24 Highly Successful Gamification Examples in 2024

Updated: February 01, 2024

Gamification is becoming increasingly common for businesses and in the school environment these days.

This is because gamification really works, and it helps to make learning far more engaging and enjoyable. Gamification uses a variety of different strategies to deliver results, and you can easily make the most of these kinds of tools for your business or your classroom if you wish.

Gamification can work best when you use tools and apps that help to track the actions that your students and staff take. This can provide data that you can use to make the most of your gamification efforts and to develop new ideas for future gamification plans.

If you are ready to learn some more about highly successful gamification examples that you can use as a model for your own classroom or company, keep reading.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the application of game elements like point scoring, competition, awards, and rewards to help make learning and work processes more engaging and interesting.

This is a common tactic that helps to make online apps more interesting and to keep consumers using them, but it can be used for all kinds of other purposes as well. Gamification can deliver big results for a variety of different kinds of processes, and it can be applied to work and school with equal success.

While you might not want to use all of the gamification tools out there for your work or teaching needs, you can still select from the ones that make sense for your use. Gamification connects learning and work tasks with the reward center in the brain, making these processes more enjoyable and making them more rewarding to repeat.

What Are Some Examples of Gamification?

There are nearly endless examples of gamification being used throughout daily life, including points in mobile apps, leaderboards in video games, customer loyalty programs, competitions for team building, rewards in the workplace, and much more.

Gamification can take place in apps through the use of rewards that are earned for daily participation and through competition with other people using the app. You can also see gamification when apps or processes allow those who are engaged in them to compare their progress or stats to a leaderboard. There are many ways to use gamification in the workplace as well as the classroom to motivate better results from student and staff efforts.

1. Mobile Apps: Points for achieving different status levels.
2. Video Games: Storytelling, points, levels and leaderboards are common features of video games.
3. Customer Loyalty Programs: Turning shopping behavior into points and rewards is a common gamification mechanism.
4. Rewards in the Workplace: Providing additional opportunities to employees outside of core functions to connect with company culture and foster engagement.
5. Badges for Status: Providing badges to users for attaining different levels as they progress through a program is a frequently used gamification strategy.

Gamification Examples

These gamification examples can give you a roadmap to make it simple to add gamification to your classroom or your workplace. You do not need to use all of these different types of gamification to make the most of the benefits of the gamification strategy, which means that you can pick and choose among these options to fit your specific needs.

Examples of Gamification in Education

1. Rewards to Motivate Students

If you want your students to be motivated to try really hard when they are working on classroom assignments and more, you can reward them for daily engagement, studying, and more. Rewards can help students or staff to guide their own fate when they are engaging in study or ongoing education.

2. Badges to Encourage Frequent Classroom Involvement

If you want to give your students rewards for studying or for other activities related to their classes, but don't want to go too far on the rewards concept, badges can be a great tool. Consider digital or physical badges or you can easily use an app or an online teaching portal to award them. This is a very common tool that is used for apps that promote daily interaction as well as a committed investment over time.

3. Storytelling to Encourage Student Engagement

If you decide that your students need the motivation to feel engaged in their learning processes, a story can help them to feel connected to the goals that they need to fulfill as they study and learn. You will want to pick a storyline that matches the interests of your students, and that will make them feel connected to what you are teaching. This kind of device can be the best way to motivate students with fun things to do.

4. Progress Bars to Motivate Students

This can be a big motivator for students as they can see visually how far they are toward the completion point for a task, class, or the overall curriculum. It can be motivating to see how much work you have left to go, and a progress bar can show this right away.

5. Points-based Currency to Reward Students' Efforts

If you want to let your students earn rewards on their own, you can award points-based currency that they can use to add up to an overall gift or reward. Many schools use an online gift store or even a physical gift shop where students can turn in their points to win.

Examples of Gamification in Marketing

1. Rewards for Motivating Daily Engagement

No matter what kind of marketing you are engaged in or need to create, daily engagement with a site, an app, or products can make a big difference in your bottom line. You will want to make sure that your consumers are motivated to shop, use, or engage with your product on a regular basis.

2. Customer Points Program

When you want people to engage with a product of a business over and over, you can use a points program to help them to get rewarded for this engagement. These points can be turned in for other items of value, or they might be used to provide things like cash back if you have the bandwidth for this.

3. Earned Perks to Create Repeat Customers

You can use a rewards structure that allows your customers to earn perks like discounts on future purchases, gift cards, and more. This can be a great way to make people want to return to your business over and over again.

4. Countdowns to Increase Customers' Urgency to Buy

This can be an ideal marketing tactic that helps people to be motivated to make purchases under some pressure. This can be a countdown sale or some other kind of short-term benefit that encourages engagement and interaction.

5. Loyalty Program to Encourage Repeat Customers

Loyalty programs can reward customers for buying over and over again from your business. This is something that you see with fuel points, purchase points, and discounts that can be earned through repeat customer actions.

Gamification Examples in Business

1. Rewards to Create Loyal Consumers

Companies can use rewards to make sure that customers want to come back over and over. There are so many ways to make sure that your customers feel like you are thanking them for coming back with return business over and over again.

2. Virtual Currency to Encourage Consumers to Spend Again

Online currency can be used to help motivate customers to come back and get part of future sales for a reduced price. This is common in retail businesses like Kohl’s, but it can be used in many other kinds of businesses as well.

3. Countdowns to Boosts Sales in a Timely Way

Countdowns for sales, purchases, and more can make your business relevant and can help motivate customers to buy from you under some pressure. This can be a great way to get your customers to engage with your business during peak season or during low times when more sales can be equated to increased revenue when you need it most.

Examples of Gamification in the Workplace

1. Progress Bars to Keep the Team Engaged

When you show your teams and staff how close they are to finishing a task, making sales, or completing work processes, they will feel more motivated to finish the things that they have started. This can work for all kinds of processes and can help make your teams motivated.

2. Badges to Promote Employee Excellence Recognition

When you want to make sure that your staff can brag about their achievements, badges can be an ideal way to let them do it. Badges can be awarded online or can even be physical and meant to be displayed on people’s desks.

3. Quizzes and Competitions to Enforce Healthy Motivation Inside the Team

If you want to have your teams motivated by competition, you can use quizzes and other challenges that can be compared. This can allow your teams to compete with one another to be more motivated to reach new levels of achievement.

4. Extra Credit or Bonus Points

Just like in school, offering activities that give your employees a chance to earn extra perks like gift certificates and longer lunches can help to make work fun.

5. Story-based Gamification to Motivate the Team

Stories can be the ultimate gamification tool, and you can use storytelling to motivate your teams to work toward goals. The story can be motivated by individual work or by teamwork, the choice is up to you.

Gamification for Employee Engagement

1. Rewards to Promote Employee Engagement

Rewarding your employees can make them feel more connected with the job and the company. There are so many ways to give rewards for work that has been done, and you can make this program in any way that you choose. You can give out gift cards, perks based on breaks and things like lunch, or anything else that you think will fit into your daily work routines with ease.

2. Extra Credit to Encourage Employees' Hard Work

Offering fun things to do and perks can make your employees work much harder overall. You will allow your teams to make the most of extra opportunities by giving them a chance to benefit from making an effort to do so. This might be added education for the job, essential training information that needs to be completed each year or even added training that might help make promotions a reality.

3. Badges to Acknowledge Employees' Excellent Achievement

Badges can be virtual, or they can be awarded as physical items that can be placed on desks or in a public place. These can be awarded for customer service, helping other staff, and more. There are many ways to make badges really meaningful for employee engagement, and you can create any kind of badge that you want for this purpose.

Onboarding Gamification Examples

1. Onboarding "Quests" to Promote Engagement

Having each part of the onboarding process associated with a quest theme can make it much easier to keep your staff on track as they learn the ropes. This is a process that taps into the progress bar and the storytelling process with ease. Quests can be really engaging, and they are the foundation for many video games, which makes them very familiar to modern audiences.

2. Progress Bars to Help HR in Monitoring and Tracking Processes

The progress bar is really useful here as well so that new staff does not feel defeated by the tasks set before them or have worries about not getting all of their new staff training done in a timely fashion. This can be a great way to help your HR team track the progress of new hires as well.

3. Quizzes to Encourage Self-competition Among New Hires

Quizzing doesn’t have to be high pressure, and if you don’t make the answers matter negatively, you can help your new staff to learn their new hire information while competing with themselves. You will want to be sure that there are no consequences to wrong answers that slow down the learning process so that the quizzing process remains fun and effortless.

Gamification Can be a Big Hit at Work and for School

No matter what environment you want to make more engaging, gamification can be the right tool to generate this outcome.

Making anything from learning to work like a game can make staff and employees much more engaged and committed. Gamification helps with the retention of information and with the involvement of those who do not always want to get invested in these kinds of processes. Gamification can also help to create new habits and to improve routines for your business or for classes of students.

If you have not used gamification in the past, now is the time to start leveraging this powerful tool to make all kinds of learning and work processes more fun than ever. Your staff and your students will have tons of fun with all kinds of different tasks when you use gamification to motivate them, and these different gamification ideas will help you to market your business as well. There is no shortage of benefits that can be associated with gamification, so you should make sure that you don’t go another year without using gamification at school or in your business.

Using the right tools can make all the difference when you want to gamify teaching or work materials. If you're looking to introduce gamification into your program, check out Scavify's gamification app and platform.