From a young age, we've always been taught through play, since fun things are much more easily absorbed. That's why even in preschool, we do fun activities with an educational purpose. Therefore, play is an efficient way to transmit information and, most importantly, to facilitate its retention.

As we grow up, these games become displaced by books and endless lessons and/or readings about what we want to learn, and the only motivation we have to move forward is our willpower and the interest we have in that knowledge.

This is especially true in the professional world, where there seems to be no place for something as "childish" as games, since a product, service, website, or application is being sold to third parties, and an image of professionalism and seriousness is always sought. However, this is changing thanks to gamification.

Gamification is simply the process of equipping services, websites, etc. with certain elements and mechanisms from the world of video games, to make, a priori, the use of said service more fun.

Gamification shouldn't be confused with turning your service into a game. Using gamification doesn't make your product less serious, far from it, as Foursquare and Microsoft with Visual Studio demonstrate. Gamification makes it more engaging and motivates users. Above all, it aims to attract first-time users by offering a friendly and approachable environment.

A very clear and widely used example of gamification can be found in the aforementioned Foursquare. Every time we check in to the app, or in other words, position ourselves at one of the locations offered by the app, we are awarded points, titles, and even achievements when we have performed a specific action.

This action may seem trivial and the reward intangible, however, as I said at the beginning of the post, we have been doing this activity since we were little and we find satisfaction in playing this “game”, in being rewarded for using the application.

Gamification can be used to motivate users to use our application, since the more they use it, the more points, rewards, etc., they will earn. You can then incentivize the collection of these items by allowing users to exchange them for more tangible benefits.

Another function of gamification can be the replacement of the typical plain text tutorial or manual for learning how to use a service, with a series of steps, with a final reward, which makes the user more willing to use said service, since they don't have to "swallow" a tedious manual, it is more visually appealing, and as they learn, they are already using the service, so they can see the immediate effects of it and the advantages they would obtain from using it.

However, the most important aspect of gamification is that by maintaining checkpoints, defined actions, and other events that generate game-like activity, we are generating statistics on the use of our service, application, website, etc. In this way, without bothering the user, we are monitoring their activity on our service, which functionalities they use most, which they use least, etc., and thus be able to develop marketing strategies to use the strengths to our advantage and improve or camouflage the weaknesses.

An example of this could be the following.

Let's say we have a service where users can sell items to each other. The payment options offered include PayPal, Google Wallet, cash on delivery, and credit card.

Each time a user uses one of these payment methods, they are awarded 1 point, so that in our databases we will accumulate that value for all users according to the type of payment they have used.

Over time, we could find that the total user score based on payment type is:

– PayPal: 500

– Google Wallet: 20

– Cash on delivery: 5

– Credit card: 100

From this, we can clearly see that people who use our service prefer to pay with PayPal, whether because it's more popular, easier to use, or for some other reason. However, in this example, it's more expensive for us as a company to have a user use PayPal than a credit card, because PayPal charges higher fees and we earn less per transaction. Looking at the data, we can assume that while credit card payments are common, they could be even more so if they were as easy to use as PayPal. Therefore, perhaps efforts should be focused on improving credit card payments or incentivizing them in some way to encourage users to change their payment habits.

Another example with the same service could be that for every 10 purchases, the user earns a "Buyer" achievement, which appears on their profile. For them, it would be a badge to show other users; for us, it would mean that if a user has 3 "Buyer" achievements, they have made 30 transactions on our service and are therefore an active user, unlike someone who has been registered for a long time and has none.

It's true that this data can also be obtained directly from the database and transaction records, but this method incentivizes users to use the platform, whether through the psychological satisfaction of achievement and receiving a reward, which they can then share and teach others about. Furthermore, we can easily add more points of study in the future, which we hadn't initially considered.

As we can see, Gamification is not a "child's play", it is something to be taken seriously, especially now that more and more elements of this type are appearing every day.

Software Engineering Division