**1. Introduction**

The many opportunities for incorporating gamification within everyday life and the advantages that it brings are an important rationale for the increasing digitalization and digital transformation in all aspects of work and play. Gamification encourages purposeful engagement with a product or service for longer periods of time than might otherwise happen. Through apps such as Strava, our personal leisure time has been gamified, and Microsoft Viva tries to create the same emotional and even competitive responses with our work Outlook calendar.

Gamification is possible as part of everyday activities because of two closely interrelated phenomena. The first phenomenon is the widespread process that has driven the digitalization of "serious" products and services, enabling a systematic unpicking of processes, the sequences of actions and activities that can be isolated and manipulated. By viewing work and play as a sequence of smaller and more

granular activities, it is possible to then attach numeric values and weightings to each undertaking and completing each activity in ways that create scores. Individual scores and relative rankings can then be shared through social media. A score or ranking is a more self-contained unit of comparison than the explanation required for all the actions that brought you to that outcome. Searching for "Strava rankings" through Google will even directly embed the top three cyclists in "Distance Leadership" on its results page. Achievements of this type can also become badges to permanently share through social media. Within the world of work and through the Open Badges system, LinkedIn enables professional success to be displayed in this way too.

An exemplar of the process of digitalization and the opportunities that this process brings is found in the move away from using physical media in the distribution of films and music. Shifting music consumption patterns onto a streaming service enables new music to be recommended based on listening preferences and enables everyone to have their own entirely personalized radio station. A user experience that effectively describes the product that is Spotify. Popular music is one example of gamification that existed prior to widespread digitalization. Because sales, downloads, or listens can be measured so readily that the use of the weekly music charts has existed for over 70 years. And Spotify has a range of charts to introduce a form of light competition across multiple dimensions of artists and songs that now includes a "daily viral song" chart. As such an integral aspect of popular music, it is sometimes difficult to recognize the long-term presence of gamification. But music industry also introduces an important lesson about the benefits of gamification. Gamification can reflect back positively on the core business by driving new sales and introducing greater awareness of new artists. Gamification does not necessarily work well if it is "tacked on" without thought and cannot clearly offer additional value for the end user.

The digitalization of core products and services benefits from being supplemented with additional digital assets, including badges, scores, and unlockable extras. But, briefly, moving away from consumer gamification there are similar benefits for the application of gamification within the internal operations of an organization. As consumer technology shows, turning an activity into a score enables comparison and inevitably, competition. Introducing a scoring mechanism can be a way to motivate people to retry actions to improve which can, in turn, improve overall efficiency and productivity. This is particularly useful in situations where repetition is necessary to bring mastery. It should be stressed that solely repetitive roles are those most likely to be automated. However, mastery within a role that includes variability and change is building the capacity to deal with the one-in-a-hundred, one-in-a-thousand, and one-in-a-million situations when they arise and being able to recognize these situations in the future. Within a work environment introducing a form of scored competition can encourage teams to compete in ways that improve overall performance and encourages knowledge sharing between team members to improve personally and collectively. The Leagues.ai system does exactly this. By providing a mechanism for competition at granular levels of the organization, it is possible to reward strong individual performance on a weekly basis. Over longer periods of time the Leagues. ai system can provide a rank order of success that imitates the team ranking table in a football or a cricket league.

Working alongside the new opportunities offered by the digitalization of "serious" goods is the second phenomenon that makes gamification possible; a proliferation and wide-ranging continuum of games. There is a vast array of "idle games" or "clicker games" that are downloadable from the various platform app stores for playing on mobile devices or directly accessible for play through a browser window.

## *Creating Effective Management Simulations: Rapidly, Responsibly, Relevantly DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106430*

This specific genre of the game relies on the primary mechanic of clicking on items to use them in some way. Clicking generates an in-game income that can be increased by spending some of this income on upgrades. This is why the games are sometimes described as "incremental games". This category of games employs three significant mechanics that are also highly relevant for gamification within other domains. In these games, there is a reward for returning, there is a push to leave (in order to return), and the dynamics of the game will shift as a player improves their experience and knowledge of the game [1]. These three elements can also be found in the application gamification tactics either singly or in combination across many examples. The creator of one of the best-known incremental game, AdVenture Capitalist, has documented the maths behind these games. In describing the variants around the exponential growth found in the games there are also indications of how the three key mechanics of clickers are embedded within this code [2]. In order to keep players coming back despite the relatively simple mechanics. These are games that have had the principles of gamification reflected onto themselves. Clicker games can also make good business. The *Idle Heroes* game was reported to have achieved US\$70 m in net revenue in its first two years of availability [3].

However, these numbers pale in comparison to the "serious" games that require the advanced computing power of a dedicated games console or PC. The headline numbers show the scale of these activities with a global industry worth US\$300 billion and 2.9 billion active users [4]. A more startling finding is that gamers, on average, spend 16 hours a week playing games and another 8 hours watching gaming streams [4]. The speculation from the industry is that these numbers will also continue to grow. With a third of the global population engaged in gaming and with an inevitable distortion in favor of the 70% of the world population living within developed economies, games are everywhere. All these figures indicate that games are a key aspect of popular culture and everyday life.

While the prevalence of gaming is impressive there are also strong indications that engagement with games is clustered more heavily among younger people. The uptake of a relatively simple word game, such as Wordle, offers a somewhat surprising indication of this bias and challenges the assumption that this simple word puzzle game might be more popular with older people. With 300,000 daily players in the US, the generational differences are noticeable. "In total, 26% of respondents in the [millennial] generation said they play "Wordle," compared to 18% of Gen Zers and 9% of Gen Xers. Just 5% of baby boomers are playing the game." [5]. Perhaps indicating different preferences for consuming and accessing games, the private British Broadcaster ITV reintroduce its gameshow "Lingo" in 2021 based on the success of Wordle and a full 33 years after the original 10-episode run, which was a licensed format taken from the US television. With a free-to-air broadcast time in the UK of 3 pm, the show is presented for primarily an older audience or those with home caring responsibilities.

The value of gamification rests on these twin pillars that see the digitalization of "everything" and the dominant role of games in popular culture. The benefits of successful gamification are significant as any product or service will benefit from increased engagement and long-term connections with its target audience.
