Gamification In 2022: The Future Of Immersive Technologies

You keep hearing the term gamification being passed around and yet you still don’t know what exactly it is or what makes it so special. Have you ever been bored whilst completing a task? Well this is where gamification comes into play. Gamification has taken the world by a storm, from boring onboarding tasks to fun challenges that help you complete a task quicker.

If you want to know more about what the future of gamification holds and beat others to it, then keep on reading!

The Future of Gamification

To understand the future of gamification let me take you back in time, with a little history lesson on how gamification came about!

Many say that the first gamification to be spotted on the market was in 1912, talk about being ancient. So who started it? Some famously known American popcorn brand called American Cracker decided to include a free prize in every bag of popcorn. Remember lucky charms cereal?

Okay now back to the year 2022, you can see gamification almost everywhere, in marketing, on our phones, on the road, you get the idea. Here are some future predictions for gamification (yes, I am psychic).

1. The Metaverse and Immersive Technologies

The rise of the metaverse may have been a shock to all of us but it was about time! Think of all the possibilities it brings e.g. imagine a time when you can virtually attend meetings and actually interact with each other.

I recently discovered that you can try on products or clothing from different stores in the metaverse and guess what? They will look and fit exactly like how they would in real life! So you will not have to waste time returning clothes because they do not fit.

We will be seeing a cross over between the metaverse and immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality. I think it is safe to say that this will cause gamification to sky rocket in terms of level of accessibility. Exciting isn’t it?!

We are seeing many companies who are ahead of their time implementing these technologies in their onboarding and training activities. A solid example of such a company is Exxon Mobil. The organization has managed to adopt a gamified VR experience to provide safety training for their employees.

As we see an improvement in this industry, it is safe to say that it will create better gamified experiences that will fuel engagement.

2. Better design

This one goes without saying but we live a fast paced world and in order for you to keep up, you need fresh ideas and designs. Seemingly, there has been a massive improvement in gamification designs and initiatives. There is no excuse to have terrible gamification designs when you have so many tools at your disposal.

A key factor here will be design that is mainly centred around supporting the needs of employees. You are probably wondering what this even means, basically companies will start using employee feedback when improving the design of gamification strategies.

It is easy to say that all companies will accurately follow this, but those that will succeed know that by aligning bigger organisational objectives with the employee’s values is a step up!

3. Digital learning

A love hate relationship for many students, however, digital learning is here to stay. But how do you keep students engaged enough to come back? We are seeing more digital learning spaces offering badges and rewards for students who complete lessons in a specific time frame. If you have kids you may know of the online learning system called Squla that provides a learning virtual environment that allows students to play educational games against each other. Trust me it works!

4. Mobile application gamification

This one feels self-explanatory but it is still interesting because not all mobile apps utilize gamification. 1huddle’s blog post even  states that well over 70% of millennials feel disengaged from their work. So how can organizations solve this? Well by enforcing gamification of course! Think of it this way, you are always on your phone (and do not pretend that you are not! I am not judging). Obviously it would make more sense for mobile apps to use gamification for employees who are on-the-go.

A great example of a company that has implemented this is LÓreal and their gamified solution for their travel division. The reason behind this was to create a better and efficient way to train their Beauty Advisors who are based in different Asia-Pacific regions. This birthed the brilliant idea of creating a gamified mobile app to train and engage their learners which (surprise, surprise) helped the company surpass their engagement and customer satisfaction goals within just a year of development!

Conclusion

I hope you are starting to see how crucial gamification is for an organization and personally I foresee this trend moving past 2022 and I am not mad about it.

We are excited to see what the future holds for gamification and it will definitely be a bright one!

Curious to know more about gamification? Read up our previous blogposts and go ahead and share it with your network! Feel free to follow us on LinkedIn to get updated on our next blogpost.

Till next time!