Four pillars of gamification

Gamification is the main trend in modern media, business processes and public communications. The consulting company Gartner, the world leader in the study of the market of information technologies, for example, confirms this fact by its "Hype cycle-2012" graphic of representation the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. Why exactly this technology has become the focus of the players in the digital age of communication? Is it fortuity or regularity? Is gamification only a marketing instrument to ipulate consumer behaviour, as it seems to its opponents? Maybe gamification is one of responses to the modern socio-cultural needs, according to its apologists? What are the prospects for further development of this phenomenon? These are the questions we tried to answer by means of system analysis. We considered gamification in the context of the general concept of "game", on the one hand. On the other hand, we entered gamification into the motivation system of main communication processes participants, to which gaming technology and mechanics were applied. © IDOSI Publications, 2013.