Gamification: The future of business applications and processes

When the company's business seeks innovation and better results, it needs to experience this culture every day. No strategy influences the behavior of the public, employees and customers more than “Gamification”, a concept that is gaining supporters all over the world.

Gamification is the term adopted in Portuguese (from the original Gamification) that consists of the use of game techniques and mechanics to solve practical problems or arouse the engagement of a specific audience. There are several didactic and behavioral theories behind this discipline, such as the fun theory and positive reward. In practice, it's thinking like a game environment to create solutions in an innovative, motivating and fun way.

The processes and applications that employ this solution are intended to encourage people to adopt them or change the way they are used. Increasingly common, gamification has been applied by companies and institutions from different areas as improved tools compared to traditional approaches, especially with regard to involving people in selective processes and production goals, to familiarize themselves with new technologies, streamline your learning or training processes, develop your skills and make tasks considered tedious or overly repetitive more enjoyable.

To illustrate the concept and develop the theme, we quote here the article “5 Reasons You Can’t Ignore Gamification” from the website Incentive Mag – Managing, Marketing, Motivation. This text is from January 15, 2013 and brings up-to-date the solutions that Ludium can offer for the corporate market:

5 reasons why you can't ignore gamification

By Whitney Cook

January 15, 2013

At a recent National Retail Federation conference, gamification, where employees interact and socialize around a common bond of knowledge, competitive strategy, and fun, was touted as the next great form of media.

Social.

Gamification is more than ultra-modern training. It's engaging employees with knowledge that encourages competition among peers and gives public rewards and recognition to those who excel. It can cover virtually any topic: improving operations, reducing logistics costs, and challenging employees to understand how their roles contribute to the company's success.

CEOs, directors of human resources, and operations and innovation teams across a variety of industries are learning that integrating gaming techniques into their companies will drive performance, highlight achievements and skyrocket engagement within their organizations. Experts at Stamford, the Gartner firm specializing in IT consulting and research, predict that by 2014, 70% of global organizations will have at least one gamified process or application; by 2015, 50% of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify them. Many of the world's biggest brands are deploying gamification. Coca-Cola, AOL, Nissan, and Nike are all jumping on the bandwagon, and at the

As more and more studies become available, the advantages to gamification in the workplace are becoming more and more apparent. Intrigued? You should be. Here are five indisputable reasons why you can't ignore gamification and its potential to power your business.

1. Gamification allows your employees to actively measure their performance

Those dreaded annual reviews: Everyone has to do them, but wouldn't it be nice to give your employees access to real-time feedback whenever they need it? The big opportunity with gamification is that there is immediate cause and effect. If you make a wrong move in a game, you are corrected the moment it happens. If you make a strategically smart move, you get immediate positive reinforcement.

Gamification gives the power of feedback to the employee and accelerates knowledge. This is good for the company as it creates a more efficient and attractive way to monitor employee progress. In addition, it promotes transparency about how the

performance is measured and at what point the worker is

really.

2. Gamification Improves Knowledge

It's no secret that most of us started playing games at a young age. In fact, our brains are built for the game. Does it not make sense for us to use the same types of techniques in our training environment today? As we all know, knowledge retention is an important part of every employee's daily life. Training and promotion are not only important to the employee, they are essential to the growth of the company. Industry expert and author Jeanne Meister claims that interactive learning games can increase long-term retention rates by up to 10 times. That's a very powerful statistic when you start talking about knowledge retention.

3. Gamification Improves the Sense of Achievements for All Members

Every year, companies spend thousands of dollars sending employees to seminars, classes, training sessions – the list is endless. You may know from experience that one of the perks of learning is to showcase our achievements through certificates on our desks, letters behind our names, and highlights on our LinkedIn pages. We like to compete, to win, to receive validation. In the workplace, people are automatically evaluated for their knowledge, accomplishments and global reputations. Allowing your employees to become masters of their business and creating a community that openly recognizes their achievements will not only grow your team, it will grow your bottom line.

4. Gamification Creates Unparalleled Levels of Engagement

Employees crave social interaction in the workplace. We love our lunch friends and ball teams, and we can even go to the group dynamics event at the local golf course. People like to feel that they belong, that they matter, and that they are more than cogs in the big corporate machine. Gamification creates a virtual world where you can be productive and still have fun. This is good for your business because it promotes innovation, productivity and fun, which will inevitably improve the work environment. Studies have shown that happier people mean more income.

5. Gamification Strengthens Learning and Development

It is not surprising that many companies are adopting gamification in order to encourage innovation among their employees. In 2011, 40,000 people worked for just 10 days to solve the secret of a key protein that scientists believe could lead to a cure for AIDS. Researchers had been working on the problem for 15 years with no solution. How did people do this? They did it by playing a crowd-sourced game called Foldit, which was developed by the University of Washington. It goes without saying that this discovery is something very important! While you may not be looking for a cure for a deadly disease, creating and promoting innovation within your company is absolutely essential in today's marketplace. Reinforcing learning and development within your team not only promotes a productive work environment, it also creates opportunities for expansion and job security for employees in the future.

Whitney Cook is an account manager at Inward Strategic Consulting, focusing on gamification and employee engagement in the retail space. Cook advises companies on the best ways to introduce gamification and has partnered with some of the most respected names in the gaming industry that focus on brand loyalty, employee engagement and innovation. She can be contacted at whitney@inwardconsulting.com or at www.inwardconsulting.com.

Primeiro projeto da Ludium!

The game Alfabeto Melado was the first project made by Ludium, and the first of many projects of the partnership between Ludium and Redalgo, the only company in Brazil qualified by the MEC (Ministry of Education) to produce educational games for elementary schools.

The game will be launched in public and private schools throughout Brazil and its objective is to make children who have just learned the alphabet be able to practice writing and using letters in a fun way, emphasizing learning and having fun learning new words with the letter learned.

The look of the game was made with this audience in mind, so we used artistic decisions with pastel colors, and moderate use of saturation so that there is no visual stress. Every graphic element present in the game was thought to be easy for the child to familiarize with, such as the realistic style of the paper background (which also serves to encourage the child not only to play with the iPad, but to play with truth and pen and paper), the cartoonish style of the figures, similar to his favorite TV cartoons and the idea of ​​collage, a recurring activity in schools.

The lack of embellishments around the gameplay was a difficult decision for the art, as anything else (as proved in testing) would distract children and distract from the game.

Here, a mocape, made by the art director, to put all these art concepts into practice.

This was the Gamedoc used as a guide. This was created internally, under the guidance of our client.

The mocape was quickly approved by the customer, who was very happy with the style chosen.

Below, the process of creating the figures present in the game. We started with a simple sketch, made with photographic references.

After the sketch, the final art is made.

Colors:

finalization. A layer with texture and effects was created to facilitate the process, basically it was only necessary to drag the color drawing to this layer and it would become this final piece.

Hope you liked the result! Until the next project.