Game Studies: Gamification & the blockchain (Chapter 2: talking about the target group and a introduction to the different types of gamification)

(fotocredit: my parents playing)

For today we are going to talk about the target groups for games & gamification and a big shift that I see happening here. So lets call this subchapter: 

Who is playing?

Not a long time ago - especially talking about digital games and digital gamification approaches gaming was "a nerd thing". The age group maybe 20-35 and gaming was nothing you would write in our official CV. But time is changing (as we know) and the first and now even second and maybe third generation of people that grew up with digital games are in leading position spread all over different occupation groups. That means: Gaming is a good part in your hobbies section of the CV and further more companies start to put more and more gamification and play-like procedures into their company-processes. 

But there is one more thing and that is the digital native 2.0. (or super digital natives, or generation glass) generation. There are many words for those who actually grow up with digital devices like tablet-pcs or smartphones. This is the generation that learns how to click on icons and is doing parallel operations without even knowing the alphabet. Furthermore this means that operating a digital device, playing games and doing creative stuff in things like art-apps comes even before going to school, before learning figures and characters. 

(fotocredit: my godchild some years ago. iphone 3 vs wood-toy - i put a crazy filter on, so that it is just an illustration)

So to sum up: 

Todays kids start to play (digital) games in a very young age. And that generation that started to play around on the Atari 2600 e.g. in the age of 38 like my father is now 70 +. We have now a very wide range of people that played digital games and that are open minded for gamification processes in the outside-gaming world. Finally we have two big "new" target groups for app developers and publishers: Pre-Schoolers and Grandparents. 

In figures:

• 69 % heads of the household play digital games
• 75 % youngsters and teenagers play games
• 40 % are women … the gender gap gets smaller
• every fourth player is older than 50
• average age is 35, activly playing for 12 years

(source: Entertainment Software Association; JIM Studie)

Reasons why we love to play

And of course there are many reasons why we love to play. About the immersion part - I guess - I have to talk in one of the next postings a bit more in detail. 

1. Immersion (Ijsselsteijn, 2000)
2. Search for identification (Hartmann & Schramm, 2005, Gee 2008)
3. Projection to and from Avatar, Search for Role-Models
4. Experience of autonomy and competence (Ryan, Rigby & Przybylski, 2010)
5. Open gaming worlds, Success, Emotional freedom(Jansz, 2005)
6. Self-efficacy (Klimmt, 2004)
7. Feedback from the gaming environment: action and reaction, Social contacts (Yee, 2007)
8. Competition (Vorderer et al., 2003)
9. Cooperation (Prensky, 2010)

To find the original papers I suggest plattforms like google scholar.

So let us now come back to gamification and give me the chance to introduce "my" categories of gamification. Each categorie will be a seperate posting. So the next postings will be about: 

• In-Game Gamification (Gamification mechanics withing digital game environments)
• Serious Games (following the classic gamification definition I decided to put that actually as gamification categorie, but about that we can discuss the whole night :) )
• the very classic gamification (like sports apps with points and badges)
• and shamification (motivation through 'Bad words')

After that 4 postings we talk about immersion a bit more as that is key for a successful gamification approach and after that I like to talk about Exploitationware and Ludefaction. The dark side of gamification. So you know what you are up to - and you can decide if you like to follow me :). 

As I already mentioned in my last posting. Pls tell me what you like to hear more. I do gamification now for more than a decade so feel free to ask anything here in the comment section. 

Good night from Austria/Vienna.