We all work hard to pay our bills, and have many weekly responsibilities for ourselves, our family, and our friends: house cleaning, grocery shopping, and taking our kids to school. However, many of
us can often feel these things are unrewarding and
even boring as part of our weekly routine.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your children told you that they would like to help you with household chores and then after dinner they would like to study math? How about turning weekly house cleaning to an enjoyable family activity? We can hear you saying ‘YES!’.

Now there is a fun, encouraging, and behaviour developing new approach that is changing our daily home and work lives. It is called ‘Gamification’. With gamification, you could transform long periods of hard, painful, and unrewarding work to something much more fun and enjoyable.

The term called ‘Gamification’ became popular in early 2010s, and since then it is shaping our work place, health, education and many other important aspects of our daily lives.

Changing habitual behaviours such as inactivity or commuting to school and work has proven difficult for traditional health initiatives. Gamification provides new opportunities to shift people towards a more active lifestyle by providing positive incentives and rewards players who get moving. In this sense, Gamification can be applied to almost any activity, and can help drive desired behaviors within the context of that activity. Today we know that with gamification, childhood obesity can be reduced and healthy family dynamics can be built. Children with special education show great improvements, overall student failure rate is lowered, and productivity at work is increased by making things simply ‘Fun’.

Gamification is a current method used to create a new pipeline of patient and clinical data, therefore realizing the importance of ‘fun’ tracking our progress and achieving better health outcomes by changing our behaviour is the goal.

Let’s have a look at couple of examples and see how Gamification improves the health of millions of adults and children`s lives:

mySugr is a friendly app for patients with diabetes to track their blood glucose throughout the day. The app does its best to make the task of diabetes logging less mundane and encourages patient engagement through the use of extensive gamification techniques, such as activities and rewards.

The app assigns points for everything patients do in the app. For example when users enter their blood sugar, they get couple of points; when they select what meal of the day it was, they get another point. With these fun elements patients manage their daily diabetes in more engaging ways to “score” as high as possible.

According to Ontario Canadian Diabetes Association, 30 per cent of children and youth in Ontario are overweight or obese. Numbers are not that much different in BC. First Nations and Métis children and youth have higher rates of type 2 diabetes compared to non-aboriginal children. In the quest to keep kids active, app called Zamzee is on a mission to help children and their families to make physical activity a fun part of daily life. Zamzee combines the fun of games and the science of motivation to boost kids’ physical activity levels.

In 2016 Pokemon Go took the world by storm. To date, it’s been downloaded more times than dating app Tinder, and has seen children and adults taking to the streets in droves to locate and catch virtual Pokémon. Gamers were willingly leaving their sofas to walk kilometres each day in search of their Pokémon prey. During this time, researchers and doctors acknowledged the physical and mental health benefits that the games was providing because participants were seeing exercise as more fun and less of a chore.

This app encourages smokers to quit smoking. The app uses medical elements such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to personalise the experience with challenges, messages and incentives. The creators say it changes the way quitters think about smoking and helps them to stay committed.

Super Better is a game to help with people with depression, weight loss, chronic fatigue syndrome, anxiety, chronic pain and other challenging life events. So far it has helped nearly half a million people so far achieve personal growth and tackle real-life challenges. It is free so once you sign up, you can choose a goal you want to work towards, and add “quests” to your account that you can complete to work your way there. The player chooses the specific Power-Ups, Quests, Bad Guys and Allies suitable for the issue at hand. The game
functions as a creative and entertaining gamified, self-help approach, and a way to adopt a gameful mindset during times that don’t feel pleasurable in any way.

Workplace wellness has seen the rapid ascent of computing technology for healthy behavioural changes and well-being in the last two decades. This includes a broad range of consumer applications and badges, starting from monitoring and managing one’s own health and well-being, to serious organizational games for healthy employees and organizational success.

Gamification in corporate culture means motivating employees to use knowledge management systems, whether it’s a spread sheet, a CMS platform or a whiteboard– to inspire productivity, teamwork, innovation and wellness. Gamification, within the context of corporate wellness, is a tool to make behavioral changes and improve overall employee health. When employee is hungry and reaches for an apple instead of a candy, or exercising during lunch break instead of checking social profiles, this means mastery, autonomy, and control which are the same motivations for a gamer.

It’s a well-known fact that putting resources into employee wellbeing is beneficial over the long haul. Managers want to monitor, support and reward their employees with their fitness achievements while lowering healthcare costs and decrease absenteeism.However Ross Smith, Director of Test at Skype gamification and Director of Engineering at Microsoft has one caveat for managers.

According to his findings, if the attendance to the game is voluntary, then it becomes more fun for the employees. Being able to determine what makes things fun to the employees, increases participation rates and creates transparency and high trust within the organization.
Researches have confirmed that well-designed games are enjoyable and engaging because playing them provides basic needs of satisfaction to its users. For companies;

• It enhances the overall employee engagement and retention.
• It promotes good-natured competition for employees to achieve wellness goals.
• It makes employees and managers to understand each other’s values and collaborative skills and helps managers to create successful teams.

For example; Ochsner Health System, a large Louisiana-based healthcare company with more than 10,000 benefits eligible employees has applied Gamification. 50% of the employees who have participated earned enough points to achieve Level 3 in the game and received a substantial health insurance premium discounts for the next year. The company also saw actual cost savings from this approach.

Seeing the benefits of Gamification urges insurance companies to embrace games because they could promote better lifestyle habits. In light of this, one of Canada`s Employee Assistance providers Morneau Shepell released a program called ‘Getting to Your Gold’. The program is specifically designed to help motivate behavioural changes while connecting co-workers and Olympic athletes through an engagement program.

The primary objective of Getting to Your Gold program is to maximize employee engagement for employees own health outcomes. In order to make it accessible to users, the program is hosted on an online portal that houses different Olympic spirit- hemed challenges, athlete videos, heath & wellness polls and expert advice. With this program employee engagement and total wellbeing are optimized through fun and informative Olympic spirited challenges.

• Physical activity
• Nutrition
• Rest/sleep
• Mental wellness

As quoted in Corporate Wellness Magazine, ‘Getting to Your Gold’ offers a two-way support model: Employees will cheer on their Olympic athlete, while the athlete will provide encouragement and ‘coaching’ for employees to reach their wellness goals.

Increasingly, we are turning to technology to support our health, and this is not likely to change any time soon. Gamification could be quite the game-changer. Universities, hospitals and insurance carriers are incorporating this new approach to help their patients and clients. In the past ‘games’ were viewed as a frivolous waste of time, but health tech is taking us far away from that image.

Many examples show how fun games can influence and sustain changes for healthy behavior. Serious video and app games will continue to be “promising venues that seek to entertain while attempting to elicit behavioral change.” Gamification for wellness is here, and seems like the future is now. Look at the success with apps like Fitbit, Jawbone, and Misfit. These tools and games provide education, motivation, and big community.