As part of my Neoco baptism, last week I attended a gamification event at the inaugural Digital Shoreditch Festival. Gamification is most definitely a buzzword for 2011, and some are boldly claiming that by 2015 half of all companies will have somehow adopted gaming elements in their work and embraced gamification, so it was great to attend a day discussing the concept in detail.
The main message I took away from the day is that gamification is not the Holy Grail, but if you have a strong proposition and leverage gaming elements well it can help with its success.
Rick Gibson and Raf Keustermans started the day off with some staggering statistics: 65-75% of people in the developed world play games of some sort, and half of Facebook’s users will participate in social games at some point, leading to approximately 150 billion minutes spent every month on social games worldwide. That’s a phenomenal statistic when you take into account Yarden Yaroshevski’s point that users give companies their undivided attention when they play games (as opposed to other kinds of media such as television advertising).
Raf did put forward some sobering thoughts however: after the first month of playing a particular social game, only 15-20% of users are still active (and only 1-2% will pay for further gaming privileges). Couple that with the fact that of approximately 80,000 Facebook games currently active, fewer than 100 achieve a monthly engagement rate of 20%, and fewer than 60 of those that do are over six months old. This means that only a tiny 0.07% of all Facebook games have managed to achieve lasting engagement.
Remember gamification and the use of gaming elements can help you engage with your users, and allow you to gain valuable insight about them in the process, but you still need to come up with a compelling idea that will excite them; gaming elements will not turn a bad proposition into a success.
Still, it was a fascinating talk and I’m very much looking forward to next year’s Digital Shoreditch Festival – it looks set to become a regular on the London events calendar!
Tags Digital Shoreditch Festival Events gamification Raf Keustermans Rick Gibson Yarden Yaroshevski