I love team buildings. And I’m pretty sure most of you love them too. The main reason I love it are those little games we usually play at such events. There is always some kind of informal competition, and you can feel it even on a simple rafting adventure. Some crews will not finish the ride while those who will are going to praise themselves.

All those little games played at team-building events are usually just a cover for learning something new that management decided to implement in your company. And without a game, presenting those changes would be boring.

Can games really improve learning?

Scientific researches like this one show that learning through playing games is about 23% more effective than traditional techniques. And not only that. Other research shows that games are a great motivator, the driving force for most people. And this way of learning proved to be much more efficient than pure fact reading.

So, one could conclude - if you have a dull and tedious task ahead, gamify it and the results will follow.

Give me some success stories?

The US Army has created a combat simulation game for internal use but is was eventually published. The result was a big surge of new applicants joining the US army in following years. In fact, it proved to be the most successful way of recruiting new soldiers.

Another example of gamification is Duo Lingo. This language learning mobile app is structured in levels and achievements that students accomplish, share on social media and thus make it more competitive. Long streaks of learning the language are additionally rewarded in the app and this raises the competitiveness even more.

How it relates to developers?

As a developer you often get a task to implement certain functionality in some new technology you never worked before. So, you start researching and finally end up on documentation site. No matter how well structured and nicely written documentation is it will become tedious and boring just to read paragraph after paragraph. What if learning new technology could be done though game? Would it be more effective? I'm pretty sure keeping focus would be much easier. Simple little game can do miracle. But, let's see some examples.

Gamification at Infobip

Developers are no exception. Just like everyone else developers love games. Maybe even a little more. So, offering some kind of game built around your service will for sure attract more developers to try it. One could think of developing a game as an unnecessary expense, and rarely pays off. But what you get in return can exceed all your costs and expectations. One of the first things you will get is feedback.
Last year we at Infobip developed a simple game around our SMS API. The game was mainly targeting the internal developers at our own tech event. Our main goal was getting some feedback on our documentation and overall developer experience.

It was a simple 2D adventure-like game in which the players had to move their hero around the map and solve some challenges. To move the hero and solve the challenges (e.g. fix the broken bridge to continue he adventure) players had to send SMS messages to a specific number with the instructions in the message text. And to send those messages players had to find the solution in the online documentation.

In general, the reception was very good. More than 30% of all attendees at the event registered (yes, they had to put some effort and register separately) and half of those registered tried to play. Some of them gave up because of various reasons and did not finish the game. But those who completed the game were thrilled by the entire idea. The feedback we got has helped us identify some of the weaknesses in our documentation. We found some features that were not working as expected or were too confusing for most of the players who saw the documentation for the first time.

We also collected some feedback from those who did not finish the game. The main reason was a lack of time, but according to their feedback, they really like the idea. Since playing this game required some coding and a lot of documentation reading, we were very satisfied with the overall number of developers who actively participated. And most of those who gave feedback expressed their willingness to participate in a similar game with some other API in the future.

What can you learn from this?

A lot, actually.
You will get a lot of testers for your service if you create a game that utilizes the product or service. Based on the feedback, you can also plan the new functionalities or remove some of the existing ones. Also, feedback will give you an insight into your documentation and that can help you plan and prioritise the improvements.

So, simple things like unlocking the achievements and getting nice badges can boost the popularity of your service. Of course, this may depend a little bit on integration with social media. People engaged in social media care about their achievements. It is more likely that they will accept some challenges given by their friends.

If a game is well structured and uses all the crucial functionalities of your service, it will be much easier to grasp all the complex details written in documentation. What is more important, it will give some context to the functionalities of your service.

Developers' feedback is of high value

Developers who will play your game and get familiarized with your service through it will most probably not be in a position to directly decide if that company will become your next client, but they can help and influence the decision process. Recent research on software purchasing trends, conducted by Bessemer Venture Partners and Auth0, revealed that 87% of organisations value or highly value the product feedback provided by developers.

If a simple game can persuade someone to join the army, then following the same road to persuade someone to buy your service could be well worth a try.