Checking points and rewards is easy with a smart phone.
© Thinkstock

An Observation About Life

It was a Saturday like any other.

• I started my day with a walk. I turned on my fitness app to record how far and how fast my journey was. My walk earned me fifteen fitness points.
• I opened my food app to scan my cereal bar code and enter my breakfast food data. Not a bad calorie count to begin the day. The app shared that I had 1900 calories left to spend.
• I loaded my grocery store app with all the exclusive “Just for You” specials and headed to the store. At checkout, my receipt showed that I earned a 15% savings because of my special coupons.
• Plus, through my reward card, my food purchases earned me forty-five gas reward points. Added to the fifty-five points I had already earned, I now qualified for a discount at the gas station.
• At the gas station, I punched in my grocery store reward card number and redeemed the points I had earned, saving twenty cents a gallon.
• As I drove to the mall, I watched my gas consumption on the car dashboard display. I strategically stepped off the gas pedal several times and coasted to try to beat my previous record.

And then, I had an Oh, I see observation about life. My day so far had been full of points, rewards, and earnings. I am living a video game! 

Yes! I earned a reward!
© Janine Boylan

The Name of the Game

Many companies use game-like programs to motivate employees or customers, such as group incentives to lose weight or energy consumption reports that encourage us to compare and compete with friends and neighbors over energy savings.

The concept of using game strategies to engage an audience has been around for a while. Recently this marketing strategy has earned a name: gamification.

Author and entrepreneur Gabe Zichermann clarifies that gamification “is taking the best ideas from games, loyalty programs, and behavioral economics and putting them together and using them to create engagement over the long haul.”  You can see Zichermann speak in greater depth on gamification during this TED talk.

The Facts Behind These Games

Is it OK that our lives are becoming one big video game?

Game designer Jane McGonigal argues that it is. In a Wall Street Journal article, McGonigal says video games give us four things that we need for a happy life:

• satisfying work
• real hope for success
• strong social connections
• the chance to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

Games connect us, even when we’re alone.
© Thinkstock

More and more reports are showing the positive effects of video games.

• Fredric Wolinsky and his Iowa colleagues published a report showing that playing video games improved a group of seniors’ cognitive processing skills over their counterparts who did not play the game.
• Linda Jackson and team discovered that the more middle-school kids played video games, the more creative they were.
• Paul J. C. Adachi and Teena Willoughby’s study shows that video games build “(1) intrinsic motivation, (2) concentration and cognitive effort, and (3) cumulative effort over time to achieve a goal.”

I’m Game

The fact is that gamification works. It makes the mundane more fun. Going to the grocery store, filling my tank with gas, or driving from errand to errand were never high on my list of fun things to do, but making a game of these activities has made them more appealing and, yes, rewarding.

So, my observation about life (with apologies to Shakespeare):

All the world’s a game,

And all the men and women merely players;

We have our points and our reward cards,

And one man in his time has many user names. . .

 Comment on this post below, or inspire insight with your own OIC Moment here.