Not all game types have to be visual or gamified to be effective in your campaign. A contribution game helps your audience provide for others. This may seem strange, but it’s best to view this game type giving your audience a way to give back.
Here are some elements of the contributing game type (not every contributing game will have every one of these elements, so you can pick and choose what works for you):
Being responsible: Giving your audiences the chance to be responsible for looking after other people can be very fulfilling. This can be done by creating roles within your campaign. For instance, you can award administrator or moderator rights to certain audience members. You can develop a multi-layered hierarchy that allows for certain positions of power within certain geographical locations.
Access: Award access to special features and abilities within your campaign. In this way, your audience will have more ways to help others and to contribute. It also helps them feel valued by your company, which will in itself foster a more meaningful and earned role in the campaign.
Collect and trade: This element taps into people’s love of collecting things. If you can, try to give your audience a way to collect and trade items in your campaign. For instance, they could use their points to get discounts on products and services. If you do, you’ll build relationships and engagements of purpose and value.
Gifting: Gifting offers your audience the ability to gift items to other players, helping them achieve their goals within your campaign. For instance, some campaigns allow users at a certain achievement level to gift membership benefits to family and friends. This element can be difficult to incorporate, but the potential for reciprocity can be a strong motivator.
Sharing knowledge: This element has become important in gamification lately. You incorporate in your game a way for your audience to answer questions and teach other audience members. When they share their knowledge, your campaign offers them an in-game reward.
Community
The vast majority of your intended audience like to be part of a community. The community game type can create a fun environment through interaction with other members.
Community elements allow audiences to collaborate in order to achieve bigger and better things than they could on their own. Community elements make sense in gamification marketing campaigns because community elements are widely used in popular gamification models. For instance, if you have a FarmVille-type game (www.zynga.com/games/farmville/), audiences will be happy to water someone else’s farm in exchange for new crops for their own farm.
Here are some elements of the community game type (not every community game will have every one of these elements, so you can pick and choose what works for you):
Guilds or teams: Guilds allow your audience to share common scenarios and skills, and to be recognized as a trusted, trained resource. Entry into the guild should be through invitation or proof of time spent in the campaign overall. When adding this element, give your audience the ability to build close-knit guilds or teams themselves. Small groups can be an effective way to increase engagement. Finally, you can consider ways to allow team-based competitions.
Social networking: Allow your campaign to connect with social networking platforms, not only to allow your audience to connect with their current friends but also to become visible to other audience members. This can help create opportunities for new relationships within your campaign. In this way, your campaign can create new mini-communities within each social network platform.
Social discovery: This element is extremely similar to the social networking element, but it goes one step further. It’s a way for your audience to be found and build new relationships. You do this by using your data to help match your audience members based on their choices and status within your campaign.
Customization: It is almost the norm now to give audiences the tools to help customize their experience within your campaign. This allows your campaign to be more personal and increases overall engagement. You can offer avatars, allow players to upload profile pictures, and even allow them to upload their own background images. The idea is to allow your audience to customize their environment, letting them express themselves and choose how they’ll present themselves to others within your campaign.
Time-dependent rewards: Time-dependent rewards may include things like birthday gifts. You can go one step further and design time-dependent rewards that are only available for set period of time (for instance, if audiences come back next Wednesday, they’ll get a reward).
Creating the Perfect Gamification Campaign Settings
In addition to working out what your gamification campaign will include, you need to decide how your campaign will run. This includes thinking about the demographics, duration, and frequency of your campaigns. This information will help you shape the final shape of your campaign and create a consistent message both for your team and your audience.
Choosing the right game for your audience
Deciding which gaming elements will work with your audience is essential. One method for finding the right elements is to look at the Bartle player types (see Figure 2-1), a classification of game players based on a 1996 paper by Richard Bartle. According to the Bartle player types, there are four different kinds of players, each motivated by a different incentive for playing:
FIGURE 2-1: The Bartle player types.
Achievers: Achievers are all about points and status. Here are some characteristics of achievers:They want to be able to show their friends how they are progressing.They like to collect badges, trophies, and in-game status.They respond well to incentive schemes, such as air miles.They want to gain points or get to the next level.They like proof of success, such as points, possessions, or prizes.They seek rewards and prestige with advancement in the campaign.Around 10 percent of players fit into this category.
Explorers: Explorers want to see new things and discover new secrets. They aren’t as concerned with points and badges. Here are some characteristics of explorers:They value discovery more value than in-game status, such as badges.They’re okay with repetitive tasks as long as they eventually “unlock” a new area of the campaign.They enjoy the surprise element that is possible in a gamification campaign.They want to discover new things; they love to find hidden treasure.They like to dig down and find something new or unknown. Secret pathways and rare finds excite them much more than prizes do.They care more about the gameplay than the end result.Around 10 percent of players fit into this category.
Socializers: Socializers want to interact with other people. If you want to appeal to this group, the social interaction elements in your campaign will count more than the campaign’s gamification strategy. Here are some characteristics of socializers:They experience fun in their games through their interaction with other players.They’re happy to collaborate in order to achieve bigger and better things than they could on their own.Their
