The Engagement Game: Why Gaming is Embedding Itself in All Platforms
A Deep Dive into the Expansion of Gaming Elements in Everyday Digital Platforms
From ancient dice games to modern online communities, games have always connected people. Today, gamification—integrating game elements into digital platforms—enhances interaction and engagement. This article explores the rise of gamification across industries, its psychological and social impacts, corporate benefits, and future engagement strategies.
Sections Covered:
The Surge in Gamification
The Psychology, History and Humanity of Games
The Corporate Benefits of Gamification
The Future of Engagement Strategies
1. The Surge in Gamification
Platforms are constantly seeking innovative ways to capture and retain user attention. Enter gamification - the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. This trend is rapidly embedding itself across diverse digital platforms, transforming our routines and how we interact with technology.
LinkedIn's recent introduction of games into their mobile app exemplifies this shift. Known primarily as a professional networking platform, although no stranger to bold experimentation, LinkedIn's mission is to ‘connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.’ At first glance, productivity and games seem at odds, but the addition of a dedicated games tab shows a strong commitment to integrate gamification and strategically enhance product value.
This decision is driven by the imperative to boost daily user engagement. Gamification offers an effortless method to send notifications, enticing users to return to the app regularly. By encouraging users to share their experiences, LinkedIn fosters organic community marketing, ultimately strengthening its network and enhancing overall user satisfaction of the product.
LinkedIn's adoption of gamification is part of a broader trend sweeping across various industries. From education to fitness, digital platforms are increasingly incorporating game elements to boost engagement. This strategy adds a secondary product vertical to ad-revenue funded services, enhancing the core offering while creating new avenues for user interaction. This strategy is not new. Early social games on Facebook, like Zynga's Farmville, demonstrated how gaming could drive engagement on networked products.
The rise of gamification in news media platforms like The New York Times comes at a critical juncture for the newspaper industry. A 2017 Pew Research Center report highlighted sharp declines in both circulation and revenue for newspapers, underscoring the need for innovative strategies.
In 2022, ‘Wordle’ became the most searched word globally on Google, illustrating the cultural significance of simple, yet engaging games. The New York Times capitalized on this trend by acquiring Wordle, with a goal to reach 10 million digital subscriptions by 2025. This target was achieved early, partly due to the acquisition of The Athletic, a sports media platform providing that would provide another consistent source engagement from another aspect of games.
The impact of games like Wordle on the NYT’s bottom line has been so profound that it's jokingly referred to internally as "a gaming company that also happens to offer news”. This creative pivot represents a successful adaptation to the changing media landscape, opening new avenues for engagement and revenue generation in an era of declining traditional newspaper readership.
Other major players are also leveraging gamification. Netflix has integrated interactive films and mobile games into its platform, competing with top games in the iOS App Store. Amazon's acquisition of Twitch and its integration with Amazon Prime showcases another successful approach to incorporating gaming elements into a broader ecosystem. Education platforms like Duolingo have long recognized the power of gamification as well, with their language learning app enhancing learning experiences through game elements and allowing for extensive experimentation in product design and marketing strategies.
As we delve deeper into this trend, it becomes clear that gamification is not just a novelty - it's becoming an essential tool for digital platforms to drive engagement, retain users, and ultimately, achieve their business objectives. The following sections will explore the psychology behind this phenomenon and its far-reaching implications for both users and businesses.
2. The Psychology and Humanity of Games
Throughout human history, games have been a fundamental aspect of our social fabric, deeply intertwined with our psychology and humanity. From ancient civilizations to modern societies, games have served as a universal language, transcending cultural and linguistic barriers.
The earliest known board games, like Senet in ancient Egypt (circa 3500 BCE) and the Royal Game of Ur in Mesopotamia (circa 2400 BCE), were not mere pastimes but reflected religious beliefs and were thought to represent the journey of the soul. This spiritual dimension highlights how deeply games were embedded in human psychology and cultural narratives.
As societies evolved, so did the role of games. In medieval Europe, chess became a metaphor for life and social hierarchy, while in East Asia, Go was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured aristocrat. These examples illustrate how games have long been vehicles for teaching strategic thinking, social norms, and cultural values.
The Industrial Revolution brought about a democratization of games. Mass-produced board games and the rise of organized sports allowed people from all walks of life to participate in shared experiences. This shift reflects the human need for connection and equality, as games provided a level playing field where skill mattered more than social status.
Games have always been events that bring people together, even when played alone. This idea took a new form in the early 20th century with newspaper puzzle sections. The first crossword puzzle, published in New York World in 1913, started a new trend. Suddenly, people across the country were solving the same puzzles at the same time. These daily brain teasers became a kind of solo game that still felt shared. People looked forward to their daily mental challenge, knowing others were doing the same thing. Newspapers had found a way to create a daily game "event" that anyone could join. These puzzles weren't just fun – they also gave people a chance to exercise their minds and learn new things. This shows how games can connect us, even when we're not in the same room.
The psychological impact of games becames particularly evident during times of societal stress. During the Great Depression and more recently in the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a notable surge in puzzle engagement. This phenomenon underscores the role of games in providing comfort, structure, and a sense of accomplishment during uncertain times.
Gamification leverages these intrinsic qualities of games to boost user engagement on digital platforms. Companies enhance user interaction by incorporating game elements, encouraging users to connect, collaborate, and stay committed to their platforms through dopamine-driven feedback loops. For instance, DAU (Daily Active Users) is a core metric for many platforms. The New York Times and LinkedIn have effectively applied
’s Hooked model to their games by incorporating scarcity:
Trigger: A daily notification or reminder prompts the user to play the game.
Action: The user engages with the game, knowing it can only be played once a day.
Variable Reward: The outcome of the game varies each day, providing an element of surprise and satisfaction.
Investment: The limited availability of the game increases user investment, as they must return the next day for another chance to play.
This strategy encourages daily engagement and creates a shared experience from a single unique event. Unlike games with constant retries, daily games foster anticipation and community among users participating in the same challenge. This asynchronous approach provides a shared experience across time zones, supporting international connections.
The evolution of games from ancient religious rituals to modern digital experiences reflects the constant in human psychology – our need for engagement, learning, social connection, and personal growth. Games have always been more than just entertainment. They are a mirror to our humanity, reflecting our values, fears, aspirations, and the ever-present human drive to connect, compete, and achieve.
3. The Corporate Advantages of Gaming
While games have deep roots in human psychology and social interaction, modern corporations have recognized are harnessing their power for business advantage. By leveraging the innate human attraction to games, companies can drive engagement, retention, and ultimately, their bottom line.
Companies strategically select and implement games that align with their core business metrics and goals. This approach transforms the age-old human love for games into measurable business outcomes. Let's explore how different companies utilize gaming elements to boost their key performance indicators (KPIs):
Increasing Watch Time: Netflix integrates games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which offers extensive gameplay, to keep users engaged for longer periods. This aligns perfectly with their core metric of maximizing watch time.
Boosting Daily Active Users (DAU): As mentioned in depth above, platforms like LinkedIn and The New York Times employ daily games and challenges. These regular activities encourage users to return daily, significantly improving their DAU metrics.
Enhancing User Engagement: Amazon's acquisition of Twitch for $970 million in 2014 exemplifies the value placed on gaming communities. Twitch has evolved into a platform where people watch others play, creating a new form of shared interactive experience. This high-engagement model enables Amazon to attract a younger audience and enhance the value of their Prime subscription, making it more appealing and worthwhile.
User Retention and Reactivation: Games serve as an excellent mechanism for improving user retention. For instance, if user engagement typically drops after five days, companies can implement weekly gaming events to maintain interest. By creating multiple event cycles on different cadences, businesses can foster more sustainable and predictable long-term engagement.
Data Collection and User Insights: Gaming elements enable platforms to gather a wealth of high-touch user data. This valuable information can be used for experiments, user segmentation, and refining marketing strategies.
Revenue Diversification: Adding gaming features helps platforms diversify their revenue streams beyond traditional advertising. Microtransactions in games, particularly on mobile platforms, demonstrate users' willingness to pay for engaging content.
Organic Growth and Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Platforms like Twitch often offer exclusive in-game content for subscribers, creating buzz and organic growth within the gaming community. This word-of-mouth effect can be a powerful marketing tool.
By integrating gaming elements, companies can create more touchpoints with users, increasing the likelihood of purchases or upgrades. This functions as an automated, low-cost nurturing system. As
notes in The Cold Start Problem, reactivating existing users is far less costly than acquiring new ones. Gaming features can play a crucial role in this reactivation process. Many networked products face challenges with high Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). Games provide a relatively low-investment solution that boosts engagement of existing users and offers a mechanism for reactivating dormant users. This approach allows platforms to embed a habit of product usage for longer-term benefits.
We are now seeing social media platforms transitioning to subscription models with monthly payouts based on engagement metrics, as seen with Threads and X. Each month, large creators share their earnings, creating another organic growth flywheel through the gamification of engaging with a platform over others. This engagement-based revenue helps drive more activity for core metrics, although it may be to the detriment of the platform's culture, as engagement farming and inflammatory posts often drive more interaction due to their nature.
Moreover, apps need high ratings to attract new users and retain current ones. Users who are engaged with an app through game elements are more likely to continue using it, recommend it, and give it positive ratings. This engagement helps improve organic marketing efforts and extracts more value from the product's existing user base.
In essence, the corporate world has recognized that games are not just play – they're serious business. By tapping into the psychological and social aspects of gaming discussed earlier, companies can create engaging experiences that not only satisfy users' innate desires for challenge and connection but also drive significant business value.
4. The Future of Engagement Strategies
With intensifying competition for user attention, companies are diversifying their strategies to capture and retain engagement. They are expanding their methods to tap into attention funnels and interlinking these benefits with their core products. The primary approach is to create habits that encourage regular user interaction. Habit-forming strategies include daily challenges, reminders, and personalized content to keep users coming back.
The advent of event-based analytics and AI is revolutionizing how companies fine-tune their engagement strategies. By capturing and analyzing detailed user data, platforms can implement targeted improvements and personalized experiences at an unprecedented scale. This precision offers immense potential to deepen and scale gaming experiences. Generative AI is also streamlining game creation, allowing for faster development cycles and more frequent updates.
Interestingly, alongside these technological advancements, there's a trend towards simpler approaches. This strategy focuses on building strong user habits rather than relying on attention-grabbing techniques that need constant novel content, features, or updates. As we saw with the psychology of games, building strong user habits can lead to long-term engagement and loyalty.
In this context, engagement can be categorized into three main types:
Consumption: Users passively engage with content, such as watching videos or engaging with rich product features. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch excel by offering continuous, personalized content to keep users entertained and returning.
Interaction: Users actively participate by completing tasks, commenting, liking, and sharing experiences. Social features on platforms like LinkedIn and Duolingo encourage interaction, creating dynamic, community-driven experiences through discussion forums, leaderboards, and collaborative projects.
Sharing: Users spread content within their networks, such as sharing achievements or insightful articles on social media. This engagement acts as organic marketing, expanding the platform's reach through viral content and community events, boosting both participation and growth.
Combining these three types of engagement can create a robust strategy that attracts and retains users. For instance, a game might offer high-quality content (consumption), encourage player interactions (interaction), and promote sharing achievements and highlights (sharing). This approach ensures users are engaged in multiple ways, strengthening their connection to the game and increasing loyalty and organic marketing growth over time.
Moving forward, it is essential to address the ethical implications of these engagement strategies. While gamification can enhance user experience and drive business goals, it also risks fostering addiction. Future strategies must balance effective engagement with user well-being, using psychological insights to create healthier, more sustainable models.
The integration of gaming elements into digital platforms represents a fundamental shift in our interaction with technology. Gaming is becoming central to digital experiences, blending with core functionalities and driven by AI and data analytics. As more platforms implement native games, like LinkedIn and The New York Times, new opportunities for smaller game developers will arise. The trend towards simpler, engaging games across various platforms offers fertile ground for innovation and growth. However, this must be balanced with ethical, user-centric design to ensure both users and businesses benefit from engaging, personalized, and meaningful digital experiences.
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—Rohan
Sometimes I hate how something as simple as a daily streak makes you feel the need to keep coming back. It’s great to build habits, but not when the habit isn’t exactly useful.
Duolingo has always been a standout to me as early users of gamification.
Mobile games have always been egregious with timers, cooldowns and all the other overwhelming fomo stuff.
Do you have any examples of good and bad uses of gamification Rohan?