Class Post Discussion - Taskrabbit: The use of Gamification

I am very impressed with the capabilities of TaskRabbit and what it has to offer. It gives people the motivation to help others, all for the reward of levelling up, personal gratification and earning money. Task Rabbit shares many qualities with another website called Fiverr which, suggested in the name, works by offering $5 for tasks.

Something of which separates the two websites would be the motivation behind completing the tasks given. Of course Task Rabbit does offer money as well, but the key to the success of Task Rabbit would be the gamification behind it.

Gamification has been used in business for decades but since the digital age gamification has expanded and given new ways of which in can be incorporated (Accenture, 2013). Before the digital age gamification was used primarily at workplaces where by having these gamification incentives for the employees, (labmanager, 2009) means that they are more likely to do the work and get it done it good time, they would be striving for the achievement. For example, in the work place there may be incentives such as pay rises, parties and prizes.

Similarly, with TaskRabbit’s gamification, the incentive is to level up. The more tasks of which you complete the higher level you will become. Since the levels are easily viewable on each users profiles and the leaderboards, this creates further motivation as it helps to show others that they are trustworthy since the use the website a lot. This means more customers for them which is especially useful if they are using TaskRabbit and websites a like for business purposes.

Other websites such as Newgrounds.com have also incorporated this technique of gamification. Newgrounds is a website which hosts Flash content for games and animation. Instead of hiring others to manage the portal of submissions, they have instead implemented a system which motivates the users to vote on the content submitted. Their system works by gamification, using a levelling up system by getting users to vote on 5 Flash entries per day, in order to get 10 EXP. As the levels increases EXP is required to level up, more It takes 38,640 points in order to reach the maximum level, meaning that it takes a total of over 10 years in order to reach this.

Fig 10. Screen Captured: Newgrounds Voting System

As you progress through the levels, the more experience you have with voting on submissions and therefore they’ve made it so that your vote is worth more per level. Unlike TaskRabbits systems, the levels don’t so much show others how trust worthy you are but more so are used as bragging rights.