Build Gamified Websites with PHP and jQuery: Using gaming principles to make learning more engaging, motivating, and interactive is a growing trend in web development. It's called gamification, and this book is the complete introduction to its theory and practice.

Before we can go too far down the road on any journey, we first need to be clear about where we are trying to go. This is where business objectives come into the picture. Although games are about fun, and gamification is about generating positive emotion without losing sight of the business objectives, gamification is a serious business.

Organizations spend millions of dollars every year on information technology. Consistent and steady investment in information technology is expected to bring a return on that investment in the way of improved business process flow. It's meant to help the organization run smoother and easier.

Gamification is all about "improving" business processes. Organizations try to improve the process itself, wherever possible, whereas technology only facilitates the process. Therefore, gamification efforts will be scrutinized under a similar microscope and the success metrics that information technology efforts will. The fact that customers, employees...

Now that we are clear about what we are trying to accomplish with our system, we will focus on the actions we are hoping to incentivize: our target behaviors.

One of the big questions around gamification efforts is can it really cause behavioral change. Will employees, customers, and stakeholders simply go back to doing things the way they are used to once the game is over? Will they figure out a way to "cheat" the system?

The only way to meet long-term organizational objectives in a systematic way is for the application to not only cause change for the moment, but lasting change over time. Many gamification applications fail in long-term behavior change, and here's why.

Psychologists have studied the behavior change life cycle at length. Studies show that people go through five distinct phases when changing a behavior. Each phase presents a different set of challenges.

The five phases of the behavioral life cycle are as follows:

Although the last few sections have been about the serious side of things, such as objectives and target behaviors, we still have gamification as the focal point. Hence, from this point on we will refer to our users as players. We must keep in mind that although we have defined the actions that we want our players to take, the strategies to motivate them to take that action vary from player to player. Gamification is definitely not a one-size-fits-all process. We will need to look at each of our target behaviors from the perspective of our players. We must take their motivations into consideration, unless our mechanics are pretty much trial and error. We will need an approach that's a little more structured.

According to Bartle's Player Motivations theory, players of any game system fall into one of the following four categories:

Gamified systems, like other systems, are simply a series of actions. The player acts on the system and the system responds. We refer to how the user interacts with the system as activity loops. We will talk about two types of activity loops, engagement loops and progression loops, to describe our player interactions.

Engagement loops describe how a player engages with the system. They outline what a player does and how the system responds. Activity will be different for players depending on their motivations, so we must also take into consideration why the player is taking the action he is taking.

A progression loop describes how the player engages with the system as a whole. It outlines how he/she might progress through the game itself. Whereas engagement loops discuss what the player does on a detailed level, progression loops outline the movement of the player through the system.

For example, when a person drives a car, he/she is interacting with the car almost constantly...

After we have done the work of identifying our objectives, defining target behaviors, scoping our players, and laying out the activities of our system, we can finally think about the area of the system where many novice game designers start: the fun. Other gamification practitioners will avoid, or at least disguise, the fun aspect of the gamification design process. It is important that we don't over or under emphasize the fun in the process. For example, chefs prepare an entire meal with spices, but they don't add all spices together. They use the spices in a balanced amount in their cooking to bring flavor to their dishes. Think of fun as an array of spices that we can apply to our activity loops.

Marc Leblanc has categorized fun into eight distinct categories. We will attempt to sprinkle just enough of each, where appropriate, to accomplish the desired amount of fun. Keep in mind that what one player will experience as fun will not be the same for another. One size definitely does...

We are finally at the stage from where we can begin implementation. At this point, we can look at the various game elements (tools) to implement our gamified system. If we have followed the framework upto this point, the mechanics and elements should become apparent. We are not simply adding leaderboards or a point system for the sake of it. We can tie all of the tools we use back to our previous work. This will result in a Gamification Design Matrix for our application. But before we go there, let's stop and take a look at some tools we have at our disposal.

There are a myriad of tools, mechanics, and strategies at our disposal. New ones are being designed everyday. Here are a few of the most common mechanics that we will encounter when designing our gamified system:

First time players will need to create an account initially.

This is the mock-up of our signup page.

Main Player Screen

This captures the main elements of our system when a player is fully engaged with the system.

Main Player Post Response Screen

We have outlined the key functionality of our gamified system via mock-ups. Mock-ups are a means of visually communicating to our team what we are building and why we are building it. Visual mock-ups also give us an opportunity to uncover issues in our design early in the process.

Most gamified applications will fail due to a poorly designed system. Therefore, we have introduced a Gamification Design Framework to guide our development process. We know that our chances of developing a successful system increase tremendously if we: