To effectively motivate gym customers or gym app users to continue exercising, many gym operators and developers create fun features to make exercising more enjoyable. However, the fun factor may not be enough to motivate customers to maintain their efforts. In practice, gamification is increasingly used for this purpose. Designed appropriately, gamification elements can help motivate and retain customers and help them achieve fitness goals.
What is gamification?
Gamification is a term from the field of human-machine interaction and has become a much-used expression in today's media landscape. It can be described as a process of playful thinking and a game mechanic to engage users and solve problems. In practice, this concept can often be found in fitness challenges, in which participants compete against each other in groups. The goal is, for example, to run more kilometres than the others, to burn more calories or to move more weight.
However, gamification concepts cannot only be applied to sporting activities. Examples include point systems, such as badges and achievements, and the use of levels and experience points to indicate progress. Although the term is still new, the concept has been found for several years in various loyalty programmes such as "frequent flyer points" or "loyalty points" in retail. These gamification programmes can lead to changes in users' behaviour - they use a service more frequently and intensively in order to achieve predefined goals and thus receive external rewards.
Motivation through gamification
Sport and fitness have always been trendy topics in the field of gamification, as people often find it difficult to motivate themselves here. Researchers distinguish between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivations are those that drive someone through the inner self. Here, the person acts because they find the activity meaningful, even if there is no guaranteed reward. Extrinsic motivations on the other hand, spur because the goal leads to external rewards, such as money, social status or achievement points. Many running apps try to motivate people: Intrinsic motivation here can be to stay active or to run faster. The extrinsic motivation can be - depending on the person - the points reward or participation in the community that surrounds them.
Examples of use for gamification
The concept of gamification includes different core elements that can be used for motivation.
Points are an absolute prerequisite for all gamified systems, even if these points are not always visible to users. They reveal how users interact with the system and help to make appropriate adjustments to the products and services offered over time. Points can correspond to concrete values, such as money or social status (e.g. premium gym membership), or can be counted as game points, such as experience or skill points. For example, points could be awarded for each visit to the gym, drink purchased or membership upgrade.
Levels (or stages) indicate progress. They illustrate to users how 'good' they are and where they are in the system. They do not have to be used as in video games, but without them there is no progress. As the level increases, the difficulty of the challenge should be increased to maintain motivation. Levels or stages can be based on points achieved or mapped through another variable (e.g. membership length). Reaching a level can be rewarded with certain rewards (e.g. free drinks, bringing a training partner for free) or discounts to create new incentives for retaining clients or attracting new clients.
Challenges and quests give users a sense of purpose for what they are doing in the activity. They make the activity more fun and rewarding, adding depth and meaning. For example, a challenge would be to go to the gym at least once a week for a year. A reward for this challenge could then be a special badge, discounts or vouchers from the gym. Internal rankings can also be kept for these challenges, which can be viewed in the studio. However, such challenges do not necessarily have to be completed alone, but can also be mastered in teams or as a whole studio, which increases social interaction. However, the content of such challenges must always be chosen carefully, as some challenges can possibly lead to unhealthy behaviour, such as excessive training with too short regeneration phases or too low a calorie intake in a diet challenge.
Rankings allow users to compare themselves with each other. There are two types of leaderboards: the incentive-less leaderboard, which is only partially displayed and users are placed in the middle of it, and the infinite leaderboard, which displays all users but can be divided into smaller separate leaderboards such as age groups, by gender or professionalism. Such rankings could, for example, be publicly displayed in the studio or shown in the studio's own app to present the results of the latest challenges (pull-up challenge, biggest body fat reduction, best times in a running event, etc.).
Badges have been used for a long time in other contexts, such as in the military or in sports. The use of badges is a powerful tool to encourage or motivate users to do something. Human behaviour has shown that we tend to collect things and want to be rewarded for actions. For example, badges could be awarded for reaching certain physical fitness or health milestones (e.g. body fat percentage and blood pressure in the normal range, a certain number of pull-ups, or breaking a certain time in a ten-kilometre run).
About the author
Prof. Dr. Marco Speicher
Prof. Dr. Marco Speicher is head of the Department of Computer Science at the DHfPG. In 2019, he completed his doctorate at Saarland University on the topic of "Measuring User Experience for Virtual Reality". From 2014 to 2019, he was a research assistant and doctoral student at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), where he worked in the Ubiquitous Media Technologies Lab (UMTL) and Innovative Retail Laboratory (IRL).
The article was first published on Fitness Management.
Sources
Koivisto, J. & Hamari, J. (2019). Gamification of physical activity: A systematic literature review of comparison studies. International GamiFIN Conference 2359, 106–117.
Leslie, E., McCrea, R., Cerin, E. & Stimson, R. (2007). Regional Variations in Walking for Different Purposes: The South East Queensland Quality of Life Study. Environment and Behavior, 39 (4), 557–577.
Zichermann, G. & Cunningham, C. (2011). Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps (1st ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media.
For a complete literature list, please contact marketing@dhfpg-bsa.de.