Life is seemingly a cycle of activities; waking up, going to work, accomplishing chores, running errands. This is quite usual for people to forget that there is happiness in small things in life and being busy with work and all other tasks we perform everyday is so overwhelming. This is the place where gamification comes into play as it provides an effective way to turn ordinary practice into a thrilling experience.
Thus, gameful principles refer to the use of any game-related concept except for games themselves, form or genre. In its simplest form, gamification is about bringing fun, interest, challenge, and element of reward into simple and repetitive tasks thereby enhancing people’s motivation and participation. Suppose you decide to do your exercise in the gym or a walk around the house into the game where you collect virtual coins. Sounds fun, right?
Unleashing the Power of Play
Where gamification comes into play, it taps from our basic instinct and that is play. We play games because they provide the need to problem-solve, compete and achieve. It releases dopamine, one of the transmitters of pleasure and motivation which makes us feel like playing and eventually win.
According to CG’s blog post, gamification has been shown to have numerous benefits:
- Increased Motivation: People wonder whether tasks are more palatable if they are presented in a game format because motivation to work is higher and they are more likely to persist more.
- Enhanced Learning: An interactive entertainment context is an effective tool for acquiring new knowledge and skills in a joyful and entertaining way.
- Improved Productivity: This is because gamification can assist in directing our concentration towards the work at hand while ensuring that we have completed the tasks at hand.
- Boosted Engagement: People remain interested in the process because the final objective is broken down into multiple games that make every chore joyful.
- Greater Satisfaction: In the same vein, task performance feels more satisfying when it follows; the constructive achievement pattern.
From Theory to Practice: Gamifying Your Life
Therefore, how can you gamify your life? Here are a few tips:
- Identify Your Goals: For which tasks do you have least affinity or broadest dislike? These are areas which need to be gamified.
- Set Clear Objectives: Divide large goals into big tasks into small achievable tasks. This gives a clear path to follow when chasing success.
- Introduce Points and Rewards: It is recommended to assign the point values of the completed tasks and then give yourself motivating rewards for achieving that various points. They could be operational (a movie night) or non-operational (Additional screen time).
- Create a Leaderboard (Optional): Adding friends or family to the game creates a competitive Centre, so everyone will try his or her best. But be careful here, competition should not overpower motivation internally.
- Track Your Progress: Keep track of how well you’re doing with checklists, progress bars or usage of level-up systems. For instance, observing your progress can help boost your morale significantly; you learn how much you have progressed in your field.
- Keep it Fun: Avoid the complexities if they’re not necessary and do not get entrapped into excessive attention to detail. It’s important to reduce the pressure of these assessments and make every trial exciting for the kids and develop full enjoyment of it.
Beyond the Basics: Gamification for All
One of the greatest strengths of gamification is that it is a very eclectic approach. It can be applied to a wide range of contexts and activities:
- Fitness and Health: Smart applications for fitness can tell you how you are doing, set up goals, and send rewards in form of badges.
- Education and Learning: Games for education can always help make learning more fun and actually help the students remember better and be more motivated.
- Habit Formation: A good example is that of gamified apps that you can use to put the positive habits you want to encourage into practice, giving rewards as well as recording the streaks that one has in practising those habits that are being encouraged.
- Work and Productivity: Project management tools should incorporate fun aspects within their setting and deadlines can also increase working efficiency.
Challenges and Considerations
While gamification offers a plethora of benefits, it’s important to acknowledge some potential challenges:
- Over-reliance on External Motivation: Gamification should not be a sole motivation to the tasks but should enhance our natural motivation towards the tasks. What happens when the carrot is no longer there that makes people want to do the task?
- Potential for Addiction: That is because gamified elements may be as stimulating as a set of smaller rewards and tend to overshadow the rest of life’s activities.
- The “Gamification Gimmick”: However, if the approach to application of the use of gamification is not well thought out, the approach can look forced and uninspired and that diminishes its impact.
With these challenges in mind, we can then take full advantage of gamification in a manner that will make practising the corresponding tasks a much more satisfying and enjoyable endeavour.
The Future of Gamification
What this means is that while technology changes, so will the gamification tools and techniques therefore, it is important to keep updating the technology used in organisations. This is a good reason why with the development of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies, it is possible to introduce much more effective and engaging gamified experiences.
Having the opportunity to draw inspiration from the concept of play and subsequent gamification can open a Lot up. Firstly, we can convert the ordinary into the interesting, the difficult into the adventurous and the overall life process into an epic.
