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Achievements and learning: Gamification comes to businesses and schools


By Alex Handy


 Alex Handy
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May 18, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Games and business software have always had an interesting relationship. While business tends to frown upon playing games, the serious games movement, which really started to take off in 2004, has convinced many businesses like Alcoa that games can be used to further business goals. But serious games were just the beginning.

According to Gartner, by 2015, more than 50% of all businesses that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes. Leave it to Gartner to make fun sound dull. But that's what gamification is all about: fun. Though it is difficult to quantify, many game development firms have long understood how to codify fun into software.

To that end, the ubiquitous achievement badges have begun to trickle out of Xbox Live and into enterprise applications. As a quick and easy way to gamify almost anything, achievements have become the flagship gamification project of choice for many enterprises, so much so that startup Badgeville has emerged to address the need.

So, what exactly are achievements? If you've never used a modern game console, you may have missed out entirely on this new trend in gaming. Goals are set within the game, or now, within the software, and when users reach those goals, they are rewarded with an achievement badge or through a point system. Achievements can be anything from registering for a new application to completing 100 form submissions or expense reports.

Tony Ventrice, senior designer at Badgeville, said, “We have both an API as well as a suite of turnkey widgets along with the frameworks that people can take and embed with a couple lines of JavaScript code.”

Having embedded said code in an application, users can then be tracked according to how many goals they've accomplished. Users can also show off their badges to exemplify just how expert they are at certain tasks and systems. These badges are all about establishing a social reputation system, said Ventrice.

“Gamification systems are important, and they work much better in a social context. It's about bringing social features to your experiences. We're seeing that a lot from our customers: People want to be social but they don't know how to be. It's not about sending employees to that outside site. You're earning points in a community.”


Related Search Term(s): Badgeville, Edmodo, gamification

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