Gamification-Web of Games

 

In the tech industry, it is usually bad to be over 30. I’m 55. But there is one advantage to age, and that’s perspective. I witnessed the deep change that PCs brought, enabling technically skilled people to access computing power, call it tens of millions of people. Next was the Graphical User Interface (GUI) which brought productivity applications to most knowledge workers, call it hundreds of millions of people. Then the Web and mobile phones brought access to anyone and any information anywhere at any time, call it billions of people.

I predict that the next inflection point won’t be about numbers of users. It will be about engagement.

The tech industry has a neologism: “Gamification” Inside this awkward term are three profound truths:

1. Social games change engagement in deep and dramatic ways. If you want to get people to do something that they might not otherwise do—such as plan for retirement, study for exams, learn something new, get healthier or pick a school for their kids—make it a social game. You will see engagement rates change from a mere 5% to 70% or more, and people will sustain those rates week after week after week. Why? Because games are fun and appeal to the primitive brain in all of us that wants constant rewards, social recognition and adventure.
2. Gamification will accelerate the movement from physical to online solutions.  Already, we read about vanishing shopping malls being replaced by online shopping, but as websites that sell goods and services become games rather than content sites (and this is already happening), the trend away from buying at bricks-and-mortar stores will accelerate dramatically unless we can make shopping more fun—because as Groupon has already demonstrated, people like this juxtaposition of shopping and games.
3. Mobile will finally take its place as king, a position to which it has rapidly been ascending the last several years. Japan provided early evidence of this (watch any group of people there riding the train), but social games lend themselves to this form factor and this form factor is location-aware and constantly with you. We will see the end of PCs within a decade. They will be replaced by mobile devices, including tablet devices.

For the old world, its game over..O_o