What activities should be gamified?

There are many theories on which components that makes a game and even if they may differ widely they usually point out one thing; the need of a good feedback system. A short feedback loop is often one of the biggest differences between games and reality and one of the main reasons that games are so engaging.

But on which activities or achievements should we give feedback and how should that feedback be presented? When talking about gamifying a consultancy model, which have clear steps and sub-goals to reach the next level, it might at first be obvious to simply give feedback when you achieve on of those goals; e.g. get a badge or points and see how you are getting closer to the next consultancy level with a progress bar. However, career progress can't be generically generated. In the end such decisions are always made after a manual assessment and a dialog with the affected indiviudals (manager and employee). There is no way to remove the human factor. This means that in a system where the feedback is based purely on professional performance, one will only receive feedback when the manager is giving it. In the best of worlds, such evaluations can be given frequently, but in reality it's not. The feedback loop will simply be too long for a successful game.

We simply needed something else to base our feedback on and to "keep the score" in our game. When realising that the bottom line of assessing the performance is dialog we started to think of ways to facilitate better commincation and focus the game on helping both parties to be more prepared for the assessment meetings. Personal developing meetings are held one, or in some cases two, times a year and the main input is the consultants personal log. After some research however, we found that the log is often ignored in between the meetings and that common practice is to, in the last minute, try to remember what you have done the past year. So we decided to make updating the log the central activity. A big advantage is that we can easily design game mechanics that generically provide direct feedback based on this activity.

Direct feedback from the system itself is not the only advantage. As we have already concluded; tayloring the game layer to fit our specific audience is vital. In our previous post we showed how status isn't something that is important to the employees at Cybercom. Comparision of performance between consultants might therefor not be motivating. On the contrary, there is a risk that it's only demotivating for the the people who, for different reasons, aren't performing well at the moment. However, we do believe that social interaction within the game is a great way to increase communication in the company and an additional way for the player to receive feedback from his or her co-workers. Again we think that the individual log should have a central role by setting up a system where one can comment on each other's posts in some way. That's not only good for the log writer who gets recognition, it's also a way to raise awareness of in-house competencies and a way to enhance the spreading of knowledge within the organisation. As we are struggling with the issue of what level of transparency that is fitting we also see the number of log updates as a delicate way for the consultants to compete by implementing a leader board.