Abstract
Significant developments in digital marketing activities and practices have intensified the practices of businesses in this direction. They have turned to different ways to retain their customers and increase their loyalty and to motivate their employees and to strengthen their performance. One of these ways is “gamification.” Gamification is used in many sectors from informatics to retail, from production to finance, from automotive to insurance, from medicine to health sector. The fact that the COVID-19 pandemic, which deeply affected the health sector, increased the sensitivity of individuals to monitor their health, also affected the development of mobile health applications. In this respect, the use of gamified content in mobile health applications has an important place for both patients and healthcare providers. With gamification, health services can be offered to the user in a mobile environment.
TopGamification And The Health Sector
Game Notion
Games are rule-based practices that have processes, aim to have fun, socialize and learn, have results such as gains and losses, and also have goals. there are some common features in the games (Ertemel, 2017: 136):
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A common end goal
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Explicit rules
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Instant feedback
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Voluntary attendance
The four common features in the games have also come to the fore as the basic common features of the fiction gamified in the physical and virtual worlds. Considering what the games cover, a game includes; system, player, competition, rules, interaction, and feedback (Ertemel, 2017: 135):
System: It is the environment where the players in the game know what they can do and their limits.
Player: The person who interacts with the game elements and other people in the system.
Competition: It is the struggle for supremacy and leadership among the players.
Rules: The strict element in the system for fair and clear results on behalf of the players.
Interaction: It is the communication where the players are for chat, competition, and support.
Feedback: The stimuli that players receive for error, interaction, or movement.
Outputs: The tangible result of the player's progress, what they did in-game.
Emotional Motivation: It is the direction of the player's emotions with fiction.
John Huzinga, who made the definitions of “player human, game” with Homo Ludens, listed the basic features of the game as follows (Huizinga, 2013: 24).
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The situations may change in the games, but they should be played freely.
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Games are not real life, they are for fun.
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Games have certain time and place limits.
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The games have their own unique layouts.
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The game has elements of tension and excitement.
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Games cannot be played by force, it is essential to play games voluntarily.
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Games are reproducible as they can carry out the cultural transfer.
Game designer David Parlett has divided games into two classes. It has been evaluated as informal games that develop improvised, played without direction, and formal games that are played for a purpose within the rules, with a winner and a loser. Before the players start the game; they accept the winning or losing situation, scoring, the progress of the game, and the penalties for cheating, that is, the rules of the game (Tekinbas and Zimmerman, 2003: 73).
Figure 1.
Comparison of game and play concepts
The word “game” is used in many languages and has the same derivation as the word “play.” For example, in French, “jouer” means to play, “jeu” means game, and in Spanish, “jugar” means to play and “juego” means game. However, in English, as seen in Figure 2, the word “play” is used for play, and the word “game” is used for the game. Because the words “play” and “game” are different from each other. Play is an activity that does not have rules, is played freely, and is somewhat enjoyable. A game, on the other hand, is a competitive entertainment with rules focused on a certain purpose. Games and activities take place in competition or contention with clear rules that have goals and consequences for the participants, compared to play and toys.
Figure 2.
Key differences between game and game-like approaches
Key Terms in this Chapter
D6 Design Framework: Created by Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter to improve gamification content. The model, each step of which begins with the letter D, combines game theory and motivation in six steps in the gamification system. These steps comprise: 1. Defining business objectives for the gamification project that will be undertaken, 2. Delineating the target behaviors that one hopes to encourage or discourage in players, 3. Describing the intended players, 4. Devising appropriate short-term engagement loops and long-term progression loops, 5. Being sure not to forget the fun, 6. Deploying the appropriate tools.
Gabe Zicherman: The concept of motivation-based gamification, which stands for status, access, power and stuff is the owner of the SAPS reward theory. Status: It’s the position of the user compared to other users in the application, supporting intrinsic motivation. Access: It’s the ownership of systems that are closed to use by accessing components that aren’t available to other users with privilege. Power: In the process, it’s giving users some power over other users in the system and owning the system. Stuff: To give players tangible rewards. It can be used by creating an extrinsic motivation effect to bring people outside the process into the system.
Al Marshedi: He's the owner of “The Sustainable Gamification Model” which reveals that to create an effective and sustainable effect in gamification, first of all, the user's goals, skills and needs for the relationship must be defined. It's stated that as users reach their goals and gain expertise in line with their goals, the interest in gamification applications will gain continuity and users who progress in line with meaningful goals can continue to develop within the system and eventually become experts.
Gamification in Health: Gamification’s primarily utilized in health and wellness applications dealing with disease prevention, self-management, medication adherence. The core of healthcare gamification’s very patient-centric as it aims to improve patient engagement by making their experience more personalized.
Gamification Elements: The dynamics are the design solution of the environment that enables the internalization of the content, the mechanics contain the emotional elements by making the user interact more and the components which are the design objects on the front that interact with the environment as three groups are gathered by Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter.
Yu-Kai Chou: He's the experienced designer who developed the “Octalysis” framework, which is mostly used in gamification. According to him, successful gamification starts with the basic impulses of the user, not the game elements. These basic impulses motivate the user in games or non-game areas. In the center of his octagon model, there're eight basic impulses called epic meaning & calling, development & accomplishment, social influence & relatedness, empowerment of creativity & feedback, ownership & possession, scarcity & impatience, unpredictability & curiosity, and loss & avoidance.
Fogg Behavior Theory: It was created by B.J. Fogg to understand how behavior works in gamified content. It’s argued that the triad of motivation, ability and prompt will must occur simultaneously for the behavior to be performed. If the behavior doesn’t occur, at least one of the three elements is considered to be missing.
Hook Model: It was developed by Nir Eyal to ensure that the user's constantly active in gamified content and to ensure habit formation in the user by mentioning the importance of increasing their interaction. Within the model, the process's divided into 4 stages trigger, action, variable reward, and investment.
Flow Theory: It's the theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which is explained as a situation of voluntary effort for a difficult and valuable task. Flow allows for full focused attention. The user's knowledge, skills, and abilities to varying the task from easy to difficult is critical.