A game is simply a structured type of competitive play, usually undertaken just for fun or entertainment, and at times used as an educational tool as well. Games are quite different from work, that is normally undertaken for remuneration, and also from fine art, that is usually more or less an expression of personal or artistic elements. In other words, games involve an element of skill in their play. The object of the game is to beat the computer or another player in a particular game, by using logic and strategy. The object is generally to solve the given problem or to achieve a mission.
The science of gamification has developed a lot over the last few years. Nowadays, it is used to analyze many different facets of organizations, including entertainment and sport, with the aim of finding better ways to engage people in organizations, better understand customers, design better products, improve communication, provide better customer service, etc. Gamification has been applied to a wide range of areas, from the field of education to retail, marketing, healthcare, business management, etc. However, it has proved to be a powerful tool not only in the field of gaming, but in business as well.
The first person shooter ( FPS ) video game was a pure strategy game. It involved shooting enemies without any real aim or strategy, except that one should shoot as many enemies as possible within the time given. It was an immediate success, being one of the most popular games at that time. Later on, with the help of complex technologies and the introduction of user friendly software, it became a pure strategy game with sophisticated artificial intelligence. This made the game more interesting, as it started to take the player into the battlefield and presented them with various challenges such as ambushing enemy soldiers, making successful attacks, surviving attacks, protecting bases and so on.
With the help of gamification, a different form of interaction was introduced between the designers and the gamers. They were able to increase the desire of players for the game through different means, such as use of technology that allowed the players to interact with their own characters, using the game mechanics to create challenging scenarios and to increase the difficulty of the game. They could, for instance, increase the difficulty of killing a particular character, by making it more difficult to injure or kill the character. They could also increase the potential number of winning conditions, by making it more difficult to achieve the objective within a set time period. This was known as the systems in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a measurable outcome.
A good example of this concept is present in popular massively multiplayer online role playing games such as World of Warcraft. In these games the players are separated into two teams, each team attempting to destroy the other team’s base by making the most number of kills. The game outcomes are determined by a set of game rules, which state that one team has to completely eliminate the other team before a new team can take their place. Each player on each team is given a limited number of lives, depending on game mechanics, meaning that there is only a single way to win. And because all the action takes place in the virtual world, rather than in real life, it is considerably easier to identify the most efficient strategies, eliminating the guessing involved in cases where a particular strategy isn’t obvious to the players. This is why many people call it a two-person game theory, even though technically a team of two people can play.
The two-person game theory has also been applied to the design of video games. Gamification has led to the development of games which are more successful at attracting players and have more engaging qualities than their simpler inspirations, ones that involve action in the real world. In the case of role playing games, this means creating games which require players to make a significant amount of effort, often with the goal of achieving a higher level of success in the game than they would be able to achieve within a single day in the real world. However, it is the design of these games which has led to many recognising their potential as a tool for teaching people important skills. Video game design education has produced games which teach crucial life skills such as self control and decision making, as well as much more abstract ones, including math and language skills.