Gamification exploration by building a browser based JavaScript game

I have been exploring gamification and how it might be used to align website users with business goals. Gamification normally materializes in subtle User Interface changes to increase user engagement. However, I wanted to dig a little deeper and actually have a look at it at a lower level. This led me to actually putting together a browser based JavaScript game.

Without doing anything, a game will automatically align with some business goals… e.g. brand building and community engagement. Perhaps future iterations will have more direct and physical engagement techniques like… score over 10,000 and get a free t-shirt.

If nothing else I hope it might put a smile on your face today or even occupy your kids for a few minutes.

What’s under the hood.

This little 2d game is built using the javascript library phaser.io. This library handles all the physics-related elements and allows us to just focus on the game logic and graphics. It renders the game as a canvas DOM element which has decent browser compatibility.

To make the game mobile responsive, a npm module was added enabling the direction functionality which makes it usable on most mobile devices. The game still works best using the keyboard arrows on a computer but it becomes very difficult to fold a game in to a digital marketing strategy if you need to tell all your users to come back when they are back in the office and on their computer.

The future of this game and your thoughts on gamification

As you can see, this game doesn’t follow any particular logic and doesn’t track to the real world. Why is the duck chasing stars? I dunno… but it’s fun. If you have any thoughts on future iterations of the game then I am all ears. Or if you’d like to discuss how your business might use gamification to engage your users then don’t hesitate to reach out!