Gamification of This Site!

Gamification of an application or website is the process of adding one or more game-like devices to the activity. In this case, the activity is using this website! This website is run on WordPress, and if you have ever worked with WordPress before, you may know that they offer every kind of plug-in that is possible to create. In this entry, I’m going to try to gamify this site using a popular Gamification plug-in, called GamiPress (No sponsorship or affiliation.)

The plug-in out of the box is pretty bare bones but it adds hooks and db entries that other plug-ins use to build some of the most important functionality. The main plug-in is free, but quite a few of the add-on plugins are not, and some of them can be quite expensive.

The reason you would want to gamify a WordPress site can vary as much as the actual sites can vary on WordPress. You can build any type of site on WordPress, and so many of the types of sites could use gamification.

Examples

Library

Let’s say you were building a website that was designed for book lending. Maybe you are a digital book library. You could gamify that site to promote reading by your users. Some gamification goals might be:

• Increase the number of books read
• Increase the number of book details viewed

In order to increase the book detail pages viewed, which you may presume would lead to more people downloading books, you could directly do so, say by creating a point system. Let’s call the points pulp. And say you can gain 20 pulps by viewing the book’s detail pages. Simply having points will increase the desire for some people to view book covers, but let’s make it even more desirable, to really get some increased views.

Let’s say the normal lending period is currently 10 days. You might decrease the normal lending period (we are not trying to increase the costs of lending or the wait times) to 8 days. But you can offer the users 2 extra days of lending for 60 pulps. This way, they can get the books longer, if they browse the book stacks.

This is a hypothetical scenario, and with any game-making, there can be benefits and issues that can arise, both expected and unforeseen. It’s possible users would be upset if they suddenly had 8 instead of 10 days, so you might grandfather users in, or give existing users a boatload of points when the transition happens.

Game Publisher

Let’s say your website is actually a game company, and you normally don’t see a ton of views on your pages, since you publish mostly through, say, Steam. To increase your user’s interest in your site, you could gamify the pages. One scenario might be:

• Increase the number of views of upcoming game pages on the site.

In order to do this, you might create a point system, so that each time a logged-in user loads a coming soon game page, they can get some number of points, each day. So they can simply return to your site and get more points. If they leave comments, like the page, or engage with the site in any way, they might get more points.

These points could be used for in-game loot, in any of the game publisher’s games. They could set up a loot store on the site, and make it so that you can only unlock certain loot in the game with the web points system.

Gamification Begins!

Points

To begin with, you have to name your currency. You can have several currencies if you like. I thought about what this site is about, and thought about some interesting currencies, some specific and some generic.

• Gems
• Sparks
• Games
• Moves

In general, any would be fine, but the main point is that you have to have a currency created in order to begin gamifying the site. In the end, I choose Sparks.

Ranks

Next, you can think about ranks, this is optional, but fun. As you earn points, you may move up the ranks.

I found a graphic that has Rank images on it, that seemed might be related to sparks, or maybe Stars would be more appropriate.

The next step is to determine what a user needs to move up the ranks, and if you want something to occur when they move up. In my case, I created 3 ranks, Player, Gamer, and Game Dev. There can always be more ranks if I find the need, but for this project, it was mostly for fun, and I’m sure 3 is enough.

Adding the Ability to Earn Points

In order for this system to be active, we need ways for users of the site to unlock points. I decided to add points for the following:

• Sending feedback to me (10 points)
• Commenting on a post (20 points)
• Reading a post (10 points)

I set the ranks to 100 points each, so after reading 10 posts you would move up a rank, 20 points two rank. Commenting would get you to move up much faster than reading the entire site.

Conclusion

Normally this site does not allow users to register or log in, and having points means I need to enable that. So after I created the gamification system, I decided I needed to put it off for a bit, as I need to first enable Social Login to the site, so that it’s not so pointful to create an account (and remember your password!)

I will also need to change the comment system to use the logged-in users (the current comments do not require you to log in to this site.) It’s a big change and will need some time before it goes live.

I’m not sure this is the end! I think this is just the beginning of adding a gamification system to the site. Let’s see where this goes!

I want to thank, someone who I do not know, Upklayk! For all the images used in this post.