
How Gamification Creates Engagement - justine84
https://getbadges.io/blog/why-gamification-works-part-2-engagement
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SnowingXIV
I setup ZohoCRM for one or my clients and it's been great, but by default
their "game" was on. I have it turned off but have debating if it would be
beneficial to have the employees using it. Not sure if it would produce better
results or shift their focus into getting badges in the game as fast as
possible (reducing quality of their updates to the crm or worse impacting how
they interact with contacts/clients)

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justine84
Seems like the badges were not aligned to the results you wanted. Good badges
would be related to the company goal (selling products) instead of
housekeeping the CRM. Some early badges can be related to keeping the CRM
updated to create some habits, but long-term objective is definitely
different.

Besides that gamifying sales is promoting individual achievements and creating
a competitive environment, whereas in IT it should be oriented to building a
reliable and happy team.

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jaxomlotus
I have a problem with people adding gamification in an attempt to increase
engagement. Often times this means stimulating the same dopamine reward
responses that people get from gambling. I see this in particular with apps
geared for children, and it bothers the hell out of me that it's completely
non-regulated.

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andrewmcwatters
Does it really have to be regulated? I don't like it either, but don't parents
have a role in children's lives? When a child asks for money to purchase
microtransactions, a parent can simply say "no." Think of a world where if you
want to add this type of functionality, and you're not marketing to kids, you
still have to go through some additional licensing or legal step to add a few
lines of code to your product...

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kirykl
The Overjustification Effect says the opposite to this, basically saying
gamification would actually decrease engagement over time

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect)

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YCode
The complaint about gamification on that page is:

> gamified contexts such as foursquare might provide expected rewards for
> activities that do not adequately meet self-determination theory’s three
> innate needs for intrinsic motivation—relatedness, autonomy, and
> competence—and therefore reduce intrinsic interest in those activities.

The article kind of addresses this, discussing how you get someone interested
with a long term narrative or goal rather than numbers. This would mitigate
issues with autonomy and competence that are created in a numbers only
environment.

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cocktailpeanuts
In those cases I would say it's not gamification that creates engagement.
Rather, these people __already __want to be engaged, and they 're using these
badges as a tool for themselves. Basically it's being used as a way to
accelerate engagement but it CANNOT create engagement that doesn't exist. The
difference between the two is very important because most "gamification"
companies confuse the two and end up failing thinking they're doing the right
thing. Instead, what they're doing is starting from a wrong assumption, and
wrong assumption never leads to good results.

It is a good idea to use a tangible milestones mechanism to motivate people
who are already motivated, or who will do those things anyway. For example, I
visit coffee shops in the morning to pick up coffee. This need already exists.
So that's why a coffee shop providing "buy 10 get 11th coffee free" stamp card
can make me come back. It doesn't "create" engagement, since it's not like I
would go to a coffee shop 5 miles away just for this coupon deal. It simply
makes it easier for me to make the decision I already make.

However it is arrogant to think that you can "create engagement" this way, and
you are doomed to fail. Because you're nothing more than a gimmick. I have
never seen anyone succeed with this philosophy.

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deno
Justyna, the style of „quoting” you’re using is correct for Polish, but not
English, which uses a pair of upper quotation marks, like so: “”. Good luck
with your startup.

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justine84
Thanks, I've fixed that :)

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nacs
I'm seeing that strange quoting style all over your actual website too (not
just the blog post). May want to change it. I thought it was a HTML coding
error till I read the parent post.

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justine84
Thank you for checking all pages. Looks like I have a lot of work to do to fix
this :)

