term coming into use, other fields borrowing elements from videogames was common; for example, some work in scientific visualization adapted elements from videogames. A Forbes blogger also retroactively labelled Charles Coonradt, who in 1973 founded the consultancy The Game of Work and in 1984 wrote a book by the same name, as the "Grandfather of Gamification".

The term "gamification" first gained widespread usage in 2010, in a more specific sense referring to incorporation of social/reward aspects of games into software. The technique captured the attention of venture capitalists, one of whom said he considered gamification the most promising area in gaming. Another observed that half of all companies seeking funding for consumer software applications mentioned game design in their presentations.

Several researchers consider gamification closely related to earlier work on adapting game-design elements and techniques to non-game contexts. Deterding et al. survey research in human–computer interaction that uses game-derived elements for motivation and interface design, and Nelson argues for a connection to both the Soviet concept of socialist competition, and the American management trend of "fun at work". Fuchs points out that gamification might be driven by new forms of Ludic Interfaces. Gamification conferences have also retroactively incorporated simulation; e.g. Will Wright, designer of the 1989 video game SimCity, was the keynote speaker at the gamification conference Gsummit 2013.

In addition to companies that use the technique, a number of businesses created gamification platforms. In October 2007, Bunchball, backed by Adobe Systems Incorporated, was the first company to provide game mechanics as a service, on Dunder Mifflin Infinity, the community site for the NBC TV show The Office. Bunchball customers have included Playboy, Chiquita, Bravo, and The USA Network. In June 2009 a Seattle-based startup called BigDoor was founded, providing gamification technology to non-gaming websites. Badgeville launched in late 2010, and raised $15 million in venture-capital funding in its first year of operation; it provides gamification services to a number of large customers. IActionable launched a gamification platform aimed at integrating with Salesforce.com.

Among established enterprise firms, SAP AG, IBM, EMC, CA, Slalom Consulting, Deloitte, Microsoft, LiveOps, RedCritter and other companies have started using gamification in various applications and processes.

In December 2011 Salesforce.com announced the acquisition of the social performance platform provider Rypple, which uses gamification for employee performance and HR.

In September 2012, a Turkish gamification start up named İşte Oyun launched the first gamification platform in Turkey and received the first round of investment in two months.

The inaugural Gamification World Championships will be held in San Franscisco in October 2013. The event will be judged by leading global Gamification practitioners: Mario Herger, Marigo Raftopolous and Yu-Kai Chou.

Legal restrictions

Through gamification's growing adoption and its nature as a data aggregator, multiple legal restrictions may apply to gamification. Some refer to the use of virtual currencies and virtual assets, data privacy laws and data protection, or labour laws.

The use of virtual currencies, in contrast to traditional payment systems, is not regulated. The legal uncertainty surrounding the virtual currency schemes might constitute a challenge for public authorities, as these schemes can be used by criminals,fraudsters and money launderers to perform their illegal activities.

Criticism

The enthusiasm for gamification among its proponents has met with a critical response from a portion of the games community. University of Hamburg researcher Sebastian Deterding has characterised the current popular strategies for gamification as not being fun and creating an artificial sense of achievement. He also says that gamification can encourage unintended behaviours. Game designers like Jon Radoff and Margaret Robertson have also criticised gamification as excluding elements like storytelling and experiences and using simple reward systems in place of true game mechanics. MIT Professor Kevin Slavin has described business research into gamification as flawed and misleading for those unfamiliar with gaming.

Gamification as a term has also been criticised. Ian Bogost has referred to the term as a marketing fad and suggested "exploitationware" as a more suitable name for the games used in marketing. He has also suggested that gamification is just an extension of existing ideas in marketing like loyalty programmes. Jane McGonigal has distanced her work from the label gamification, listing rewards outside of gameplay as the central idea of gamification and distinguishing game applications where the gameplay itself is the reward under the term "gameful design".

See also

• Game
• Game Theory
• Incentive-centered design
• Serious game