Abstract:

Our constantly changing society demands for a more efficient and effective transfer of knowledge. As companies and organizations push their employees to stay up to date, these employees perceive the pressure for change and the struggle with digesting and integrating new knowledge.

Since Nick Pelling coined the term gamification, the concept has gained popularity ever since and with the right settings and use of correct elements it offers a real-world change to drive and increase motivation of, amongst others, employees.

Inspired by various gamification projects and gurus as Yu-Kai Chou, we, a dynamic trio of higher education teachers involved in diverse multi-disciplinary projects, run a one-year project that allowed us to experience, analyze and log all the steps needed to design a client-based gamification strategy for an organization, representing a complex environment.

The aim: to become experienced experts, able to pass on this expertise to students who are increasingly involved in (inter)active learning, project assignments, creation and development of applications for many purposes which have a common aspect, there are always users that need to be motivated to learn about and use the application.

The outcome: a script containing a pragmatic approach and a set of best practices.
The method: based on our theoretical background on gamification we conducted a case study involving medical staff from different hospitals (practicality and synergy where the main reasons for this selection) combined with interviews and focus groups. We anticipated on two major phases in this project.

Firstly the involved organizations need to acquire comprehension of the concept (of gamification) and become aware of the necessity of an holistic embedding. As a result, the organizations would be able to project the impact of the installment of the gamification strategy both horizontally and vertically in their working environment.

Secondly, there is the search for matching and feasible gamification techniques. Starting from existing techniques (commonly listed in literature on gamification) we tested which techniques resonated with the target audience and examined the impact of the application of the techniques on corporate and social culture.

Our ambitious and short timed project proved to entail quite some challenges. Apart from the obvious constraints due to the pandemic, we needed to safeguard our meta view on the project while we devised and developed a tailored gamification strategy and we were confronted with the fact that, although people associate gamification wrongly with games, they also did not connect with a relating action verb, namely "play". Hence we often found ourselves asking subjects the following question: "Have you ever played?".

Keywords:

Gamification, workplace training, best practice.