Gamification and Game Theory – How It Applies to Your Digital Strategy

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Gamification, and to a lesser extent Game Theory, are terms you’re going to be hearing a lot of over the next six months or so. They are going to be used in the context of digital marketing strategies, and will probably be poorly explained to you. But what actually are they, and should you really care?

First things first, let’s get some things cleared up – the two terms are, at best, loosely related; Gamification is not the application of Game Theory, nor does Game Theory necessarily cover the concept of Gamification. They do, however, share a common theme, especially when we’re talking around digital marketing strategy. So, what’s what?

Game Theory has been around for around 80 years, and can be broadly summarised by the analysis of strategy against strategy – that is, the choices made by one party based on the choices of another party and to a lesser extent the likelihood of those choices leading to an improvement or deterioration in the position of said party (gulp!). It’s something that maths geeks and social analysts love, and largely it isn’t applicable to digital marketing. Except it also sort of is…

Before we discuss why, let’s define our other term. Gamification is the application of gaming concepts to traditionally non-gaming situations. The overarching objective of such an application is to encourage users to undertake activity or disclose information which they might otherwise not have done, based on their natural tendency to partake of gaming. More complex than simple trickery, it uses the concepts of engagement and success-motivation to capture your users’ interests, attaining buy-in and eventually a willingness to continue the relationship, be it through giving up personal information, filling in quizzes or even making monetary purchases to further their gaming involvement.

Gamification is hugely applicable to digital marketing in that it presents a way to engage users that may otherwise not have looked twice at your services. Forget your primary audience in this case – you already have those in the bag…gamification helps you capture people that traditional marketing simply can’t touch, purely by giving those users a reason to engage with you.

Ask them to look at 5 pages on your site, and no one will care; Ask them to find 5 hidden easter bunnies dotted around your website, maybe with the chance to win an iPod, and they’ll scour every page you have.

You’ve likely entered competitions yourself that use gamification techniques – you see them often at the end of a product review and the question will simply be regarding the specification or name of the product – all you have to do is read the product review to find the answer. Easy, right?

Would you have read the review otherwise? Probably not. That’s gamification at play, making you do something you would otherwise not have done simply because it presented the chance to win something.

Gamification also allows you to engage with a much wider audience than ever before – it’s highly likely you know someone personally whose primary activity on facebook is playing games. The biggest addicts, certainly on my friends list, tend to be the people who would otherwise be least likely to be on the internet at all, never mind on a social networking site. Alas, the opportunity to game is simply too much for us mere humans.

So where does Game Theory come into this? It brushes on the strategic site of your digital marketing purely in that, to be  very simplistic about things, your marketing plan is simply a strategy to defeat that of your opponents, which in this case are your users and their unwillingness to engage with you or divulge any marketable information. How you implement ideas, be they viral videos, online games or interactive functionality, is driven by how that will help you better your position against your user’s attempts to get what they want without giving anything in return. Gamification is simply the obvious application of this strategy.

Now here’s the news – whilst casual, online gaming is quite a new phenomenon, the use of Gamification and the study of Game Theory in digital marketing is nothing new – you’ve likely been doing it since you started any marketing activity at all, just purely under a different name. After all, marketing – and especially digital marketing – is all about creating an engaging, navigable and interactive enough experience to entice your users to visit and convert, and increasingly to share and convert. To do this through challenges and viral gaming has been a mainstay of digital marketing for over a decade.

In summary, gamification and Game Theory are probably two new terms to you, but the good news is you actually already know, understand and are likely utilising the concepts behind them.