I recently read an interesting article by Nick Kolakowski, that said in order to see how the future of big data will pan out, we should be looking to gamification.
One of the reasons he felt that gamification will inspire new thinking, was that the gaming industry means big business; sales last year exceeded $20 billion. As a result games developers need to be at the cutting edge of technology. They need to possess the ability to deal with frequent changes in computing infrastructure.
The vast amount of data that these platforms are now interacting with, means that games developers need to be pushing the boundaries on current capabilities to speed up processes, and deal with the heavy demand from users.
One example he gave of this was SoftLayer. He said “As part of a new game launch last year, the company saw 1.4 million players come to its Website in a week, up from a few thousand beta-users prior to the launch. Heavy demand for some games has driven SoftLayer to double its infrastructure overnight. This variation in demand is the wheelhouse of general cloud computing, but games do seem to have a higher fluctuation than traditional IT applications”.
And if take another example like the online betting industry, which collects vast amounts of data from their users. Data, such as, the sports and activities people like to bet on, the average bets placed, geographical information and details on betters preferences, it only stands to reinforce our opinion that we have a lot to learn from gamification. Particularly when it comes to collecting, analysing and storing data.
You can read Nick’s full article here.
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