Consequences

When we mention consequences in gamification design, especially when facing internal staff, we often receive push back from clients. However when we go through real life most of our choices have consequences. What seems like a great decision one day, may turn out not ideal but the best you had to make with the information available at the time. The more decisions you have to make the more the chances of experiencing rewarding and challenging consequences.

For most of us working at growing our businesses full information is never available. We have won several projects, which then subsequently due to changes in personnel, budgetary changes or sometimes I also wonder if the weather or bad stomach ache, causes for people to change the parameters. From delays to projects not starting is not unusual. Only those of us very active in this industry will know that first hand.

Significant investment requires an element of risk taking and also sets you up for a potentially great reward. It is like that in games and also in most real life scenarios. In real life you may do your best to eliminate the chance of high risk, and put mitigations in place, whereas in a game you may opt to go all out to see what would happen. I often wondered if there was a simulator for business life where you could enter your own circumstances, the industry and play with various strategies and see how it works out.

Gamification design should just like in life not just focus on happy reward, but meaningful consequences and learning points play an important role too. Persuading clients of such is becoming easier the more I do it, even though temptations always go back to not wanting to be too harsh. I would argue that not letting people learn from feedback and consequences is harsh and creates a very unrealistic picture of reality. Balancing between reward and consequence is where the art of gamification design lies in my view.