According to Taiwan statistics, the unemployment rate of youth aged 15 to 24 has remained at approximately 11 to 12% in recent years, which is approximately three times the overall unemployment rate. How to integrate digital game thinking into the workplace and learning, and enhance youth employment willingness, has become a new topic for companies to recruit talents. Liu Zheyun, founder of Tianyu Technology and president of Gonghao Federation, recently gave a speech at National Chengchi University and pointed out that if talents with different characteristics can find appropriate positions in the organization through gamification mechanisms, it will be an important solution for companies to attract and retain talents.
Liu Zheyun gave a speech at the Real Estate Research Center and School of Communication at National Chengchi University, attracting enthusiastic participation from more than a hundred teachers and students. He shared an article he had read, pointing out that "no one will be unemployed" in the well-known game "World of Warcraft": quick-responsive players serve as output, careful players are qualified as healers, and those who are not good at combat can also find a foothold through collection and production. In contrast, in real society, people are often accustomed to measuring personal value with a single quantitative indicator.
This realization became the beginning of Liu Zheyun's involvement in corporate gamification. But he admitted that gamification is by no means simply adding points to work or putting it in a game skin. In the early days, he invested millions of dollars to develop the system, but suffered repeated setbacks because he only applied the game visuals to traditional project management tools. It was not until he re-examined the core reasons for players' deep immersion that he grasped the key. In addition to tasks and rewards, competition, collaboration, random events and peer interaction are the soul mechanisms that drive independent investment.
In order to verify the effectiveness, Liu Zheyun took the lead in introducing this model into the business team, planning the "Ice and Fire TP (Target Points, Performance Target Points) Battle" and mobilizing hundreds of colleagues to divide into two camps. This mechanism converts performance into attack power, treats mission progress as health points, and introduces card drawing and team confrontation. At the end, all members are designed to work together to defeat the "Big Devil" level, turning competitors into strategic allies. During the event, colleagues showed a high degree of self-motivation, achieving a high participation rate of over 90%, and even driving explosive revenue growth in a single quarter.
As the business side achieved results, Liu Zheyun further extended the mechanism to administrative logistics. To address administrative contributions that were difficult to quantify in terms of turnover in the past, the team launched the "Sharing Friends Club" program, which allows colleagues to accumulate points by proposing process optimization suggestions and cross-department mutual assistance, and can exchange them for substantial benefits such as full-day leave, giving clear recognition to the logistics efforts that were easily overlooked in the past. These practical experiences eventually converged into Tianyu Technology’s gamified governance platform that integrates its various business units, which is the “World Tree” system.
At the end of the speech, Liu Zheyun brought the discussion to a theoretical level: "When work, which is originally a "non-Play" matter, is fully driven by game mechanisms, can it still be called real Play?" He quoted Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's views in the famous book "Homo Ludens", defining games as a field that is "voluntary" and has independent rules. He believes that the core test of enterprise gamification is never just driving performance, but how to strike a balance between organizational goals and individual independent will.
Liu Zheyun concluded that gamification is not about making work more interesting, but about reshaping the way individuals participate in organizational tasks so that talents with different characteristics can find their place. When game mechanisms are implemented in the workplace, the real wisdom lies not in training all employees to be players, but in giving everyone the ease and freedom to decide how to participate in the game at any time.
