Here comes the Gamification of IT (aka Business, IT and Video Games, the Love Story)
Written By: Matt Weaver
Have you ever seen a 10-12 year old boy staring blankly at a video game on a screen (or a television), fully engulfed in what he is doing – nearly completely oblivious to the physical world around him, unless shaken or yelled at repeatedly? That was me at age 11 when my family picked up an Atari 2600. Even before that I enjoyed games on the Commodore 64, Apple IIe – but the console really got me, and I still enjoy games to this day, although rarely play them.
Video games have come a looong way from 8 Bit graphics taking up a few Kilobytes of memory and storage. Moore’s law and technology breakthroughs make things faster and more capable, the size of the addressable market and industry size (estimated recently to be worth $65 Billion USD) is staggering, and video game production budgets are now rivaling first rate summer movies. Corporate sponsorship within video gaming existed for years, as games often provide access to youth who have yet to make up their minds on which brands they identify with/purchase.
The industry itself has been monetized by entrepreneurs, some doing something ethically and completely legal – such as the former P&G employee who resigned years ago to form a business to buy and distribute virtual goods bought in lots and then broken down and sold via ebay, spurring questions around intellectual property of things that don’t exist outside of magnetically stored 1’s and 0’s back in the day. Everquest (or Ever-crack as the one person I knew who played it called it) was the game – and its economy at one point in USD was equivalent to the 77th richest country in the world.
More recently the grey markets created by Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) games such as World of Warcraft have shown a seedier side of gaming, employing factories of prisoners in slave labor type conditions to play video games all the time they are awake, building up stockpiles of virtual goods/cash, and then exchanging these for tangible cash in USD$.
I wonder – why not do more from a corporate point of view? In a culture where gaming is so pervasive that Angry Birds has nearly replaced the newspaper or magazines for bathroom reading for many (the REAL reason the Birds are so angry – it’s hard to get angry at green pigs) – why not?
If you incentivize users with an entertaining and engaging experience (I’m talking to you Minecraft), generally with ongoing points or status awards, you can:
- Reinforce your brand and build loyalty for it within your target demographics
- Know your customer better over time, build up a tremendous amount of data
- Establish a relationship they care about – not just another weekly email
- Get actual results – crowd-sourced work parsing and validating unstructured data, for example, in a game-like forum. Stand-up some servers – better yet use EC2 with game mods – or build a much more engaging iOS/Android App – MORE than marketing!
All at minimal cost! It does not cost much to develop a game – there are open source alternatives, as well as commercial, with open SDKs.
My 6 year old spends considerable time on a toy company’s website, with very rudimentary flash games. He’s a fan of the brand for life but not b/c of the website – imagine what could be done if more thought outside the box. I define ‘the box’ as a web-site with simple flash/html5 games heavily based on product being sold – occasionally building a simple app for IOS or Android. That is great – what companies don’t realize is they could do so much more if they connected the dots, they have a willing audience willing to work under game mechanics as long as the experience is worth it for no cost, sometimes even paying more than their time.
Microsoft is opening up the Kinect, paving the way for low-cost robotics for outer space, bomb defusement – the applications are as endless as the human imagination. The military uses video games as part of the training process for enhancing situational decision making. Where are the large enterprises?
13 years ago a guy on my team built a Doom-mod which triggered scripts to take action when various things were shot by the ‘player’. He wanted incidents to show up as monsters – but that wasn’t happening in a production environment. Nonetheless – he was very ahead of his time. Can’t wait to play what’s ‘next’!
