There is a word that has been echoing insistently through the business world for some time: gamification.
Everything gets “gamified” to become nicer, more useful, more effective…
But is gamification only a way of entertaining people, or can it become a working tool?
And how can gamification be used in the world of events?
To find at least a few answers to these questions, let us take a step back and start with what gamification means and where the boundaries of this phenomenon lie.

“Gamification” means using elements that come from the world of games in contexts that are, in themselves, not playful at all.
Doing gamification, then, does not mean building games or turning serious activities into games; it means enriching those same activities with elements borrowed from game dynamics, which is a very different thing.
You take the enjoyable elements typically associated with play (hands up anyone who does not like playing) and use them to make tasks such as work or study, completing paperwork or carrying out routine activities more appealing.

When we talk about gamification we are talking less about playing and more about working, studying and learning — and also about paying taxes and filling in a form — in a more enjoyable and engaging way.

The reasoning behind this practice rests on something many studies have shown: if you include purpose-built enjoyable elements in a “serious” activity the activity loses none of its relevance but, because it becomes more pleasant to carry out, it will be completed with more commitment, more engagement and, perhaps, more effectiveness and satisfaction too.
When an activity is linked to a game component it is immediately moved out of the world of “having to do” and into the world of “wanting to do”, which is typical of the activities we take on willingly and often with even more commitment and dedication than the ones we are obliged to do.
One last note: in the words of Fabio Viola, currently perhaps the leading gamification expert in Italy, gamification is 70% positive psychology, behavioural science, marketing and social science, and 30% technology (UX and UI). Which is another way of saying that a game, when properly designed and thought through, is a serious and structured thing that leaves very little to chance.

Now that we are clearer about what gamification is, how can we use it strategically in the business world?
Looking at the main sectors and areas where it is already applied today, we find:

• training and professional development
• customer loyalty
• acquiring new customers / lead generation
• changing or introducing habits and behaviours
• presenting products and services
• team building and human resources management

More generally, gamification can be applied to almost anything that can benefit from the release of dopamine — a substance that influences mood, the sense of pleasure, attention, memory and learning — which play stimulates.

Adding playful elements to an activity also stimulates:

• the repetition of behaviours (which makes learning and retention easier) in response to rewards and progression
• the (healthy) competition that can come, for example, from comparing your results with those of your peers
• cooperation, linked for example to the need to complete activities as a group
• persistence, driven both by the wish to improve your own results and by the wish not to lose the benefits already earned
• curiosity, linked to discovering what is unknown (the game) and how good you are at working it out

With everything we have said so far, things get more interesting. Not only because we have understood that gamification does not mean filling our events with little games until they look like a funfair, but also because its practical applications become useful to anyone who wants to improve the effectiveness, the participation and the profitability of an event.
So it can be a business tool. But how?
Thinking it through, we found a first set of areas in which a game component, added to activities the event already includes, would make them work better. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but it will give you some ideas:

1. assessing learning
2. the presentation of products or services
3. the increase in traffic to the stands in the exhibition area
4. greater brand awareness for sponsors
5. the creation of networks and groups of people
6. the acquisition of qualified leads
7. the rise in attendance (at specific sessions or across the whole event)

In practice there are few limits to the ways this tool can be used if the journey is well designed — identifying objectives, studying the target audience, choosing the rewards and so on — just as in any marketing activity that sets out to produce observable, measurable results.

That is why the gamification system we built for SharEvent turns on two hinges: flexibility and simplicity, which in our experience are the best fixed points for making a tool genuinely usable.

Would you like to try it for yourself? Request a live demo and we will show you.