Gamification -- The Casual Buzzword

One of the hot topics of discussion at the Casual Connect conference in downtown Seattle (which highlights everything you could possibly imagine about the casual games business) has been “gamification.”

PopCap CEO Dave Roberts

PopCap CEO Dave Roberts kicked off his keynote address on Tuesday with 10 things he hates about the casual games business. The #1 item on his list? You guessed it: Gamification.

On Wednesday, at a press event, PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka elaborated on Roberts’ remarks, telling GeekWire that he doesn’t have a problem with the concept of gamification. What Kapalka can’t stand about gamification is the name. After all, he holds games as sacred products. Creating a term like gamification does more to harm to the business because it actually dilutes down what a game means. And, in his view, a game has one simple goal: to be fun.

The term certainly has come on strong in the past 12 months. A Web search for the term about two years ago on Google returned just four results. Now, according to a recent search, there are about 1.6 million results.

At this year’s Casual Connect conference there’s no shortage of panels about the concept: “Smart Gamification: Seven Core Concepts for Creating Compelling Experiences:” or “Gamification for Everyone: What’s your Strategy?” or “Gamification and Social TV: The New Way to Watch.”

A new consultancy called Research Through Gaming (R.T.G.) applies game mechanics to improve respondents’ survey-taking experiences, collecting ‘Playspondent’ feedback to boost response rates.

UK based RTG provides gamification consultancy as well as working on specific online and off-line research game design and development. RTG is launched by former Nebu exec Betty Adamou who hopes to give a much-needed facelift for market research. ‘There’s definitely a benefit of being first in market with R.T.G. as the first provider in MR solely focused on gamification. I’m looking forward to the future of market research, which I hope will have more and more of a creative and innovative edge.’

The firm is online at: http://www.researchthroughgaming.com

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