Abstract:

The 21st century brings changes in society and technological development is affecting people's daily lives. Given the technological development and the people's positive attitude towards entertainment, the gaming industry has developed rapidly in recent years and its annual sales worldwide continue to grow. Researchers have shown interest in understanding why people play games and transfer their positive effects and nature in different fields. Thus, organizations and also educational practitioners are looking for new methods to engage employees, clients, and students, and one of the latest methods to do so is called gamification. The visionary who noticed this phenomenon and in 2002 named it gamification was computer game programmer Nick Pelling who explained it as a process where game elements are applied in the learning process in any field (Kim, 2015; Karagiorgas, Niemann, 2017). In recent years, the increase in the popularity of the term can be explained by the emergence of social media and the development of information and communication technologies. However, although the concept of gamification only appeared in 2002, this does not mean that gamification as a concept did not exist until then. It just was not given a name and an explanation. At the intuitive level, people have been applying this concept for a long time.

No articles about the history of gamification can be found in the academic databases, that is why the author believes this could be a useful study to conduct. Thus, the aim of this study is to develop a timeline from the beginning of the 19th century to the creation of the term ‘gamification’ describing the historical development of the concept by giving some of the most notable examples of the period, where the game elements are used in different contexts with the specific purpose.
This study proposes the text mining technique as the research method that has been successfully used to discover and extract interesting patterns and useful information from analyzing massive text data on the internet or other sources. In this particular study, the source of data would be the Google platform using the keywords “History of gamification” and further explore the given results.
The results of the text mining reveal the first customer loyalty programs that are still widely used practice nowadays, also the children movements formed in Great Britain which were an important part of the wider geopolitical agenda in the society at the 20th century, outlining the different roles of women and men as part of cohesive collective national organizations and the role of game elements to ensure that, as well as further studies reveal the correlation with other counties as the Soviet Union, Germany and France, and other examples.

Keywords:

Gamification, history, concept, Historical development.