Rajat Paharia, founder of Bunchball and leader in gamification, recently published in the Huffington Post his thoughts and definition of gamification, defining gamification as motivating people through data.
We would like to challenge his definition.
First off, a game by definition is characterized by a set of rules and competition or strife towards specific, discrete outcomes or goals by human participants. Paharia's definition fails to encapsulate the concrete definition of the root for gamification. It's true that the end goal of gamification is to motivate employees, but perhaps not by setting a definition for gamification that discards the true essence of competition, goals and human participants.
Furthermore, Paharia argues that gamification engines capture big data generated from online experiences to motivate better results. However, this definition wrongfully disjoins motivation from human behavior and synonymies' it to production. Motivation is a human behavior and they can no be separated.
We defend that Gamification is any type of goal-oriented competition designed to motivate employees by encouraging engagement.
This singular definition encapsulates the essence, purpose and true design of gamification.
Here is a perfect example of applying gamification that encourages engagement and motivates healthy habits through a goal-oriented process that niether incorporates big data
nor online experiences.
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