Unlocking the Power of Gamification: Insights from Pete Baikins
Pete Baikins, CEO of Gamification+, sat down with Kiwings to share his journey and insights into the transformative power of gamification in learning and business. With a background in CRM and a passion for strategy games, Pete discovered that gamification could make complex systems more engaging and effective—both for users and organizations.
🚀 Gamification Across Industries
Pete highlights how gamification is no longer a niche concept. It’s being used across industries—from finance and IT to textiles and cybersecurity. Whether it’s onboarding, compliance, or leadership development, gamification is helping organizations drive real behavioral change.
“Gamification is all about changing people’s behaviour.”
🧠 Learning That Sticks
Gamified learning isn’t just fun—it’s effective. Pete points to the growing $11 billion game-based learning industry and emphasizes that even simple gamified elements can boost engagement and retention. However, he notes that true maturity in gamified learning comes when the content itself—not just the wrapper—is designed with game mechanics in mind.
🎯 Measuring Impact
How do you know gamification is working? Pete suggests using traditional learning metrics—like completion rates and retention—but also recommends creative approaches like “boss fights,” where learners face real-world challenges to prove behavioral change.
🕹️ Game Designers in the Workplace
Should learning designers become game designers? Pete says yes—but also encourages hands-on learning and involving employees who already love games. This collaborative approach ensures the games are relevant and enjoyable for the workforce.
🏁 Where to Start
For organizations looking to adopt gamified learning, Pete advises starting at the top—with leadership buy-in—and beginning with small, controllable projects like induction programs. Proving ROI early helps build momentum for larger initiatives.
“If it doesn’t start at the top, then it may just get away with achieving low-impact gamification.”
🙏 Final Thoughts
Pete’s interview is a powerful reminder that gamification isn’t just a trend—it’s a strategic tool for engagement, learning, and transformation.
Full Interview Transcript:
International Gamification Consultant, Mentor, speaker, trainer and lecturer
CEO of Gamification+
GAMIFICATION+ is an award winning and globally recognised leader in Gamification consultancy and training. They help organisations achieve behaviour change through game like experiences. They have delivered work for companies around the world including the UK, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Canada, Greece and Dubai to name just a few.
Kiwiings interviewed the CEO of Gamification+, Pete Baikins about his journey and insights about Gamification way of learning.
What inspired you to get in to Gamification?
I was running a CRM company where we had a big complicated software for Customer Relationship Management and I wanted a way to get people to be more comfortable with it and to continue using it and use more of the features in it. So I realised that Gamification likely was the answer for that.
Secondly I have played a lot of strategy games and I get better at them all the time and I wanted that same level of fun for my business software systems so that I get better at running a business. And that’s how I got inspired to explore gamified ways of working more seriously.
Q: What is the broader scope of Gamification in organisations?
A: It is getting broader all the time. The main places I see Gamification within organisations is through marketing campaigns, loyalty programs, through every stage of the HR processes like recruitment, on-boarding, training, employee engagement, innovation, employee retention and wellbeing, future leadership programs etc. And then it is also being used to increase productivity. Gamification is all about changing people’s behaviour. So broadly across all Industries, generally if you want to get a person to do more of a particular behaviour or perhaps less of a particular behaviour then Gamification might be the answer.
GAMIFICATION IS ALL ABOUT CHANGING PEOPLE’S BEHAVIOUR.
Q: Is Gamification used across all industries?
A: Yes, pretty much. In terms of my own Client List, 45% of them are financial services companies; they were the earlier adopters. Other industries are the IT companies and the leading-edge textiles. I would say quite all of them are doing stuff but mostly it’s in-house generated and still picking up. Certain industries have taken certain aspects out if it first: Like almost every bank that I know has some sort of gamified financial literacy program for their customers for educating them about their services/products; others are doing things around health & safety compliance and even in cyber security cyber risk etc.
We also have a structured learning program which allows them to see how they can grow in organisation.
Q: How mature Gamification in learning is? Is it successful, failure or just a fun tool to experiment?
It is successful. There is a big game-based learning industry, which is massively growing across the world with over 11 billion dollars of investment last year.
So even putting up some simple Gamification shows big improvement in statistics around the learning effectiveness, whether it is number of people completing a bit of content or coming back more often or engaging more often. But when it comes to maturity, I feel there is still a long way to go. Currently the learning experts are just building some game elements around and outside of the existing content itself; just to make participants win some badges or to come back to it. However, the major goal of using Gamification is to drive behavioural change. Now to achieve this behavioural change, you really want to gamify the content itself and host it on a structured gamified learning management system. So, from Gamification point of view, I don’t see that that is being done often enough.
Q: Is gamified way of learning more effective to a particular level of people in the organization or is it that everyone in the organisation can have gamified way of learning?
A: Well I have seen it used at all the levels. But I’ve seen more interesting & deeper provisions of things used at the leadership level or future leaders’ programme level.
Q: How can we measure the effectiveness of gamified learning, is there any particular way to do that?
A: Well, whatever way you are measuring the current learning methods, you can measure it the same way. That’s a good way to start with so that you can see how it compares to your existing learning techniques. But generally speaking, you measures are like; how many people are engaged and contacted, are they engaged in all of the contents; if you’re quizzing them afterwards, how much are they retaining etc. My favourite ways of measuring effectiveness is actually what they call as ‘boss fights’ in game terminology, which is like a challenge to prove someone is actually changing their behaviour because of their training.
For an example, if you gamified compliance training in a financial services company, 3 weeks after the training I would send out an offer to bribe or something and then see if their behaviour has actually changed because of the compliance training.
Q: Do you think maybe now learning designers have to also be game designers? And they should have a formal education of game designing also.
Sure answer is yes. But the fastest way to learn game design anyways is to build games. So I am the fan of the on-the-job learning anyway, but it’s good to have some theoretical background particularly in your choosing & trying to learn about particular audience on what sort of game elements might work best for them or what sort of game elements might work for a particular type of behaviour change that you want.
The other way is to go and find out amongst your target audience who already play games and bring them on board into the teams who are developing the learning. This way you will get the workforce involved in building games that they actually like to play.
Q: As an organisation, how should we go about adopting gamified way of learning? What should be the ideal process map? Where should we start?
A: It needs to start at very top; with the leader, because it needs to be supported from CEO and senior leadership team. How playful are they, do they play games, do they miss playing games, can they empower the people beneath them to take part in games and that’s absolutely where we have to start. If it doesn’t start at the top, then it may get away with low-impact Gamification.
The other thing is to start with the smallest projects where you’ve got the most control individually. So someone normally has control over the induction program, they can easily experiment within just their bit and then start proving the return on investment from the effectiveness of the induction program after gamifying it and then when you go to do the project you really want to do, you’ve got some nice statistics to back you up saying it will probably work.
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Pete was interviewed for the 1st May 2020 edition of Kiwings Times (based in Bengaluru, India). This was an edition themed around Gamification and learning. As well as my interview, it sets the scene for gamification and learning nicely, with examples, book reviews and more. You can download and read a copy by clicking on the picture here:
