If you’re someone who thinks gamification is just a fad, you may want to look away now.
To be clear, Bunchball isn’t just jumping on the latest buzzword. The company was founded to deliver gamification tools all the way back in 2005 — founder and Chief Product Officer Rajat Paharia has told me that he probably came to the market too early, and has had to keep the company alive while the industry caught up. Now it’s focused largely on enterprise customers who want to use game mechanics to turn employees into better workers.
There are, however, other applications. For example: Bunchball just announced that it’s partnering with financial literacy site Wall Street Survivor. The site already offers a virtual stock market simulator, but apparently that wasn’t game enough, so it has been redesigned using Bunchball’s Nitro platform.
On the new version of Wall Street Survivor (viewable on the beta site), there are now “missions” where users learn about stock market concepts. They receive badges for completing those missions and making trades. They can also receive rewards if they have some of the best returns among the virtual portfolios in the Wall Street Survivor database.
The change is being touted as a way for the site to appeal specifically to millennial, who may be intimidated by investing and the financial world, but will enjoy the gamified approach.