Amy Jo Kim: The term ‘gamification’ won’t exist in five years

For Amy Jo Kim the term “gamification” is as divisive as “community” was at the dawn of the Internet era.

“It means so many different things that you could spend all day arguing about ‘Oh this is a real community. No, it’s not. Yes, it is. Blah, blah, blah… who cares?’” said the longtime software designer in a recent Web panel hosted by the University of Waterloo, ahead of its Gamification 2013 Conference in October.

“I don’t tend to use the word ‘gamification,’” added Kim, principal at Shuffle Brain and a renowned social game and community designer and planner. “In five years the word won’t even exist: we will be just talking about great design. Some of it will have a game style, some of it may not and you just use it appropriately as it goes there.”

Kim, who previously helped design the eBay site and music video game Rockband, said gamification is most commonly associated with the loyalty industry, which has applied a reward-like structure to hook consumers. That’s not inherently bad, she added, except when it’s applied without regard for the user experience.

“Just making something gamelike, doesn’t mean it’s going to be good,” said Kim, referencing the derogatory term “Incentives 2.0” that has been widely applied to loyalty-rewards platforms such as Foursquare that have proliferated over the last five years.

The backlash is in response to the blanket approach by what Kim called “gamification vendors” that present their solutions as a kind of “magic pixie dust” that businesses simply need to “sprinkle on your application and wonderful things will happen.”

A 2011 study by marketing research firm Gartner found that by 2015 more than 50 per cent of organizations will gamify their innovation processes and that gamification will be as important as Facebook as a tool to retain customers.

Stephen Anderson, the creator of card game “Mental Notes” and a fellow designer who participated in the online discussion with Kim, helps companies build more interactive and engaging apps that employ game elements to create a better user experience.

He said companies should look to Minecraft, a popular videogame where players are plopped into an imaginary world and must learn how to build shelters to avoid being devoured by monsters. Beyond survival there are no goals and users are free to play however they choose.

In this way the game fosters what Anderson referred to as the “autonomy of purpose” that he said spurs human learning and endeavours.

“What can we bring from that back to the design of business apps?” queried Anderson, who wrote “Seductive Interaction Design,” a book that applies dating best practices to business apps. “Most of the apps I’ve encountered on the Web aren’t very good at introducing themselves and easing a person into their system.”

The key is for game developers to pull back and “let the audience do more,” conceded Anderson, who will be running a workshop at the conference that runs from October 2-4.

As a good example of this, Anderson pointed to Twitter’s favourite, or “star,” function that can be in a variety of ways: as a simple bookmark, a testimonial or as a kind of “like” function to give kudos to people for their tweets.

“They had never specified what the use case was, they had just provided this feature that people could use and make up what they will.”