Gamification of graveyards

Writing my first blog on Gamasutra… just thought it's worth mentioning…

I've been heavily involved in gamification for the past year or so after realizing that something is missing in the information systems world. I've been developing information systems for many years and while some of the projects I've worked on were a great success, other weren’t. The funny thing about it is that there was no correlation between the business value of the application and its success. There are various theories which I'm not going to go into here, but the bottom line is that I felt something is missing. That something was excitement. Application that got users excited would succeed. Others, well… succeed less. The question is how do you get your users excited over an application? This is where believe gamification can help out. I'm not saying gamification is a magic pill, but it's a tool that we have not used and are actually just learning to work with.

I will go into much more details about my point of view for gamification in the next posts, but here I wanted to share a short example. I've asked many gamification professionals if they think that we can gamify anything, and there was some debate over gamification of sad events. Can we gamify a funeral was a specific debate area.

I'm not sure about the funeral itself, but it made we wonder about cemeteries as a great gamification application. The idea is extremely simple. You go into the cemetery with your smartphone and by pointing your smartphone at a specific headstone, the system will provide you with the life stories, pictures, and anything else from the person under the stone. To make things more interesting one can make the connections between the occupants of the cemetery. Perhaps a specific person was a friend or relative of someone else. In such a case, you may be guided to that person. The system can perhaps allow you to order flowers or write something nice about that person on his virtual grave page?

Well – to me such an application would make such visits more enjoyable and more meaningful. I especially like this idea because it doesn’t use any points, badges or leaderboards. There are no rules either just possibilities that anyone can decide how to apply.

Liked the idea? Have any opinion about gamifying a funeral? Please share on the comments.