Talking about Microsoft, the company has introduced a new plug-in, which would be for its Visual Studio development program. This plug-in, accordingly is titled Visual Studio Achievements, and will require the developers to unlock badges and compete with their fellow coders on a leader board. Geekwire reported that this will allow software developers to unlock achievements, receive badges and work their way up a leader board based on the code they write. One’s spot on the leader board is based on the code you’ve written, which includes points such as how sophisticated it is, and which Visual Studio capabilities one has used to make it so.
In all, there are 32 achievements, with badges falling into a wide range of categories including “Lonely”–for coding on a Friday or Saturday night and the “Scroll Bar Wizard” badge–for writing a single line of code at least 300 characters long. Another interesting badge is the ”Turtles All The Way Down” badge-awarded for writing a class with ten levels of inheritance.
This is an attempt by Microsoft to help developers gain some recognition for the coding they do.
Karsten Januszewski of Microsoft said:
“Developers finally have the ability to actually show their friends, colleagues, project managers, spouses and customers how good they are at what they do all day and sometimes into the night. … Built on ideas from the developers themselves, it is intended to be a humorous community-building game as well as a path to the many, and, to some, unknown features offered in Visual Studio. This is one of several initiatives Microsoft is undertaking to recognize developers for their tireless and indispensable work.”
Google, on the other hand is playing with Google Maps. According to MSNBC, next month Googlers would see a gamified maps app being delivered by the search engine giant. The game will be driven by Google Maps and is yet to be named.
However, once again this is an effort to help bolster Google+, making Google Maps game a part of Google+ Games platform. There is a possibility that the game would be powered by an Android-powered device, and navigated by motion control capabilities.
A video related to this game, can be seen below:
{iframe width=”560″ height=”315″}http://www.youtube.com/embed/iql2CXCR23Q{/iframe}
The efforts are huge, but if they click, things would be easier for these giant to firm their stance.
The success of these gamified products is not restricted to the giants only, but marketers on the whole can make use of it. Garret Ippolito of CRMtrends.com predicts that the marketing apps would even increase efforts to gamify a few products, this year. Ippolito predicted, “Gamification is not a passing fad, it is here to stay.”