Gamification Effectiveness and eLearning

“The cases for using gamification are numerous and growing…SAP uses games to educate its employees on sustainability; Unilever applies them to training; Hays deploys them to hire recruiters; and the Khan Academy uses it for online education…” writes David Zinger in a 2014 journal article[1] about gamification.

Knowing that these well-established organizations make use of gamification to strengthen their competitive advantage should come as no surprise. The question is whether you can afford to not be familiar with this potential game changer. Done right, gamification can transform your own organization into a more cohesive, engaged and productive work environment.

Gamification – it is pronounced a bit differently (Gam-ification) than it looks, and reads more like Game-ification.

Why make this distinction? Why explain how to properly pronounce the term? Because the very meaning of the word “games”, helps to clarify the meaning of the larger, and perhaps, stranger term – gamification. Gamification is what it “sounds” like – the process of something behaving characteristically like a game.

It is something that is applied, obviously, to the world of games, but also something of significance in the business world. This “theory” of gamification can be applied to marketing as well as to training or e-learning in order to accomplish tangible and predictable responses, reactions, and goals.

In this whitepaper, we are going to explore the broad meaning of gamification and learn how it can be used in modern business training to achieve tremendous and quantifiable results. We are going to review twelve different concepts that will help you recognize how and where to apply gamification.

[1] http://www.astd.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2014/05/Game-on-a-Primer-on-Gamification-for-Managers