Gamification is a meta word that is gaining popularity day after day.
The first part of it is made by game, a term often associated to fun and amusement without any particular purpose.
There’s more: gaming is not only that but taking advantage of interaction is becoming a powerful means to convey messages of every kind.
Among them you can consider the improvement of customer management, build loyalty and maximize the performance of employees and partners.

It’s a really different point of view that shift the focus away from the traditional gaming market, based on the production of titles that have a great appeal on young males, and that can reach different demographic categories.

The gaming market has grown in the latest years and its numbers keep rising with no particular signs of dropping in profits. Gaming is now a huge industry that spread its products on different platforms, from dedicate consoles to browsers and mobile phones, in the future even on TVs.
But how Gamification works? Which are its main features? How is it possible use them in real world examples?

The first thing to analyze is the visceral meaning of the word: Gamification is a set of rules with the intention to apply the mechanics of gaming to nongame activities. In this way it’s possible to change people’s behavior and drive the active attention of the user to the communication message.
There are many context in which Gamification can be applied: a site, service, community, content and campaign can be arranged to be “gamified”, so it can drive participation and engagement in the users.
To aim for this goal the design process have to be rethinked so it can include game mechanics and dynamics that alter its base structure, adding the compelling factors that attract the audience and encourage it to come back for more.

Game mechanics are the real tools to “gamify” a site or service: introducing concepts like points, levels and challenges encourage users to put their time into it, driving participation and helping them to build relationships inside the game.Those relationships can get people motivated to pursue objectives, modifying their behavior. Objectives can be rewards that give to users the possibility to express themselves in the community, using virtual goods to create their own identity, or status achievements to share for spreading competition, using leaderboards to ensure involvement.

Gamification is part of a more complete topic that we call Game-Based Business Solution, that also include Game-Based Marketing. We, as alittleb.it, know it very well because we can offer a full and tested solution, used, for example, in the development of the social game “La Grande Avventura” (The Great Adventure – Camp Orange Social Web Game) for MTV Italy and Nickelodeon, that reached the objective to double the nicktv.it’s global page view in the first month of availability.
We can offer optimized Game-Based Business Solution because the deeply know the final market, owning Darkwave Games, the alittleb.it’s gaming brand, that develops high quality proprietary games to be published on the most important online stores worldwide.

In the next posts we’re going to discover in details the various elements that define Gamification and Game-Based Marketing so keep following us if you want experience something new and don’t hesitate to contact us if you need additional clarifications.