Gamification: figure out the game

As part of our entrepreneurial course, Scott and I discussed many business models, from a payed version to a freemium one. We thought the most successful one would be the free version for users, but going with this option implied that our users wouldn’t have the motivation of making money out of sharing parking. Our minds jumped to the solution: Gamification. Wikipedia defines gamification as the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.

We thought, if we make sharing fun enough, we could get people to use beep beep without involving money!

So we started thinking about ideas for gamification: we give people limited “lives” which they can spend to search for parking. People gain lives by sharing parking spots and information about them. If someone ever runs out of lives and needs to search for parking spots, then we can give them a few in exchange for other information regarding parking. This earn and spend cycle could bring equilibrium to the game.

But was this fun enough? Were we being realistic? Time to ask an expert.

We got in touch with our Operations Management professor, Ian Mc Carthy. He is Professor and Associate Dean Graduate Programs at the Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, an active twitter and blogger and Everton fan. You can read here an article published by the Huffington Post where he was interviewed regarding the subject.

The good news we got we talking to him was that Ian actually agreed with us, gamification was the way to go. He also reminded us to keep it simple, convenient, valuable and reliable.

But he gave us new thing to worry about: How will you confirm that the information being submitted is valid? How will you address time delay? Are your users time sensible? What about pedestrians, can they play too?

He also mentioned reciprocity: the more people play, the more advantages or priority they should have as a way of being awarded for their loyalty to the app. We could do this by rating users and giving them badges to differentiate them from other users.

After that, he reminded us to look into our new source of revenue, which would be the data we would get from our users. How valuable is it? What can be done with it?

As a final word of advice, he told us: figure out the game.

Even though we feel Ian left us with more questions than answers, he did encourage us in the right direction. Some issues we found the solution for, others we are still thinking about. We are still looking for ways to make beep beep more attractive to users. All ideas are welcome :)