Why Gamification?
Why Gamification?
Gamification and serious games as a playful solution for imparting knowledge and creating lasting insights.
What is Gamification?
Gamification is the application of playful elements such as game mechanics, design or principles in a non-game context. The general aim of gamification is to increase the motivation of users by enriching their experiences with these additional elements. This makes gamification widely applicable and used, from education and advertising to everyday working life.
Typical elements borrowed from the gaming environment include ranking lists, rewards, quests and animations. These gamification elements are intended to promote intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
Typical elements borrowed from the gaming environment include ranking lists, rewards, quests and animations. These gamification elements are intended to promote intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
What are Serious Games?
Serious games and, in a broader sense, business simulations are a related category to gamification. Instead of enriching an everyday process with some playful elements, serious games are a gamified representation of a system, an organization or a topic. Serious games are primarily intended to facilitate the learning of skills, the transfer of knowledge or the experience of insight. This positions serious games as a great alternative to traditional seminars, workshops, and lectures. It is also why serious games can be found in modern training and education contexts both for educational institutions as well as in corporations.
How does playful learning work?
Learning through play is a fundamental human need. Especially at pre-school age, playing and learning are not different activities, but one and the same. This casual observation has also lead to a host of studies in the fields of human development and human learning on the effectiveness of play-based solutions across all age categories and subject areas.
«The Four Pillars of Learning» as described by Stanislas Dehaene in «How we learn» are the following: Attention, Active Engagement, Error Feedback and Consolidation. Serious games and simulations are therefore excellent learning tools because they involve active engagement and short feedback loops. This still novel form of learning also helps to keep participants’ attention. When the playing is done, the learning doesn’t stop. Debriefings and debriefing sessions are used to consolidate the transfer to the participants’ own everyday working lives. In this way, playful learning supports sustainable training and education and enables relevant topics to be communicated effectively and efficiently.
«The Four Pillars of Learning» as described by Stanislas Dehaene in «How we learn» are the following: Attention, Active Engagement, Error Feedback and Consolidation. Serious games and simulations are therefore excellent learning tools because they involve active engagement and short feedback loops. This still novel form of learning also helps to keep participants’ attention. When the playing is done, the learning doesn’t stop. Debriefings and debriefing sessions are used to consolidate the transfer to the participants’ own everyday working lives. In this way, playful learning supports sustainable training and education and enables relevant topics to be communicated effectively and efficiently.
«The most important prerequisite for effective and successful learning is the amount of active learning time, i.e. the time in which [the participants] actively, committedly and constructively engage with the content to be learned.»
Serious Games, Gamification & Simulations by game solution
At game solution, we offer our own kind of gamification. In collaboration with our customers, we develop customized serious games that cover their specific topics in a tailor-made way. But what does this mean for you? We bring 20 years of game development experience, you bring the idea. After a comprehensive discussion, we will find the right approach, be it one of our proven standard solutions, an adaptation or scenario to better suite your needs, an integration into an existing program or a completely unique serious game for your organization.
Want to know more about how we apply gamification to provide an optimal outcome to our customers?
Explore some examples of our Serious Games, Simulations and Game Development Projects.
Find out who is behind all the awesome serious games and gamified workshops.