To conclude our series on gamification, we bring perspectives and projections of how this approach will be used in our routine and in the corporate environment in the coming years.
Gamification at work: millennials
A survey by Pew Research Center, on the future of gamification, stated that 53% of technology experts believe that by 2020 gamification will be widespread not only in the job market, but also in education and healthcare. This can be explained by the high concentration of millennials in the job market, who will make up 70% of the entire workforce in 2027. This generation grew up in the digital environment and mainly playing video games and is the generation that uses these media the most for learning and professional improvement, which indicates that their learning absorption is highly interconnected with the online and gamified environment.
Training in companies with gamification resources will be highly effective with this audience, as will tools that encourage employee engagement.
VR Consolidation
VR is not exactly a new technology, but it is an area that has been gaining importance – and investment – from the main hardware manufacturers. With content producers joining the trend and platforms like Facebook With solutions to popularize the format en masse, we will see VR put to the test in the coming years and for some experts it could be the beginning of a new revolution. Virtual reality could be a vast field for exploring new forms of user interaction with the dynamics of games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCpNKLXovtE
Gamification as a marketing strategy
Digital marketing, in its constant evolution process, already works with several gamified content formats to attract customers, such as quizzes. Some startups have used a dynamic to launch their products and applications that is essentially gamified: they place each new user in a waiting line to access the application, inform the user's position in the waiting ranking and provide ways for the user to advance positions. in the queue, for example recommending the app to friends. This way, the company can start promoting the product long before it is ready, launching it with more control, in addition to gaining a viral mechanism. This is an example of an action that tends to be used more as an initial marketing strategy, especially for applications and online services.
In health
Mainly for people who seek, spontaneously or on medical advice, to change habits and improve their quality of life, there are numerous applications that help with this task, encouraging diet, water consumption or physical exercise with prizes ranging from badges to airline miles. The main systems for mobile devices, both Android and iOS, offer features that make it possible to centralize this data from all these applications and provide a general overview in a true unified center of each user's health. Anonymously, this data could be used in the future for scientific research, monitoring the user's doctor and many other applications. To achieve this, one piece will become fundamental: regular user participation, reinforced by gamification.
On education
Experimenting with gamification in education has been in use for a few years and has increasingly shown its importance due to the excellent results achieved, as in Khan Academy, for example. The use of resources such as augmented reality and games created essentially for learning are already included in students' routines and are now emerging as a trend for the coming years, when we talk about corporate education. While a few years ago the corporate narrative was always about reducing costs, even influencing the workforce, today the search is to map employees and retain talent and this involves improving their training and interaction. Gamification acts in this context as a great resource to generate engagement and appreciation for teams and personnel.
As an auxiliary tool
For 42% of experts, gamification will be an additional approach that will improve some segments of communication and human relations, in specific circumstances and not predominantly. Some specific elements can be applied on a specific basis, making this approach easier to implement in existing processes and well assimilated by all audiences, from young people to older people.
With new technologies, new screens and new forms of interaction with the user, new ways of provoking stimuli, encouraging actions, reinforcing or changing habits through gamification will also emerge. Games themselves evolve and create or popularize new features that can be enjoyed in non-game environments, as we recently saw the great success of Pokemon Go making use of augmented reality, which has already become known to millennials and has many applications in the field of education. .
Regardless of the area, gamification should be seen as a means and not an end. Each project must be studied, its audience and the goals you want to achieve and from there we will know where and how gamification can help. The important thing is to know the possibilities and the pros and cons of this approach. We hope in this series of articles have clarified the main points of this approach.
