Gamification and its Applications
Gaming is fun. It gets the heart racing, brings an element of competition and determination to the table and opens up a realm of possibilities. Come on admit it, there’s something remarkably satisfying about taking out a baddie or gaining some kind of blow-your-mind superpower.
This explains why so many businesses want a piece of the gaming pie. By incorporating gaming elements into other areas of activity such as online marketing they can make the whole consumer experience far more enjoyable. Integrating game-play mechanics into an environment not typically associated with the gaming world is called gamification — and yes that is a real word.
How Does Gamification Work?
In a tech-centric world where products get better and better every day and information is easily available — consumers are notoriously hard to please. So, how do you get noticed amid a sea of innovative, creative and adventurous competitors? You up your efforts, that’s how. Chilling by the water cooler? Forget it! There’s too much awesome stuff to achieve.
It’s all about pushing boundaries and with gamification; you can breathe life into a basic website, enterprise application or online community. By enhancing user engagement with a product or service you’re likely to get a much more interactive and loyal response. And there are plenty of business scenarios where gamification is being used.
Applications of Gamification
What gives gamers a buzz apart from stunning graphics, wicked character profiles and imaginative graphics and gaming zones? Well it all comes down to being the best. People spend hours trying to top leaders boards and complete specific levels. So, within an organisation, gamification encourages employees to go head-to-head in return for rewards and incentives which can ultimately improve productivity. This is especially seen in sales teams.
A great example of gamification at work came from Hewlett Packard who developed an online platform known as Project Everest. This had every re-seller’s profile integrated with reward schemes and gave the best performing team the chance to bag top-notch prizes such as luxury holidays to top resorts. Not bad, huh? According to an article on Intelliverse, a whopping 80% of the company’s re-sellers participated in this programme — and it’s easy to see why.
If it all sounds too good to be true, you’d be right in some cases. While gamification is about engaging users through interesting rewards, there have been cases where loyalty programmes only favoured company big-wigs and didn’t actually reward the workers much at all — but this is one area where blockchain technology has helped to create transparency. The ability of this technology to provide detailed and secure records and facilitate transactions through the use of tokens has made it the perfect solution for such cases, says an article on Nasdaq.
It has especially been advantageous for game publishers and developers who thrive on the circulation of virtual assets. Blockchain has made it easy to establish ownership of virtual assets, while allowing secure transactions of these assets within the platform.
An example of such an application is Sgame Pro™, a blockchain platform where publishers, players, influencers and marketers are all bonded through the circulation of SGM tokens. It’s all pretty awesome and highly revolutionary stuff!
While the concepts of gamification and gaming are different from each other, Sgame Pro™ has been able to bring them together. The platform rewards players with their utility-based ERC-20 standard token, SGM or the Sgame coin. Players are rewarded according to the time and skills on the platform, which is determined by the ‘Proof-of-Play’ protocol. These tokens can then be traded across the platform, used to buy digital and physical goods in the Sgame Pro™ marketplace or to enter multiplayer challenges for larger winnings — and more.
Founder and CEO of Sgame Pro™, Gip Cutrino, says that since these tokens will be the sole mode of transaction within the ecosystem, the use of fiat money to buy stuff will be negated. That means you can keep your hard-earned physical cash safely in your wallet — hurray! Moreover, these tokens can be transferred to an external ERC-compatible wallet as well.
For more details about the awesome Sgame Pro™ platform and its upcoming ICO, visit sgamepro.io today and follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.