Building products with my background in gaming, the topic of “Gamification” comes up regularly. Usually with the idea of making a mundane user task more entertaining and therefore increasing the likelyhood of completion.
First, a bit of theory:
There are three so called brain loads:
- Cognitive/Mental: Memory, Thinking etc.
- Motor: Moving hands or arms
- Visual: Stimulation through visuals
Games raise (= increase) one or more of these brain loads to create an entertaining and engaging experience.
- Visual & Motor: Fruit Ninja, Point and click shooters
- Motor only: Press buttons as soon as you can
- Motor + Mental: Candy Crush, Starcraft
- Mental: Puzzle games
Back in the 80’s, the goal was to lower brain loads to make everything as easy as possible. Now, there are software/web structures that are very established so they can be made more complex again to make things more engaging.
Some fail, and some succeed. I will write about that in a future post.
