What is Gamification?
Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. It’s a strategy used to enhance user engagement, organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, traffic violations, voter apathy, and more.
In education, gamification involves incorporating elements like point scoring, peer competition, team work, score tables to drive engagement, help students assimilate new information and test their knowledge. It taps into the human psyche’s natural desires for socializing, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, or closure.
Successful gamification enhances a service with affordances for gameful experiences to support user’s overall value creation. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading websites.