Recently I have been thinking about how we can improve engagement on our documentation platforms. It is not that our numbers are bad in and of themselves, but of course Confluence does ), and we’re competitive enough to want to have the highest engagement rates.
It was against this background that I began to look more into gamification.
I find that it is it both an interesting and promising motivational tool, but I also recognize how ubiquitous it has become at this point and how frequently, sadly, it is misused and end up pushing users away rather than keeping them engaged.
But because I believe that the concept is fundamentally good but the implementation often bad, I still want to reflect a bit on how it can be useful for knowledge managers and what can be done to heighten the chances of succes of gamified solutions.
I believe this will be welcome to the extent that it can help knowledge managers close the gap that often exist on projects between the kind of documentation that the project wished it had and what is actually has. By
It is no secret that there is often a gap between the kind of documentation that projects would like to have and the documentation they do have.
Needless to say, knowledge systems and processes must be designed to fit the needs of the project or organization and so while I believe that some of the insights in whats follows are broadly applicable, there will also be some that are bound to be specific to the video game industry, particularly tripe-A games.1
Gamification defined
Gamification is the application of game elements, particularly game mechanics and experience design, outside of the realm of games as a means to motivate a group of people to engage in some activity.
We can distinguish between internal and external gamification initiatives
Preliminaries
In 2025 I don’t believe that any gamification initiative is likely to succeed unless it is preceded by some survey and analysis of would-be players sentiments towards the initiative.
Gamification has come to be seen as something of a panacea and its overrearch is evident to just about anyone who has a smartphone and an internet connection. For this reason it is important that you gauge the level of badge fatigue of your intended players before you make a bad situation worse and end up investing in a solution that´s a non-starter.1
Ensure alignment between sponsor and player goals
One, if not the, most important thing for any gamification initaitive to be succesful is arguably to ensure that there alignment between the
This is a point that Brian Burke is at great pains to make when diagnosing early attempts at gamification which exactly fell through on this point:
Gamification is a great approach for guiding people to change behaviors so they can become more effective, but it is not a great approach for getting people to make more widgets. If the problem is sheer production, then an incentive program with tangible rewards is probably the right answer. For example, sales organizations often use contests with prizes, like a trip to an exotic locale, for the top sales performers. This kind of incentive program can be effective in motivating the top performers to work a little harder. But gamification is not about motivating people to achieve the company’s goals, it’s about motivating people to achieve their own goals. Very few employees have a goal of working harder, but many employees are motivated to work better. And that’s where gamification can be applied.
The question that emerges is how you can ensure that the goals of the players and the organization align?
As I see it this boils down to the communications task of showing the value of
Tasks and Gamification Opportunities
Below is a table with common knowledge management tasks and suggested gamification mechanisms for each:
| Task | Gamification Mechanism | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Content Management | ||
| Creation | - Point per document - Extra points for creating documents that score highly on some objective quality metric |
Users are creators |
| Maintenance | - Points for check if a document is up to date | This will frequently be part of a LCM framework together with e.g reviews |
| Review | Points for reviewing | Done by page owner |
| Archive | Points for archival marking | |
| Organization | ||
| Improve searchability | ||
| Adjust prefix | Points for adding missing prefix | |
| Adjust tags | Points for adding | Most automatic, some manual tagging needed |
| Adjust labels | Points for adding | Most automatic, semantic labeling manual |
| Engagement | ||
| Content Reviews | Done by SME/team lead | |
| Content Consumption | Points for reading | Time must match average reading duration |
The points can be used to either give team members a badge for their contributions or to rank them on a leaderboard or, even better, both. Newsletters can be used to highlight exceptional performance with respect to some of the tasks or for contributions in general.