Why Gamification?

When the documentation experts at IT Glue talk about documentation culture, we talk about teams that want to document their assets and processes. When you work with well-documented environments, you can hardly imagine going back to any sort of substandard documentation.

This is the point of documentation zen, but to get to this point you have to have a well-documented environment. In other words, to get the point where teams are intrinsically motivated to document, they must be extrinsically motivated to document. This is the answer to the question of “why gamification?”, and it’s because you need to get a certain level of documentation mastery to sustain that mastery, and gamification is one of the most effective techniques to get you there.

Why Gamification Works

There are specific elements contained within game design that specifically trigger motivators in humans. These elements are effective because they reward people for their competence and autonomy, which are strong motivators for most people. What we’ve found is that gamification can help create triggers for the types of internal rewards – call those rewards validation or just call them dopamine hits – that create stronger motivation.