Rajat Paharia was gamifying before their ever was such a term. He is the founder of Bunchball, a California based gamification firm that has worked with companies such as Comcast, the Los Angeles Kings, and Hasbro. Although the company began to build online games for non-game based sites in 2005, it wasn’t until Facebook’s FarmVille exploded that gamifying became popular.
Since then, Paharia has seen a sharp rise in the popularity of gamification. One of their most popular projects is a website based off of the NBC television show The Office, where users can sign in as characters from the show and earn “Shrute Bucks” (a currency based on one of the show’s more eccentric characters).
Through the game, fans were creating buzz, and according to Paharia, “NBC loved it because they were paying all these users fake money to do real work.”
The gamification pioneer sees only growth in its future as companies will discover ways to apply it to their own needs, both in their infrastructure and with consumers.
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