And yet, even with the increase in competition, products like World Of Warcraft, Fortnite, and Grand Theft Auto Online, all driven by engagement, are some of the most profitable properties in the gaming landscape. In fact, gaming, in general, is one of the biggest growing entertainment businesses of the 21st century.
Their secret? Good old-fashioned psychology. What all successful games have in common is that they have managed to strike a fine balance between frustration and reward to create an engagement cycle that is really hard to break away from. So, what can we learn from gaming in general? A lot. But first, we need to understand a crucial concept – gamification.
What is gamification?
Gamification is the application of game-design job function email list principles and ethos as well as gaming mechanics to non-gaming contexts. It’s an engineering solution that approaches issues in a novel way to provide unorthodox and highly efficient solutions.
Gamification is based on three core principles:
Game design is a problem-solving skill: Game designers are not making toys, they are creating sophisticated systems that interact and engage with users in a myriad of ways. Those skills can be recontextualized and deployed in other environments.
Games are becoming part of folk psychology: As the gaming industry grows concepts like score, experience points, traits, levels, and achievements are becoming mainstream. Gamification aims to exploit the fact that people are already familiar with these concepts and understand the reward cycles.
Any process can be gamified:
Gamification examples go from overt marketing strategy: types and stages of formation processes like literally turning work into a videogame to more subtle strategies that might not use the terminology but apply the core concepts.
Think of social media like Instragam, change the concept of likes for points and followers for levels and you will soon start noticing how the pattern of generating content for Instagram is very similar to trying to overcome a stage on candy crush, or level up your character in an RPG.
Understanding the reward cycle
Nir Eyal, author of Hooked – How to build habit-forming products synthesized his own experience as well as the findings of search engine optimization mails psychologist B.F Skinner into what he calls “The hook model.” This is a succinct and easy-to-follow process that describes how sites like Facebook have turned gamification principles into engagement and revenue.
The hook model is based on four broad steps: triggers, actions, rewards, and investment
Triggers are the things that set a user-product interaction in motion. The first kind of trigger is intrinsic or internal, referring to a user’s state of mind, their motivations, feelings, and desire.