Gamification Of Writing Sites And How They May Influence The Way You Write

Gamification is the term used as its a form of behavior modification and a means to influence you with making certain decisions. But don't panic, it is not a bad thing, its a way for an individual, group, or a company to ask you to do certain tasks, then become rewarded for these tasks when you complete them.

This process has been running in games both board, card and electronic since the beginning of these games. When you think about games, you know that when certain actions are completed, you are rewarded by earning points, or XP (a term for gaining experience, usually in points) or other means for winning, or gaining a completed task.

As tasks are completed and beginning levels are reached through to medium levels and higher, usually once more tasks are completed, more complex challenges are issued to you as an offer to achieve. Usually the higher the risk of the task, the more beneficial the payoff.

Depending on the writing site/s you use, you may or may not notice as you write and create content you may also be earning something like 'badges' for your progress. You may additionally be earnign rewards for activity elsewhere on that site. These badges may be rewards for items like;

• Completing 10 articles
• Issuing ten questions
• Providing ten answers
• Posting ten forum posts
• Leaderboard of the most, the highest, the best achieved for a category
• Challenges completed

There are many rewards offered and these may or may not influence the way you write. Some of these content creation sites may also offer certain special rewards that only become available once you have achieved a certain task, group of tasks or certain levels of attainment. These special rewards are only offered once unlocked and will not be available to site members until they themselves achieve it.

You may be influenced to just write one more article for that 100 article badge, or one more forum post to reach 1,000 posts, or one more answer to get our 500 Answer badge.

The reason why we are happy to be influenced in this manner is we are competitive by nature and we love being tasked with achieving certain behaviors and being rewarded for it. Our curious nature also assists us with finding out what happens when we' just get to that next level and find out what is needed to unlock the next one'

So as you may or may not realize, we love these kinds of risks and rewards when we play our card, board and computer games. But we may not also realize that companies are using these concepts to influence our behavior by gaming the way we do tasks with offering rewards for tasks completed. It is not to different from someone playing a game and unlocking an achievement than it is when spending 30 dollars in a store knowing that 30 dollars earns us a 5% discount for when we purchase fuel (as it does in Australia and New Zealand) for our cars.

If you look at the way you shop and see what vouchers you redeem, what 'hot offers' and coupons you have, you are experiencing a 'gamification' by companies to influence you the way you spend your money by offering rewards or discounts - as the game.

Conversly, writing and content creation sites influence us with when and how often we write to reward us with badges, honors and special privileges and an increase in potential income earnings as well.

Welcome to the Gamification Of Life!