Gamification archaeology

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I’m really excited since I found out, that I was taking advantage of gamification before the term has even existed. It’s fascinating becoming aware of being an „innovator“ in a technology life cycle.

I moved some files to my NAS as I discovered some old files from my work for a computer game community site over a decade ago. One of the key features of this website were the forums. Players were able to discuss everything related to the game and a huge community was evolving around the forum. Additionally, it had some reward features to keep users active over a long period of time.

The system was realized in a relative simple way: the forum had the features of displaying the posting count and the avatar of the users enabled. Users weren’t allowed to upload an own avatar picture. Instead, the avatar was linked to the amount of postings the user had made. Frequent, good or helpful posters on the forums should be rewarded with more rare avatars that also help to build up a higher reputation and indicate the contributions of this user to others.

Naturally, the hunt for special avatars also caused one main issues: the users tried to exploit the process of accumulating a high count of postings by „spamming“. To reduce the spam, moderaters sometimes had to delete the postings made by the user in question or even reduce the posting count by a noticeable amount.

Apart from the spam issue, the reward system worked perfectly and motivated a lot of users to be active on the forums over a long period of time. The system used some core features of recent gamification concepts.
The posting counter was immediately giving feedback to the contributions of the user: everytime a new posting was made, the counter increased by one. Users could instantly follow their progress by looking at their short profile information. Additionally, the avatars rewarded for frequent posting created some long term goals for the users, keeping them active over a long period of time.

Nowadays, gamification systems are rewarding users with badges, experience points and achievements. These reward mechanisms are almost the same as over a decade ago in the forums. The whole concept has remained the same. Users get instant feedback to their actions and are rewarded with special awards for long term goals.

The term „gamification“ can be traced back to 2004, but it wasn’t popular used until 2010[1]. However, even without being aware of the term, the main concept was already used in 2000 and before. It’s fascinating to become aware of the fact that I was taking advantage of gamification before the term even existed. It’s even more exciting that I was using it from the very beginning and nowadays trying to research the benefits of it.