It’s been almost a year since we started a European Union project called “Gamification for Hard to reach Adults”, included in the Horizon 2020 initiative, and we’ve just come back from Rome incredibly happy about the project’s evolution. Happy and proud of being part of a project with such a powerful social aim: to help people who have been unemployed for a long period of time within the European Union to become entrepreneurs, using gamification techniques to involve them in the challenge, increase their self-esteem and give them tools to successfully achieve it.
From our point of view, gamification is a very serious and rigorous discipline, which designs mechanics and dynamics that use general game elements in order to motivate people to action. And, this way of understanding it, so close to psychology, makes it not easy at all to be applied.
Sometimes, it creates scepticism. Some people don’t truly understand it and believe it’s something “not rigorous and not serious at all”. Our mission is to persist and demonstrate, with success cases and effective implementations, that Gamification is a consultative approach based on investigations that prove that memorable, fun and pleasurable experiences are more likely to succeed in content transference and a higher content retention. Therefore, those experiences have a higher potential to promote changes among user’s behaviours.
And, to let the truth be told, once we overcome the basic and classic level of badges, points, and leaderboards -aka PBL-, Gamification becomes a powerful transformation tool with an extensive potential, since it connects with our deepest motivations and pleasures.
Working together with our European partners from Turkey, Finland, Italy, France, Romania, United Kingdom…. we created a high-performance team of social transformation specialists and gamification experts, working together to help long-term unemployed people in order to inspire their professional lives again and help them build their own solutions.
The meeting in Rome, as you can see from the details in the following link, was a huge success and raises the solution performance level to where the highly self-demanding team sets the limits.
Next step: A one-week gamified event for trainers and long-term unemployed audiences, with more than 50 people, in Sabadell, Spain.
