Social Gamification, Mobile Apps, Personalization - Gamification 2021

Gamification has become mainstream fare for businesses, brands and consumers. It has found its way into groundbreaking science projects and presidential elections. When done correctly, gamification produces indisputable results, and is likely to remain a cultural force for years to come.

There is a lot of new ground that Gamification intends to tread in 2021, so much so that this list below is the second component of a two part article. Let's read on and see what else is in-store for gamification in 2021.

Mass appeal to a now multi-generational workforce

Millennials, Gen X, Y, and Z are all now contributing to the workforce at the same time. We’re currently at a point in civilization that is unfamiliar to any neighbouring time periods when it comes to number of different age bracket workers all sharing the same workforce. Business leaders are needing to put systems in place that can cater to the multiple forms of workers, all with their own unique approaches work.

Game mechanics have been noted to be the uniting factor that all workforce generations can agree upon. Having game aligned business systems in the current digital age makes for the learning process becoming engaging and fun for young and old.

Personalization and gamification

In the area of long-term gamification efforts, personalization will be key. Whether it be for learning purposes, on-going competitions within a marketing campaign or business platform structures, personalization will lead the charge in keeping users engaged and involved within the gamification structure. The key aspect of all this being that if people are going to put a lot of time and effort into a task, they want to make sure that whatever milestones that they have achieved are recognized, recorded and identified with the individual user.

2020 looks interesting as we can expect organisations to proactively utilise the benefits of personalisation within the context of task oriented practices. While, the concept of personalisation will only become more refined and strengthened with time, 2021 will see a huge leap forward in the way gamification initiatives are structured around individualisation. The future will see organisations being able to implement e-learning gamification and personalised learning experiences where AI and machine learning can analyse, predict the learner journey and include the suitable game elements that match the individual learners’ preference. Like after understanding the existing knowledge level of the learners, the machine learning capabilities can recommend a customised and personalised learning path and even assign gamification elements accordingly.

Having the ability to restructure content according to user preference, along with personalised progressional feedback will be a game changer in the years to come. This will be a feature that once it proves itself and puts its roots down, will become an expected and standard feature on all future initiatives.

Social gamification

Today with the proliferation of social platforms, the users are more interconnected than ever before. We predict a latent increasing trend of blending the social elements with e-learning gamification to engage the audience.

Social learning through collaboration with peers has been strengthened with innovative new technologies and the ever-increasing interconnectedness of the world. Learners are collaborating across numerous social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and Slack to name a few. This has encouraged the trend of blending e-learning gamification with social elements, such as chat options and forums to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing.

One of the strongest drivers behind gamification is the social and communal factors that contribute towards an individual applying themselves further in a task.

Apart from the formal structures or channels, learning happens through the various informal learning channels like social media websites, apps etc. An example is a social forum like Quora using game elements like badges, points etc to motivate the users. Quora had an upvote system that enables the users to vote for the answer that is most relevant. The answer that receives maximum upvotes is shown first in the list.

By using a simple game mechanic, it could motivate the users to provide quality content and increase their contribution. This however, is only just the beginning of what the true application of social learning tools and other social elements in learning and it it will be a while before it reaches its full potential.

Increased penetration of gamification in mobile apps

The proliferation of mobile devices like smartphones, tablets etc has lead to the evolution of an app culture that is driven by the numerous mobile apps that aim to make our life easier and mobile learning apps and advergame apps are no exception.

The accessibility of gamified initiatives across mobile and tablet devices has lead companies to create high quality, long-term engagement efforts that can be downloaded and be ready for use at any time the user pleases. We’ve seen a great increase in entertaining branded games and engaging gamified learning platforms, and their success is only going to lead to an influx in further gamified app creations.

Measuring what matters

For some time quality, meaningful data and reporting have been lacking in the market. The focus in the earlier years has been on interactions and clicks, with some platforms even billing you on that basis. Thankfully we are seeing a shift to much more actionable and meaningful information tracking around data such as the net promoter score, application into practice, feedback on actual performance, retention and turnover rates. I think the industry is finally ready to produce the data c-suites have been looking for. A data-driven approach also starts with clear objectives and then measurables against those, which although we can track pretty much every detail was not being shared with clients.

Final Thoughts

Gamification appeals to our natural human behaviour, while trends come and go, the aspiration to make activities like learning, marketing and business performance more engaging will forever be an ongoing process. How we understand gamification needs to evolve and the developments in gamification processes taking place in 2021 are only helping shift the common outlook towards the engagement process.

2021 will be strongly focused on providing a seamless customer experience through forms of personalisation, automation and AI-powered technology, so to stay ahead of the curve and increase conversions in the coming year, you’ll need to get better at producing custom, conversational content – particularly audio and video content – to share with your better-targeted audience.