Goal 1: design starting from needs and feedback
Games are excellent tools for doing something very important: getting to know the people at an event. Through the mechanics of play and the involvement it creates — whatever the setting, even one that is not remotely playful — people can express themselves, their wishes and their goals in a way that is at once more open and more focused.
That way you can gather valuable information for designing activities that work better, because they answer what people need or expect. All of that information can also help investors and sponsors produce the famous “valuable content” everyone aims for and few can define (spoiler: it is the answer to what people are looking for, and to find that out you usually just have to ask them, ideally through tools that are enjoyable as well).
It can also save money on activities that, not being based on shared interests or tastes, might not be appreciated and would therefore use up resources that — barring very rare cases — are always in short supply.
Goal 2: encourage exploration and interaction with the space
Organisers of in-person, online and hybrid events often complain that some areas of the event space get very little traffic.
That can mean the activities planned in those areas are poorly attended or, worse, that sponsors and exhibitors get limited visibility, with a heavy impact on the overall quality of the event and on how satisfied investors are. Here too games can help, because they encourage people to explore the space and discover the event more actively.
Nothing beats a treasure hunt: attendees solve puzzles or complete tasks to find clues hidden around the event space, and even the least obvious corners end up being visited actively and attentively.
Goal 3: increase motivation and participation
“Give me a score and I will lift participation.” That could be one of the slogans carved on an imaginary plaque dedicated to gamification. Because the score attached to each game really is one of the strongest levers for creating motivation and participation.
The chance to come top of a leaderboard is a hard siren to resist, even for the least competitive among us, who still get a pleasant confirmation of their personal and social standing from seeing themselves near the top of a list. Often there does not even need to be a prize at the end of the race, because the prize is that shared visibility. We have seen it many times ourselves: put a screen in the busiest part of an event’s foyer and show the scores, and the people behind them, updated in real time — the motivation to take part becomes irresistible.
Of course, that participation then has to be steered towards strategic goals that depend on the individual event, and those goals will differ for a training course, where what matters is that information and knowledge are absorbed, and for a trade fair, where it may matter more that exhibitors are visited and collect quality leads. Either way, it all fits easily into a structure of the same kind: one built on healthy competition between people, through play.
Goal 4: break down the barriers to networking
We all know that people often attend events more to build relationships, or to keep existing ones alive, than for the specific sessions on offer. The relational side is central to every event and is often the real reward for the time, the money and the energy spent on attending.
Those relationships do not always form and grow on their own, though, and games can help things along. Role-playing games or simulations built around the theme of the event, for example, can help people connect with each other while they take on specific roles and work through scenarios tied to the subject of the event.
This makes relationships easier to build, because it takes people out of the here and now, where shyness and awkwardness can get in the way, and it also breaks the relationship “bubbles” that sometimes limit the power of networking. Taking on a role that is not your own, even temporarily, makes it easier to connect with people you would find harder to approach in real life and who, for that very reason, can lead to more valuable outcomes.
Games, then, are far more powerful tools than our society still tends to assume. Gamification has moved out of pure entertainment and out of the world of childhood into very different fields — sometimes, it must be said, to excess — and it has done so mainly because it is a powerful tool that works.
It works better, of course, when games are designed with clear goals and then built so that those goals are met. That puts the strategic side of designing every event activity at the centre once again, and on the tools and the advice that go with them we can help you.
Just request a live demo and we will start showing you what kind of gamification we mean at SharEvent.