Gamification – is it winning?

It’s almost the fifth anniversary of the launch of the first high profile ‘gamified retirement saving app’.

This featured a family of cartoon nuts and bolts and was designed to educate staff about saving levels, and to encourage younger staff to engage with pensions and long-term saving by playing something like a cross between Pac-Man and Jungle Run.

The launch was part of a five-year ‘saving for your future’ campaign and was based on the power of games to engage people.

There’s no debating this power. The global turnover of the gaming industry back then was estimated at around $70bn. Now it’s almost doubled to $134.9bn.

But surely claiming that playing a video game that involves collecting coins can help encourage people to save more for retirement is like saying playing Space Invaders can help to increase the likelihood of people joining the Inter-Planetary Diplomatic Corps…

The serious point here though is that creating this kind of game, just isn’t gamification.

Gamification is about finding ways to generate the sense of achievement, reward and progress that people feel as they carry out a task or process that they need to do anyway (or that you want them to do) by adding ‘gamified elements’ such as points, perks or prizes, linked to how the task or process is completed.

Inside Amazon’s cavernous warehouse near Manchester, as many employees race to fill customer orders, their progress is reflected in a video game format. It’s part of an initiative by the e-commerce giant to help both reduce the tedium of its physically demanding jobs and improve the efficiency of work like plucking items from or stowing products on shelves.

The games are displayed on small screens at employees’ workstations and, with names such as MissionRacer, Dragon Duel and CastleCrafter, look a lot like old-school video games e.g. Donkey Kong and SuperMario. The games can register the completion of the task, which is tracked by scanning devices, and can pit individuals, teams or entire floors in a race to pick or stow products. Game-playing employees (it’s optional, not compulsory) are rewarded with points, virtual badges and other goodies throughout a shift.

There may be debates about whether it’s appropriate to reward improved performance with badges rather than bonuses, but there’s no debating that this is true gamification.

By extension, gamifying saving for retirement would look more like rewarding members who increase their AVCs with a t-shirt, or those who login to their member account every month for a year with a hat or some vouchers.

The pension industry may see that as trivialising what is obviously an important and serious issue, but it will be interesting to see what, if any, results are publicised at the end of the five-year campaign.