Here’s a little story that hasn’t yet been told, hope you find it interesting!
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Though I wrote my first computer game waaay back in 1981, by 1999-2000 I’d grown disenchanted with the near-abusively one-sided way things worked in the industry. Given that one major games publisher tried (unsuccessfully, thank goodness) to sue me for £2.56m while another cancelled a big project days after approving a full-on milestone, you can see why that would be. Hence I decided to do an MBA: this was partly to try to salvage anything worthwhile from the bruising experiences I’d had, but mainly as a form of lightweight business therapy. 🙂
At the same time, I also started to move away from games into an unfashionable mix of embedded development and business analysis. So at some point during late 2002, I put all these pieces together [in a buggy-whip ‘core competency’ kind of way] and began to wonder whether the kind of games user-interface I had been developing for so long could be used to turbo-charge all manner of transactions and activities on commercial electronic devices – in-flight video, ATM machines, vending machines, mobile phones, etc. Unsurprisingly, this was the point when I coined the deliberately ugly word “gamification“, by which I meant applying game-like accelerated user interface design to make electronic transactions both enjoyable and fast. Note that I was much more interested in applying gamification ideas to electronic devices than to the Web back then: just as now, I wanted to build physical things and to make them fun and effective to use.
All of which is why in 2003 (9th April) I founded a one-man consultancy called Conundra Ltd specifically with the idea of pursuing gamification, though I eventually dissolved it in 2006 (17th October) after eliciting no significant customer interest. Here’s a copy of the original 2003/2004 Conundra webpage, which should give a fuller idea of what I was aiming for (though note that the email link there doesn’t actually work, I gave up the conundra.co.uk domain loooong ago.)
Ultimately, the little genuine gamification work I did was essentially restricted to developing a couple of 3d casual games (3D Pool, 3D Chess) for a mobile phone platform that was never directly released (the Alphamosaic VC01). Sure, these games coupled particularly easy interfaces with high-gloss rendering technologies (direct-maths raytracing on a 16-bit array processor!), but the particular vision of gamification I had briefly glimpsed back in 2002 was simply a decade too early. Besides, the whole MBA mindset that tends to drive such high-concept business ideas was already on the downward slide by then… but that’s a story for another day.
So as far as “gamification” goes, I devised [I believe] the term, tried to make money from it, failed miserably, pulled out long before anyone else used it, and that was pretty much the end of my involvement. Oh well! 🙂
…but there’s a follow-on. Having then joined the CCTV industry and then started to develop my own innovative kind of small ‘speed dome’ security camera (hence ‘nano-dome’, doh!), it only struck me a little while ago that what I was doing was at heart a curious kind of culmination of the gamification path I had started out on way back in 2002. For PTZs – keyboard-steered cameras – are essentially a kind of industrial videogame, and one of the key things I was aiming for with the control software in my own camera was to make it what I would call ‘properly interactive’. And what would that make it but a truly gamified device?
Of course, I may have missed the biggest gamification boat of all (mobile phones), because in many ways Apple picked up the whole gamification UX ball and ran further with it than anyone else. So however much I like Dieter Rams’ designs, I’d argue that maybe the real secret behind Apple’s iWhatever devices isn’t Jonathan Ive’s aesthetic but the underlying idea of gamification – making hard things easy, expressive, near-effortless to use. Automating sprezzatura, one might say. Put in those terms, perhaps the full societal rollout of gamification has only now just begun, hmmm?
Funding Startups (& other impossibilities) 
Comments on: "The (short) prehistory of “gamification”…" (43)
[…] a comment Even when I first started going about “gamification” back in 2002 or so, I had a clear vision of what I was talking about. As you can see from my (long defunct) Conundra […]
[…] Nick Pelling coined the term “gamification” in 2002, meaning “applying game-like accelerated user interface design to make electronic transactions both enjoyable and fast.” The idea is that the more an interface feels like a fun game, the more likely users are to embrace it. Foursquare’s anointing of “mayors” for people who check into particular locations the most is a form of gamification, as is the “upvoting” of user-submitted content on sites like Reddit. […]
Up voting on spaces such as Reddit. This is interesting. Is there a book that reduces everything to a form that teachers can digest? Jo
Mr. Pelling, I am researching gamification for my Integrating Technology in the Classroom class (I just started my Bachelor’s program for ESE Education), and I was wondering if there was any more information that you could provide regarding your process of coming up with the word…or anything else, for that matter. I love the idea 🙂
jadorelamusique: I think my post sums up more or less everything important about what happened.
In many ways, what I was trying to express with “gamification” was a pair of sharply contrasting ideas that were then only just starting to emerge. On the one hand, “games-platform-publishing-ification” (i.e. turning electronic devices into publishing platforms, as we now see with iTunes, App Store, Kindle, etc); and on the other hand, “games-interface-ification” (i.e. making device interfaces more responsive, immersive, and interactive, as we now see with the whole “UX”, Web2.0 and Ajax phenomena).
“Gamification” in the sense of “encouraging-social-validation-and contribution-through-game-like-currencies”-ification is where most of the gamification people now seem to be looking at, but for me this is a very narrow view of the set of positive lessons that mainstream devices had to learn from the games industry.
So for me, I think it’s important to say that Apple have proved to be the masters of proper gamification, because they tackled the two specific kinds of gamification I thought most important. And they’ve done pretty well out of it, wouldn’t you say? 🙂
I certainly appreciate the response, Mr. Pelling. I am sure my group members will appreciate your expertise.
Apple certainly has made a mint from mastering gamification 🙂
[…] of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior.” Nick Pelling claims to have coined the word “gamification” in 2002, defining it as “applying game-like accelerated user interface design to make electronic […]
[…] game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior.” Nick Pelling claims to have coined the word “gamification” in 2002, defining it as “applying game-like accelerated user interface design to make electronic […]
[…] The term gamification was coined more than ten years ago by British programmer Nick Pelling, who described it as ‘making hard things easy’. […]
Man, you werent “a decade too late”, you simply missed the point of gamification..
Wojtek: actually, I was a decade too early and I believe that my version of gamification is what made Apple into arguably the most successful tech company in history.
But forum badges are cool too, if you like that kind of thing. 😉
[…] motivations and psychology, let’s start with a simple definition. Back in 2002, Nick Pelling, defined the term as: “Applying game-like accelerated user interface design to make electronic transactions both […]
[…] game-like user interface for commercial electronic devices (ATMs, vending machines, mobile phones) Nick Pelling coins the ‘deliberately ugly’ word, […]
[…] Pelling lays claim (in this 2011 blog post) to coining the word in 2002 when he “began to wonder whether the kind of games […]
[…] inventor and computer programmer Nick Pelling is credited with coining the word gamification. His intended usage of the word was to describe the application of a game-like accelerated user interface to make electronic […]
[…] dispositivi commerciali elettronici (ad es. bancomat, distributori automatici, telefoni cellulari) Nick Pelling conia la parola “volutamente brutta”: […]
[…] and pit against each other in a race to survive. It may be a little farfetched from the concept Nick Pelling coined in 2002, but with a squint – Keatan may be on to […]
Can anyone answer my question? Does the definition “the use of game elements in non-game situations” belong to Nick or any other person? and if not who first said gamification and where can I get the proof. was it first used in an academic text? Thanks…..
anadolupreping: that’s not quite how I defined it in 2002. Back then I was more interested in how mainstream electronics, culture and society were about to be invaded by big concepts from the games industry (specifically content platforms and game-like user interfaces). Hence I coined the name “gamification” in respect of those kinds of broad brush ideas: the modern “medalification” version could be said to be a somewhat narrower version of what I had in mind. 😉
[…] the history of the word is much more colorful. The word gamification first appeared around 2002 when British-born video game developer Nick Pelling coined the term. In its original […]
[…] The term gamification was coined by Nick Pelling in the year 2002. Past then there were very few who knew about the concept of gamification and its possibilities of implementing it in corporate training. You can refer the following trend chart from Google to understand the rising demand for gamification over the years. The success of e-learning gamification is mainly attributed to the capability of gamification to make the learning experience engaging and interactive […]
[…] game-like user interface for commercial electronic devices (ATMs, vending machines, mobile phones) Nick Pelling coins the ‘deliberately ugly’ word, gamification. With a name, the history of gamification […]
[…] games so engaging, many are keen to test it out in non-gaming contexts. This process is called “gamification” (not to be confused with game […]
[…] games so engaging, many are keen to test it out in non-gaming contexts. This process is called “gamification” (not to be confused with game […]
[…] games so engaging, many are keen to test it out in non-gaming contexts. This process is called “gamification” (not to be confused with game […]
[…] called “gamification,” and it’s been around for a while now. In fact, the term was coined way back in 2002, though it’s evolved and changed a bit over […]
[…] hans egen utsago myntade Nick Pelling ordet “gamification” runt 2002/2003, men mer troligt är att det myntades […]
[…] терміну “gamification”. Нік Пелінг використовує термін “гейміфікація” під час розробки користувацького […]
[…] The (short) prehistory of “gamification”… […]
[…] Pelling, N. (2011, August 09). The (short) prehistory of “gamification”… Retrieved September 13, 2020, from https://nanodome.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/the-short-prehistory-of-gamification/ […]
[…] History of Gamification: From the Very Beginning to Right Now – Growth EngineeringThe (short) prehistory of “gamification” – Nick PellingThe Truth About Gamification (The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly) – Bryan […]
[…] success of games has not gone unnoticed by business and design industries. We see this in the popularization of the “gamification” buzzword as early as 2002, though it was more widely adapted in […]
[…] miramos la hemeroteca, en un breve artículo publicado en 2011, que ya se dice pronto, Nick Pelling nos explica los orígenes de la palabra […]
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[…] did this by exploring people’s perception of coronavirus and employing a gamification process (using games to explore issues and find solutions) to build common ground for reducing […]
[…] did this by exploring people’s perception of coronavirus and employing a gamification process (using games to explore issues and find solutions) to build common ground for reducing […]
[…] did this by exploring people’s perception of coronavirus and employing a gamification process (using games to explore issues and find solutions) to build common ground for reducing […]
[…] N. 2011. The (short) prehistory of “gamification”… (2021, September […]
[…] – Nick Pelling […]
[…] term emerged. In 2002, Nick Pelling, a British programmer, and creator of the computer game Frak!, coined this term designing a game-like interface for ATMs and vending […]
[…] programmer Nick Pelling first coined the term in 2002 while designing game-like user interfaces for commercial electronic devices like […]
[…] According to Pelling, gamification is “applying game-like accelerated user interface design to make electronic transactions both enjoyable and fast.” In other words, gamification is the application of game-typical elements and mechanisms into the contexts which are normally foreign to game. […]