If you’ve ever wondered how to make your training content feel less like an obligation and more like something people actually want to engage with, this month’s Learning Lab LIVE session was for you. We dove into Arcades®—ELB Learning’s gamification platform designed to enhance the Training Arcade®—and walked through how to build a fully gamified learning experience from scratch, live on screen.
Here’s a recap of everything we covered.
Games vs. Gamification: What’s the Difference?
Before jumping into the build, let’s build a common understanding around a couple of terms that are often used interchangeably, even though they mean different things.
Games (such as those built with the Training Arcade) are individual activities in which learners engage with content, such as trivia or recall challenges. They use game mechanics like points and levels, but they’re self-contained.
Gamification, on the other hand, is broader. It’s the application of game mechanics to non-game experiences. For example, reading a PDF, watching a video, or taking an eLearning course. The goal here is to make everyday learning tasks more engaging by adding rewards, recognition, and a sense of progress. This is where Arcades make things easy.
Is Arcades an LMS?
Another common misconception is that Arcades is meant to replace your corporate learning management system (LMS).
Short answer: No, it is not. This is an important distinction to remember.
A traditional LMS is an enterprise system focused on tracking learner activity for compliance and accountability. It serves the organization’s need to ensure training gets completed and documented.
Arcades, by contrast, is a gamification destination that can live inside or outside your LMS. It’s designed to serve the learner, giving them a space to engage with organization-selected content on their own terms, earn experience points and badges, and see how they stack up on a leaderboard. It’s less about coverage, more about motivation.
Common use cases where Arcades has been used include onboarding programs, multi-day workshops, sales training, and any special learning initiative where you want to drive engagement beyond the basics.
A Tour of the Learner Experience
Here’s what learners see when they log into an Arcade:
- A personal dashboard showing their progress, XP level, and avatar
- A global leaderboard so learners can see where they stand against colleagues
- A daily spin-to-win that incentivizes logging in each day with a chance at bonus XP or prizes
- Achievements/badges that unlock as learners complete specific actions within the platform
- Activity tiles for games, videos, PDFs, SCORM modules, and more
- A journey (learning path) that sequences content across multiple stages, requiring completion of one stage to unlock the next
- A prize shop where learners can redeem points for rewards you’ve configured
The experience feels genuinely game-like—and that’s the point.
Check out this product tour to see it for yourself.
Building an Arcade: The Step-by-Step Process
During the session, we built an onboarding Arcade live. Here’s the condensed version of the build process:
1. Create your Arcade. Give it a name and configure other settings that affect the backend.
2. Add your activities. This is where you pull in your content—Training Arcade games, videos, PDFs, SCORM files, and images. Each activity tile is customizable with its own background color, image, and settings. You can enable or disable individual activities to control what’s visible on the learner dashboard.
3. Set up a journey. Journeys are multi-stage learning paths. You add stages, populate each stage with activities, and learners must complete each stage to unlock the next.
4. Configure competitions. Beyond solo play, Arcades adds two engagement layers: head-to-head challenges that allow you to challenge a colleague to beat your score, and team vs. team competitions, which have teams compete by averaging scores across members.
5. Add prizes and awards. Prizes are an optional feature that you can turn on to be able to give out company-sanctioned incentives for reaching certain milestones. Awards are digital and more flexible, allowing you to reward learners for going above and beyond on a specific activity.
6. Brand your arcade. Swap out the default color scheme for your organization’s brand colors, upload a background image, and add your logo. It takes about 30 seconds and makes a significant difference in how polished the experience feels.
7. Invite your learners. Send invitations directly from the platform, or upload a list. Learners receive an email, create or connect an account, and land right in their Arcade.
Tracking and Analytics
It wouldn’t be a training tool without reporting. Arcades gives administrators a robust analytics dashboard where they can track:
- Individual and aggregate player accuracy
- Activity-level engagement and completion
- Journey and mission stage progress
- Leaderboard standings over time
All of this data can be exported, giving you meaningful insight into how learners are engaging.
Wrapping it Up
Arcades make it very simple for anyone to add gamification to their training program. We didn’t quite get to build the full Arcade in under an hour during the webinar, but finishing it off should only take a few additional minutes. Give it a try for yourself and see the value gamification can add to your training program.
Watch the full session below, and START YOUR FREE TRIAL of Arcades today.
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