Gamification in the days of blockchain: 10 applications, 20+ techniques and strategies

18 min readOct 16, 2020

In this article I will help you understand the basic strategies of gamification and how gamification and blockchain combined together can revolutionize the mechanisms of user acquisition and conversion, even for non-profit activities.

Let’s explore the basics of gamification and how to make it the ultimate tool for user engagement with blockchain

The gamification is the application of game design elements in non gaming contexts. Gamification commonly uses these elements to improve the aspects of involvement (and therefore the achievement of objectives) of users and results to be a proven tool capable of increasing the efficiency of an interactive process.

Gamification is based on the physiological mechanisms of pleasure and fulfillment and is intrinsic or applicable to many traditional aspects of our life. Here are some references on the effectiveness of gamification.

The blockchain, thanks to its characteristics of immutability, transparency and interoperability paves the way for new and more effective gamification strategies.

Let’s analyze in detail what are the main areas in which gamification has taken on a decisive role, the main strategies applied and how the blockchain can improve them.

Applications of gamification

Gamification can be applied to both personal and social activities, even if it works better in the second case, and to periodic and occasional actions, where it works better with the first case.

Let’s see what are the current areas of application of gamification techniques outside the gaming industry.

Education / Training. Used to ensure constant user engagement and the completion of the most tedious tasks, it also pushes users to achieve better results.
Inspiration / Design. Various gamification techniques are used for the conception and exploration of new innovation spaces.
Crowdsourcing. We mean some collaborative development activities including: crowdprocessing, the participation in collaborative processes aimed at solving a process / problem; crowdrating: collaborative construction of service and product ratings; crowdcreating: collaborative construction of contents and software. Crowdsourcing can be incentivized by stimulating and quantifying the effort of contributors. Find here in-depth information on crowdsourcing gamification.
Work and Productivity, where some workers’ performances are measured and compared to encourage greater productivity and competition.
Cybersecurity: in this context, gamification is used for hackers and security experts to compete with each other in exchange for recognition and economic remuneration (bounty) to identify security flaws in proprietary software and hardware, it is also used in hacking competitions to identify and train talents.
Health: some physiological parameters are measured and positive changes are evaluated and recognized, also through challenges.
Marketing: on the consumer side they are used to increase customer loyalty, on the seller side they are used to incentivize the achievement of objectives.
Crowdfunding: gamification techniques are used to stimulate investments and lead investors to build differentiated portfolios.

In the near future, gamification applications may also be applied in the public interest.

9. Taxation. Through reward and fortune techniques, tax agencies will be able to incentivize consumers to request invoices and receipts.

10. Civil obligations: through reward, fortune and vanity techniques it will be possible to motivate virtuous social behavior.

Gamification techniques

The main gamification techniques can be classified into the following categories and subcategories, for simplicity described separately, although these are often used in combination. In addition, I created a concept map to make it easier to understand the relationships between these various techniques.

Vanity: set of techniques that insist on the desire to express the user’s sense of identity and originality.
Avatar: provides the user with the opportunity to represent themselves through a highly customizable 2D / 3D digital identity in a unique and often extroverted way.
Badges / Achievements: allow the user to show their level of engagement and success in the game scheme, often they are publicly or community accessible.
Progress Tracking / Statistics: provide quantitative indices of user achievements, often private.
Leaderboard: allow users to access performance ranks, they show a relative (the user has visibility of only some users above and below his level) or global (all users are shown) ranking.
Reward: a simple form of gamification where participants are rewarded with a gift, usually virtual.
Fortune: a simple form of gamification where participants acquire the right to participate in a random drawing to determine a possible reward.
Collectibles: set of techniques that involve the creation or accumulation of collectible (often virtual) resources, which acquire value based on their uniqueness.
Virtual Goods: assets or collectibles that represent virtual goods, the more unique they are the more they have value. It can also be valuable to accumulate quantities of the same good, because combined together they can give access or convert into a new good.
Tuning / Customization: consists of having a virtual item to which you can add virtual accessories, whose composition gives rise to unique items, which can also be customized in the visual aspect (colors, patterns, decorations).
Challenges: set of techniques to stimulate the achievement of personal results. A challenge, unlike a competition, leads to a private result, not shared with the community.
Skill: a type of challenge based on personal skills acquired.
Speed: a type of challenge based that does not require particular personal skills but only time / dedication.
Virtual Economy: defines a simple economy of supply and demand, in which users are stimulated to spend their credits to obtain rewards and purchase virtual assets, then to earn new credits, obtainable both through the completion of challenge, both through direct purchase at marketplaces.
Curation: defines a virtual entity that needs periodic attention to be maintained or kept alive, and which can take on more advanced characteristics if it receives more care. It usually also goes in combination with the purchase of virtual accessories.
Community Culture: set of techniques based on the sense of community and belonging, it returns satisfaction in participating in the activities of a group, usually combined with Leaderboards.
Competition: consists of competitive activities organized by a community, where users compete to demonstrate their skills.
Collaboration: a community that organizes collaborative activities, where users help each other in facing a common challenge.
Participation / Governance: set of activities and tools that allow users to actively participate in the decision-making activities of the community, they can be strategic or related to a specific aspect of the community.
Group Consensus: strategies that focus on the search for consent by users within their own groups. Behaviors preferred by the majority are rewarded and recognized, and behaviors that the majority deem inappropriate are discouraged.
Curiosity / Surprise: a simple form of gamification where participants are encouraged to take an action in order to receive a small surprise.

Player profiles

The gamification techniques are built around the players, that is the users of a service engaged in the game dynamics. Players can be stimulated by leveraging on peculiar characteristics of their personality, which are a unique combination resulting from the interaction of 4 primary profiles:

creative : the player has a psychological profile stimulated by creativity and inventiveness ( Avatar, Tuning /Customization);
competitive: the player has a psychological profile that prefers competition and personal success (Leaderboards, Badges / Achievements, Progress / Tracking);
exploratory: the player has a psychological profile attracted by the discovery, understanding of secrets and meanings (Curiosity / Surprise, Virtual Goods);
collaborative: the player has a psychological profile in which collaboration and interaction with other players is the basis of the gaming experience (Community / Culture).

The four main profiles can be arranged on two axes that represent the propensity to interact with other players (favour interaction with player vs interaction with contents) and the propensity to openness (favour creation of open tasks vs execution of closed ones).

It is important to know and apply these concepts persona profiling because the construction of a successful gamification strategy can follow two approaches:

satisfying these four profiles in a balanced way in order to stimulate all possible types of users;
identify the most frequent profile (s) of the average user of the service in question (if possible) and develop a vertical strategy.

The blockchain in gamification

The blockchain offers numerous advantages in gamification contexts.

Immutability: guarantees that it cannot be tampered with by any of the parties involved.
Authoritativeness: the information it reports, if properly signed by recognized organizations and entities, is indisputable.
Transparency: one of the main frictions encountered in creating centralized gamification scenarios when they are proposed to new communities is the fear that they are based on rules that only benefit the proposing organizations. By making the gamification mechanisms clear, transparent and perhaps codified through a smart contract, users tend to trust more and therefore to invest more resources in terms of money and time.
Interoperability: gamification today revolves around a single product or a single brand, by bringing gamification to the blockchain it will be possible to create portability of virtual resources outside the limits imposed so far.
Liquidity: it will be possible to buy / exchange / sell assets obtained from gamification activities outside the limits currently imposed by the emitting organization.

The blockchain can be used in gamification contexts when it maximizes the characteristics listed above.

It is important to be immutable when you want to assure users that they will not lose acquired resources and recognition. Example: the acquisition of economic or reputational assets.

It is important to be authoritative when assuring parties that do not know each other that the information declared on the blockchain is reliable. Example: the portability of certificates and qualifications.

It is important to be transparent when the information you disclose is of value to a group or helps to trust an organization. Example: being able to independently verify the performance of an online service without having to trust a self-declaration.

It is important to be interoperable when assets acquired in a certain context have value when transported to other similar contexts. Example: a training qualification acquired from a trainer could be transferable and recognized by another trainer.

It is important to be liquid when these assets have a transferable economic value that can be exercised by the recipient. Example: a qualification for completing a training course has no transferable value, discount coupons do.

Decentralized gamification strategies

After introducing gamification techniques, we will now discuss the main strategies applied by companies to implement these techniques and how the blockchain offers a competitive advantage over a centralized solution. We remind you that these strategies are used to:

increase conversion, stimulating users to reach goals / buy / spend more;
increase user engagement and therefore greater loyalty and brand awareness;
open new channels with users;
build user communities.

Gamification of qualifications

What it is: a series of strategies to encourage users to acquire and publish qualifications and skills (example: the Linkedin profile), share academic and academic merits (Researchgate), follow training and specialization courses (example: Coursera), provide technical opinions (e.g. StackOverflow), participate in discipline-specific contests (HackerRank).

How it works: combines the techniques of challenge, vanity and community / culture.

What problems present: walled garden restrictions, qualifications are obtained and kept by different organizations, there are no international standards of portability.

How the blockchain can improve it: providing an immutable and neutral ledger with a common format where it is possible to go to certify the qualifications, merits and results of users and obtain a global and verifiable vision from organizations authorized by the holders of these qualifications.

Productivity gamification

What it is: a series of strategies to increase workers performance, safety and accident prevention. The performance of workers on tasks and projects are measured and tracked, leaderboards are drawn up to show workers and teams more performing in terms of performance and errors. If used in a sober way they can create healthy competition and a desire for improvement in the team.

How it works:combines the techniques of challenge, vanity and community / culture.

What problems present: walled garden restrictions, the results obtained are produced and managed by different organizations, there are no portability standards.

How the blockchain can improve it: providing an immutable ledger where it is possible to certify, with a standardized protocol, the performance and recognition of workers who are interested in keeping track of it, and which can be quantitatively and qualitatively verified by organizations previously authorized by the owners of the data.

Crowdsourcing gamification

What it is: a series of incentives for crowdsourcing, a huge global resource that develops real economic value, just think of the social impact of initiatives such as Wikipedia or the code of thousands of open source projects developed and maintained by communities of enthusiasts and professionals. To date, the work of many contributors is not remunerated in any way, even if some communities are starting to formalize incentive tools based on gamification.

How it works: through a composition of community / culture, curation and vanity techniques, in some cases it can introduce elements of challenge.

What problems present: walled gardens restrictions, the various communities are isolated, there is no reward economy, the contributors do not have the tools to present a unified vision of their commitment.

How the blockchain can improve it: providing an immutable and neutral ledger with a standard format where it is possible to certify contributions, create a reward economy based on measurable achievements, provide a global and verifiable view of such achievements for organizations authorized by the data owners.

Fitness gamification

What it is: a series of mechanisms to increase users to overcome laziness and perform sports activities. Sports measurement is becoming a very relevant business, especially since many insurance companies offer significant discounts in exchange for monitoring policyholders and verifying weekly physical activity achievements.

How they work: as a composition of reward, community / culture and challenge techniques.

What problems present: walled gardens restrictions, the data produced by an application is not portable to other companies and therefore it is not possible to build a shareable history of fitness activities.

How the blockchain can improve it: tracking users fitness activity on a neutral support would enable the complete accessibility of such information and therefore the creation of new data markets. For the sake of completeness, it should be pointed that data tracked on blockchain, representing actions in the real world, is as reliable as the devices (and companies behind) that carry out these measurements and certify them. While there are several techniques to mitigate the falsification of personal data relating to fitness activities, these data are subject to these risks.

Advertising gamification

What it is: in recent years web users have increased the awareness that they are treated as products whose attention is rented on social networks. As a result, initiatives aimed at transforming users into active, aware and rewarded participants in web advertising have multiplied. Many platforms are introducing economic rewards in exchange for the consumption of Ads and the purchase of products.

How it works: they use a combination of reward, curiosity / surprise, community and sometimes challenge techniques.

What problems present: the channels for the transmission of advertising on the web are affected by low trust and reliability, consumers are unpaid and are often attacked by invasive advertising, publishers find it difficult to verify the actual consumption of their campaigns.

How the blockchain can mitigate these problems: the blockchain can make the entire flow of delivery of advertising messages totally transparent and allow consumers to obtain a reward channel, users can also accumulate ads consumption accomplishments and be challenged to spread product awareness with decentralised affiliation programs.

Loyalty programs

An interesting vertical of advertising gamification are Loyalty Programs, designed to strengthen the relationships between brands and consumers.

What they are: loyalty programs encourage users to collect points, through the purchase of a brand’s products or by carrying out actions such as sharing content and involving new users. These scores can then be consumed for the purchase of other goods and services (rewards). They apply effectively for recurring purchases (consumables / travel) in markets where there is a lot of competition.

How they work: they are a composition of reward and virtual economy techniques, they can include components of fortune and vanity.

What problems present: one of the most common criticisms of loyalty programs is that they are designed to maximize the company’s profit, through unbalanced rules that make it very difficult for users to be properly rewarded for the effort applied in collecting points. They also present portability problems: the obtained points are recognized only by the issuer.

How the blockchain can improve them: implementing a loyalty program on the blockchain makes it more reliable and more portable, perhaps through a consortium of companies that supports and recognizes score tokens. In fact, the blockchain enables transparency, guarantees greater reliability and reduces fraud. Furthermore, the blockchain enables portability, and therefore the possibility of being able to join or convert loyalty points in forms not foreseen until now.

Gamification and digital twins

What they are: digital representations of physical objects, they are sold or purchased by users who can modify, personalize, exchange them and who can acquire and apply accessories.

How they work: as a combination of collectible, vanity, community and virtual economy techniques. They work for expensive / luxury goods or for imaginary objects / creatures. They are a digital evolution of modeling and can be combined with Virtual Reality technology. If associated with real physical objects they can also be used to create anti-counterfeiting solutions.

What problems present: they generally have portability problems, cannot be used and exchanged outside the scope of the issuer.

How the blockchain can improve it: the blockchain can guarantee interoperability, making these assets independent from the initially issuing organization, liquidity enabling a decentralized market and therefore a monetary value for these assets, replicating the dynamics of classic collecting.

Crowdfunding and gamification

What is it: crowdfunding is a generic term that defines a series of strategies aimed at raising funding from a multitude of users to achieve goals. There are various types of crowdfunding: reward that allows you to (pre) finance the creation of a product that still does not exist, donations to raise funds for charity, equity to finance a company in a capital increase in exchange for shares, profit to buy debt or profit rights of a company.

How it works: the crowdfunding strategies listed above can adopt gamification techniques based on badges / achievements, communities, vanities and obviously rewards.

What problem present: centralized crowdfunding presents problems of trust (there are usually not enough elements to judge the quality of the team), evaluation problems (you often don’t have the skills to judge the quality and therefore the probability of success of the project). Equity / profit crowdfunding makes the portability of purchased assets difficult, as there is no secondary market to evaluate the value of assets and liquidate them.

How the blockchain can improve it: the blockchain can intervene in crowdfunding processes in various ways, as already demonstrated in various successful projects for participation and results, it is interesting to underline that the introduction of the blockchain in crowdfunding projects enables gamification mechanisms that work at better only in a trustless context.

The blockchain can enhance crowdfunding:

providing decentralized mechanisms for lean, permissionless (with associated pros and cons) and cheap fundraising;
providing decentralized mechanisms for the controlled release of funds, exercised through the collaborative governance of shareholders. As already experimented with in the Ethereum ecosystem with the introduction of DAICO projects, it is possible to raise funds in a smart contract and let them be released gradually or in tranches, depending on the achievement of milestones and objectives, whose success is evaluated by investors through their weighted vote;
guaranteeing investors liquidity on secondary markets, for crowd projects based on the purchase of financial assets;
enabling scoring / review services on reliability and quality of projects, based on Curation and Prediction Markets.

Governance, contribution and scoring / review services can be gamified by focusing on competitiveness and rewards based on the achievement of results, based on the creation of content voted as useful for the evaluation / execution of the project, or on the release of predictions that prove correct.

Curation and Prediction Markets at a Glance

Curation Markets, as defined by its inventor Simon de la Rouviere, are models that allow groups of people to coordinate more effectively and increase the value that co-create around shared goals.

They are therefore tools to raise funds and coordinate governance operations to achieve certain objectives. Joining an initiative managed with a Curation Market takes place by depositing an equivalent value in exchange for specific tokens of that market, which are minted on request without a pre-established limit and which represent the investment stake on a project.

The cost of the tokens is determined by the smart contract itself according to a predefined price growth curve as the circulating tokens increase, the burn of these tokens always returns a value determined by the smart contract through the same token value curve and allows anyone to finance and prioritize a particular activity linked to the project, and for the curators to liquidate part of their tokens to make a profit based on their effort.

Therefore Curation Markets are a unique paradigm for raising funds, directing them to priorities shared by the community and rewarding the achievement of objectives, and are very suitable for the application of community-oriented gamification techniques like rewards, curation and vanity.

The Prediction Markets,already widely used in financial, politics and sports forecasting, are models that allow anyone to bet on the outcome of a future event, thus allowing them to accumulate weighted predictions. When the event finally occurs, whoever betted on the correct outcome receives a weighted prize of the bets pointed on the incorrect results.

Prediction Markets are a very powerful tool that creates an economic incentive to stimulate the Wisdom of the Crowd, where forecasts done by sufficiently large crowds have been shown to be more reliable than ones done by a single recognized specialist.

Crowdfunding Prediction Markers can be used to:

evaluate the probability of success of a project;
evaluate the probability of success of a business model;
assess the receptivity of a market (customer type) to a specific service / product;
evaluate the distribution channels that are most effective for a market and product.

Examples of Blockchain-powered Gamification Technology Platforms

Blockchain enabled gamification is an almost unexplored market, and at the moment there are no killer apps or particularly established platforms, but something is starting to emerge. Here are some early stage projects for example purposes, if you know someone who fits the topic do not hesitate to suggest it in this post comments.

SandBlock

SandBlock provides a blockchain protocol that allows merchants to define reward programs and rules for their customers. Using this platform, merchants define a rewards program, financing it with specific crypto tokens.

SandBlock is also launching its SandBlock Chain, a blockchain dedicated to creating shared digital assets such as loyalty points. As stated by SandBlock, on this chain can be created new tokens whose value can be supported by SandBlock token, fiat currency or other type of resource.

Surprise.io is the main initiative that uses the Sandblock Chain to create a universal loyalty program shared between hundreds of merchants and support cashback programs.

https://sandblock.io

OpenSocial THX

THX provides a platform to facilitate digital communities building. This platform allows an online community to reward its members with decentralized tokens with an underlying economic value, in exchange for virtuous behavior. Such actions include bringing in new members, creating valuable content, creating and attending events, answering questions, etc. each community can determine its own reward rules.

https://www.thxprotocol.com

Whappy

Whappy provides a platform for blockchain gamification, specifically an application for loyalty programs and brand awareness.

https://www.whappy.it/en/blockchain-gamifcation-reward-whappy-2/

SwissBorg Community App

With this mobile app SwissBorg has introduced an interesting gamification mechanism with reward for the forecast of the Bitcoin daily price.

https://swissborg.com/products/community-app

Conclusions

The blockchain can empower gamification strategies with its characteristics of immutability, transparency, neutrality and portability, making this technology the optimal medium for the demolition of walled gardens in gamified environments.

Despite this blockchain still misses some fundamental ingredients to play a determinant role in gamification:

there is a lack in open protocols for sharing and standardizing identities and assets, necessary to achieve portability. and interpretability of decentralized information;
there is a lack of organizations capable of promoting such protocols;
current scalability limits of the some main public blockchains restrict the applicability of decentralized gamification to scenarios that involve low-frequency on-chain interactions, although it would be possible to circumvent these limits by relaxing some decentralization constraints.

The good news is that many decentralized ecosystems are moving rapidly in the gaming field, thus also dragging the gamification initiative, and in 2–4 years we could see the affirmation of the first apps.

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