Do you play computer games? Even if you do not, perhaps you can still figure out what type of gamer you could be: achiever, socialiser, explorer or killer.These types are important to know if you are a marketer, advertiser, publicist or business owner. They are the types being used as a guide by gamification experts who are transforming the way companies are selling goods and services over the internet.Gamification is the process of using game thinking and mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems, says Gabe Zichermann, one of those experts, and who I went to see speak two weeks ago. He is the author of Game-Based Marketing and the soon-to-be-released Gamification by Design.Achievers, socialisers, explorers and killers are player types defined in a study by Professor Richard Bartle back at the dawn of the multiplayer online game industry in the 1980s. He did not intend them to define personality types; they describe gaming behaviour. But they turn out to also be convenient ways of describing people.That’s important to know if you want to use gamification techniques to create a wider audience for your marketing. Appealing to all of them is the sweet spot games try to achieve.Everyone has bits of one or the other in them. So a gamer can be a mix of 100 percent killer, 50 percent socialiser, 40 percent achiever and a ten percent explorer. However, the vast majority of people, about 80 percent, tend to be mainly socialisers, as discovered by the social networking sites and the company that invented the Facebook “poke”.Socialisers are people searching for interactions with others that are easy to reciprocate, lightweight, and non-confrontational. Zichermann uses the metaphor of four teenagers going to a shopping centre. They are not going there to shop but to socialise. The shopping is a means of socialising.“If store owners were smart they would not put all the same dresses and items in one spot,” he says. “The girls do not want to buy the same dress and so will move apart. Store owners should randomise items to maximise the social experience, so the girls can shop in the same spot and still socialise.”Designing for achievers is tough as there can only be one winner. Achievers love the status and the recognition of being a winner. The explorer plays for the social credit for having discovered something such finding a hidden Easter egg in a game or knowing all of the routes in Super Mario Bros. Explorers spend a lot of time on a game to discover the virtual world created for them.The killer wants to win by beating or conquering someone else and having everyone else know about it. They want respect.Zichermann urges people to watch the reality TV series ‘Storage Wars’ in which people bid for the contents of storage lockers when the rent is in default. The lock on the storage locker door is broken open and people get five minutes to look from the outside at what’s in the locker. Then the bidding begins.The “killers” are those bidding just to win over someone else. They don’t really care what’s in the locker. This describes Dave Hester, known as the “Mogul”, who just wants to dominate. “Killers” can also describe those who go all out criticising everyone on a blog; these are known as “comment killers”.The common way of dealing with such posters is to moderate them or ban them. But that’s not how game creators would deal with them. In gaming killers tend to cause havoc but they are also the most active and avid players.“They are just expressing their behaviour in a bad way,” says Zichermann. “You need to put them on rails toward a goal. Understand their motivation. The trick is to shape their behaviour by creating a pathway for them to express themselves.”For example, a publisher could reduce “comment killers” by setting up a reward system to give them some form of the recognition they seek. They could be offered a dinner with someone famous or better yet be given some form of status on the site as a commenter who is given the most positive feedback from others on the site for the quality of their comments.“You will not stop everyone, but you will reduce the behaviour,” he says. That is the gamification mantra: “Reward early, reward often, and try not to go negative.”Next week I’ll conclude this series on gamification techniques by looking at Zichermann’s statement that “fun is the new power metric” and his observation that businesses need to understand why “status”, which costs them nothing, is worth more than winning a “free item”.Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.