Gamification of Yelp
Yelp has built an entire database off of crowdsourcing information from users. Without the people, Yelp would never have been as successful as it is now. While it may seem too true for the users to do the job for Yelp for free, it is the reality of Yelp’s success. This statement is partially incorrect as the Yelpers don’t do it for free. Nevertheless, they are not being paid with money but rather satisfaction. A user has an incentive to build a reputation in the Yelp community because it almost feels like a game. In a Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, millions of players that are attracted to this genre spend lots of time in their daily lives to better their character by any means allowed in a game. Be it a weapon that gives you more attack damage or a boots that make increase your intelligence, players constantly farm gold and experience points to get stronger. While it may seem like this behavior would be limited to games that would feel rewarding due to the fact that games are simply fun, businesses found a way to incentivize users with their own “game”.
About 70% of users on the Internet are apart of some social network (Kachniewska). The outreach and influence that social media websites have is immense. They can use this to their advantage by getting a better grasp of their users by captivating them with rewards. Just like increasing stats on your armor in World of Warcraft, increasing the amount of followers you have on Yelp feels as great. Games have been around in almost every culture until ancient times. As weird as it may seem, researchers have started to find that we are “hardwired” to play (Zichermann and Cunningham).
There are many elements that can make up a game that can also be part of gamification. “Self-representation with avatars; three-dimensional environments; narrative context; feedback; reputations, ranks, and levels; marketplaces and economies; competition under rules that are explicit and enforced; teams; parallel communication systems that can be easily configured; time pressure.” (Deterding, et al.) In figure 1, we can see that in order to implement different aspects of a game in a product, it needs to uphold the same principles of each level.
Figure 1: Levels of Gamification (Deterding, et al.)
In Yelp, there are some aspects of gamification. Reviews are publicly displayed to those looking at the business. The number of friends are listed as well as the amount of reviews for each reviewer. Furthermore, the reviews can also be rated by other Yelpers who think the information was helpful. Lastly, users can also receive compliments for the quality of their reviews (Pellikka). It has been shown that video games can change how someone behaves however the game intends (Deterding, et al.).
Works Cited
Deterding, Sebastian, et al. “Gamification. using game-design elements in non-gaming contexts.” CHI’11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2011.
Deterding, Sebastian, et al. “From game design elements to gamefulness: defining gamification.” Proceedings of the 15th international academic MindTrek conference: Envisioning future media environments. ACM, 2011.
Kachniewska, Magdalena. “Gamification and Social Media as Tools for Tourism Promotion.” Handbook of Research on Effective Advertising Strategies in the Social Media Age (2015): 17.
Pellikka, Harri. “Gamification in Social Media.” (2014).
Zichermann, Gabe, and Christopher Cunningham. “Gamification by design: Implementing game mechanics in web and mobile apps.” O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2011.
