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What is gamification?
“The use of game elements and game design techniques in non-
game contexts.”
Examples of gamification:
Nike+ application: longest run, fastest run, compare to previous times, track what you’re
doing, and establish goals and challenges. Success gets trophies or medals. It also has the
ability to compete against friends or gain encouragement. It makes running more like
playing a game.
Zombies Run: Game where you are being chased by zombies. Goal is to get people to take
phone with you and run. Phone tells you that you’re running away from zombies and you
have to run away from them. Adds another dimension to running. More immersive than
Nike+.
Game elements: the toolbox that you can work with.
For example Empires and Allies, a Zynga social game on Facebook:
Points: keeping score
Levels
Resource collection
Quests: find missions for rewards
Avatar: show character
Social graph
These all go towards making up the experience of E and A on Facebook. We can see game
elements in games, but the exact same elements in non-game environments.
Game design techniques: not just a jumble of elements, but designed for the purpose of
being fun.
A way of thinking, not just a set of practices.
Non-game contexts: anything other than the game for its own sake.
When you play a game you play to have fun in the game. However, if you play for an ulterior
objective then this is a non-game context.
Business
Fitness
Health
Education
Why is it important?
1. It’s an emerging business practice: lots of diverse companies are doing it.
2. Games are powerful things: they have a real pull on us.
3. Lessons from psychology, design, strategy and technology.
Brief History
2002. Serious Games initiative: actual games that are played for a non-game purpose.
Games for Change: playing games for social good. For example playing someone in the Arab-
Israeli conflict
2003. Conundra consulting promoted gamification of consumer products. Beginning of
notion.
2005. Bunchball founded which was the first modern gamification platform; they
incorporated points and leaderboard mechanics.
2010. Gamification took off. Gamification became an agreed term, and a presentation by
Jessie Shell on the takeover of gamification.
Jane McGonigal did a TED talk.
Examples and Categories
Three main areas where it adds value
External: to the firm or organisation. Applications for customers, or potential
customers.
o ClubPsych. Website for a show called Psych, to engage people with the show.
Uses game mechanics and elements like avatars, leaderboards, and rewards.
Resulted in major increases in usage and sharing.
Internal: to people within the company already. Notably crowd-sourcing, which is
internal within a community.
o Windows 7 Language Game. Deploying localisation testing overseas
within a game framework. Over 4,000 employees took part for free.
Behaviour change: situations where someone wants to do something, but can’t do
it.
o Speeding boards. Seeing feedback on your speed causes people to slow
down.
o Lottery for speeding. Have a lottery on the speeding camera and feedback
board. Average speeds decreased from 35 to 28 mph when implemented in
Stockholm.
Conclusions
1. Gamification can motivate.
2. Applications in many domains.
3. Encompasses many techniques.
Week 1
What gamification isn’t:
Making everything into a game or an immersive 3D world.
Use of any games in business, like McDonalds Monopoly.
Any games in business, like Solitaire.
Simulations (these are serious games) like in dental or medical training.
Just for marketing or customer engagement.
Just PBLs (points, badges, leaderboards).
Game theory, which is the study of strategic decision making using analytical
processes and mathematical models.
Gamification is:
Listening to what games teach us.
Learning from game design, and areas like psychology, management, marketing and
economics. A way to understand motivation and human behaviour.
Appreciating fun and its power.
Defining gamification academically. http://bit.ly/o6aX1U. Distinguishing between games
and fun, whole and parts.
What is a game then?
So what ties together things like hopscotch, CoD and water polo?
Wittgenstein: in Philosophical Investigations he showed the example of games to point to
the difficulty of using language. He says you can’t define boundaries.
Suits: we can define every possible game based on three concepts:
1. Pre-lusory goal: objective like hitting a ball over a net
2. Constitutive rules: the rules of chess
3. Lusory attitude: means something to the players and a want to follow the rules
A game is voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles.
Huizinga: the game is separated from the real world. The lines around a soccer field
demarcate players and spectators. When you sit down and start to play a video game you
enter the game. When you’re in the magic circle, the game rules matter – you need to be in
the magic circle to be motivated to play.
Games and play
Is there a fundamental difference between games and play?
“Play is the aimless expenditure of exuberant energy.” – Schiller
Play is in a constraining environment.
“A game is a closed formal system that engages players in a structured conflict, and
resolves in an equal outcome.” - Swain and Hoffman
“A game is a series of meaningful choices.” – Sid Meier
Games and play in my life:
Games: coding on CodeCademy, Rugby
Play: surfing YouTube, messing around with scrapbook
Key components
Voluntariness
Learning or problem solving
Balance of structure and exploration
Video Games
We’ve come a long way from the beginnings of Pong.
We now see a huge rate of growth with social games like CityVille – it took 6 weeks to reach
100 million users.
(What games stick in my mind? Sim City from when I was a young kid in Australia. The
unbelievably infinite possibilities of the game and what it could do.)
Changing Impact
Big and evolving industry, which has double the Hollywood box office revenues and
also faster growth.
Online games will outsell retail by 2013.
China is a huge growth market.
Virtual goods are beginning to be worth real money: $7.3 billion globally.
44% of UK/US adults have played a mobile game in the last month.
Mass medium with over 100 million Angry Birds players for over 12 billion minutes a
month.
Mass phenomenon for all social groups. Average player is 30, and 47% are women.
Just a game?
Real world building blocks
E-business 2.0: analytics (data from users), cloud (games in the cloud), mobile
(mobile gaming with huge growth rates).
Social: leveraging social graph
Loyalty programmes: frequent fliers and credit card rewards using gamification
Management and marketing research: customer segmentation and analytics
Games are getting real
The real world is moving into the game (America’s Army, by the US Army).
o The most successful recruiting tool ever.
Games are moving into the real world.
o Gold farming in WoW to turn virtual assets into money.
o Can be as many as 400,000 people making money as gold farmers in China.
Games were always real!
o Monthly sales competition = challenge
o Frequent flier tiers = levels
o Weight watchers = team
o Loyalty card at Nandos = Reward
o American Express platinum = badge
Week 2
2.1 Why Gamify?
Dodgeball example and its problem? Classic social media issue – none of my friends using it
so doesn’t reach critical mass.
Dodgeball has engagement gap.
Not a lot of variety: check-in, or don’t. Less engaging.
No progression. Didn’t get anywhere by virtue of what you did. Checking in for 100th
time was the same as 1st.
Social interaction.
Habit: make it a habit with people; remove thought process from checking in.
FourSquare: Implemented gamification into the check-in process.
Implemented the mayorship idea: most check-ins in location gives mayor badge.
Created friendly competition, and reward to checking in.
Progression, choices and badges (with their own levels).
20 million users, $70 million in VC
2.2 Thinking like a game designer
“Think like a game designer” – resolve to look at issue as a game designer
Don’t need to actually become one! We don’t need the technical skills.
Different to thinking like a gamer. We all play games in one way or another, but gamers
don’t think about the structure due to the immersive nature.
Reflection: three structural elements that make the game successful?
Consider participants as players: words matter. They have subtle implications for the nature
of the relationship.
Players are at the centre of the game, and the world revolves around you.
Players need to feel like they are in control, and have a sense of autonomy.
Players play.
Free motion within a set of constraints.
Our goal is…
1. To get people playing: easy to get into the experience.
2. To keep people playing: how do I create a genuinely engaging experience?
2.3 Design Rules
The Player Journey: the conceptual path they follow through the game which has a
beginning, middle and end.
Onboarding: entering the game and finding out what to do.
Scaffolding: training wheels to overcome complexity that would otherwise create issues.
Pathways to mastery: achieving real skill within the framework of the game.
Plants vs Zombies
Guides: do this, do that
Highlighting: pointing things out
Feedback: good job, well done
Limited options: simplification in the initial stages
Limited monsters
Impossible to fail!
The way the game explains how to do it makes it a lot less complicated and weird. In just a
few minutes, anyone can figure it out.
Balance: Game design involves the game being constantly in balance. Not too hard, not too
easy, players in balance in the game.
Monopoly: keep everything in balance with properties.
When you pass Go you get $200 – this is for balance. If money weren’t continuously
injected, you would quickly run out.
Prevents monopoly and recession.
Create an Experience
TurnTable gamified the experience of listening to music.
It turned live streaming into being in a club with other people that you can rate.
Created an experience richer and deeper than going into iTunes.
2.4 Tapping people’s emotions
What really makes games engaging? (the emotional component)
Games are engaging because they are fun.
“In every job that is to be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The
job’s a game.” – Mary Poppins
Fun isn’t limited to entertainment; we can enjoy it in lots of different contexts.
What kind of things are fun?
Learning something interesting
Solving a problem
#winning
Doing not much in a nice place
Being with people you like
Receiving recognition from other people
Admin and paperwork
Using imagination and being creative
Role playing
Customising stuff
How can we use the different kinds of fun to produce an emotional response?
2.5 Understanding fun
Nicole Lazarro: emotion in games
See white paper and poster. There are four different kinds of fun which appear in game like
contexts. They are not mutually exclusive.
1. Easy fun: fun because it’s casual, nice and easy.
2. Hard fun: challenges, problem solving, completion, overcoming obstacles. Fun
represents accomplishment.
3. People fun: the fun of interacting with others, being on a team, and socialising.
4. Serious fun: doing meaningful things good for people, planet, community, and self.
Might not be something other people find fun or meaningful.
Marc LeBlanc’s 8 types of fun
1. Sensation
2. Narrative
3. Fantasy
4. Challenge
5. Fellowship
6. Discovery
7. Expression
8. Submission
Also see A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster.
Takeaways
1. Fun can (and should) be designed. It’s not just out there, it is created.
2. Fun can be challenging. It isn’t always easy, positive and simple.
3. There are different kinds of fun.
2.6 Finding the fun
Gamify things that might not seem like good candidates.
The funtheory.com
The world’s deepest trash-can. Collected 72kg of rubbish, which was 40kg more than
nearby bins.
Piano stairs. Getting people to go up the stairs instead of the escalator.
Bottle bank arcade. Getting points at the bottle bank.
Important that you fill in your profile fully, but this is boring.
They added the profile completeness bar.
o Not really a game, as it doesn’t have rules and objectives like we consider.
o But it’s a little bit game-like, and just enough so to encourage people in
meaningful ways to fill in their profile bar.
o Profile completeness went up by 20%.
Has game elements like feedback, progress and completion.
Week 3
3.1 Breaking games down
There are loads of different elements within games, just as there are in a house.
Noughts-and-crosses is a really popular game. Let’s think about the game and its elements:
Game board
Players and teams
The tokens (X vs O)
The rules
Competitive game
Turn based
Win and draw states: three symbols in a line is a win.
No progression or scoring: no level 1 or 2, or scoring, you merely win or lose.
The game (the elements, rules, and aesthetics) is created from:
1. The experience (what the player feels): the overall impact of the game.
2. The elements (the bits and pieces): the game
3.2 The Pyramid of Elements
Around the elements is the overall experience; the
whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.
For example, the aesthetics, sound, visual aspects,
and what ties the game together.
The game dynamics are the most high level
conceptual elements in a gamified system: the
hidden structure. (Not the rules, which are game
specific.)
The dynamics include conceptual elements that
provide the framing for the game, such as…
Constraints
Emotions
Narrative: the structure that pulls the game together. This can be explicit or implicit, and
gamification relies on things like consistent graphical experiences.
Progression: giving the player a sense of improvement or progression.
The game mechanics move the game action forward.
Challenges
Chance
Competition
Cooperation
Feedback
Resource acquisitions
Rewards
Transactions
Turns
Win states
The game components are specific initiations.
Achievements
Avatars: character representation
Badges: achievement representation
Boss fights: high level monster
Collections
Combat
Content unlocking
Gifting
Leaderboards: score lists
Levels
Points
Quests: do things for reward
Social graphs: seeing friends
Teams
Virtual goods
Dynamics
Mechanics
Components
Marc LeBlanc created the MDA framework for understand games: Mechanics, Dynamics and
Aesthetics. See: MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.
Lessons to take from the Pyramid
Variety of options in implementing a gamified system
Lower level implementations tend to rely on higher level concepts in the pyramid.
3.3 The PBL Triad
Some game elements are more common than others, and these shape gamification.
Points
Badges
Leaderboard
Virtually every standard gamification implementation uses PBLs – they serve a variety of
different functions, and more than expected. Samsung Nation has PBL at the core. But, they
are not everything.
Points
Score: relative position of players
Determine win states
Connect to rewards: 5000 points to get a reward (Air Miles?)
Provide feedback: good or bad, relative or objective
Display progress: progress dynamic
Data for the game designer: used to enhance game or system
Fungible: universal currency with other points
Badges
Representations of achievement to self and others
Flexibility of badges: open canvas for rewarding anything
Style: they are graphical, and can be styled and designed
Signalling importance: shows what’s important and significant in the game
Credentials: just like diplomas
Collections: wish to collect badges, adds extra structure
Social display: status symbols
Mozilla Open Badge framework: informal learning that doesn’t fit into the traditional notion
of college.
Leaderboards
Ranking: within the competition
Personalised leaderboard: position-relative or friend-relative
Can they actually demotivate people? Can make people give up as it focuses on zero-sum
competitive challenge.
3.4 The Limitations of Elements
The elements are only part of what you need to know. Throwing elements onto a business
process doesn’t make it fun and engaging.
The elements are not the game.
Don’t overemphasis reward. Not all rewards are fun; not all fun is rewarding.
Generic site – users don’t differentiate, and get burned out with others.
Google News gamified reading news. They added badges for subject areas. They argue…
Keeps track of reading for self and friends
Data for self and friends
But these aren’t massively compelling reasons. The badges also have no reward or
achievement.
What about…
Meaningful choices
Puzzles: thought, creativity?
Mastery: any pathway to confidence/expert status? Staircase for its own sake?
Community: social interactions are powerful in games
3.5 Interview with Bing Gordon: ex-Electronic Arts executive
1. Why should CEOs know about gamification?
(a) The new normal for people born after 1971, who are used to games and their
interfaces. You need to understand the lens they see the world through. (b) A lot of game
design principles underscore a lot of communication and motivation theory. As a CEO
the job is to inspire and communicate with employees, and game design brings useful
stuff to the table. It’s to maximise effectiveness with customers and workers. (c) The
importance of instant feedback.
2. Where should we go to figure out gamification rules?
No books on game principles per se; there are some books on golf. Blogs and thinking of
interaction designers. The easiest way is to play a great game. The things working in
the best games are the best principles.
3. What do people consistently misunderstand about gamification?
(a) The primary motivation of games is winning competition, whereas cooperation
trumps competition 3:1. (b) High score listing/ranking is a de-motivator, not a motivator.
You only get motivated 90% to success.
4. Is gamification just a fad?
The ups and down of businesses are a fad; the Zynga stock drop after IPO is just an
example of this. This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. Gamification is a
fun way to apply communication theory, which has been relevant since Adam and Eve.
5. Where’s the key to differentiation if gamification becomes the new normal?
The digital generation believes in being the best version of yourself in a peer-to-peer
world that isn’t hierarchical.
Week 5: Motivation and Psychology
5.1 Motivational Design
Psychology is central to what makes gamification effective, specifically motivation. This is
what makes you do something versus something else.
Different things motivate different people: money (reward) is a common reason. However,
lots of people do things for reasons other than reward: sports, for example.
MLB.com Badges
You get badges if certain things happen when you’re watching the game. Some comments
from hard-core baseball fans:
“I was obsessed with MLB.com’s ‘badges’, this curious sidebar diversion…”
“I felt like a moth to a flame”
“Collecting virtual items with no observable purpose and no ultimate reward or benefit
does seem like an appropriate pastime for a blog such as ours.”
The badges had a motivating effect. This got people interested, it seems. However, how many
people were actually engaged?
Motivation is complicated
There’s no answer that says what way to motivate people is. In gamification we need to be
aware of lots of them.
For example: Apple Stores
How to motivate people to buy computers? What would motivate people to buy more
computers in a retail store? Make it quick, easy, and simple? Along came the Apple store…
People need to come in and browse. They need to be able to use them. We need to
create a lounge experience. There will be a lot of helpful people who aren’t necessarily
sales staff. We’ll create a place you want to linger.
Apple store is the highest grossing retail chain in the United States.
5.2 Behaviourism
In behaviourism, what’s inside someone’s head is off-limits. We can test what goes into
someone’s mind, and what comes out. It’s had success, but it has real limitations.
There is a stimulus: something gets done from the outside.
This causes a response: we see behaviour in response to the stimulus.
The stimulus is linked to the response: dogs salivating on a bell ring (Classical
conditioning/Ivan Pavlov)
There is also operant conditioning where the stimulus and response generates learning
(Skinner and rat experiments).
Over time, behaviourism lost sway for a number of reasons. However, in cases people will
indeed respond to stimuli and learn.
Behavioural economics
This is a new branch of economics, but has the same approach of thinking about what people
do, rather than why they do it.
Let’s look at what people do, not theory. People make “mistakes” consistently.
Loss aversion. People are more afraid of losing $100 than of winning $100.
Power of defaults. Success of opt-out rather than opt-in donor registers.
Confirmation bias.
Takeaways from behaviourism
Observation: look at what people do.
Feedback loops: feedback produces a response which can motivate behaviour.
Reinforcement: learning occurs by reinforcing stimuli.
5.2 Behaviourism linking to Gamification
Watch what people do: people don’t always behave in the way you might think.
Importance of feedback: when you do something, you get points.
o LinkedIn profile completeness bar. Where you are and how to get to the next step.
Consequences create results through conditioning. People learn to associate results from
what happens.
o Farmville crops withering. Getting people to, as a habit, check in to Farmville and
water their crops.
o MLB.com badges. Action results in a badge, and they learn how to feed good.
However, rewards are just on type of game mechanic. However, a lot of components are
rewards: achievements, badges, collections, content unblocking…
The Dopamine System
Why do people talk about addiction with something that has no tangible value? It relates to
the structure in the brain associated with pleasure and learning.
The brain releases and responds to dopamine, giving a sense of pleasure.
Behavioural gamification creates rewards that maximise engagement based on dopamine
release and the addictive quality.
5.3 Reward Structures
Many different things can be rewarded. FourSquare rewards for checking in, being part of a
swarm, being in a bar, etc.
There are different categories of rewards.
Cognitive Evaluation Theory
Tangible/intangible rewards: physical things versus the non-real things. A badge is
intangible, but money is tangible. A boy scout patch is a tangible reward, a “well done” is
intangible.
Expected/unexpected rewards: sometimes we know it’s coming, and sometimes it’s a
surprise. Expected rewards aren’t so cool, but a lot of things in gamification are expected.
Contingency
o Task non-contingent: not having to do anything
o Engagement-contingent: reward when you do something
o Completion-contingent: reward when you finish something
o Performance-contingent: reward when you finish something to a certain standard
There is a lot of complexity that can go into reward design.
5.5 Reward Schedules
Continuous rewards: you get a reward each time you complete an action.
o Not particularly interesting. At some point it will cease to reward, as it is
automatic.
Fixed ratio: if the activity happens a number of times you get the reward, e.g. you get an
award the 1st time, 3rd time, 5th, 7th time, 9th time.
Fixed interval: after a fixed number of action completions, e.g. every 3 units.
o Fixed rewards have a limited value, as the brain picks up on the schedule.
Variable rewards: no fixed schedule.
o Most interesting for gamification, as our brains love surprises.
Examples of gamification rewards
Quest: time on site. Fixed interval as you get it after a certain time.
Merit: site visits. Fixed ratio as it happens every certain number of times.
Variable rewards
We tend to respond powerfully to variable schedule rewards. There are different ways that
these can be variable.
Surprise: don’t know they’re coming
Competitive/non-competitive: based on competition (or not)
Certain/uncertain: if you know a reward is contingent on something, or whether there is
a level of chance involved. Codecademy badges are certain, MLB.com badges are
uncertain.
Variable Schedule Reward Machine: The Slot Machine
This is about tangible rewards which are variable. An effective slot machine is tuned so that
it is random, but the reward comes just enough so you don’t give up.
Week 6
6.1 Limitations of Behaviourism
What does it leave out? A lot.
Why do people slow down for the speed display? People see their speed and through
feedback… But is it just them becoming aware? Is it avoiding potential punishment? It’s not
about changing behaviour and learning, it’s getting caught.
Why does the lottery work? Well, people like lotteries, so let’s do them everywhere. But this
leaves a lot out – what is it about the lottery that is motivating? We have to go beyond
behaviourism, because we’re dealing with what people think and feel.
Operant conditioning fell out of favour in Psychology.
You can tend to think of people as a black box, and not as a player. The focus on reward has
issues.
6.2 Dangers of Behaviourism
Potential for manipulation. Slot machines are a great thing for casinos, but not good for
gambling addiction. If we design systems optimised to addict, we shouldn’t do so
ethically.
Hedonic treadmill. Once you start focussing on rewards for pleasure, you have to keep
doing it as people will learn to only respond to reward. Won’t systematically change
things. Requires constant reward.
o Monkey experiment with tone before variable grape juice reward. Dopamine
began to be released on tone, not on grape juice.
o -> You need to be anticipating rewards to get dopamine hit.
Overemphasis on Status. Gamification leverages a love of status, such as Frequent Fliers,
where you have a high status as you’re at the top of the status. But not everyone
constantly does stuff for status.
6.3 Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation
We need to start distinguishing between different types of reward and motivation.
Intrinsic rewards: doing something for its
own sake
Doing the thing itself is fun, engaging or
rewarding.
“I love just sitting on a beach and taking
it all in” – I want to do this thing for the
sake of doing it.
Extrinsic rewards: doing something for a
reason other than itself
It’s about the reward, not the thing itself.
SAPS Reward Categories: Zichermann
Status: it will make us valued and respected by people.
Access: access to something other people don’t have.
Power: able to do things that others can’t do.
Stuff: things you get in response to actions.
Two claims:
1. Do higher up things first, as it’s cheaper. Status has no real value. Rank ordered in terms
of companies designing systems.
2. Rank ordered in how powerful motivators these things are.
Where do gamification rewards fit within the system? Are they intrinsic or extrinsic?
6.4 How rewards can demotivate?
Rewards acting as extrinsic motivators can crowd out the intrinsic motivators. The result is a
decrease in motivation: the over-justification effect.
The reward substitutes for the intrinsic motivation.
Drawing: kids were given rewards for drawing. The idea changed from being to draw for
nothing, to draw for reward. Going back to drawing for fun was difficult for the
previously intrinsically motivated kids.
Day care pickup: intrinsic motivation for picking up kids on time is exchanged for
economic reward.
Over-justification studies generally focus on interesting tasks.
Reward types matter:
o Tangible types are at the greatest risk of replacing intrinsic motivation.
o Unexpected rewards have little chance of replacing intrinsic motivation.
o Performance-contingent rewards can go both ways.
6.5 Self-Determination Theory
People aren’t necessarily motivated by rewards. Intrinsic motivation is more powerful.
Spectrum of motivational types (less motivation -> more motivation)
1. Amotivation. Complete indifference
2. Extrinsic motivation.
a. External regulation. Only thing motivating you is someone else telling you to do
something. No “you” in doing this, but purely for external cause.
b. Introjection. Taking external motivators and making them our own, for example
with status. I’m taking other people’s view and using it for myself.
c. Identification. Identifying with something and its goals, but not necessarily
enjoying it. For example, using maths in later life.
d. Integration. Complete internal alignment between my goals and the thing I’m
going to do.
3. Intrinsic motivation. No reason other than the intrinsic reward. Worthwhile and
motivating in itself.
The motivation spectrum
What does it take to make something intrinsically motivating? According to self-
determination theory there are three factors.
Competence. Sense of ability and accomplishment within the activity.
Autonomy. Being in control, making the choices, without external influence.
Relatedness. Activity is connected to something beyond yourself.
Fitocracy: using gamification to intrinsically motivate people to exercise.
Using a spectrum of motivational types to intrinsically motivate - showing competence:
“Congratulations! You earned…”
581 points
Badge
Level up
“You’re now Level 3, awesome!
“Share your workout to friends”
Using autonomy:
Choose your own interests by custom building challenges – you are in control of
experience.
Quests are things you can take on yourself, but have different points levels.
Relatedness:
Strong social element
“Better with friends”
“Meet other fitocrats”
“Groups we think you’ll like”
This is not just about you alone, but is about a community activity: bigger than you.
Ideally gamification should be based on an attempt to appeal to intrinsic motivation.
Week 7: Gamification Design Framework
(A design framework to apply gamification concepts)
7.1 The Design Process
What actually is design? Design is a general approach to addressing challenges.
Design Thinking: this should be a process all business engages in for any process, and it’s
worth understanding the major principles in order to apply them to gamification.
Purposive. It has a goal/objective, and everything in the process has to tie into that
purpose. The design needs to constantly refer back to the goal.
Human centred. It is designed around real people who are players in the game.
Everything should be based on the person, and we need to think about the experience.
Balance of analytical & creative. We need to be creative and analytical in balance. You
can’t reduce some things to a formula. Just analytics will result in a dry and informal
process, missing opportunities for creativity and innovation that lie outside the formal.
o Abductive reasoning. Inference from insufficient information. Making an
intuitive leap that is based on a foundation of knowledge.
Iterative. It inherently expects we won’t get it right the first time. We try, fail, learn and
try again. Over time we improve through the process, beginning with prototyping that
gives the skeleton of the game play. We playtest, which gives a sense of the structural
elements of the game to real people.
These are some basic guidelines for design as a process. For gamification, a 6 step process
has been developed for implementing gamified systems: the D6.
1. DEFINE business objectives. What is this system designed to accomplish? What are
its goals?
2. DELINEATE target behaviours. What do we want people to do?
3. DESCRIBE your players. Human centric, player centric design is important. Who is
going to be using this? What are they like? How can the system respond to different
types of players?
4. DEVISE activity loops. Structure the core micro and macro game play aspects.
5. DON’T forget the fun.
6. DEPLOY the appropriate tools. Use the right elements and structures and put them
in place.
7.2 Objectives and Behaviours: the first 2 steps
Business Objectives
The goals for the gamified system: what is this for? Learn to code in JavaScript
(Codecademy), complete online courses (Coursera). Let’s look at FourSquare.
Social sharing. Habit formation for the mass of users.
Influencer marketing. If you’re a mayor you get vouchers or deals, as you may be an
influencer because you clearly frequent a space a lot.
How do we do this?
1. Make a list and rank it – include all possible objectives.
2. Eliminate means to ends. Collecting badges isn’t an objective, normally. Get rid of
stepping stones that aren’t business objectives.
3. Justify objectives.
Target Behaviours: what should the customer do?
Specific to company and situation.
Success metrics. What are the “win states” for achieving the goals of the system? What
will let us know we have achieved the goals?
Analytics. What are the ways of measuring the path towards the success metrics?
o DAU/MAU. Daily average users over monthly average users, which is a ratio.
What is the average number of people on your site on any given day? How does
this compare to how many people come back? For example, 2 million daily
average / 10 million monthly average = 20%. This ratio shows us how engaging
the site is. The closer to one, the more engaging the site.
o Virality. People referring friends to use the site. The rate at which people tell
other people who then come to the site.
o Volume of activity. How much activity is happening? How many badges are won?
How many points are earned? Shows level of engagement with the site, and what
people are doing.
7.3 Players
Who are these people? Not just what they look like in the game, but what do we know about
the players?
Standard demographics: age groups, location, income…
Psychographics: their behaviour, what they like buying and doing.
Motivators? What motivates people.
We can look at the different kinds of players in a system.
Bartle MMOG Player Type Model
Richard Bartle, University of Essex, came up with this when he was studying early MMOG.
He wasn’t trying to make general statements, but his framework has proven to be very
durable. But, it must be taken with a grain of salt.
Achievers: acting on the world. Want recognition, and want to do something in the
game world and therefore gain recognition.
Explorers: interacting with the world. Seeing what happens when you do stuff, and
push on the limits of the game “just because it’s there” (Edmund Hilary).
Socialisers: players who interact with others. Being in teams, talking and chatting
with others, and the social experience is more important than achievements that
result.
Killers: acting with other people. Want to stomp on other people, or impose
themselves on others. Can be healing others, or killing others.]
This doesn’t mean we are all born into one of these quadrants. We are probably in all of
these, and we move back and forth from all of them.
We don’t need to segment players, just understand how they might respond to various
structures.
7.4 Activity Loops
A game has loops just as a computer program does. We will look at two kinds of activity
loops which we call: engagement loops (micro-level) and progression loops (macro-level).
Engagement Loop: the process of motivators
appearing, someone taking an action (or not),
and then getting feedback. This then becomes
a motivator.
We need to structure the loop in gamification
design. A well designed system keeps this loop
moving.
Progression Loops: a look at the structure of
what happens to users in the site. For example,
there are a series of small challenges as a part
of a larger challenge.
For example: Codecademy breaks up the Blackjack game into smaller parts to complete in
order to build the program. This is start to finish, through intermediates, to give the user a
sense of ease in individual steps, and sweep and potential of motivational big step.
The player’s evolution in the game can be seen as rising and falling. It begins with
onboarding, then alternating climbing and rest continue. Over time, tremendous gains
towards mastery have been done.
A well designed game and gamification system has well-structured engagement loops to
ensure feedback goes to motivation, and progression loops that allow people to move from
beginner to mastery.
7.5 Fun and Tools
Motivation
Action
Feedback
A lot of gamified systems forget the fun, especially if it’s a PBL system where you focus on
behaviourist loops. It’s easy to forget one of the key points is that it must be game like.
We often have to ask ourselves, is this fun? Is this engaging? Fun is important.
PBLs are not necessarily un-fun. The challenge is making sure these things are deployed in a
way that unleashes some of the versions of fun we talked about.
Samsung Nation: “Have fun discovering everything Samsung.com has to offer”. Why is this
something exciting? If the activity underlying it isn’t fun and engaging, then you’re going to
have issues. But fun can be anywhere.
LinkedIn progress bar: Fun in feedback, knowing you only have a bit more to get to the next
level. Not life-changing fun, just amusement and engagement.
Protein Folding: you get points for finding the best folding patterns of proteins. As a result,
several serious breakthroughs have resulted in medical science.
The final step in the design process is to deploy. The key is to use the right tools.
There is a rich palate that a designer can work with. PBL examples can be successful, but
there are a lot more things beyond that which are possible.
Once all the right questions have been asked, we now need to think about the different
options and choose the ones best suited to the challenge at hand.
Week 8: Design Choices
8.1 Taking Stock
Let’s take stock at a high level on what gamification is. There are two different kinds of
gamification. Both are true examples, but they are very different models.
Is a slot machine a game?
No. There is no sense of meaningful choices, or sense of play. You just pull the handle,
and it gives you money or not, based on random determination. Fundamentally, it’s like
flipping a coin.
Yes. A lot of gamification looks like a slot machine. There’s surprise, trying to find a
pattern, randomness, engagement loops, and people find stuff exciting about it. It can be
called a game of chance.
There are two different things going on when we use the term gamification.
Doing. Gamification is about doing things using games and game structures.
o Marketing and economics. Disciplines about measuring behaviour and having
structures.
o Incentives.
o Satisfying needs.
o Game elements (inductive). Building up from the bottom.
o Status.
o PBLs.
o Rewards.
o Making users do things. Things they want to do on their own but don’t get. Giving
motivational help to move people along a path.
Feeling. Gamification is about how you feel about doing something.
o Game design and cognitive psychology. What’s going on that makes someone
interested in something.
o Experiences. What you encounter inside.
o Fun. More than meeting basic needs, there is something experiencial and
indivisible.
o Game thinking (deductive). Starting big and going down.
o Meaning.
o Puzzles. Learning and challenges, but involve more than PBL.
o Progression. Mastery, competence, and more about the journey than the reward.
o Making players awesome. Figuring out what it is that helps someone achieve full
potential. More focused on user goals than external goals.
Both perspectives are valuable. Be aware of the two approaches, and where they come
together and where they diverge.
8.2 Is Gamification right for me?
There are four questions to ask.
1. Motivation: Where would you derive value from encouraging behaviour? If motivation
matters, gamification is a good thing in the situation.
Motivation is important in situations that involve deep creativity, unique skills, connections,
or teamwork – not just rote-work, but something complex and deep. However, it’s also
important where the task at hand seems dull, boring or repetitive. Motivation here has a lot
of impact.
2. Meaningful Choices: Are the tasks involved potentially sufficiently interesting? Intrinsic
motivation and self-determination give us the idea of autonomy.
3. Structure: Can we gamify the system by using rules or algorithms? Does this lend itself to a
digital system that encodes the rules to the problem set? It can’t be vague, subjective, or
unclear.
4. Potential conflicts: What other motivational structures are there? Can we avoid tension
with these? Salary is the most basic of these motivations; others are the desire to not be fired.
When applying to learning, we need to think about conflict with grading. Lee Sheldon
gamified his courses, and gave people points and levels. This has to be designed around
existing incentives, so it couldn’t be done alongside normal letter grading.
8.3 Designing for the Collective Good
StackOverflow is a site for programmers, which revolves around questions and answers from
a community. How do you get people to answer others people’s questions about coding?
StackOverflow did that; the site has over 2 million users, with 5000 questions per day.
“The field of programming is almost by definition one of constant learning. Programming
is supposed to be fun…”
Know your players. Understand the community involved in the activity. What’s meaningful is
different in different communities. FourSquare badges are colourful, fun, graphical, whereas
StackOverflow badges are very different. It’s about numbers and information, not clutter.
The three categories are gold, silver and bronze.
The system is designed to incentivise pro-social behaviour and to help the group.
“The design of StackOverflow makes helping your fellow programmers the most effective
way to ‘win’…”
Points in the system are called reputation. These are gained from others, who vote up your
questions and answers. There is exchange and gifting, both very social things.
“So then the problem becomes how do you encourage groups to do what’s best for the world
rather than their own specific, selfish needs?”
Game elements pull against the tendency for groups to collapse into selfishness.
Points give you more abilities, moving you towards the state of moderator, not more access.
Badges are about doing things that are good for the site: vote 100 times, edit 500 posts, etc.
This is all to incentivise things that are in the interest of the group, not the individual.
“All the gaming elements are there in service of a higher purpose… I believe it ultimately
helps me become more knowledgeable and a better communicator while also improving the
very fabric of the web for everyone.”
Try to find ways to have the gamification elements push towards the greater good, and this
will more likely result in a deep and enduring gamified system.
8.4 Designing for happiness
Positive psychology: developed by Martin Seligman (U. Penn), which is to do with what
makes people happy and fulfilled. How people feel better about themselves, as opposed to
what happens when something goes wrong.
There are five aspects for being a fulfilled, successful individual: flourishing. Gamification
has an opportunity to tap into these.
Positive emotions
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Achievement
Flow is the idea of a state where we are engaged in what we’re doing to the extent that we
lose ourselves in it, and are completely engaged to the best of our abilities. This occurs as
often in work as it does in play.
It’s not something that can be made to happen, but occurs organically when an activity has
certain characteristics.
Too difficult activities cause anxiety.
Too easy activities cause boredom.
In the middle is the flow channel, where we have an activity that is not too easy, not
too hard, especially when the difficulty is variable.
There are other conditions.
Clear goals.
Balance between perceived challenged and perceived skills. Emphasis on perceives –
it feels like it’s just hard enough. It’s about how you feel, not objective difficulty.
Clear and immediate feedback. This is feedback allowing us to get to the point where
you are completely immersed.
8.5 Amy Jo Kim
Author and workshop organiser on gamification and applied game design.
What’s with the current gamification phenomenon?
It’s a wave of interest in gaming because of a lot of reasons. Gamification as a word may go
away, and the toolkit will be implemented as a part of normal stuff, just as AI is now.
Gamification will be many different techniques inspired by games. The wave will grow bigger
to become an integral part.
Player types – her perspective
Taking Bartle’s model and applying it everywhere is silly. There are a lot of systems, but they
are for utility and not a descriptor of the be all and end all. It’s an appropriate model for
some types, but they don’t work a lot of the time in non-MMOG situations.
Amy Jo Kim’s Social Engagement Verbs (inspired by Bartle’s player types)
Explore: right out of Bartle
Compete: similar to achievers,
but more specific.
Collaborating: very much what
he calls socialisers, but with a
game perspective. If you try to
choose what game mechanics
and strategy to apply –this is
really useful.
Express: self-expression is a
huge driver in social media.
This is a primary player type –
people who play with avatars,
etc.
The following are specific words
built around these. We can map out
the core actions in the product
against the chart, and see where
they fall. Then map this against who we’re trying to reach.
If we’re talking all male sales staff, they’re comfortable with competition. However, middle-
aged mothers would be suited to collaboration.
Take Bartle as a starting point, and adapt for your world.
What’s the opportunities around the idea of collaboration as opposed to competition?
“Game: a system in which players engage in an artifical conflict, defined by rules, that
results in a quantifiable outcome”. – Rules of Play
This defines zero-sum games very well: games where we are opponents. I win, and you lose.
Head-to-head battles: boxing
War simulations: chess
Rank-ordered competitions: Olympic sports
Gambling: poker (you play against the house)
But this definition doesn’t work for a lot of games. What about the Sims? There’s no
quantifiable outcome…
“Game: a structured experience with rules and goals that’s fun to play” – Engagement
Design
This is defining zero-sum games, where we are partners: it’s either win-win or lose-lose.
Playground games: skipping
Party games: draw something
Martial arts
Charity walk: we’re all winning together
Mistakes people make when leaving social media/game design and coming into gamification
Funnels and engagement loops are familiar to web people, as is loyalty. They are not familiar
with the fact that the gaming experience changes over time; the player journey necessitates
different things to respond to people’s increasing commitment and skill.
Sustainable gamification has the experience evolving over time. The three stages of newbie,
regular and expert allow you to think about the first day or week, then two months in, and
then the expert, or the elder. What will the most skilful players be able to do? How are they
engaged? Think about engagement loops at all stages of the cycle to drive retention
throughout.
Week 9: Enterprise Gamification
9.1 Enterprise Applications
We now look at internal applications of gamification: specifically gamification in large
business.
Sometimes this is done consciously, or unconsciously. Constellation Research talked to 50
early adopters, and found a wide variety of different uses.
Intranet (or extranet) Engagement
Gamification here works in the same way as an external forum. Game elements encourage
people to contribute, respond, and improve just as they do in StackOverflow.
- SAP external network gamified to enhance forum quality.
Productivity Enhancement
This is helping people to do their jobs. Gamification can provide feedback and motivation
that is helpful to employees improving their job performance.
- Call centres encourage agents to deal with calls quickly and well.
- Agent screens have leaderboard, levels, customer satisfaction numbers, and
achievements all focussed on improving performance, as well as highlighting elements
aesthetically.
- This data is then monitored as KPIs by management.
- Is this always helpful? Can it be negative?
Efficiency Enhancement
Efficiency is about making people work better by doing everything efficiently. Email is a good
example, as people do it all the time as a secondary responsibility. Gamification can improve
the process efficiency.
- Timer showing email time, progress bar for time, and point system. You get points for
quickly dealing with email; this incentivises email efficiency.
- Creating virtual currency around email – sending has a cost.
Knowledge Management
Deloitte WhoWhatWhere: encourage consultants to find out more about each other.
Consulting firms have people all over the world with lots of knowledge, who don’t know
about each other. Gamification encourages people to share this information.
Human Resources
Hiring: identifying the best candidates
Onboarding: getting people going early on
Acculturation: getting people engaged in enterprise culture and reinforcing it
Corporate training: using game mechanics to encourage learning
Employee recognition: informal employee rewards
T&E: travel and entertainment – people get a fixed amount of budget, and not using the
full amount means you can do stuff with it. Encourages efficiency with expenses.
Innovation
DWP’s Idea Street is a government initiative which is an idea marketplace that people can
come up with. People can buy and sell shares in those ideas, and they created a stock market
style marketplace. DWP generated a large number of good ideas and therefore delivering
better service.
Serious Games
Siemens created PlankVille, which is a manufacturing plant operation simulation, which can
help people understand how to be more effective in plant management.
9.2 Workplace Motivations
What motivates people at work? Standard rewards: pay, bonuses, praise, responsibility…
These are almost entirely extrinsic motivators, designed as compensation. So it can’t be the
whole story.
Skill Development
This could be motivated by extrinsic rewards (better salary, etc), but can also be intrinsic.
LiveOps creates virtual call centres using applications, and has lots of part-time staff. These
are often people to develop new skills, so they built their own gamified site but it’s geared
towards skill development. This is “we want to help you learn how to be better at the job”.
Information
Objective Logistics has gamified the restaurant industry, and can track restaurant waiters
and provide feedback to employees (and company) via metrics like ranking and satisfaction.
Corporate Citizenship
There are things done in a company that aren’t about the job. A good example is the
Microsoft Language Quality game. Thousands of employees did this voluntarily. A lot of the
motivation was because they were doing things that were better for the company.
Fun
Zappos (online retailer) uses the face game to help you recognise fellow employees by name.
9.3 The Game vs The Job
Where is the dividing line between the game and the job? The players might be more
focussed on the game than the job; the game may push them one way and the job another,
which leads to problems.
Imagine a call centre gamifies a system using PBLs. If you get done with a call within 30
seconds you get 10 points, and completing n calls in an hour gives you more points. People
will play the game instead of doing a good job.
Instead, a structure that gives points for customer satisfaction and streaks will encourage
optimisation on satisfaction.
We need to gamify based on business goals.
Citizenship Behaviours
Situations where people will do good things at work to be nice to colleagues/company.
Altruism
Conscientiousness
Civic virtue: part of a larger community
Common courtesy
Sportsmanship
These can be tapped into for the benefit of the company. The language quality game tapped
into the desire to make Windows a quality product.
Applying citizenship
Where do productivity games work well?
Core skills Unique skills Future skills In-role (2) Citizenship (1)
1. Core roles involving citizenship. A skill that everyone has (speaking your own language)
but doing something to do with corporate citizenship.
2. In role responsibilities with future skills. Training and improving behaviour.
There are two big gamification applications to the workplace. One is groups (communities
and trying to get mass participation) and the other is individuals (improving skills or
performance).
Enterprise gamification requires close attention to nature of the game and how this matches
up to the workplace.
9.4 Playbor
Is the game truly voluntary? Playbor is the combination of play and labour. Is it a game or
work? Games surely have to be voluntary? Being forced to do something isn’t so fun.
Target checkout clerks get a rating of Green, Yellow or Red, and this shows up with scores on
the checkout. Is this a game for the cashiers? Or is this a private big brother, and has nothing
to do with fun, voluntariness. Where are the game aspects in that?
The Disney “electronic whip” is a leaderboard system for laundry workers. Workers don’t like
it all, as it is seen as standing over them and punishing them for not working really hard.
How can gamified systems be designed to promote beneficial elements but not to demoralise
workers and have negative effects?
The system needs to be perceived as voluntary and transparent.
What are the elements deployed? Pure ranking and scoring is a terrible way to
promote engagement and collaboration in favour to competition.
9.5 Daniel Debow
Daniel Debow now works for Salesforce Rypple.
Rypple amplifies behaviour. It focuses on goal settings, coaching, recognition, and forms an
easy way to gather feedback. It’s a modern approach to social performance management.
Why is gamification valuable?
Rypple never set out to build a game, even though they hired game designers. They wanted
to design a great experience, and thinking about what people engage with.
Game designers were careful not to be putting game mechanics all over stuff. If all it takes to
make a game successful is putting game mechanics in, then all games would be successful.
Most games fail because the underlying game play isn’t rewarding.
How do you find things that are intrinsically rewarding?
Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes not. Look at data and behaviour. Then try things!
Rypple allows people to ask for feedback, and it’s not a sustained behaviour. People like
to give feedback, but how do you design it so people don’t feel bad about the feedback
they get.
People would send emails to each other, have meetings, or get physical badges. People
value the meetings more than others: the fact that peers say that what you did was
important.
You don’t know things until you try.
What’s different about enterprise application versus marketing?
(1) Rewards often drive behaviour. One of the most common gamified rewards in spreading a
product is “introduce your friend”: they get $10 and so do you. This was used by DropBox
and PayPal. Rypple wanted to do this inside an organisation.
Because it was free, managers could use it without going through HR. They used the same
principles, as customers were so valuable. This should make it spread like crazy, but it made
people use it less. It was because people felt uncomfortable endorsing a product for money.
(2) The willingness to engage in seemingly frivolous behaviour is very much dictated by
organisational culture. The ability to design badges depends on this. People also moderate
their behaviour because they know people are watching. They don’t want to engage in
behaviour that deviates from corporate culture.
Can these things work in traditional companies?
1. Social companies are very driven and business focussed companies. It’s a workplace that
isn’t a mid-West industrial company, but there are still similarities.
2. Lots of customers have less famous names that aren’t Facebook.
3. Some of the most established companies are interested as they have the same problem,
and want a solution that resonates with the current workforce.
4. It’s not like people don’t play games at work already. At Goldman Sachs people get deal
toys – it’s basically a badge. Job titles and roles are partly a status symbol. Levelling
rewards like corner offices and parking spots.
How do you avoid the mechanics making things cut-throat?
There are a few techniques.
1. Be empirical. See what happens! We have theories about how people behave, but they are
often empirically wrong.
2. Get people who have actually designed games involved in the problem. Real context and
real designers, not just businessmen.
3. Think of gamification as an amplification tool.
Week 10: Social Impact & Behaviour Change
10.1 Gamification for Good?
Can gamification make the world a better place and improve people’s lives? Well obviously.
Gamification is a motivational tool, and it’s near irrelevant what it motivates people to do.
Games produce positive energy, sociability, and focus. There is a lot of potential good in
making things more game-like. Purely trying to find fun and engagement in any task may
have social value.
What about a context where the application is deliberately focussed on beneficial impact?
Inherent relatedness (one of the three components of intrinsic motivation): being part of
something bigger than the individual.
o Not always simple to unlock this power.
o We know about things we should do, but we most often don’t.
o We need to activate this sense of relatedness.
Gamification is about rewards for doing good: does gamification put a premium on doing
something for the short term? Can we crowd out or over-justify the things we would do
for philanthropic reasons?
Behaviour change: most examples here are about changing people’s behaviour.
10.2 Social Good Applications
Let’s think about the potential we have and the different types of approaches.
Health and Wellness
Zamzee: Hope Laps is a non-profit that uses games and gamification for health reasons. This
is a pedometer that measures physical fitness, in a similar way to Nike+. This is interesting
because it is targeted at low-income teenagers. Activity levels are tracked and keyed with
game elements, which include points, badges, levels, and rewards. This produces real results.
SuperBetter: this is about improving people’s lives and overcoming issues. The game was
created to motivate Jane McGonnagal to overcome concussion and improve her situation.
Classic elements use quests, allies, power-ups, and also bad guys. An example of helping
people get and do better.
Energy and Environment
oPower: you see feedback on how you are doing with your energy consumption. You also see
relational data, which is related to other people nationwide and also your neighbours. The
social dimension (peer pressure) is very powerful to get people to engage in new behaviours.
Goals, leaderboards, and quests are elements involved.
Recycle Bank: gamified system of rewards to encourage people to recycle. These can be
redeemed for rewards. This is a standard gamification that has been widely implemented.
Education (student motivation is a massive challenge)
Quest to Learn: an entire school that is structured around games.
Gamifying existing systems by changing the way we mark – see The Multiplayer
Classroom which deals with High School and Higher Education.
Gamifying the credentialing function: traditionally done by diplomas and
standardised tests. Mozilla foundation’s open badge initiative is a way to use game
elements as a way of showcasing skills and accomplishments.
Government
Governments can act as enterprise, so this makes sense for departments just as anyone else.
Government provides customer service by interacting with citizens.
Government can use gamification to promote its policies. The White House commissioned a
project looking at how games and game elements can promote policy goals. Twenty-three
government agencies attended a meeting to discuss this.
10.3 Social Impact Techniques
CAPRI (Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives)
System to prevent congestion at peak times around a University campus.
Standard feedback & reward approach: levels and monetary rewards with credits.
Monitoring is automating: GPS smartphone tracking negates need for self-reporting.
Communal pressure: use of the social graph to show relation to friends.
Chance: credits can be redeemed for using in a game, where you have a chance of a
bigger reward that is random and not guaranteed.
Kukui Cup (University of Hawaii)
This is a system to create competition amongst students in residence halls to see who can use
the most power and be the most efficient in their energy use.
Competition: entire process is built around trying to do better than peers.
Here, there is no external, existing kind of structure, and the competition is about taking
pride in winning. The competition has less potential to be dangerous.
Practically Green
The company motivates sustainability types of actions.
Impact: showing the consequences of activities, and seeing the metrics within an entire
company. This can be a powerful motivator: seeing what you’re doing.
10.4 Behaviour Change
What’s the secret to sustainable behaviour change? This is really applicable when we’re
talking about social good, but is relevant to all forms of gamification and also elsewhere.
Habit Formation
A habit is something we do automatically,
that we do without really thinking about.
Fogg Behaviour Model
Three elements: Behaviour =
motivation + ability + trigger
Motivation: the more we want to do
something, the more likely we are to do
it
Ability: the more we are able to do it,
the more likely we are to do it
Triggers: the things that push us at a
particular moment to engage in an
activity.
o High ability and motivation means triggers are more likely to work.
o Low motivation and ability means triggers are less likely to work.
We can plot everything on these three axes.
Triggers
Motivation and ability can trade off against each other: if motivation is high, then you
can do hard things. If motivation is low, it has to be an easy task for people to do it.
Trigger timing: the thing that, at that moment, gets you to take that action.
o We have to have the trigger when someone is ready and able to take that
challenge.
Trigger types: there are three kinds
o Sparks: triggers that increase motivation
o Facilitator: triggers that increase perceived ability
o Signal: motivation and ability is high, we just need a reminder
Applying this to gamification
Engagement loops (motivation action feedback) lead to motivation
Progression loops (onboarding levelling mastery) lead to perceived ability: we
improve actual and perceived levels of ability.
Good games trigger effectively.
10.5 Susan Hunt Stevens
Susan Hunt Stevens is the founder of Practically Green, and a long time tech executive and
entrepreneur. We’re looking for a perspective on getting people to engage in sustainability
activities using gamification.
Practically Green is getting people to embrace more sustainable activities. They bring
transparency to the social graph, allowing competition, collaboration, learning, sharing and
congratulating.
The levelling system allows people to see where they are in the rankings – there is no
sustainability benchmark, so gamification makes one.
How do we figure out what to do and how it’ll help us improve? Points: these allow us to
move up the levels.
How do we reward people for doing things to do with sustainability that they wouldn’t
see rewards for in normal life? You guessed it, badges.
The system wasn’t made with gamification in mind, but it just happened. It also brought fun
into the process. This brings in more people into the process.
What does it take to make people engage in long-term processes?
There are games that people play for lifetimes, but most games are played for 12-18 months.
Most people seem to be engaging because they are a part of a community that is doing
something for the good. The people you play with are what brings you back.
How do we avoid crowding out intrinsic motivation?
No redeemable points, no currency around points.
The more tangible the reward mechanism, the more incentive there is to cheat and game
the system.
How do you give people status, access recognition and power more than stuff? Stuff leads
to cheating.
Week 11: Criticisms & Risks
11.1 Pointsification
This is an effectiveness criticism.
Gamification is taking the thing that is least essential from games, and representing it as the
core of the game. PBLs aren’t what get people to play, and what stimulates motivational
things we’ve talked about in the course.
Motivation is an inadvertent con. It’s suggesting that what is good about games is points and
leaderboards. This is totally wrong.
Many gamified systems rely principally on PBLs and surface level game mechanics. They
don’t give the sense of intrinsic motivation and engagement that is going to produce
sustained results.
We can address the criticism.
This focuses in on a limited set of gamification examples and practices. We can take this to
heart, without letting it seriously harm gamification.
Does gamification actually work?
If gamification reduces to pointsification, does this mean it won’t produce the engagement to
drive real change?
Real research on effectiveness is limited. Some social scientists have started to do
research, and we will see this coming out soon.
If it’s just about shallow elements, we have a lot of potential for engagement decay.
People will get bored by the surface level mechanics, if that is all that drives them.
Crowding out, or overjustification.
“Gamification is the high fructose corn syrup of engagement” – Kathy Sierra
It seems great because it’s sweet and cheap, but as we learn more it turns out to be
harmful. It will push people away from intrinsic motivation to external reward.
FourSquare was a massive gamification success story. The badges on top of social location
powered FS to massive adoption. However, in 2012 they did a redesign to change the
interface of the system in a way that significantly deemphasised the game elements. Why?
PBL became less central as the social element came to the forefront. PBL was an engagement
and adoption technique.
Implications
Names are powerful: people don’t like the word gamification as it implies this is
about games. Yes, it is in a way, but it’s not entirely.
Bad gamification is bad. Behaviourist gamification is subject to the limits and
dangers of rewards.
There is more to games than gamification, and vice versa. Gamification draws on
psychology, design, social media and business.
Caveat ludor. Make sure to always keep in mind the difference between
pointsification and gamification.
11.2 Exploitationware
Gamification is too effective, and can get people do things outside of their interest. For
example, our Disneyland leaderboard example.
Ian Bogost made a post on his personal blog where he made 2 arguments.
Gamification is “an intentional con”: a way to try and make people think their job doesn’t
suck, even when it does. It is inherently a technique that can be used to make people
confused, and focus elsewhere than compensation and meaningfulness.
“Gamification proposes to replace real incentives with fictional ones. Real incentives come
at a cost but provide value for both parties based on a relationship of trust. By contrast,
pretend incentives reduce or eliminate costs, but in so doing they strip away both value and
trust.”
The problem is use of gamification either inadvertently, or deliberately as a trick to force
people to do something.
CowClicker shows the emptiness of systems that rely purely on engagement loops. Actually,
50000+ people started playing the game. People were topping the leaderboard, with huge
amounts of currency which they accumulated from clicking on cows.
In designing gamification, we have to look at:
1. Focus on the business objectives. What’s the purpose of encouraging people to do
something, and how does it tie to a deeper goal?
2. Who are the players? Focus on the people involved in the game, and don’t treat them
as people sucked into playing something with no/little point.
11.3 Gaming the Game
There are a lot of mistakes you can make, but one of the most common is to forget who the
object of the system is: players! And players… are people!
Nicole Lazarro says that gamification can kill. On the on-ramp to the San Francisco Bridge,
you see a pricing system based on congestion, aimed to encourage people to go across at less
busy times: at 0659 its $6 and 0700 its $4. If you go to the bridge at 0659 everyone is
swerving off the road in order to save $2. This can cause accidents!
We have to realise how people will respond to system.
Cheating
People may figure out a way to achieve their own aims in the system that aren’t the aims of
the game designer. Well-designed games with social elements tend to dissuade people from
cheating.
Beneficial cheating?
How can you have cheating in a game where you end up with better results?
An Innovation Market was made in Lloyds Bank. Insider trading started to happen – this is
outlawed in the financial markets as it damages trust. This virtual insider trading was a way
of strengthening teams around great ideas. This is what the system was about, not about the
virtual money.
The critical thing is to recognise that people act in different and spontaneous ways to
different stimuli. Even if people aren’t doing what the game designer wants them to do,
exactly, they’re demonstrating autonomy and adding to intrinsic motivation.
11.4 Legal Issues
There are some legal issues to do with designing a gamified system. We have five potential
issues
1. Privacy. We get a lot of player information in our gamified system such as profile
information, as well as information about everything they do in the game. We have
very detailed and personal information. Laws vary wildly between jurisdictions: in
the US there is little restrictions, and in Europe there is a lot more legislation.
2. Employment/labour law: exploitation via a gamification system. One of the issues
brought up in Target union’s talks was the leaderboard system in the checkout. Once
again jurisdictions matter.
3. Deceptive marketing. What can you do to market something? If the gamified system
isn’t clearly designed to market, then we have to be careful. This is especially relevant
in market focus gamification.
4. Intellectual property. IP law regulates access to digital assets. Virtual goods are
potentially protected by IP law, and this is an issue in any digital system.
5. Virtual property law. What happens if a user spends a lot of time and effort (and
often money) to get virtual stuff? But it can be easily taken away by the developer. So
what rights do they have over it? The courts so far have said this is a licence
(something you get contractually), not property.
a. The CARD Act (US) regulates gift cards, which might be similar kinds of
virtual currencies to those used in gamified systems.
11.5 Regulatory Issues
As well as legal issues, there are some regulatory concerns. Practice might be allowed, but
only under certain restrictions from government agencies.
Paid endorsements. This happened with bloggers who were getting paid by companies to
write paid reviews. FTC mandated that you have to disclose why you’re endorsing
something. Many gamification systems provide opportunities for points through social
media recommendations.
Banking regulations: do we have a currency or freely tradable good? Are we even allowed
to do this without being registered as a bank? Probably not that common, but worth
keeping in mind if we have money/trading structures.
o Record-keeping
o Reserve requirements
o Currency manipulation
o Anti-fraud
o Money laundering
o Consumer protection
o Taxation and accounting
Gambling and sweepstakes
o National regulation of gambling: inter-state gambling is basically prohibited. You
can gamble in designated areas, and in government sponsored lotteries. In other
countries you have greater/lesser regulation.
Distinction between games of skill and chance. Chance is gaming, skill
isn’t.
o State regulation of sweepstakes (in the US)
Week 12
12.1 Beyond the Basics
How have we completed the goals?
1. What is gamification? What actually is it, and how does it fit into other things that are
similar like serious games.
2. Why might it be valuable? Marketing, HR, enterprise, and social impact examples all
show how game elements and design feed into value and goal reaching.
3. How can we do it effectively? Different forms of gamification, step-by-step design
frameworks to apply it, and the negative sides of what can happen.
4. What are some specific applications? Massive breadth of areas where we can apply
gamification.
Where are we going next? Let’s look at things to be done that relate to game design but are
broader. They’re big topics that are worth touching on.
Inducement prizes: rewards where the goal is to encourage people to do something.
The winner gets money, instead of everything. We use competitive instincts.
Collective action
Virtual economics: how economic pressures can be applied to virtual goods, and how
we can create a functional economy.
The future: where is gamification going to go? Will it be good or bad as it scales up?
12.2 Inducement Prizes
Orteig promised a $25,000 prize to the first person to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. Prizes
are a way to either reward certain behaviour (Nobel is prize for past action) or to encourage,
A contest to motivate a result
Alternative to direct funding
What are the advantages?
Economy and efficiency: the Orteig prize was $25k, but people in total spent $400k
chasing the prize.
Creativity and flexibility: when the Exxon Valdise tanker ran aground, there was a
prize for someone who could figure out to pump solid oil. The winner was a guy who
used lessons from pouring concrete, and someone they wouldn’t have gone to with
R&D money.
Gamification
Inducement prizes are about motivation. This is a kind of reward structure.
Fun? It’s clearly an extrinsic reward.
SDT theory factors are all here: competence, autonomy and relatedness.
Inducement Prize Initiatives
TopCoder
X Prize Foundation
DARPA Grand Challenges: military organisation which has a self-driving car
challenge which has been very successful.
America Competes Act: this encourages and makes possible these competitions on a
wide scale.
What does it take to design one of these competitions effectively?
Multiple individuals/teams capable of competing: enough people have to be able to
compete and win. If only one person can do it, then hire them.
Costs sufficiently small: cheap enough for people to spend their money chasing.
Everyone except winner loses out.
Balance of scale and incentives (Karim Lakhani): in designing an inducement prize
you want it to be as big as possible, but with a decent chance of people winning.
Opportunities to leverage results: we want to actually do something with the winners.
12.3 Virtual Economies
Gamified systems + currency = virtual economies
All of these can exist in gamified systems.
Virtual goods are a widespread phenomenon.
Virtual goods can be unlocked as a way to monetise the game, as a way to easily
achieving things.
The virtual goods market is estimated at $7 billion in 2010, which will grow to $13
billion by 2016.
Loyalty programs as virtual currency. Airpoints dollars?!?!
o They assume that just the currency thing is enough, and you don’t need any
fun. Tangible rewards have serious limitations, don’t forget.
Balance is critical in economics: economics are driven by scarcity
Scarcity is a variable in a gamified system defined by the designer. Where you can use virtual
goods and currencies, you need to make sure you have scarcity.
Sources: put money into the economy
Sinks: take money out of the economy
Dangers in building virtual economies do exist
Real money costs real money… duh
Remember the hedonic treadmill and crowding-out
Intrinsic value from rarity and surprise
Persistent virtual rewards
VIRTUAL GOODS
Tradable/redeemable points
VIRTUAL CURRENCY
In-game transactions/markets
VIRTUAL ECONOMY
12.4 Collective Action
Amazon MicroTurk
The Amazon MicroTurk
Exchange provides a
crowdsourcing arena. You can get
people to do human intelligence
tasks where computers can’t do it.
There are over 200,000 HITs
available each day on Mechanical
Turk.
Applying Gamification
FoldIt (www.fold.it)
This service was developed by
biomedical researchers working
on 3D protein folding. It’s very
computationally difficult, but
people are really good at figuring it out as people like doing puzzles. This is a game like
system that asks you to figure out the most efficient layout of proteins. The researchers have
motivated thousands of people to do this. It has really successfully managed to do this.
DigitalCoot (from MicroTask)
Using gamification to check OCR output for digitisation of Finnish National Library
works.
The ESP Game
Shows people picture, and says “what is this?” You give the same thing to two different
people, and see if they’re right.
The point is to improve image search. It’s hard for a computer to look at a picture and say
“that’s a sheep!” We want to meta-tag for search engines.
People are just told that something is fun, and this is why they should do it.
What situations lend themselves well?
Task can be split up easily
Task is better done by humans than computers
Motivational elements can be done by gamification: money, love, fun?
12.5 Into the Future
No one knows the future; gamification is a young field that is changing very fast. Let’s
imagine what will happen if gamification becomes pervasive in society.
Sight, by Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo
Grant
Inducement
prize
Employee
s
Crowd-sourcing
Competitive Collaborate
Top
-do
wn
B
ott
om
-up
This is the best example for what could happen if it became universal. It shows an
integrated gamification of life in a dating situation.
Choices: these are forks in the road that we have to choose.
Empowering or manipulative? Do we help, or take advantage?
Shallow or thoughtful? Is it just PBL or do we look at other mechanics?
Doing or feeling? Behavioural or cognitive?
The future of gamification is up to us.
Gamification hasn’t been around very long, and not many people know as much about it as
class graduates.
