How to Design Gamification
Today, gamification is not only part of entertainment but extends to learning, marketing, sales, training, and many other areas. Gamification in such settings refers to incorporating elements and principles of game design into a non-game setting like a training project. Since these areas can be a bit dull and boring, gamification helps make them fun and exciting. Many studies have shown gamification is a great way of keeping learners motivated, customers engaged, and employees enthusiastic.
When you add gaming elements to your training or marketing program, your videos become more informal and make your content easier to absorb for the viewers. They tend to be more engaged, motivated, and responsive when interacting with your content and gaining points. It further facilitates learning by chunking the complicated concepts into smaller, digestible content.
You obviously won’t be adding huge, challenging games, but some lightweight fun activity is a key to making an interactive video. This article focuses on how you can design gamification for your videos and make them interactive for the viewers.
Read our blog on Gamification on E-learning Platforms for more information.
What is Meant by Gamification?
As discussed earlier, gamification is the process of using elements and strategies of game design in non-game areas. For instance, gaming themes and principles, such as earning virtual currency or points, and completing tasks and activities in order to reach a higher level, can be used in contexts outside of gaming to make watching enjoyable and stimulating.
The process of gamification is also defined as the use of the elements of games to solve problems. Games are not new, but they are used increasingly in non-game contexts, such as websites, enterprise applications, digital marketing, and even as virtual to-do lists and productivity tools. However, there is one area of gamification where it is widely used: education.
Tips to Design Gamification for Your Videos
The best combination is the ones that create sustained engagement, consider the unique needs of the learners, and do more than just use points and levels to motivate players. Gamification systems that are most effective also include additional elements such as narrative and a sense of connection with fellow participants.
Designing Gamification for E-Learning
The goal of gamified lessons is to make them more fun, achievable, and accessible. An appropriately designed game-based learning program can also provide learners with instant feedback, allowing them to feel rewarded for their progress and become more motivated to learn.
Gamification can be implemented by teachers in the following ways:
1. Awarding Points for Accomplishing Academic Objectives
Motivate students to look at simple questions from a whole new perspective. Each point is awarded for a correct answer, and students move up the ranks for well-written answers.
Are students required to cite the text in class discussions and provide evidence for their conclusions? You can use the following approach for scoring the correct answers of your students:
- Provide them with 1 point if they answer without providing any evidence.
- Give them 2 points when they answer correctly along with providing one piece of evidence.
- Award them 3 points for giving a correct answer and 2 or more pieces of evidence.
2. Use Interesting Stories
Engage your viewers and take them on an adventure with a compelling storyline. Build a story that immerses learners in the plot while they interact with the content. Creating immersive content in this way keeps learners engaged and motivated throughout the lesson. This can be made even more fun by using characters or avatars to illustrate employees.
3. Use Appealing Visual Design
Not only the video content but the gamification you add also needs to be visually attractive. Your e-learning will become more appealing and engaging with aesthetically pleasing designs and eye-catching visuals. Create a visually stimulating learning experience by combining bright colors and graphics.
Read our blog post on Color Theory - How to Use Colors in Design to come with a visually appealing design.
4. Make Competitions Part of Your Strategy
Is there anyone who does not enjoy healthy competition? Users should be able to compete with their team members, against anonymous players, or even against themselves to motivate them. Include leaderboards as a way to help learners compare their performance to that of their peers.
5. Provide Learners with Challenges
When beginning the session, have learners complete smaller, frequent tasks, and then gradually increase the difficulty level. Not only will this help them get in the swing, but it will prepare them for more challenging and rewarding challenges down the road.
6. Reward Them With Medals, Badges, or Further Levels
Who doesn’t like being rewarded? Incentives such as medals, badges, or new levels can help learners stay motivated and engaged throughout the session. If you’ve provided them with a course with multiple sub-sections, offer them badges for every 5-10 videos they watch. It is a great way to help learners keep going.
8. Provide Learners With Honest Feedback
When learners complete a task or quiz, providing instant feedback to them is a great way to keep them engaged and focused, allowing them to see how far they've come as they progress through the course and stages of the game.
9. Create Playful Obstacles
In gamification, playful obstacles and challenges are used as encouragement mechanics. A Play barrier can be:
- Academic or behavioral
- Creative or logistical
- Social or private
10. Lay Out the Project's Timeline and Structure
Success requires planning ahead of time. Keeping your first gamification project short will help you get a head start. The ideal time frame could be for the project to be planned for 1 week, the mobile learning to be deployed for 2 weeks, and the results to be measured for 1 week. At the time you will be delivering your report, you will be a month into the trial of gamification. If you set the stage for the game-based course outline, measurements, timeline, announcements, plan, and gathering all digital and physical assets that are needed for the game or course, you will be well on the way to being successful.
11. Pick Some Components for Your Game
When you are planning your game, it is crucial to decide early on what your game components will be. Some possible components include:
- Rewards: Thinking about and paying attention to this aspect of the game is essential. Your whole team should be motivated by the rewards you choose, so it might be worth surveying them about what motivates them the most.
- Learning goals: You can use game rewards to motivate your learners toward specific goals, or create "quests" that motivate learners individually or in teams to achieve specific goals.
- Time: Will we be racing for the win? Or can we award points for learning for a longer period? There are several ways through which you can add time in the game, such as combining time between individuals and seeing if they can complete a task exactly within one hour.
- Teams: Is the game only compatible with individual players, or are teams also supported? Considering the social aspects of games, team collaboration is often an excellent idea for gamified learning projects.
12. Detach Your Students from the Session
Just like prolonged classroom lectures become boring for the learners, long video lessons can also make learners overwhelmed and easily distracted. Bring learning outside of the classroom by using a game-centric approach. For e-learning, it's important to break the course up into manageable chunks, and integrate the team and blended learning techniques. Using gamified microlearning, learners are able to progress faster and feel more independent.
Read our blog on Top 12 Interactive Video Design Mistakes for more information.
13. Consider Self-Directed Learning When Designing
In many ways, the gamification process strongly relies on self-directed learning; the player navigates the digital environment and learns based on their own actions and decisions. Game components can be designed, for example, so that they require minimal human interaction for course development and gamified distribution for self-directed learning.
Another option is to go with an all-in-one learning management system. Using such software allows you to conveniently sign up students, guide and facilitate their learning, and free you up so you can focus on designing and managing your game. With self-directed learners, you will have more time to add social aspects to the course such as tweeting results, sharing clues, and other parts that will increase learner engagement.
14. Use Feedback, Prizes, and Rewards
Feedback is a critical component of learning and can often be provided in games by scoring systems, leaderboards, and notification systems. The feedback that students receive from scoring adds an exciting layer of competition among them, and the results can also be used by management to analyze student performance, engagement, and motivation. To support your game components, select a delivery system such as Cinema8 that allows learners to earn points and receive in-app rewards.
15. Report on Results of Game-Based Learning
In your final report, describe how game-based approaches will continue to be used to increase training engagement and effectiveness. In addition, it should provide suggestions on how to use technology and gamification for training in the most effective way.
Ensure that your report planning is included in the project timeline. When you announce the end of the game, tally the scores, and prepare the distribution of rewards and prizes, this marks the completion of the "end of the game" process, which means follow-up surveys are in order.
Make sure your learners have the opportunity to suggest future topics, areas, projects, and alterations to the project when surveying them about the project.
Examples of Gamification in E-learning
Since you are well aware of the importance of gamification in e-learning, you must now be wondering how to design gamified video content for your learners. However, you don’t need to be a pro in order to develop gamified e-learning videos. Certain platforms offer a variety of options and easy-to-use features that make the job a lot simpler.
Cinema8 enhances your productivity by offering unique game components to make your videos fun and exciting. It offers gamification that increases the retention, engagement, and motivation of the learners. Gamification combined with learning is your best method for engaging students. With Cinema8, you can make learning interactive by adding gamified content such as puzzles, detective games, horoscope reviews, short films, make-up and cooking, and much more. The best part is that you don't need to use any code to do all this!
Example 1: Who Want’s to be a Millionaire?
This gamified e-learning video by Cinema8 is extremely simple to use. Here, students can get points for answering the right answers to the questions provided with scores being displayed at the end of the competition.
Example 2: Math Puzzle
Are you a Math teacher? Here is the best way to keep your students engaged. Cinema8 has developed an interactive yet informational piece with its interactive widgets. There is a link between the numbers. Each new series of numbers is linked in a unique way. Give your learners an opportunity to try!
Example 3: Quiz
Why not take a moment and evaluate your student's learning while providing them with a sense of gamification? This video by Cinema8 again focuses on the question and answer pattern and provides users with points for giving the right answers. You can optimize it as per your preferences by changing the questions or giving negative points for wrong answers.
Example 4: How Well Do You Know the Horoscope?
Let’s give learners a moment to relax and enjoy. Content in this entertainment category contains questions ready to be answered, created with the help of Cinema8 interaction widgets.
https://cinema8.com/showcase/how-well-do-you-know-the-horoscope
Visit this page for more gamification videos designed by Cinema8 in the field of e-learning, marketing, e-commerce, etc.
Gamification in Business Marketing
According to a study done by Microsoft, the attention span of an average individual is eight seconds. It should be a factor you must consider for your business, particularly when we talk about marketing campaigns. Engaging your audience through gamification is a great way to capture their attention.
The aim of gamification marketing is to integrate gaming features into non-gaming contexts in order to increase engagement and motivate individuals to take action. Although gamification in marketing is not a new concept, there are a number of strategies that you can employ to increase your marketing effectiveness.
Read our blog on Generating Leads and Selling Your Product with Interactive Video for detailed guidance.
1. Include Real Games
The key to gamification marketing for your business doesn't always require a clever approach. Try the most straightforward one and incorporate real games into your marketing campaign to see how it goes over with your audience.
2. Launch a Loyalty Rewards Program in the form of a Game
By implementing a loyalty reward program, you can reward your customers for staying consistent and loyal to your brand. These programs are essentially gamified. An example of this could be, your customers will earn more points and rewards if they spend more money on your goods and services. The customer can cash in their points for substantial discounts when they have accumulated enough points.
3. Improve Customer Interaction
Games are a great way to increase customer interaction, and that is one of the chief objectives of gamification in business marketing. For instance, rewarding participants who engage with your content increases the likelihood they will interact with it again.
4. Hold a Contest to Introduce Gamification to Your Business
Would you like gamification marketing to raise brand awareness? Contests are great for that! Participants enjoy competitions as they're fun and exciting. In addition to increasing visibility for your brand, the best contests encourage customers to interact with you.
5. Come up With Gamified Marketing Videos
Does your brand have an online presence? If yes, interactive videos are a crucial part of any marketing campaign since you want to keep your customers interested and engaged. For instance, you can add a simple timed quiz or one with badges to keep the users motivated.
Cinema8 is a growing and easy-to-use platform that helps you add interactive features to your video and make it more engaging. Your audience can be kept interested by using game elements like points, badges, levels, missions, quizzes, unlocks, branching choices, timers, etc. in your videos.
Bottomline
There's a natural fit between games and learning. If you want to keep your learners motivated and engaged, don’t just rely on lectures. Instead, give them room for entertainment and relaxation for better retention. To incorporate gamification into e-learning, opt for game components that are suitable for your topic, team, and students. Besides being interesting and fun, they must offer learners some sort of information and social experience. Similar is the case when we talk about marketing. You can’t simply tell users how beneficial your products are and expect them to buy the product right away. Add some interactivity to motivate them to take an action!
Cinema8 not only helps you develop gamified video content but also allows you to analyze user engagement so you know what gaming components work best for your audience!