Gamification is actually as old of a concept as games themselves or to be more precise play. We humans like most mammals and some other animals use play as part of our growing up process. It is an ingrained behavior that is found in all humans. This behavior is one of our most advanced learning mechanisms that drives us to explore the world and test out new things. Kids all over the world use play to experiment with the world around them and if you remember your childhood you will probably also remember coming up with all kinds of little games and stories by yourself. Gamification is a new buzz word that relates to our age old instinct to come up with stories and rules to contextualize our world around us and engage with our surroundings in creative ways, but this definition is not what most people are thinking about when referring to gamification. Mostly people refer to gamification simply as the act of adding game elements to something that was originally not a game. As the nature of language manipulates and changes definitions there are multiple definitions to gamification. My favorite one and the one that this website mostly builds upon is from Yu-Kai Chou. He is the author of the Gamification Book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards and inventor of the gamification framework Octalysis;  “Gamification is the craft of deriving all the fun and engaging elements found in games and applying them to real-world or productive activities. This process is what I call “Human-Focused Design,” as opposed to “Function-Focused Design.” It’s a design process that optimizes for human motivation in a system, as opposed to pure efficiency.” (Chou, 2019) Chou’s point about “Human-Focused Design” This definition really focuses on seeing gamification as a way to improve the use of tools, rules, technology and much more to compliment our human abilities. 

During my research on the essentials of a game I came to the conclusion that every game has three mandatory componants. The Goal sets the stage, where is the beginning and what is the end. Tracking is responsible for proving that you have accomplished the goal and the Rewards are the motivating factors for accomplishing that goal.