The U.S. military's "America's Army" video-game recruiting tool

Executive summary: By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon, and more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application. An example: the U.K.'s Department for Work and Pensions innovation game  Idea Street and the U.S. military's "America's Army" video-game recruiting tool. Edited by Peter Horn By 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes, according to Gartner, Inc. By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon, and more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application. "Gamification describes the broad trend of employing game mechanics to non-game environments such as innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change," Gartner analyst said Brian Burke.

"Enterprise architects, CIOs and IT planners must be aware of, and lead, the business trend of gamification, educate their business counterparts and collaborate in the evaluation of opportunities within the organization."

The U.K.'s Department for Work and Pensions has created an innovation game, Idea Street, to decentralize innovation and generate ideas from its 120,000 people across the organization. Idea Street is a social collaboration platform with the addition of game mechanics, including points, leader boards and a "buzz index." Within the first 18 months, Idea Street had approximately 4,500 users and had generated 1,400 ideas, 63 of which had gone forward to implementation.

Further examples include the U.S. military's "America's Army" video-game recruiting tool, and the World Bank-sponsored Evoke game which crowdsources ideas from players globally to solve social challenges.

Higher levels of engagement
The goals of gamification are to achieve higher levels of engagement, change behaviors and stimulate innovation. The opportunities for businesses are great – from having more engaged customers, to crowdsourcing innovation or improving employee performance. Gartner identified four principal means of driving engagement using gamification:

1. Accelerated feedback cycles. In the real world, feedback loops are slow (e.g., annual performance appraisals) with long periods between milestones. Gamification increases the velocity of feedback loops to maintain engagement.

2. Clear goals and rules of play. In the real world, where goals are fuzzy and rules selectively applied, gamification provides clear goals and well-defined rules of play to ensure players feel empowered to achieve goals.

3. A compelling narrative. While real-world activities are rarely compelling, gamification builds a narrative that engages players to participate and achieve the goals of the activity.

4. Tasks that are challenging but achievable. While there is no shortage of challenges in the real world, they tend to be large and long-term. Gamification provides many short-term, achievable goals to maintain engagement.

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Read more:
www.gartner.com
http://innovate-apps.direct.gov.uk/spark/
http://www.americasarmy.com/