Gamification and behavioural design

Gamification is a design that focuses on human motivation. It is human-centered design rather than function-centered design. It’s the art of applying all the fun and fascinating elements of a game to real life or industrial activities. This is a design process that optimizes human motivation in the system, not pure efficiency.

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4 min readJan 8, 2022

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Most systems are function-oriented and assume that people perform the desired behavior and then optimize performance for usability. However, “human-centered” design recognizes that humans, unlike machines in a system, have feelings, insecurities, and reasons why they want or don’t want to do certain things, and thus optimizes their feelings, motivation, and commitment. Gamification, built around human-centered design, optimizes those feelings, motivations and commitments to entice the user to complete a task, whether in the context of gaming business, e-learning, gaming marketing, or even health gamification.

In short, psychological principles are the foundation upon which any successful gaming initiatives are built. Effective game design takes into account the desired outcome of the intervention and focuses on the behavior and motivation of the individual player in the context of the decision-making environment. While gamification is a broad term, the fundamental principle is to take design elements from games to influence choices and behaviors.

For gamification to be considered effective, game technology must outperform other design models in terms of its ability to influence beliefs, attitudes or behavior. In behavior change design, it is important to know which persuasion architecture is appropriate for a particular application and to determine when gamification, in whole or in part, is appropriate. It’s best not to think of gamification as a quick fix to business problems, but rather as an opportunity to truly understand human behavior like game designers do, and then apply that mindset in a way that’s business-friendly.

Before you start gamification, you need to understand many behavioral, motivational, psychological, and biological theories. In particular, when careful consideration is used to define and manage behavior, game developers can improve game mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics, and arousal in an improved process to create the best conditions for successful behavior change.

The trend towards gamification is believed to have started around 2010; however, the concept of incorporating tasks into play to increase learning and motivation has been around for hundreds of years. The use of gamification, the use of game design elements for learning, engagement and motivation, is starting to gain in popularity. While creating a video game addiction is a byproduct of gamification, there are many practical uses for gamification.

Gamification is more than just adding game elements such as badges, points and ratings to a product. Gamification is the stage in transforming a product from function-oriented design to human-centered design. It is a sharpening of human motivation into a system, not a design for the sole purpose of improving efficiency. Gamification transforms user interaction with a product into an unforgettable experience full of adventure, fun challenges and the pleasure of winning.

Different types of game mechanics allow us to create specific experiences and evoke a specific range of user emotions. Gamification allows designers to manipulate human emotions, which automatically means the product is outstanding and outstanding. Think about it from an emphatic user experience perspective. Gamification allows you to manipulate human emotions, which automatically means your product has a better chance of success because it elicits user reactions.

This is the power that behavioral science gamification allows designers to harness. The concepts that influence human behavior and the psychology underlying gamification are available to us as designers. They understand the behavioral strategy of the product even if they don’t use the same words to describe it. Given the profound and deliberate impact of game design on player behavior, it surprises me that gamification is in the state it is in.

The basic method of gamification means thinking like a game designer. In order to apply gamification, developers first need a list of game design elements, and then they integrate these elements into their posts. Given this definition, we can define gamification as the use of these game elements and techniques in non-gaming environments. Although games show some clear connections with healthy behavior change strategies, the technical mechanisms used in healthy behavior change interventions may be very different from those used in game technology, even though they may involve similar mental abilities. One of these areas of expertise is the intersection between gamification, behavioral science, and motivational theory, used to create eye-catching interfaces that you can’t resist but use, or simply, how to create related video games.

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Gamification and behavioural design

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