It was a word that aroused passions too – some people hated it, insisted it didn’t exist as a proper English word while some people loved it, saying language should evolve like technology to embrace new forms.

Wikipedia, the Oracle of Democracy, declares it thus: “Gamification is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications (also known as “funware”), particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications.”

“Gamification works by making technology more engaging,[4] and by encouraging desired behaviors, taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.[5] The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.[4]”

Games are as old as time. I remember growing up in the days of Jurassic Park and playing seven stones, spinning tops and snakes and ladders. They taught me about coordination, competition and strategy.

Most people I know who own iPads spend more time on games than anything else. I am currently playing Words With Friends with 23 friends. In moments of solitude, I play Solitaire. I deleted my Skype app because it kept pinging me in the middle of my fishing for sharks. I’d rather fish than chat. That’s how addictive games are.

WIT’s Groovy Marketer of the Year, House of Travel in New Zealand, had to find a way to get its customers interested in buying longhaul holidays in a weak economy and when most people were shopping online, so it came up with the Mix and Match game (pictured) which allowed you to pull buddies in from Facebook and spin for destinations.

Niall White, group strategy director, talks of pursuing a gamification strategy. “For us, it’s important to constantly work at accessing “eyeballs” online and we see a “gamification” strategy as one way of achieving this. We try to develop engaging “games” which customers play and share for prizes, to create an awareness of our product and service.”

Truth is, games make travel planning fun. So with technology now enabling us to play more games than ever with the proliferation of handheld devices, it makes sense that we should play games with our customers.

Japan is of course most ahead of this “gamification” curve – this is a nation that is super-wired and loves games.

In his presentation at the WIT Bootcamp, Kei Shibata, CEO of Venture Republic, which operates the country’s largest travel meta search engines (Travel.jp/Hotel.jp), talked about how the merging of gamification and mobile could help create new demand and revitalize destinations.

Colopl, Japan’s biggest location-based gaming company, has a total of 2.1 million registered users and three million page views a month. It has 40 million check-ins a month in Japan alone “more than foursquare’s worldwide check-ins combined”. And the total distance its users have travelled since its service began? 11 billion kilometres, further than from Earth to Pluto.

Colopl was now being used by 118 souvenir shops, 860 hotels, 22 transportation companies and 11 tour companies in Japan, said Shibata.

Two days later, I was listening to Kensuke Joji of Hakuhodo DY Media Partners inc. who shared the new games travel companies are now able to play with customers with location-based magazines and the company’s new smart device application, Rocket Box, which brings television programming to a smartphone.

Seeing this as a new way to engage new customers, Venture Republic has signed an agreement with Hakuhodo DY Media Partners to launch a new mobile service by early 2012.

CEO Kei Shibata explains how this will work. The user watches a travel TV programme at home. If they are inrerested in travelling to the location, they can access the specific mobile application where they can then search Travel.jp/Hotel.jp database to find a suitable tour package, hotel or flight. When the user travels to the location, he or she can play, watch the TV/movie content to review, get some location information, create a photo book using his/her smart device.

At WIT, there was talk that while the industry was very good at helping customers plan and book their travel, we weren’t that good in the in-destination portion of the journey.

In fact, Rod Cuthbert, chairman emeritus of Viator, shared a survey that showed people were happier planning their vacation than during it – “so are we doing something wrong with customer service,” he asked, lamenting in particular the check-out process. “We are good at saying hello but bad at saying goodbye,” he said.

While Cuthbert was talking more about the human touch that could make holidays happier for more people, there is reason to hope that perhaps with new technology, social media, smartphones and more creative smarts entering our industry, we could learn to engage with customers in a more personal, engaging and, dare I say it, “gamified” kind of way.