The NY Times reports on Uber and gamification. Some of it is white-hat, encouraging drivers to meet goals and informing them of better opportunities. Unfortunately, much of it is black-hat, being another way to avoid actually paying drivers fair compensation by manipulating them into accepting fake rewards instead of more pay.
Personally, I loathe Uber (and would probably loathe Lyft if I knew more about it) and I like Gett. The only thing I appreciate about Uber is the introduction of competition into a monopolistic market (taxi service is generally a monopoly with collusion-style pricing, even when multiple companies compete for the service).
Showing posts with label gamification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gamification. Show all posts
Monday, April 03, 2017
Thursday, March 23, 2017
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
How to Fail (but Still Succeed) in Corporate Gamification: a Real World Experiment
In February, 2015, I ran a low-tech, pilot gamification process to encourage my company's employees to install an analytics application on their and their family members’ handsets. This report describes the initiation and development of the project, its results, feedback received, analysis of what went wrong and right, and takeaways for future gamification processes.
In other words: you add something fun DURING the process that hopefully causes people to do the process well, where previously they did not do the process well due to poor motivation. For example, you include thematic elements (like racing cars or animals in combat), iterative goals, real-time feedback and measurements – like a running score – and a social element that may range from encouragement to cooperation to competition to rivalry. And you might bestow a title upon one or more people who complete the process, or who complete it the best, where “complete the process” hopefully doesn’t mean the person who had the most fun or achieved the highest score, but instead means the person who best completed the non-game process for which we were hoping to get better results.
Businesses are filled with processes that could be done better: showing up on time, showing up altogether, fixing bugs, reducing time for handling customer service calls, handling them better, completing projects quicker, or coming up with kick-ass ideas. For some of these processes, introducing gamification to the process leads to (or can lead to) disaster. If you gamify reducing customer service call time, you encourage faster turnover but worse service. If you gamify creativity, you tend to get less creativity (there are many sources for this).
Gamification works best when it is used to improve simple non-thinking or lightly creative repetitive tasks, like attendance, turnover, and fixing bad records in the computer. Even then, different kinds of tasks are better improved by different types of gamification. It takes some experience, knowledge, and skill to marry the right kind of gamification elements, benchmarks, and goals to the right processes. And because people get bored of the same games over time, applying gamification effectively is a continuous process.
The best way to gain experience in something is to do it. The best place to do a business gamification project is in the company in which you’re already working. Without a clear business case or experience that proves the process is going to save/make a lot of money, you need a pilot that is homegrown and small scale. If it succeeds, you find something larger and more costly to tackle.
This was not the first time they were working on this client. They had made two earlier versions. To test it, they wanted in installed on as many devices as possible. On each of the previous occasions, they had tried to get fellow employees to install the client; they got 7 to 15 device installations.
My boss wondered if a gamification project would help. (I had introduced the company, and my boss, to gamification a few months earlier.) Maybe we could get to 50 devices? Or even 100? He approached me. I considered for about ten seconds and said, with confidence, that a company of our size (250 people) could get 1,000 devices using gamification: each employee could install it on his or her own device(s) and three family members of close friends for the two month trial period. If the process was designed and handled properly.
My boss was initially taken aback – 1,000 devices? – but he told me to go for it. The company will get the client ready and the kinks worked out as much as possible, and I will design the game.
I thought two weeks was a good time: a longer period would not only drag out the time unnecessarily, since people would sign up at the beginning and end, but not in the middle, but that is would actually hurt participation, because people would just delay installing the client until they forgot. And that we couldn’t sustain the energy past two weeks.
The task would be simple to accomplish for one’s own devices, and not too difficult to persuade family members for a favor for a few months.
Six teams meant teams of 40 or so players each, pairing somewhat contiguous groups with offices around the world. We tried to keep some kind of coherence, and I was hoping that the tokens and the mailing lists would serve as a catalyst for team identity. I thought a tangible token would be a daily reminder to people that there is a game in progress as well as a possible source of team-identification.
The game included cooperation with teams, to instill a sense of identity, and a competition to foster competitiveness. There was no individual leader board, since I wanted everyone to do something, not something to be done in general by whomever could do it best (which is often what happens with a leader board).
The reward was to provide some additional incentive. Generally speaking, a gamified process solely rewards badges, points, bragging rights, etc. But I figured Israelis, all of whom are post-army, needed something real to incentivize them. Israelis are keen to avoid being a “friar”, that is someone who does something that he doesn’t have to do. They are dedicated when they have to do something that they think is important; many are also dedicated to both cooperation and competition.
Here was one of the emails:
The Wiki had these instructions, together with a table at the top of the page listing the names of each person on each team, and the current day’s and total scores.
The immediate question is “Why not bring in a gamification company?” The HQ of one of the world’s leading gamification companies, Gameffective, was a mere 20 minutes from our office and I am friends with its CEO, Gal Rimon. The immediate answer is that there is no business case for gamification at the company; we were trying to build a business case. Spending tens or hundreds of thousands of NIS was not on the table.
So there was no framework, no individual point scores, no badges, avatars, fancy sounds or graphics, player props, levels, etc, etc.
Teams
The teams didn’t. See below.
Reward
No tangible reward is not a bad thing, and a substantial reward can be a good thing, but a small reward can be a disincentive - like leaving a very small tip. So this was probably a mistake. No one was motivated by the reward, though no one was really demotivated by it, either.
Token
The token was shot down during discussion with my boss and others as impractical; it was difficult to do when our employees were scattered around the world. I suggested that each regional manager could buy the tokens for their employees, but this was rejected. I suggested that, at least, each Israeli employee get a colored something, since I thought something tangible would be important. The result was this change:
In the end, we abandoned this too, since it was hard to find the right paper in the right colors and it didn’t make sense to give papers to the Israeli employees but not to the non-Israeli ones.
Task
An app that sends data about your phone to a company is not something that most people want on their phone, certainly not without very clear information about what the app does and how long it will stay on your phone. Company loyalty goes only so far. My boss agreed to give general ideas about what it did and a link to the portal with summary info. But he didn’t want to tell people how long to leave it on the phone. I wanted to tell people that they could remove it after two months, but he insisted we leave that out of the message.
So people didn’t have a clear idea of what they were installing, or for how long, or what kind of information was being collected. However, we told them that all data would be kept private to the company.
Also, the process was a fairly finite one. You could play once or twice, maybe a few more times than that, but then you were pretty much done.
Period
I wanted to run the trial for only two weeks. In truth, four days would have been right. My boss wanted four weeks, but agreed to cut it down to three weeks.
The trial was set to start sometime in October, but the client wasn’t ready, so it kept being pushed off. We almost started in December, but the foreign offices indicated that they did not want to run the trial over the end-of-year holidays. I found a new job and gave notice on Jan 19. Finally the trial started on Feb 6, scheduled to end after my time at the company was over on Feb 19.
Culture
I considered whether any of the offices would have a cultural issue with my theme selection of colors and animals. Would being on team dolphins offend the Japanese? Would being on the red team offend the Chinese? I didn’t know, but I didn’t follow through. I don’t think there were any problems.
Support
Any gamification project, unless it is a breakout hit with its audience, requires a champion to marshal enthusiasm among the troupes. In addition to the pitch at the kick-off meeting that didn’t happen, there should have been team leaders, daily events, and an enthusiastic guy (me) to go around spurring people to make the initial leap into the game. I had limited motivation: The game was supported by my company less than I had hoped and I was overruled on some design issues. I knew that I hadn’t made the best game, and the design was made poorer due to compromises that were required and some interference. I was leaving the company. On the plus side, I wanted to see the game succeed.
Reporting
Fielding reports was not difficult, and I dutifully put them up on the web site. However, many people forgot to tell me; we had more handsets connecting the server than were reported in the game.
So we “failed” to reach 1,000 handsets. But we succeeded in reaching over 10 times the number of handsets that had ever been reached in previous attempts. The data collected from the handsets, and the experience gained from the people installing them on various live devices, was invaluable to the client’s development. And it cost nothing.
Here are answers to some questions I asked other people in the company about the game:
1. Did you sign up any handsets?
YES: 8
NO: 7
“I'm proud to be part of the team that signed up the most devices and also one of the two people who personally signed up the most devices.”
“Yes, about 4.”
“I had 5 or 6 handsets installed. All others in my family have iPhones.”
“Only my own.”
“Yes, me and my wife.”
“My family only has iPhones.”
“Yes, I installed the application on my device. I talked a bit with other office members, asking them why they did not installed the client. Half of them are using iOS… and for people who use Android, their device is old and with limited memory.”
“Did not sign up any headsets. Maybe I should have...”
“I signed 3 or 4 handsets not including my own, as the app did not work for me.” [for reasons]
2. Did the "game" motivate you at all to do so (or the general needs of the company)?
“The game definitely motivated me to sign up people.”
“No, I would have done this per personal request also, although it would have been nice to win a good breakfast on the company treat.”
“I think if it wasn’t for the game I would probably install it on my phone and maybe my son’s phone, but with the game I went out to find other people’s phones.”
“The game did not motivate me.”
“It is interesting for me to see the report and I am pretty willing to install the application on my device. I am interested in the game is because I am familiar with the product and I believe it is a valuable product.”
“The game slightly motivated me but not enough to make an actual effort.” “The general needs of the company.”
“The needs of the company motivated me much more than the game/teams/wins etc.”
3. What about the game worked for you and what didn't; what might make you more motivated in the future for similar projects?
It was cool to see the client working
“The fact that we could see the actual results and stats is great. I also see a lot of value in being able to use the server as a real demo and strongly believe that we should eat our own dog food, so to speak – so that worked. ”
“It was nice to receive the summary of the information that was gathered from the devices.”
Lack of triggers or didn’t understand the game
“I didn’t look at [the emails] at all.”
“The emails got lost in the general email clutter - maybe a more physical display of the progress such as the 'thermometers" that the old fund raisers used to use would have been a good idea.”
“One thing I need to complain about was the invitation plan. From the description email, I didn’t understand how to count the invited devices. I remember the email said once we have the application installed on a friends device, we need to write email to someone simply tell the number of the device as a score.. It looks very un-serious to me. Since we don’t need to send either IMEI or some solid proof of a device, while just sending the number of new devices… are you expecting me to be serious about the game?” [He went on to say how the lack of a rigid game methodology in counting devices, combined with the competition, made it seem like the game was based on “trust”, which he couldn’t wrap his head around.]
“This game basically sounded like a spam game to me...”
General problem with the activity
“It’s my personal issue with that kind of software.”
“I did not like the point that I need to install some useless app on my friend's phones... Specifically made for spying after usage statistics...”
“It did not work for me that the people who installed the app got no benefit from it – there could be a report showing some value.”
Lack of daily interaction/feedback
“The game didn't have enough presence or awareness in employees day to day... The reports on progress were not updated daily. There were no motivating follow ups during the game.”
“I did not see my device data in the final report. It is quite a pity to me.”
Problems with the teams
“I think that there was a lack in the sense of real competition, because the groups were not homogenous enough… in the sense that I don’t really know who was in my team, and even what is my team’s name. If my team was “product and marketing”, then I would more easily associate with them and encourage them to do more… but I was brown bears or orange tigers or something else, and the team included people from outside my immediate reference group…”
“Splitting for groups didn't really motivated me. Maybe if it was more individual and I could see online how many devices I registered against the others, it would turn the competition more personal and interesting. :)”
Registering should have been automated [something over which I had no control.]
“I believe the activation of the program should have done the report automatically instead of manual report.”
“Upon installation on device, the application should pop up a screen asking the user to choose which team he wants to register to. This is more intuitive.”
Lack of motivating prizes
“The prizes didn't matter much to me but I would have added some interim (real but small) effort recognition prizes, for example, best team of the week, top signer weekly, top signer, etc.”
“A more serious motivation might be some more real gift to the winners.”
“I would have participated more actively if there was a decent prize involved.”
“Some really cool reward or giveaway or activity for everyone on the winning team may cause more motivation. But the main motivation is not about a reward at all.”
It may be that 50% participation was achieved only because this was a “new” thing. Perhaps less people will be interested next time because it won’t be new. Perhaps more people will participate: the ones who did this time will do so again, and new ones will if they know more about it and the game is constructed and introduced properly.
Everyone is wildly different about what does or doesn’t motivate them. No one type of challenge suits all people. A game that provides a number of ways to play that hits multiple motivational points is more likely to succeed. Some people wanted clearer, more defined groups, others wanted more individual competition, while others didn’t care about the competition. The prizes mattered to people – not more than doing their civic duty – but this may have been skewed by the fact that we offered a small prize. If we had offered no prize at all (except bragging rights), maybe fewer people would have asked for a better prize. Or maybe not. However, a better prize would have increased participation.
This game was an example of “short burst” gamification. Different rules apply to long term gamification that is built into the daily routines of employees, Long term gamification has high exec buy-in, is taught to every employee, and becomes part of the daily routine. It must be changed regularly and kept fresh to maintain long term interest, but the rules of engagement are different.
In this process' case, a better game, with a dedicated team, a spiffier framework and graphics, a less frightening product, a more limited time frame, maybe a little less compromises on game design, a more serious buy-in from the execs, and daily enthusiastic communication would have been preferred. These would have gone a long way in achieving better results. I still think we could have hit 1,000.
Yehuda
[1] Pictures taken from various CC sources on Google
Gamification in Business
In a business environment, gamification is the application of game and/or play mechanics to a non-game process with the aim of achieving a better result than would be expected without these mechanics. The theory is to motivate people to achieve the process’ goal – not by a job well done or a salary – but by providing engaging elements to the process and imaginary awards designed to be collected in parallel with the process’ goals.In other words: you add something fun DURING the process that hopefully causes people to do the process well, where previously they did not do the process well due to poor motivation. For example, you include thematic elements (like racing cars or animals in combat), iterative goals, real-time feedback and measurements – like a running score – and a social element that may range from encouragement to cooperation to competition to rivalry. And you might bestow a title upon one or more people who complete the process, or who complete it the best, where “complete the process” hopefully doesn’t mean the person who had the most fun or achieved the highest score, but instead means the person who best completed the non-game process for which we were hoping to get better results.
Businesses are filled with processes that could be done better: showing up on time, showing up altogether, fixing bugs, reducing time for handling customer service calls, handling them better, completing projects quicker, or coming up with kick-ass ideas. For some of these processes, introducing gamification to the process leads to (or can lead to) disaster. If you gamify reducing customer service call time, you encourage faster turnover but worse service. If you gamify creativity, you tend to get less creativity (there are many sources for this).
Gamification works best when it is used to improve simple non-thinking or lightly creative repetitive tasks, like attendance, turnover, and fixing bad records in the computer. Even then, different kinds of tasks are better improved by different types of gamification. It takes some experience, knowledge, and skill to marry the right kind of gamification elements, benchmarks, and goals to the right processes. And because people get bored of the same games over time, applying gamification effectively is a continuous process.
The best way to gain experience in something is to do it. The best place to do a business gamification project is in the company in which you’re already working. Without a clear business case or experience that proves the process is going to save/make a lot of money, you need a pilot that is homegrown and small scale. If it succeeds, you find something larger and more costly to tackle.
The Process We Found to Improve
My company made software for mobile devices, typically installed at source by handset manufacturers or service providers. They were working on an Analytics client that could be installed on a device and which would report back various information about the devices, such as installed OS version, crash times, app usage, and so on.This was not the first time they were working on this client. They had made two earlier versions. To test it, they wanted in installed on as many devices as possible. On each of the previous occasions, they had tried to get fellow employees to install the client; they got 7 to 15 device installations.
My boss wondered if a gamification project would help. (I had introduced the company, and my boss, to gamification a few months earlier.) Maybe we could get to 50 devices? Or even 100? He approached me. I considered for about ten seconds and said, with confidence, that a company of our size (250 people) could get 1,000 devices using gamification: each employee could install it on his or her own device(s) and three family members of close friends for the two month trial period. If the process was designed and handled properly.
My boss was initially taken aback – 1,000 devices? – but he told me to go for it. The company will get the client ready and the kinks worked out as much as possible, and I will design the game.
The Game as it was First Proposed
This was the email I sent as my proposal for the game:We have 250 employees (approx) and I think that each one can install it on his or her own device and get 3 to 4 close friends or family to do the same. They only have to keep it on their phone for a month or two. The game is not for the general public, since the client is not yet ready for the public.
The game is as follows: Employees will be divided into six teams, each named for a color and an animal (e.g. brown bears, blue dolphins, etc). Teams include Israeli employees paired with employees in a foreign office. The launch will be at a specific date and end at a specific date. Each team will have use of a dedicated internal email list, and a web page will contain the instructions and each day's and the total scores.
Each employee will get some kind of token, like a pin, to wear in their color during the game.
Employees report daily to me their "captures" (I'm calling the game Handset Hunt), and I update the website with the scores (manually, which is a bit of a pain; we don't have the time to develop something better.) Naturally the server registers all clients, so we know how many devices actually sign up.
If the entire company gets to 1,000 devices, we all get breakfast. The best scoring team also gets dessert (even if we don't get to 1,000 devices).
The Thinking
This game involved nearly no resources; this is a small initiative by a low level employee with no budget, or almost no budget. It is not hard for me to tabulate a dozen or fifty emails in a day, and I wasn’t expecting more than that. The daily feedback would give people a metric to see with constant changes.I thought two weeks was a good time: a longer period would not only drag out the time unnecessarily, since people would sign up at the beginning and end, but not in the middle, but that is would actually hurt participation, because people would just delay installing the client until they forgot. And that we couldn’t sustain the energy past two weeks.
The task would be simple to accomplish for one’s own devices, and not too difficult to persuade family members for a favor for a few months.
Six teams meant teams of 40 or so players each, pairing somewhat contiguous groups with offices around the world. We tried to keep some kind of coherence, and I was hoping that the tokens and the mailing lists would serve as a catalyst for team identity. I thought a tangible token would be a daily reminder to people that there is a game in progress as well as a possible source of team-identification.
The game included cooperation with teams, to instill a sense of identity, and a competition to foster competitiveness. There was no individual leader board, since I wanted everyone to do something, not something to be done in general by whomever could do it best (which is often what happens with a leader board).
The reward was to provide some additional incentive. Generally speaking, a gamified process solely rewards badges, points, bragging rights, etc. But I figured Israelis, all of whom are post-army, needed something real to incentivize them. Israelis are keen to avoid being a “friar”, that is someone who does something that he doesn’t have to do. They are dedicated when they have to do something that they think is important; many are also dedicated to both cooperation and competition.
The Trigger
I wanted the CEO in Israel, and the leaders in each region, to physically gather everyone together to launch the game and its stress its importance, hand out the tokens, and give some encouragement to participate. Either I didn’t make this clear enough or I was overruled by my boss, I can’t recall which; this trigger, or anything like it, never materialized. Instead, the game was launched by emails sent out with the game information.Here was one of the emails:
Handset Hunt, a Gamified [Our Company} Game
[Our company] would like to test its Analytics client in the field. To do that, we need to have the client installed on as many devices as possible.
We are inviting you to play our game, which we call Handset Hunt. We are aiming for 1,000 client installations in order to perform a complete test. If we succeed, [our company] will take the entire company out for breakfast.
[Our company] employees are on the prowl to capture and tag mobile devices in order to test their Analytics client. Six packs of hunters will compete to tag the most devices.
Game Goals
[Our company] needs to test the reliability and viability of the Analytics client. The test will be performed by collecting information from many devices over the course of an eight week period.
Team goal: Get the Analytics client installed on the most devices by the end of the game.
Company goal: Get the Analytics client installed on at least 1,000 devices by the end of the game.
Teams
Employees have been assigned to one of six teams. Each team has 39 players.
All employees in each office outside of Israel are on a single team together with as many Israeli employees are required to complete the team size.
You are assign to [Color Animal] team.
Game Period
The game starts on February 4 and runs to February 25 at 23:59 IST (three weeks). This is the “game period”.
Rules
1. Install the Analytics client on as many Android devices as you can during the game period.
2. Ask your family and close friends to install the client on their devices.
3. Inform friends and family to keep the client on their device until at least March 15.
4. IMPORTANT: DO NOT POST A GENERAL REQUEST to your friends on social media or publicize this game or the trial in any public forum. The client is not ready for public use and contains proprietary source code that [our company] does not want exposed at this time.
5. Registration: Each day, email to [someone else in the company] the number of new devices onto which you or your friends or family have successfully installed the client. A daily update will be available on the internal Wiki. The URL is [URL].
6. All teams have an email list to be used as desired (encouragement, discussion, etc). You are receiving this email using this list.
7. If you experience any installation problems, mail [someone else].
Privacy
All information collected is aggregated and anonymous: [our company] cannot map collected information to any individual, and the system ID of the device is not mapped to a phone number.
You can find list of collected information in the game portal: [Portal URL]
Rewards
If the company meets its goal of 1,000 devices, all [our company] employees are awarded breakfast (specifics to be determined). All members of the winning team are awarded dessert (specifics to be determined).
Installation
[installation instructions for Android devices went here]
Teams [1]
- Blue Dolphins
- Orange Tigers
- Red Bulls
- Green Dragons
- Brown Bears
- Yellow Lions
Good luck, happy hunting, and have fun!
The Wiki had these instructions, together with a table at the top of the page listing the names of each person on each team, and the current day’s and total scores.
The Problems
AmateurThe immediate question is “Why not bring in a gamification company?” The HQ of one of the world’s leading gamification companies, Gameffective, was a mere 20 minutes from our office and I am friends with its CEO, Gal Rimon. The immediate answer is that there is no business case for gamification at the company; we were trying to build a business case. Spending tens or hundreds of thousands of NIS was not on the table.
So there was no framework, no individual point scores, no badges, avatars, fancy sounds or graphics, player props, levels, etc, etc.
Teams
The teams didn’t. See below.
Reward
No tangible reward is not a bad thing, and a substantial reward can be a good thing, but a small reward can be a disincentive - like leaving a very small tip. So this was probably a mistake. No one was motivated by the reward, though no one was really demotivated by it, either.
Token
The token was shot down during discussion with my boss and others as impractical; it was difficult to do when our employees were scattered around the world. I suggested that each regional manager could buy the tokens for their employees, but this was rejected. I suggested that, at least, each Israeli employee get a colored something, since I thought something tangible would be important. The result was this change:
The Israeli employees will get a colored paper to place on their desk to write down, which are the phone numbers of the people they got to install the client. Employees also report daily to me. At the end, the Israeli employees give me their papers "for corroboration".
In the end, we abandoned this too, since it was hard to find the right paper in the right colors and it didn’t make sense to give papers to the Israeli employees but not to the non-Israeli ones.
Task
An app that sends data about your phone to a company is not something that most people want on their phone, certainly not without very clear information about what the app does and how long it will stay on your phone. Company loyalty goes only so far. My boss agreed to give general ideas about what it did and a link to the portal with summary info. But he didn’t want to tell people how long to leave it on the phone. I wanted to tell people that they could remove it after two months, but he insisted we leave that out of the message.
So people didn’t have a clear idea of what they were installing, or for how long, or what kind of information was being collected. However, we told them that all data would be kept private to the company.
Also, the process was a fairly finite one. You could play once or twice, maybe a few more times than that, but then you were pretty much done.
Period
I wanted to run the trial for only two weeks. In truth, four days would have been right. My boss wanted four weeks, but agreed to cut it down to three weeks.
The trial was set to start sometime in October, but the client wasn’t ready, so it kept being pushed off. We almost started in December, but the foreign offices indicated that they did not want to run the trial over the end-of-year holidays. I found a new job and gave notice on Jan 19. Finally the trial started on Feb 6, scheduled to end after my time at the company was over on Feb 19.
Culture
I considered whether any of the offices would have a cultural issue with my theme selection of colors and animals. Would being on team dolphins offend the Japanese? Would being on the red team offend the Chinese? I didn’t know, but I didn’t follow through. I don’t think there were any problems.
Support
Any gamification project, unless it is a breakout hit with its audience, requires a champion to marshal enthusiasm among the troupes. In addition to the pitch at the kick-off meeting that didn’t happen, there should have been team leaders, daily events, and an enthusiastic guy (me) to go around spurring people to make the initial leap into the game. I had limited motivation: The game was supported by my company less than I had hoped and I was overruled on some design issues. I knew that I hadn’t made the best game, and the design was made poorer due to compromises that were required and some interference. I was leaving the company. On the plus side, I wanted to see the game succeed.
Reporting
Fielding reports was not difficult, and I dutifully put them up on the web site. However, many people forgot to tell me; we had more handsets connecting the server than were reported in the game.
What Happened
My boss and I made some attempts during the game to remind people about it, I posted once or twice on my team list to start a conversation, but to my knowledge, the lists were never used. Participation was about 10 to 30 handset signups a day during the first few days. By the end of the first week, we had around 120 handsets. A few days later we hit 140, and then nothing until I left the company. I called later for the final counts: 157 handsets.So we “failed” to reach 1,000 handsets. But we succeeded in reaching over 10 times the number of handsets that had ever been reached in previous attempts. The data collected from the handsets, and the experience gained from the people installing them on various live devices, was invaluable to the client’s development. And it cost nothing.
Feedback
When I asked my boss about the experiment, he wrote: “We completed the development for the trail, we got the client installed on a nice number of devices, and we got insights from the trial. We did not promote it enough and did not get to all people.” In a future project, we should “Invest more in order to have the people on board, call the regions to sign up and call in order to share the insights and not trust mails.”Here are answers to some questions I asked other people in the company about the game:
1. Did you sign up any handsets?
YES: 8
NO: 7
“I'm proud to be part of the team that signed up the most devices and also one of the two people who personally signed up the most devices.”
“Yes, about 4.”
“I had 5 or 6 handsets installed. All others in my family have iPhones.”
“Only my own.”
“Yes, me and my wife.”
“My family only has iPhones.”
“Yes, I installed the application on my device. I talked a bit with other office members, asking them why they did not installed the client. Half of them are using iOS… and for people who use Android, their device is old and with limited memory.”
“Did not sign up any headsets. Maybe I should have...”
“I signed 3 or 4 handsets not including my own, as the app did not work for me.” [for reasons]
2. Did the "game" motivate you at all to do so (or the general needs of the company)?
“The game definitely motivated me to sign up people.”
“No, I would have done this per personal request also, although it would have been nice to win a good breakfast on the company treat.”
“I think if it wasn’t for the game I would probably install it on my phone and maybe my son’s phone, but with the game I went out to find other people’s phones.”
“The game did not motivate me.”
“It is interesting for me to see the report and I am pretty willing to install the application on my device. I am interested in the game is because I am familiar with the product and I believe it is a valuable product.”
“The game slightly motivated me but not enough to make an actual effort.” “The general needs of the company.”
“The needs of the company motivated me much more than the game/teams/wins etc.”
3. What about the game worked for you and what didn't; what might make you more motivated in the future for similar projects?
It was cool to see the client working
“The fact that we could see the actual results and stats is great. I also see a lot of value in being able to use the server as a real demo and strongly believe that we should eat our own dog food, so to speak – so that worked. ”
“It was nice to receive the summary of the information that was gathered from the devices.”
Lack of triggers or didn’t understand the game
“I didn’t look at [the emails] at all.”
“The emails got lost in the general email clutter - maybe a more physical display of the progress such as the 'thermometers" that the old fund raisers used to use would have been a good idea.”
“One thing I need to complain about was the invitation plan. From the description email, I didn’t understand how to count the invited devices. I remember the email said once we have the application installed on a friends device, we need to write email to someone simply tell the number of the device as a score.. It looks very un-serious to me. Since we don’t need to send either IMEI or some solid proof of a device, while just sending the number of new devices… are you expecting me to be serious about the game?” [He went on to say how the lack of a rigid game methodology in counting devices, combined with the competition, made it seem like the game was based on “trust”, which he couldn’t wrap his head around.]
“This game basically sounded like a spam game to me...”
General problem with the activity
“It’s my personal issue with that kind of software.”
“I did not like the point that I need to install some useless app on my friend's phones... Specifically made for spying after usage statistics...”
“It did not work for me that the people who installed the app got no benefit from it – there could be a report showing some value.”
Lack of daily interaction/feedback
“The game didn't have enough presence or awareness in employees day to day... The reports on progress were not updated daily. There were no motivating follow ups during the game.”
“I did not see my device data in the final report. It is quite a pity to me.”
Problems with the teams
“I think that there was a lack in the sense of real competition, because the groups were not homogenous enough… in the sense that I don’t really know who was in my team, and even what is my team’s name. If my team was “product and marketing”, then I would more easily associate with them and encourage them to do more… but I was brown bears or orange tigers or something else, and the team included people from outside my immediate reference group…”
“Splitting for groups didn't really motivated me. Maybe if it was more individual and I could see online how many devices I registered against the others, it would turn the competition more personal and interesting. :)”
Registering should have been automated [something over which I had no control.]
“I believe the activation of the program should have done the report automatically instead of manual report.”
“Upon installation on device, the application should pop up a screen asking the user to choose which team he wants to register to. This is more intuitive.”
Lack of motivating prizes
“The prizes didn't matter much to me but I would have added some interim (real but small) effort recognition prizes, for example, best team of the week, top signer weekly, top signer, etc.”
“A more serious motivation might be some more real gift to the winners.”
“I would have participated more actively if there was a decent prize involved.”
“Some really cool reward or giveaway or activity for everyone on the winning team may cause more motivation. But the main motivation is not about a reward at all.”
Takeaways
If a lackluster attempt at gamification can achieve 50% participation and produce a 1000% increase in participation for an activity that few people really wanted to do, then there is something about corporate gamification that can work for business. A big portion of that, maybe the bulk of it, is simply promoting the idea that there is an activity outside of the normal work requirements that is important to the company, is not difficult to do, and can be done in a particular time frame, so “please do us a favor”.It may be that 50% participation was achieved only because this was a “new” thing. Perhaps less people will be interested next time because it won’t be new. Perhaps more people will participate: the ones who did this time will do so again, and new ones will if they know more about it and the game is constructed and introduced properly.
Everyone is wildly different about what does or doesn’t motivate them. No one type of challenge suits all people. A game that provides a number of ways to play that hits multiple motivational points is more likely to succeed. Some people wanted clearer, more defined groups, others wanted more individual competition, while others didn’t care about the competition. The prizes mattered to people – not more than doing their civic duty – but this may have been skewed by the fact that we offered a small prize. If we had offered no prize at all (except bragging rights), maybe fewer people would have asked for a better prize. Or maybe not. However, a better prize would have increased participation.
This game was an example of “short burst” gamification. Different rules apply to long term gamification that is built into the daily routines of employees, Long term gamification has high exec buy-in, is taught to every employee, and becomes part of the daily routine. It must be changed regularly and kept fresh to maintain long term interest, but the rules of engagement are different.
In this process' case, a better game, with a dedicated team, a spiffier framework and graphics, a less frightening product, a more limited time frame, maybe a little less compromises on game design, a more serious buy-in from the execs, and daily enthusiastic communication would have been preferred. These would have gone a long way in achieving better results. I still think we could have hit 1,000.
Yehuda
[1] Pictures taken from various CC sources on Google
Monday, March 09, 2015
Status Update
My life of chaos is particularly chaotic this month (and next).
- I will be speaking on the topic of APIs this Thursday at DevConTLV. Namely: considering the design of your API from your customer's perspective: how not to annoy them.
- When I find out more about how the gamification project ended at my old job, I'll write something up about it.
- I found someone to take over my lease in Raanana, so I am moving back to Jerusalem by the of this month. That means boxes, movers, etc, etc.
- Back in Jerusalem means that I will be back hosting the Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club again, or co-hosting if Nadine wants to hang on to it some of the time.
- During my vacation last week I made good progress on my book, but I need another 6 months of quiet work-time to finish it. I probably won't get to work on it again until mid-April, and then I will be involved in a number of side interface/gamification projects for friends who are developing web-sites.
- Israeli elections next week and I don't have anyone to vote for, as usual.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Status Update
- I will not be able to do my annual game industry survey this year (which I have been publishing on Purple Pawn). I will do my best to get it done again next year. Some people have commented that they think I should ask more interesting questions; what should those be? Remember that the respondents are under no obligation to answer, and many owners of privately held companies are reluctant to answer even basic questions.
- I have made some progress on my book, going from 90 pages of notes to 180 pages of notes and a TOC. I revise the TOC from time to time, and I rewrite notes into chapter from time to time, but I keep starting them over again. At some point I hope things will take shape. It's so easy to hit publish on a blog post but so hard to let go of a chapter.
- I have left my job in Hod Hasharon and will be starting a new one in Jerusalem next month. Sometime between now and the end of July I will be moving back to Jerusalem (I have been living in Raanana for the last 3 1/2 years).
- Between the above two jobs, I am taking a week's vacation. I will be off the grid from noon Sunday until noon Thursday: no telephone, no SMS, no email, no Internet. It seems weird, I know. As a shabbat-observer, I do 25 hours off the grid every week. This feels different. Anyway, the point of it is to take a break from the endless chirps, beeps, and distractions that follow me around all the time. I want to make some more progress on my book. I also need to finalize a talk on APIs that I'm giving next month in Tel Aviv at DevConTLV.
- I started a limited-period gamification project at my last job that was not complete before I left (not my decision; I wanted to to finish before I left). Many things went wrong and some things went right. I look forward to hearing the end results, after which I will write up what happened.
Yehuda
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Save or Enslave the World: Takeaways from #gsummit 2014, the Gamification Conference
GSummit SF 2014 was a gamification conference organized and run by Gabe Zicherman and his cohorts at Dopamine, gamification.co, and Livecube.
Why I Went
I went to the conference to a) understand the disconnect between what the theorists write, what gamification companies present, and what real companies implement, and b) find out what I could contribute to the gamification world, either as a writer, an employee, or a consultant.
Gamification companies present basic, or even bad, game mechanics as implementation examples and in their turnkey products. Often there is no relation between their implementations and the motivational psychology that they espouse. The papers, articles, websites, case studies, and books on gamification present some good information about psychology and motivation, but they present gamification systems with only basic game mechanics. Simply adding points, badges, missions, and leaderboards to a process doesn't make a good game, let alone a more motivational process. Some case studies mention more complex mechanics but leave out the complex implementation details.
A small number of gamification critics who present more comprehensive motivation models are entering the gamification business. Their gamification implementations are allegedly constructed to match their motivational principles, but these implementations still lack the rich potential of complex game mechanics developed in the last forty years. Their systems are still built around an endless parade of points, badges, missions, and leaderboards abstracted from games like World of Warcraft, Farmville, and Second Life. This is akin to watching publisher after publisher espouse the rich potential of board games and then release an endless stream of games based on Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit.
What I Found (Overview)
The con was held in downtown San Francisco in a sketchy, treeless neighborhood that hosts Zynga and other trendy companies in posh buildings half a block from drug dealers and the ramshackle homeless. I estimate that around 300 people attended. Except for some audio problems, it went smoothly.
Every company with a remote connection to any definition of gamification thinks that theirs is the only correct one: they define what gamification is, they present an implementation that conforms to the definition, and then they mention case studies that have little to do with their definition. Companies that promote straight gamification were present together with those who promote play gamification, each one presenting evidence that the other ones didn't know what they were talking about.
When you carefully look at the numbers presented by these companies, few point to a challenge that was properly defined and solved using gamification. They throw out percentage increases in a metric that has little to do with the actual problem. For instance, they might say that a particular system was used by 98% of a group of people. Were these people forced to use the system? What was the net effect in those participants compared to those who didn't use the system? What was the net ROI for the company or the participants? Also, they don't present the implementations that didn't work.
Researchers on standard motivational theory, as well as companies that had nothing to do with gamification, such as purveyors of rewards, gift cards, and loyalty programs, were there. The new gamification companies presented evidence that old-school methodologies don’t work or never worked, while the old loyalty companies trotted out case studies and evidence proving that they work perfectly.
Loyalty programs, customer management, data collection, location tracking, rewards, and manipulation techniques are black hat motivation techniques (getting consumers to do what you want, or playing on consumers’ fears) and these sessions were depressing. Many sessions were sales pitches for services or books; their claims and evidence presented were directly contradictory: loyalty programs worked; loyalty programs didn't work. Don’t design for games or fun, design for engagement; you can’t design for engagement without games and fun. Rewards work amazingly well; rewards actually demotivate.
Sessions from companies or organizations that had implemented systems (straight gamification, play gamification, gameful design, or playification) described how they achieved buy-in from their organization, what were the results, and what they plan to do next. These sessions were the most helpful; they tended to be more honest than the vendors who sell gamification platforms, and in some cases they described the implementations that didn't work.
What I Heard (Details)
Rather than present the contents of each session, I will present what I learned by topic [with my comments].
Motivation
While gamification tokens (points, etc) are extrinsic “rewards” awarded after completing a task, an argument was presented that gamification increases intrinsic motivation by orienting you to do tasks that you will find rewarding. Some said that there is no fine line between the two, and most motivation is a complex combination of both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
Intrinsic motivation can trump rewards or threats of punishment. For example, if you are threatened about submitting a report late, you might still submit it late because you want it to be just right. Threats (an external demotivator) actually increase intrinsic motivation that can remain after the threat is removed.
One robust theory on motivation (Octalysis) includes eight parameters: 1) meaning (purpose), 2) accomplishment (mastery, competence), 3) empowerment (autonomy), 4) ownership (acquisition), 5) social influence (relatedness), 6) scarcity (limited awards, rankings), 7) unpredictability (random awards, exploration), and 8) avoidance (loss, opportunity cost). Some of these parameters are extrinsic and some are intrinsic; some are white hat (positive) and some are black hat (negative).
As the ease of performing a task increases, the required motivation to do it decreases. If a trigger to do a task falls under this curve, the act is not performed; above the curve, the act is performed. In any case, a trigger is needed (you may be motivated and able to exercise but forget to set your alarm). Every action is measured independently: the same action may require more or less motivation as it becomes easier or harder (or the motivation changes in some way). So you have to decide between managing the motivation, making the task easier, or providing a trigger.
The methods you use should depend on whether you want the task done once, over a period of time, or long term, and whether you are asking the person to perform a new action, repeat an action done before, change an action, do an action less, or stop doing an action.
Different gamification techniques are more effective at different points; this makes sense due to flow theory. Points are easy to acquire, so they are short term; reputation is more challenging to acquire, so it is long term, and it is also harder to game. Ramp up the processes and switch people to long term focused systems as they gain familiarity.
Happiness is short term and transient. Purpose, which may include short term unhappiness (struggle, challenge), is long term and sustained. The chemicals dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphin make us happy, but they each have a different trigger. Dopamine: anticipating rewards. Oxytocin: bonding socially. Serotonin: feeling pride.
There are different types of fun, including hard fun (challenges), easy fun (exploration), people fun (social), and serious fun (purpose). [This correlates – kind of – to Bartle's four gamer types.]
A special note about Rajat Paharia on BunchBalls' philosophy: there is no place for game deign or fun in gamification; it is all about engagement. His philosophy makes zero sense [it's engaging because it is fun and designed well!], but it's (I hope) mostly a matter of terminology and the fact that he presents his product as black hat gamification. Several companies are using BunchBall's turnkey system.
Black Hat Motivation
Rewards: A big prize (like the XPrize) focuses effort and legitimizes the time spent working towards that goal. It motivates disparate teams to accomplish things outside of companies. The cash value, above a certain amount, is not relevant, since the research results, interesting nature of the challenge, and community built during the process is rewarding to the participants. This allows you to get people to do more while spending less.
People also love lotteries and unearned coupons, which are prizes offered for no challenge.
However, rewards signify the end of a process, while business motivation must remain indefinitely.
Tracking: The Internet of Things will enable locators in billions of objects that can track people by their smartphones (or other devices). You can use exact data about people’s movements throughout a store – you can even use hidden cameras that capture their facial expressions while they interact with certain products – to gain insight on how to sell to them.
Subversion: People are entrenched against persuasion from people they oppose. You can influence their behavior more readily by using people in their own camp or people whose opinion they respect. Exploit social behavior: tell people stories while pitching to them, and use human interest and their friends.
Channeling: People are less likely to opt out than to opt in. Provide wizards. Show empty areas that need filling or populate things by default. Consider page scanning on websites and thumb reach on devices for elements you want clicked. Reduce choices, chunk, block options, block sites with popups, guilt people to not choose undesired options or make them unattractive, hide escape links, and disclose only what is necessary. People think that presented choices are valid choices: this makes them feel smart and valued, which is more effective than rewards. Make your site look credible.
White Hat Motivation
Companies that focus on making virtual things more real (like the big game companies) are ignoring the market for making real things more virtual. [The speaker ignored companies that do ARGs and other pervasive gaming. However, gamification needs more and better game designers creating better gamification techniques.]
Gamification provides a means for people to reach their goals; your company’s goals should align with people’s goals. Collaboration is better than competition. Have people compete with a system, not each other, win or lose together, interact with shared but different responsibilities and resources, and allow for user-generated and emergent features.
Gamification fights boredom. Companies in the entertainment and food industries have been attacking consumer boredom for ages, and there is no reason why we shouldn't do so in the business world for employee boredom. Motivated workers are more productive and their work is better quality. Games can provide holistic experiences that model complex systems. Emergent behavior can produce viable solutions [like in Ender's Game]. Gamification systems must include ROI, understand the learning and pain points, and consider the genre and platform.
Most disruptive technologies provide people with better means of communication. MyFitnessPal has trounced Weight Watchers in a short time because it uses effortless peer-to-peer communication. Education can be similarly disrupted. [I’m not sure that this is absolute, since apps require self-motivation without a trigger, as opposed to coaches and teachers. Not everyone is motivated by their peers!]
Case Studies
IBM created a rich and complex series of gamification processes that includes training and brainstorming. They consider it to be very successful. See Serious Games for Business.
T-Mobile is gamifying 38,000 call center workers, but balancing the rewards is very tricky, since people do what gives them a reward regardless of whether it is the best thing for the customer. If you reward quickness, customers get hung up on. If you reward no return calls within X time (a short time), workers give “solutions” that delay the return call. Etc. Groups in different locations and cultures respond to different rewards, mechanics, and structures.
Applebee's (RMH Franchise Corp) introduced a straight gamification system with no rewards. It reduced a 130% employee turnover rate by about 20% in a year. They plan to add status rewards, such as a special colored jacket for best performing employees.
Wikipedia and Delta Airlines presented gamified training programs, but it was difficult to see if these made any real substantive difference to their bottom line. The people who took the gamified training programs liked them and were trained.
The Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy gamified its scrum (agile software development) program. All of its participants were student game designers. The gamification included a full D&D-like experience played on a whiteboard with moving Post-It Note characters, earned equipment, etc. One goal was to increase the accuracy of time estimations; this also had the side effect of making people more familiar with teammates' work items. Another goal was to reward showing up for scrum meetings. The system worked for one group that had a supportive leader, but not for another whose participants saw it as additional busy work.
Gabe Zicherman led us in a workshop. We had to come up with ideas to solve a problem, including voting on the best solutions. It was "gamified" because a) we voted on the best solution, so there were points awarded (kind of), and b) he gave a prize, a t-shirt, to the winning team's solution. [In my book, it was an example of a non-gamified task nearly destroyed by an incredibly sucky game. We were already motivated to come up with a solution; the "award" of a t-shirt was actually demotivating.]
Keynotes
Jane McGonigal said that a controlled study now proves the efficacy of Superbetter. Superbetter's effects can change your life even if you stop playing it after six weeks. Games of any kind help with real world problems; for example, playing Tetris for 10 minutes within 6 hours of a trauma can help reduce PTSD. People find this weird, though they wouldn't find it weird if the activity was meditation or prayer; games still make people uneasy. 10 minutes of games also help push out other drives, like overeating or the desire for alcohol.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s talk was interrupted frequently by microphone problems. He is a dynamic and funny speaker. He talked about how science is becoming mainstream, with examples from pop culture. He also briefly mentioned gamifying science using crowdsourcing.
Adopting Gamification in Your Company
Here are some steps that you can use to bring gamification to your company:
Conclusion
Before, during, and after the conference, I also met or talked to professionals who didn't attend the conference but who work in motivation, games, or both. They say that gamification is a meaningless buzzword, a con, or nonsense (they used less polite phrases). I think that their complaints were aimed at straight gamification and the companies that sell it.
When you consider play gamification, the gamification is a tiny part of it. In the same way that Dan Pink didn't really add much to self-determination theory, but his simplifying and popularizing it added a great deal of value, gamification simplifies and popularizes playification, which may not be too bad.
Gamification proponents call points "rewards", and critics rightly point out that points are not rewards. A game where you click a button and get a million points isn't rewarding. Minesweeper gives you a point every second, but your object is to get the least amount of points; are these points rewards? People don’t run a 100 meter dash for the points, but for the intrinsic value of the race. But not so fast. The critics are not entirely correct. When a person runs all out and sees the numbers, the numbers matter; they focus the runner and provide a goal to achieve. I admit that, despite the inanity of the conference's gamified chat system (Livecube; see below), whenever my points closed in on a round hundred (500, 600, etc), I was motivated to post a few more times just to see the number roll over that hundred mark. After it did, I no longer cared one whit about my number if it was not attached to a real reward, and the additional posts I wrote to increase my score were valueless. Still, point-driven motivation does exist, at least in the very short term.
I went to the conference to a) understand the disconnect between what the theorists write, what gamification companies present, and what companies implement, and b) find out what I could contribute to the gamification world, either as a writer, an employee, or a consultant.
A) The disconnect exists because there is no clear definition of gamification, companies are still carving out a space, and as a result they disagree on what works. The long term results are inconclusive, but they are also promising for certain types of goals, especially for training and cooperation.
B) A game designer has experience with the application of hundreds of mechanics that could be used in gamification systems but currently are not. To give you an idea, consider what a game designer could do with “points” (this is off the top of my head):
Livecube
A final word about Livecube, the conference chat system designed by the guys who ran the conference.
Livecube presents chat rooms for sessions and lists of speakers and sessions, and also integrates with Twitter. It includes a gamification system that awards points for posting (more for posting pictures), reposting, favoriting, getting reposted, and checking into and rating sessions. I appreciate the chat rooms, though a real chat system works just as well. As it stands, its gamification system is a disaster. Leaderboards kill the motivation of anyone but the leaders to post anything, and demotivate reposts (since it gives leaders more points than it gives you). The badges are worthless and repetitive. The points don’t reward any accomplishment, but inspire inane post after inane post; the result are chat sessions filled with noise instead of signal. Worst of all, encouraging people to tweet when they should be listening to a speaker is a Really Bad Idea. On the technical side, conversations are hard to follow. Limiting posts to twitter length makes many types of conversations and useful information impossible to communicate. In short, the system encapsulates everything that is criticized about gamification.
A few ideas to fix it: Remove the points and badges for things that are not actually accomplishments, such as hitting the send button. Reward a random participant each day for each session; this keeps people checked in, but not posting too frequently. Deincentivize multiple posts that are not favorited or reposted. Deincentivize posting during a lecture; incentivize for posting after the lecture (or maybe lecturers should give two minute tweet breaks during lectures). Create group incentives for teams. Remove the leaderboards; leaderboards are only appropriate for when you want only a few people to do something, not when you want everyone to do something. Create achievable missions. Create rewards for tagging people physically to foster real world social interaction. Etc.
Why I Went
I went to the conference to a) understand the disconnect between what the theorists write, what gamification companies present, and what real companies implement, and b) find out what I could contribute to the gamification world, either as a writer, an employee, or a consultant.
Gamification companies present basic, or even bad, game mechanics as implementation examples and in their turnkey products. Often there is no relation between their implementations and the motivational psychology that they espouse. The papers, articles, websites, case studies, and books on gamification present some good information about psychology and motivation, but they present gamification systems with only basic game mechanics. Simply adding points, badges, missions, and leaderboards to a process doesn't make a good game, let alone a more motivational process. Some case studies mention more complex mechanics but leave out the complex implementation details.
A small number of gamification critics who present more comprehensive motivation models are entering the gamification business. Their gamification implementations are allegedly constructed to match their motivational principles, but these implementations still lack the rich potential of complex game mechanics developed in the last forty years. Their systems are still built around an endless parade of points, badges, missions, and leaderboards abstracted from games like World of Warcraft, Farmville, and Second Life. This is akin to watching publisher after publisher espouse the rich potential of board games and then release an endless stream of games based on Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit.
What I Found (Overview)
The con was held in downtown San Francisco in a sketchy, treeless neighborhood that hosts Zynga and other trendy companies in posh buildings half a block from drug dealers and the ramshackle homeless. I estimate that around 300 people attended. Except for some audio problems, it went smoothly.
Every company with a remote connection to any definition of gamification thinks that theirs is the only correct one: they define what gamification is, they present an implementation that conforms to the definition, and then they mention case studies that have little to do with their definition. Companies that promote straight gamification were present together with those who promote play gamification, each one presenting evidence that the other ones didn't know what they were talking about.
When you carefully look at the numbers presented by these companies, few point to a challenge that was properly defined and solved using gamification. They throw out percentage increases in a metric that has little to do with the actual problem. For instance, they might say that a particular system was used by 98% of a group of people. Were these people forced to use the system? What was the net effect in those participants compared to those who didn't use the system? What was the net ROI for the company or the participants? Also, they don't present the implementations that didn't work.
Researchers on standard motivational theory, as well as companies that had nothing to do with gamification, such as purveyors of rewards, gift cards, and loyalty programs, were there. The new gamification companies presented evidence that old-school methodologies don’t work or never worked, while the old loyalty companies trotted out case studies and evidence proving that they work perfectly.
Loyalty programs, customer management, data collection, location tracking, rewards, and manipulation techniques are black hat motivation techniques (getting consumers to do what you want, or playing on consumers’ fears) and these sessions were depressing. Many sessions were sales pitches for services or books; their claims and evidence presented were directly contradictory: loyalty programs worked; loyalty programs didn't work. Don’t design for games or fun, design for engagement; you can’t design for engagement without games and fun. Rewards work amazingly well; rewards actually demotivate.
Sessions from companies or organizations that had implemented systems (straight gamification, play gamification, gameful design, or playification) described how they achieved buy-in from their organization, what were the results, and what they plan to do next. These sessions were the most helpful; they tended to be more honest than the vendors who sell gamification platforms, and in some cases they described the implementations that didn't work.
What I Heard (Details)
Rather than present the contents of each session, I will present what I learned by topic [with my comments].
Motivation
While gamification tokens (points, etc) are extrinsic “rewards” awarded after completing a task, an argument was presented that gamification increases intrinsic motivation by orienting you to do tasks that you will find rewarding. Some said that there is no fine line between the two, and most motivation is a complex combination of both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
Intrinsic motivation can trump rewards or threats of punishment. For example, if you are threatened about submitting a report late, you might still submit it late because you want it to be just right. Threats (an external demotivator) actually increase intrinsic motivation that can remain after the threat is removed.
One robust theory on motivation (Octalysis) includes eight parameters: 1) meaning (purpose), 2) accomplishment (mastery, competence), 3) empowerment (autonomy), 4) ownership (acquisition), 5) social influence (relatedness), 6) scarcity (limited awards, rankings), 7) unpredictability (random awards, exploration), and 8) avoidance (loss, opportunity cost). Some of these parameters are extrinsic and some are intrinsic; some are white hat (positive) and some are black hat (negative).
As the ease of performing a task increases, the required motivation to do it decreases. If a trigger to do a task falls under this curve, the act is not performed; above the curve, the act is performed. In any case, a trigger is needed (you may be motivated and able to exercise but forget to set your alarm). Every action is measured independently: the same action may require more or less motivation as it becomes easier or harder (or the motivation changes in some way). So you have to decide between managing the motivation, making the task easier, or providing a trigger.
The methods you use should depend on whether you want the task done once, over a period of time, or long term, and whether you are asking the person to perform a new action, repeat an action done before, change an action, do an action less, or stop doing an action.
Different gamification techniques are more effective at different points; this makes sense due to flow theory. Points are easy to acquire, so they are short term; reputation is more challenging to acquire, so it is long term, and it is also harder to game. Ramp up the processes and switch people to long term focused systems as they gain familiarity.
Happiness is short term and transient. Purpose, which may include short term unhappiness (struggle, challenge), is long term and sustained. The chemicals dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphin make us happy, but they each have a different trigger. Dopamine: anticipating rewards. Oxytocin: bonding socially. Serotonin: feeling pride.
There are different types of fun, including hard fun (challenges), easy fun (exploration), people fun (social), and serious fun (purpose). [This correlates – kind of – to Bartle's four gamer types.]
A special note about Rajat Paharia on BunchBalls' philosophy: there is no place for game deign or fun in gamification; it is all about engagement. His philosophy makes zero sense [it's engaging because it is fun and designed well!], but it's (I hope) mostly a matter of terminology and the fact that he presents his product as black hat gamification. Several companies are using BunchBall's turnkey system.
Black Hat Motivation
Rewards: A big prize (like the XPrize) focuses effort and legitimizes the time spent working towards that goal. It motivates disparate teams to accomplish things outside of companies. The cash value, above a certain amount, is not relevant, since the research results, interesting nature of the challenge, and community built during the process is rewarding to the participants. This allows you to get people to do more while spending less.
People also love lotteries and unearned coupons, which are prizes offered for no challenge.
However, rewards signify the end of a process, while business motivation must remain indefinitely.
Tracking: The Internet of Things will enable locators in billions of objects that can track people by their smartphones (or other devices). You can use exact data about people’s movements throughout a store – you can even use hidden cameras that capture their facial expressions while they interact with certain products – to gain insight on how to sell to them.
Subversion: People are entrenched against persuasion from people they oppose. You can influence their behavior more readily by using people in their own camp or people whose opinion they respect. Exploit social behavior: tell people stories while pitching to them, and use human interest and their friends.
Channeling: People are less likely to opt out than to opt in. Provide wizards. Show empty areas that need filling or populate things by default. Consider page scanning on websites and thumb reach on devices for elements you want clicked. Reduce choices, chunk, block options, block sites with popups, guilt people to not choose undesired options or make them unattractive, hide escape links, and disclose only what is necessary. People think that presented choices are valid choices: this makes them feel smart and valued, which is more effective than rewards. Make your site look credible.
White Hat Motivation
Companies that focus on making virtual things more real (like the big game companies) are ignoring the market for making real things more virtual. [The speaker ignored companies that do ARGs and other pervasive gaming. However, gamification needs more and better game designers creating better gamification techniques.]
Gamification provides a means for people to reach their goals; your company’s goals should align with people’s goals. Collaboration is better than competition. Have people compete with a system, not each other, win or lose together, interact with shared but different responsibilities and resources, and allow for user-generated and emergent features.
Gamification fights boredom. Companies in the entertainment and food industries have been attacking consumer boredom for ages, and there is no reason why we shouldn't do so in the business world for employee boredom. Motivated workers are more productive and their work is better quality. Games can provide holistic experiences that model complex systems. Emergent behavior can produce viable solutions [like in Ender's Game]. Gamification systems must include ROI, understand the learning and pain points, and consider the genre and platform.
Most disruptive technologies provide people with better means of communication. MyFitnessPal has trounced Weight Watchers in a short time because it uses effortless peer-to-peer communication. Education can be similarly disrupted. [I’m not sure that this is absolute, since apps require self-motivation without a trigger, as opposed to coaches and teachers. Not everyone is motivated by their peers!]
Case Studies
IBM created a rich and complex series of gamification processes that includes training and brainstorming. They consider it to be very successful. See Serious Games for Business.
T-Mobile is gamifying 38,000 call center workers, but balancing the rewards is very tricky, since people do what gives them a reward regardless of whether it is the best thing for the customer. If you reward quickness, customers get hung up on. If you reward no return calls within X time (a short time), workers give “solutions” that delay the return call. Etc. Groups in different locations and cultures respond to different rewards, mechanics, and structures.
Applebee's (RMH Franchise Corp) introduced a straight gamification system with no rewards. It reduced a 130% employee turnover rate by about 20% in a year. They plan to add status rewards, such as a special colored jacket for best performing employees.
Wikipedia and Delta Airlines presented gamified training programs, but it was difficult to see if these made any real substantive difference to their bottom line. The people who took the gamified training programs liked them and were trained.
The Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy gamified its scrum (agile software development) program. All of its participants were student game designers. The gamification included a full D&D-like experience played on a whiteboard with moving Post-It Note characters, earned equipment, etc. One goal was to increase the accuracy of time estimations; this also had the side effect of making people more familiar with teammates' work items. Another goal was to reward showing up for scrum meetings. The system worked for one group that had a supportive leader, but not for another whose participants saw it as additional busy work.
Gabe Zicherman led us in a workshop. We had to come up with ideas to solve a problem, including voting on the best solutions. It was "gamified" because a) we voted on the best solution, so there were points awarded (kind of), and b) he gave a prize, a t-shirt, to the winning team's solution. [In my book, it was an example of a non-gamified task nearly destroyed by an incredibly sucky game. We were already motivated to come up with a solution; the "award" of a t-shirt was actually demotivating.]
Keynotes
Jane McGonigal said that a controlled study now proves the efficacy of Superbetter. Superbetter's effects can change your life even if you stop playing it after six weeks. Games of any kind help with real world problems; for example, playing Tetris for 10 minutes within 6 hours of a trauma can help reduce PTSD. People find this weird, though they wouldn't find it weird if the activity was meditation or prayer; games still make people uneasy. 10 minutes of games also help push out other drives, like overeating or the desire for alcohol.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s talk was interrupted frequently by microphone problems. He is a dynamic and funny speaker. He talked about how science is becoming mainstream, with examples from pop culture. He also briefly mentioned gamifying science using crowdsourcing.
Adopting Gamification in Your Company
Here are some steps that you can use to bring gamification to your company:
- Create a business case. Find other companies in your sector who use gamification, especially competitors.
- Shamelessly promote the idea of gamification until people are used to the idea and agree to a pilot project to see if it works.
- Identify the specific problems you want to solve. Take the time to do a proper survey.
- Ensure that gamification is the right solution. For example, gamification is great at providing immediate and progressive feedback, and at clarifying complicated procedures, making them less threatening and more likely to be completed.
- Estimate the ROI. Define the metrics that define success or progress.
- Find a champion for the pilot. Find coworkers willing to give time to the project, especially gamers who believe in the idea. For future projects, ensure that you’re not the only champion, or you will become a bottleneck and it will fall apart when you’re not around.
- Ensure that there is someone leading the process, so that people don’t become lost.
- Use outside solutions if they make sense and it simplifies things.
- Define desired actions and how they report the metrics.
- Design for different types of players.
- Create seamless, non-intrusive flow for discovery (finding out about the system) and onboarding (first steps to use the system), habit building (becoming comfortable with the system in the short term) and mastery (continued relevance in the long term).
- Reward people for using the system, since it is saving time and money elsewhere.
- Integrate gamification into many parts of the company (the whole flow, if possible). It should become a natural part of business.
- Keep the system fresh; games become stale so a gamification system requires constant input of fresh ideas. It may not be suitable for all people.
- [I will add: Provide autonomy so that people don’t feel like they are forced to do things they don’t want to do. Provide purpose: the reason they’re doing this, and the benefits for the company or for the world, whichever is relevant.]
Conclusion
Before, during, and after the conference, I also met or talked to professionals who didn't attend the conference but who work in motivation, games, or both. They say that gamification is a meaningless buzzword, a con, or nonsense (they used less polite phrases). I think that their complaints were aimed at straight gamification and the companies that sell it.
When you consider play gamification, the gamification is a tiny part of it. In the same way that Dan Pink didn't really add much to self-determination theory, but his simplifying and popularizing it added a great deal of value, gamification simplifies and popularizes playification, which may not be too bad.
Gamification proponents call points "rewards", and critics rightly point out that points are not rewards. A game where you click a button and get a million points isn't rewarding. Minesweeper gives you a point every second, but your object is to get the least amount of points; are these points rewards? People don’t run a 100 meter dash for the points, but for the intrinsic value of the race. But not so fast. The critics are not entirely correct. When a person runs all out and sees the numbers, the numbers matter; they focus the runner and provide a goal to achieve. I admit that, despite the inanity of the conference's gamified chat system (Livecube; see below), whenever my points closed in on a round hundred (500, 600, etc), I was motivated to post a few more times just to see the number roll over that hundred mark. After it did, I no longer cared one whit about my number if it was not attached to a real reward, and the additional posts I wrote to increase my score were valueless. Still, point-driven motivation does exist, at least in the very short term.
I went to the conference to a) understand the disconnect between what the theorists write, what gamification companies present, and what companies implement, and b) find out what I could contribute to the gamification world, either as a writer, an employee, or a consultant.
A) The disconnect exists because there is no clear definition of gamification, companies are still carving out a space, and as a result they disagree on what works. The long term results are inconclusive, but they are also promising for certain types of goals, especially for training and cooperation.
B) A game designer has experience with the application of hundreds of mechanics that could be used in gamification systems but currently are not. To give you an idea, consider what a game designer could do with “points” (this is off the top of my head):
- Points that are positive, negative (used sparingly!), themed, tradeable, or assigned only collectively
- Multiple point tracks, for example green points, blue points, and red points. The biggest problem with black hat gamification is that it reduces autonomy (by incentivizing some tasks and deincentivizing others); by allowing participants to select among multiple point options, you add autonomy back into the process. In any case, different point structures are required for different positions in the company (you can’t use the same point structure for call center workers and IT personnel).
- Goals based on different point tracks and levels, with badges earned either by concentrating more on one track or diversifying between tracks.
- Participant created goals and levels, thus establishing point goals that work for each participant (see flow theory)
- Additional factors to earning points. For example, if tasks are completed in a certain time, in a certain order, or with a certain buy-in, they scale upwards or include residual effects.
- Limited replenishing points that can only be assigned to others.
- A rich set of point redemption packets that utilize different point combinations, as well as a series of redemption missions (redeem A to acquire B or C, redeem C or D to acquire F).
- Ensuring that play and mastery is part of the system, and not just more work for virtual rewards.
- Most importantly, ensuring that points encourage people to do things that they already want to do, not things they will regret, feel tricked into, or come to regard as busy work.
Livecube
A final word about Livecube, the conference chat system designed by the guys who ran the conference.
Livecube presents chat rooms for sessions and lists of speakers and sessions, and also integrates with Twitter. It includes a gamification system that awards points for posting (more for posting pictures), reposting, favoriting, getting reposted, and checking into and rating sessions. I appreciate the chat rooms, though a real chat system works just as well. As it stands, its gamification system is a disaster. Leaderboards kill the motivation of anyone but the leaders to post anything, and demotivate reposts (since it gives leaders more points than it gives you). The badges are worthless and repetitive. The points don’t reward any accomplishment, but inspire inane post after inane post; the result are chat sessions filled with noise instead of signal. Worst of all, encouraging people to tweet when they should be listening to a speaker is a Really Bad Idea. On the technical side, conversations are hard to follow. Limiting posts to twitter length makes many types of conversations and useful information impossible to communicate. In short, the system encapsulates everything that is criticized about gamification.
A few ideas to fix it: Remove the points and badges for things that are not actually accomplishments, such as hitting the send button. Reward a random participant each day for each session; this keeps people checked in, but not posting too frequently. Deincentivize multiple posts that are not favorited or reposted. Deincentivize posting during a lecture; incentivize for posting after the lecture (or maybe lecturers should give two minute tweet breaks during lectures). Create group incentives for teams. Remove the leaderboards; leaderboards are only appropriate for when you want only a few people to do something, not when you want everyone to do something. Create achievable missions. Create rewards for tagging people physically to foster real world social interaction. Etc.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
What is Gamification? On This The Experts Disagree
Not everyone agrees on what gamification is (and this is not even considering alternative approaches that are not gamification). It is not simply a matter of definition; people talk about gamification while meaning different concepts.
I wrote a brief introduction to the three types of gamification. Now let's go a little deeper into what gamification is.
There are two main approaches:
1. Gamification is a feedback system that fosters engagement
Gamification is the application of game mechanics to non-game contexts. This either means adding fun and play to boring or unmotivating tasks – making the world a better place - or manipulating people into doing things that they might otherwise not want to do – making the world a worse place (take your pick).
People spend a massive amount of time playing multi-player online games doing what superficially seem to be unfun tasks: repetitively killing, jumping, farming, building complex virtual properties and characters, and so on. Considering the “Tom Sawyer” principle, gamification people figure that they can take the feedback systems from these games - points, badges, leaderboards, trophies, game currency, and missions - and apply them (with some customization) to many work, health, charity, etc tasks to achieve the same motivating results. The reasoning is that any boring activity becomes engaging if the context feels like a game, feedback is immediate and progressive, and competition or collaboration is leveraged.
These proponents see gamification as this:
For these proponents, the play mechanics are not that relevant. The gamification elements are all you need to make an engaging and fun system. The quest for points, or badges, or a high ranking on a leaderboard is fun, in and of itself. Play elements are just icing.
Let’s call this “straight gamification” (the term I used in my original post).
2: Gamification is a play system that includes video game elements
Gamification is a thin veneer of video game elements added onto playification. Playification is adding fun and play to boring or unmotivating tasks; gamification is adding points, badges, leaderboards, trophies, game currency, and missions as part of playification.
Adding rewards and making boring tasks more playful to motivate people is an old idea. Loyalty programs, recess, team building games, and vacation time have existed for centuries. Philosophies about reforming education and work processes to be more fun have existed for just as long. This is called playification.
Gamification systems do a lot more than just take the feedback systems from video games; they include elements that make the process more playful.
Challenging and interesting tasks make games fun, not feedback systems. Points, badges, etc, are not rewards; the fulfillment of a challenge, the ability to freely choose an activity, and relationships (to people or to a higher purpose) are the rewards. Points and badges track or reflect these rewards in some instances, but they do not motivate people. Assigning points and offering badges to non-challenging tasks is insulting and ultimately empty, and leaderboards applied haphazardly only motivate the top few people who are winning.
Gamification repackages the old idea (make work/school more playful) with a new name and a set of cookie cutter interfaces that orients people raised on video games.
Let’s call this “play gamification”.
Afterthought
Neither of these two are to be confused with gameful design or playification.
Gameful design is the application of either of these two gamification philosophies to user-centered tasks. In other words, tasks that a person wants to do or has to do, but wants to make more fun - making the world a better place. This is opposed to a gamification system created by companies in order to get you to do something you were not necessarily going to do, and for no real long-term benefit to you - making the world a worse place.
Playification does not require the presence or absence of game mechanics. Play gamification is one form of playification.
To be continued ...
I wrote a brief introduction to the three types of gamification. Now let's go a little deeper into what gamification is.
There are two main approaches:
1. Gamification is a feedback system that fosters engagement
Gamification is the application of game mechanics to non-game contexts. This either means adding fun and play to boring or unmotivating tasks – making the world a better place - or manipulating people into doing things that they might otherwise not want to do – making the world a worse place (take your pick).
People spend a massive amount of time playing multi-player online games doing what superficially seem to be unfun tasks: repetitively killing, jumping, farming, building complex virtual properties and characters, and so on. Considering the “Tom Sawyer” principle, gamification people figure that they can take the feedback systems from these games - points, badges, leaderboards, trophies, game currency, and missions - and apply them (with some customization) to many work, health, charity, etc tasks to achieve the same motivating results. The reasoning is that any boring activity becomes engaging if the context feels like a game, feedback is immediate and progressive, and competition or collaboration is leveraged.
These proponents see gamification as this:
For these proponents, the play mechanics are not that relevant. The gamification elements are all you need to make an engaging and fun system. The quest for points, or badges, or a high ranking on a leaderboard is fun, in and of itself. Play elements are just icing.
Let’s call this “straight gamification” (the term I used in my original post).
2: Gamification is a play system that includes video game elements
Gamification is a thin veneer of video game elements added onto playification. Playification is adding fun and play to boring or unmotivating tasks; gamification is adding points, badges, leaderboards, trophies, game currency, and missions as part of playification.
Adding rewards and making boring tasks more playful to motivate people is an old idea. Loyalty programs, recess, team building games, and vacation time have existed for centuries. Philosophies about reforming education and work processes to be more fun have existed for just as long. This is called playification.
Gamification systems do a lot more than just take the feedback systems from video games; they include elements that make the process more playful.
Challenging and interesting tasks make games fun, not feedback systems. Points, badges, etc, are not rewards; the fulfillment of a challenge, the ability to freely choose an activity, and relationships (to people or to a higher purpose) are the rewards. Points and badges track or reflect these rewards in some instances, but they do not motivate people. Assigning points and offering badges to non-challenging tasks is insulting and ultimately empty, and leaderboards applied haphazardly only motivate the top few people who are winning.
Gamification repackages the old idea (make work/school more playful) with a new name and a set of cookie cutter interfaces that orients people raised on video games.
Let’s call this “play gamification”.
Afterthought
Neither of these two are to be confused with gameful design or playification.
Gameful design is the application of either of these two gamification philosophies to user-centered tasks. In other words, tasks that a person wants to do or has to do, but wants to make more fun - making the world a better place. This is opposed to a gamification system created by companies in order to get you to do something you were not necessarily going to do, and for no real long-term benefit to you - making the world a worse place.
Playification does not require the presence or absence of game mechanics. Play gamification is one form of playification.
To be continued ...
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Think Your Game is Educational? Here’s How You Can Prove It
GlassLab’s assessment engine can be hooked into video games using an API on a variety of platforms. Players’ choices while playing the game are sent to the assessment engine, which provides multiple views into the metrics generated during each game session. Each player’s performance can then be assessed to determine if they are actually learning.
On Monday I visited Zynga’s San Francisco HQ in the company of Tamas Makany, a learning designer at GlassLab Games. GlassLab is a non-profit put together by the Institute of Play, Electronic Arts, and other entities interested in the intersection of digital games and education.
Creating the right hooks requires not only the API, but also the assistance of GlassLab's learning experts and statisticians to:
- Identify what students are supposed to learn.
- Construct metrics to measure that this learning process is actually taking place.
- Identify (or create) the game mechanics that provide these metrics.
GlassLab currently has two games. The first is a modified version of SimCity called SimCityEDU that GlassLab built using the actual SimCity code under license. The game provides multiple missions that start SimCity at specific states and require students to handle specific problems, such as how to reduce carbon emissions in their city while still providing the city with sufficient power. The second game is Mars Generation One: Argubot Academy, an original game from GlassLab featuring squabbling Martians that requires players to assess whether and how much certain sentences support an argument. The Martians then simulate a debate using the players’ arguments as weapons.
Both games are built to teach lessons based on Common Core educational standards.
[1] ECgD is based on the principles of evidence centered design, a methodology that ensures that what you think is happening is really happening.
Sunday, June 08, 2014
Gamification: Adding Fun
This is my fourth post on gamification and motivational strategy (see Adding Purpose, Adding Autonomy, and Adding Mastery). A successful strategy can use some form of gamification, as well as other tools, to develop and enhance motivation from within.
In this post I present how to provide opportunities for fun.
A gamification process is empty if the process is not compelling. Adding points and so on must be complemented with fun. Too many gamification procedures leave this as an exercise for the reader. They tell you to add fun, but they don't tell you how to do this. "Make sure it's fun! Tweak it until it is!" [1]
You can create fun in a gamification system by luck; I wouldn't rely on it. Odds are high that luck won't be on your side and your system will fail, as most do.
You can create fun by stealing a tested game design from an existing game and slapping a new theme onto it with some gamification extras. This is a popular choice for many designers, and it has the benefit of presenting game mechanics that requires little or no further explanation to its users. The drawback is that the original game is also accessible to the player, and probably already has a bigger fan base (their friends already play it), so they will probably only play with your system if they are forced to (or the theme is killer).
Alternately, you can create fun by designing and testing a good game. For this you need a game designer who understands fun. First time game designers often fail at fun. Successful, proven game designers have a decent track record for creating subsequent games that are also fun. Once you know how to find fun, you are more likely to find it again (not always, but more often than people who never find it in the first place).
Any design for fun requires extensive play testing with a wide variety of people types. Different people have different ideas about what is fun. Don't expect the same interest in a particular activity from the CEO, the graphic designer, the call center operator, and the 8th grade student.
The elements of fun include the following:
In this post I present how to provide opportunities for fun.
A gamification process is empty if the process is not compelling. Adding points and so on must be complemented with fun. Too many gamification procedures leave this as an exercise for the reader. They tell you to add fun, but they don't tell you how to do this. "Make sure it's fun! Tweak it until it is!" [1]
You can create fun in a gamification system by luck; I wouldn't rely on it. Odds are high that luck won't be on your side and your system will fail, as most do.
You can create fun by stealing a tested game design from an existing game and slapping a new theme onto it with some gamification extras. This is a popular choice for many designers, and it has the benefit of presenting game mechanics that requires little or no further explanation to its users. The drawback is that the original game is also accessible to the player, and probably already has a bigger fan base (their friends already play it), so they will probably only play with your system if they are forced to (or the theme is killer).
Alternately, you can create fun by designing and testing a good game. For this you need a game designer who understands fun. First time game designers often fail at fun. Successful, proven game designers have a decent track record for creating subsequent games that are also fun. Once you know how to find fun, you are more likely to find it again (not always, but more often than people who never find it in the first place).
Any design for fun requires extensive play testing with a wide variety of people types. Different people have different ideas about what is fun. Don't expect the same interest in a particular activity from the CEO, the graphic designer, the call center operator, and the 8th grade student.
The elements of fun include the following:
- Socializing: Many people's idea of fun is sharing time and conversation with family and friends. A game can be a backdrop against which they socialize. Either the game itself becomes a topic of discussion (such as humorous party games) or it simply keeps the hands occupied and fills in the pauses in the conversation. Winning or losing might be entertaining but irrelevant to their motivation for playing. Examples: parties, meetings, cooperation (less serious), eating or drinking, downtime.
You can build social activity into gamification by having competitive or cooperative activities that do not require the players' undivided attention while they complete the tasks. Play can be set during group activities, such as a meal or "fun day". Interaction is key. - Entertainment: Entertainment can be be either thoughtful or mindless, such as Sudoku, Candy Crush, YouTube, gossip, conversation, action/adventure movies, fantasy, and so on. Dramatic entertainment can be fun even when it is serious or poignant (though perhaps not when it is morbid).
You can include entertainment by splicing in entertainment media (adding sound or movie clips), by creating dramatic stories around which to hang your activities, or by providing simple, non-challenging game play with well-build, accessible achievements, levels, and bonuses. - Aesthetics: Many people's idea of fun includes aesthetic or sensual pleasure: art, music, film, eros, food, nature, and other such things. In gamification contexts, this also includes well-presented graphics, pictures, or sounds.
- Recreation: Many people's fun includes sport, exercise, vertigo (swings, balancing, alcohol), and so on to be fun, while others find these to be work or painful. Many people don't have the necessary abilities to partake in these kinds of activities.
You can include recreation with any activity that requires your body to participate, from treasure hunts, to races, to physical touch (use with caution). - Challenge: See my post about adding mastery. Despite what you might have understood from reading Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun, challenges are fun for some people at some times, but not for all people at all times. Challenges are the best fun for personal growth; our brains are wired to see and solve safe problems. But many people simply don't want to expand their brains, especially after they have spent a day already using them at work or school. For these people, challenges are not fun.
Example challenges include puzzles, pattern matching tasks, trading, auctioning, racing, cooperation, and competition. - Humor: Comedy, laughter, funny or inappropriate graphics, pictures, or sounds. Most people describe comedy, pratfalls, or anything else that makes them laugh as fun, or having fun. Examples: humorous stories or characters, funny roles or costumes, ridiculous challenges.
[1] Some gamification proponents claim that acquiring points is inherently fun. This ill-conceived notion might lead to a short burst of interest from someone who discovers a "game-like" system in a non-game context, but this interest will quickly fade (all the more so as gamification becomes more ubiquitous). Worse, a person lured into a "game-like process" that is not fun can feel betrayed, demotivated, and disappointed, leading to the exact opposite of gamfication's intent.
Wednesday, June 04, 2014
Day 0: Destination San Francisco
And I'm off on another crazy trip. This time to SF for the GSummit gamification conference. I will be returning on June 15/16.
I'm flying into SF 6 days before the conference in order to recover from the jet lag; from experience, it is a waste of time for me to fly half way across the globe in order to sleep through a conference the next day.
I never really thought about visiting SF, so this is somewhat of a surprise to me. I have a few planned activities, and a few days where I'm just going to "explore". At the con, I hope to learn more about what real people do with gamification: how much business is going on, and how much is just hype. Theory is one thing; practice is another. I will attempt to report all of this to you, my faithful reader.
My first flight is a bit of a killer: TLV to PHL to LAX, 7 hour stopover, and then on to SFO.
Yehuda
I'm flying into SF 6 days before the conference in order to recover from the jet lag; from experience, it is a waste of time for me to fly half way across the globe in order to sleep through a conference the next day.
I never really thought about visiting SF, so this is somewhat of a surprise to me. I have a few planned activities, and a few days where I'm just going to "explore". At the con, I hope to learn more about what real people do with gamification: how much business is going on, and how much is just hype. Theory is one thing; practice is another. I will attempt to report all of this to you, my faithful reader.
My first flight is a bit of a killer: TLV to PHL to LAX, 7 hour stopover, and then on to SFO.
Yehuda
Friday, May 30, 2014
Gamification: Adding Mastery
This is my third post on gamification and motivational strategy (see Adding Purpose and Adding Autonomy). A successful strategy can use some form of gamification, as well as other tools, to develop and enhance motivation from within.
In this post I present how to provide opportunities for mastery, the third of the three pillars of sustainable motivation according to Dan Pink.
Competence vs Mastery
Interestingly, the equivalent pillar in self-determination theory is "competence", which is on the same scale as mastery but not necessarily at the same level (competence only implies that one has basic control). A lack of competence in your work can be de-motivational, but this is frequently overcome by other motivational elements, such as status, power, and perks. All other things being equal, people are happier when they can perform tasks at which they are competent, or can practice tasks in order to gain competence.
Performing with, or gaining, mastery can also be motivational, but I don't think it is as ubiquitous. Many people I know are happy to avoid the problems and challenges that come from attaining mastery. Gaining mastery involves an opportunity cost of non-challenging activities such as watching television or posting flames on YouTube. Still, if a person must anyway devote time to something (school, work, etc), the opportunity to obtain mastery can provide a unique happiness.
Mastery of What?
Adding an opportunity for mastery requires you to identify the aspects of the task people will want to master. No one is dying to master buying things; giving out points for each purchase is not going to trigger a quest for mastery (it may trigger purpose, depending on what is being purchased). Similarly, no one is interested in mastering clicking on your sales brochure, tweeting your praises, or commenting more frequently. If you try to sell these as challenges to be mastered, you will invoke only contempt from your audience (or shame, at best). Mastery is for intrinsically interesting tasks that must be learned or performed.
To return to a previous example, if you want to sell the task "memorize bible verses", the mastery component will focus on a) memorization ability, b) textual understanding, or c) final grade. While these may look the same on the outside, they are all different skills. For memorization, the student is mastering the skill of memorization. For understanding, the skill is knowledge and understanding. The final grade is likely going to test either memorization or understanding. However, if the student is motivated by a grade, and not because of the desire to be a better memorizer or learn the material; this is not mastery, but purpose.
Gamification vs Playification
When you add points, levels, etc to a task, each point can provide quick, progressive, and positive feedback about a level of accomplishment. This "rewards" the brain on some level, not as some external award given to incentivize but by providing a milestone that reflects what you have accomplished (Nils Pihl and others). The hope is that the frequency, clarity, and immediacy of the feedback encourages you to complete tasks, or to perform additional tasks just like them.
When you add play elements to tasks, you make them more fun and more free. For creative tasks, this provides a less intimidating space to master a task; people given play and/or freedom (autonomy) will have space and time to do more than what is simply sufficient, allowing or encouraging them to pursue mastery. For work that is enjoyable intrinsically, this kind of playification is generally not required.
A well-designed gamification system requires you to complete a task within a certain time frame, or at least to check into the system on a regular basis, in order to provide a continuous stream of feedback.
Challenge Types
There are four types of challenges. Challenges are the obstacles to a task that require mastery.
Competence vs Mastery
Interestingly, the equivalent pillar in self-determination theory is "competence", which is on the same scale as mastery but not necessarily at the same level (competence only implies that one has basic control). A lack of competence in your work can be de-motivational, but this is frequently overcome by other motivational elements, such as status, power, and perks. All other things being equal, people are happier when they can perform tasks at which they are competent, or can practice tasks in order to gain competence.
Performing with, or gaining, mastery can also be motivational, but I don't think it is as ubiquitous. Many people I know are happy to avoid the problems and challenges that come from attaining mastery. Gaining mastery involves an opportunity cost of non-challenging activities such as watching television or posting flames on YouTube. Still, if a person must anyway devote time to something (school, work, etc), the opportunity to obtain mastery can provide a unique happiness.
Mastery of What?
Adding an opportunity for mastery requires you to identify the aspects of the task people will want to master. No one is dying to master buying things; giving out points for each purchase is not going to trigger a quest for mastery (it may trigger purpose, depending on what is being purchased). Similarly, no one is interested in mastering clicking on your sales brochure, tweeting your praises, or commenting more frequently. If you try to sell these as challenges to be mastered, you will invoke only contempt from your audience (or shame, at best). Mastery is for intrinsically interesting tasks that must be learned or performed.
To return to a previous example, if you want to sell the task "memorize bible verses", the mastery component will focus on a) memorization ability, b) textual understanding, or c) final grade. While these may look the same on the outside, they are all different skills. For memorization, the student is mastering the skill of memorization. For understanding, the skill is knowledge and understanding. The final grade is likely going to test either memorization or understanding. However, if the student is motivated by a grade, and not because of the desire to be a better memorizer or learn the material; this is not mastery, but purpose.
Gamification vs Playification
When you add points, levels, etc to a task, each point can provide quick, progressive, and positive feedback about a level of accomplishment. This "rewards" the brain on some level, not as some external award given to incentivize but by providing a milestone that reflects what you have accomplished (Nils Pihl and others). The hope is that the frequency, clarity, and immediacy of the feedback encourages you to complete tasks, or to perform additional tasks just like them.
When you add play elements to tasks, you make them more fun and more free. For creative tasks, this provides a less intimidating space to master a task; people given play and/or freedom (autonomy) will have space and time to do more than what is simply sufficient, allowing or encouraging them to pursue mastery. For work that is enjoyable intrinsically, this kind of playification is generally not required.
A well-designed gamification system requires you to complete a task within a certain time frame, or at least to check into the system on a regular basis, in order to provide a continuous stream of feedback.
Challenge Types
There are four types of challenges. Challenges are the obstacles to a task that require mastery.
- You versus yourself: speed, stamina, strength, calculation, courage. As your body and mind tackle challenges, they strengthen, making future versions of the same challenges easier.
- You versus a system: solving puzzles, finding solutions in complex situations, creating or fixing mechanical objects.
- You versus other players: competition, politics, relationships.
- You versus luck: spectating, gambling or risk taking.
Consider each of these types when designing for mastery.
You should already know the important research on flow by Mihály CsÃkszentmihályi. To summarize very briefly, too much challenge is frustrating and too little is boring. Flow is experienced in the happy middle.
And you should already know player type research, such as the ten player motivations [PDF] proposed by Nick Yee. To summarize very briefly: what drives one person doesn't drive another, and what drives one person today doesn't drive that person tomorrow. You may want to achieve a high score in a well-designed game, relax, learn, hack, beat or compete with other players, socialize, or whatever. A game that wants to appeal to more than a narrow segment must provide something for multiple types of motivations, some of which are not mastery.
Competition and Winning
If a player is competing against someone obviously better or worse than them, there is little competitive motivation. If there is a leader board, but a player will never, ever be on it, it usually provides no motivation. An exception to this is, for example, a group challenge to move your company from near the bottom of a heap to somewhere more respectable, whether in math literacy or recycling.
The very concept of "winner" can be problematic. It makes everyone else a loser, for one. If someone is really good at many things, but not the best at any one thing, that doesn't make him a loser. Certain people are particularly good at risk taking and looking flashy, but not as good at providing constant day to day quality service.
There are many ways to address these problems: Multiple winners that are based on anyone achieving a certain amount. For example, instead of "the person with the most points wins", use "anyone over 50 points wins". Multiple levels or types of wins: "50 point win", "100 point win", or "green win" and "blue win". This turns the single activity into multiple activities that occur in sequence or parallel, giving everyone continual motivation. Reset leaderboards at regular intervals, and make systemic winners ineligible to compete on them (give them other mastery tasks to perform).
The above is just a small sampling.
Can you think of other ways to provide a space for mastery in non-game environments? Comments are welcome.
You should already know the important research on flow by Mihály CsÃkszentmihályi. To summarize very briefly, too much challenge is frustrating and too little is boring. Flow is experienced in the happy middle.
And you should already know player type research, such as the ten player motivations [PDF] proposed by Nick Yee. To summarize very briefly: what drives one person doesn't drive another, and what drives one person today doesn't drive that person tomorrow. You may want to achieve a high score in a well-designed game, relax, learn, hack, beat or compete with other players, socialize, or whatever. A game that wants to appeal to more than a narrow segment must provide something for multiple types of motivations, some of which are not mastery.
Competition and Winning
If a player is competing against someone obviously better or worse than them, there is little competitive motivation. If there is a leader board, but a player will never, ever be on it, it usually provides no motivation. An exception to this is, for example, a group challenge to move your company from near the bottom of a heap to somewhere more respectable, whether in math literacy or recycling.
The very concept of "winner" can be problematic. It makes everyone else a loser, for one. If someone is really good at many things, but not the best at any one thing, that doesn't make him a loser. Certain people are particularly good at risk taking and looking flashy, but not as good at providing constant day to day quality service.
There are many ways to address these problems: Multiple winners that are based on anyone achieving a certain amount. For example, instead of "the person with the most points wins", use "anyone over 50 points wins". Multiple levels or types of wins: "50 point win", "100 point win", or "green win" and "blue win". This turns the single activity into multiple activities that occur in sequence or parallel, giving everyone continual motivation. Reset leaderboards at regular intervals, and make systemic winners ineligible to compete on them (give them other mastery tasks to perform).
The above is just a small sampling.
Can you think of other ways to provide a space for mastery in non-game environments? Comments are welcome.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Gamification: Adding Autonomy
Let’s consider autonomy, the second of the three pillars of sustainable motivation according to Dan Pink. Autonomy means giving people freedom to make meaningful choices.
Goals vs Processes
Granting others autonomy does not come easy to people who want to motivate, whether they are teachers, parents, clergy, or managers. Setting a goal is not the same thing as defining the process of achieving the goal, yet goal-setters often fall prey to the temptation to control every aspect of how the settee achieves the goal.
You may believe that your process is the coolest thing in workforce management, or the most efficient means of producing results, but the stricter and less leeway you provide for a person to achieve a goal, the more dehumanized and demotivated they feel. An imposed process tells the actor that he or she is a cog in a machine that, if at all possible, should be replaced by a robot.
Furthermore, the goal that you set is often not really the goal you want! For example, the teacher whose goal is to have her students memorize a list of bible verses should consider carefully if that is really her goal. Perhaps her goal is really for her students to understand the verses' meaning and to have the ability and motivation to learn bible. I’m not arguing for or against memorization, but a teacher would do well to remember that memorization is a methodology, not a goal.
You will not harm your children, students, or employees if you discuss the reasoning behind your process, asking them what they think about it, and considering alternative methods to reach their goals. When people are engaged in what they are doing and have a say as to why or how, they will be more engaged. This is the first step toward creating autonomy.
Gamification vs Playification
Straight gamification's aim is to inspire a specific behavior. Gamification attempts to motivate a person to choose to perform a specific task by adding a small amount of reward to this choice. Simultaneously, they punish NOT choosing the desired task by virtue of not providing a reward for it. In this way, gamification attempts to narrow the desire for choices outside of any pre-defined ones [1]. As such, it is poorly suited for fostering autonomy.
Playification's aim is to promote autonomy within a specific context. The word "play" is equivalent to the word "freedom"; for example, a latch that "has play" moves around freely in its socket. Similarly, a person who can play is free to explore. There may be no extrinsic reward, but there is also no punishment for playing. If the required goal is incorporated into the play process, playification can increase motivation towards that goal by providing a more enjoyable process.
Gamification can motivate simple procedural, non-autonomous behavior, while playification can motivate creative, autonomous behavior. But turning simple, procedural tasks into creative, autonomous tasks also increases motivation, and often you can design for both.
Game Design
Not all choices are meaningful. Game design has a lot to say about meaningful choices. Here are a few examples.
Number of choices
Choices that have only one good option are not meaningful choices. For example, a multiple choice test offers choices, but typically all but one of the choices is wrong.
Obscuring the right choice by making it complicated also does not provide a meaningful choice. In many games, a single option is best, but it takes a lot of math to figure out which one. This simply serves to bog down play while the player works out the solution (or the player gives up and chooses randomly).
Providing too many options produces the opposite problem but the same frustration, since the player must spend a lot of time before he or she can make an informed decision.
The correct number of choices is between 2 and 7 (give or take), depending on how hard the choices are to evaluate. More than 7 choices tends to overwhelm [2]. The depth of the choices and the time spent evaluating them should be commensurate with their importance.
Order / subset of choices
Choices about the order in which to perform a series of mandatory actions are mildly meaningful. It’s nice to be allowed to choose the order in which to perform certain tasks, allowing you to tackle the difficult ones when it suits your schedule. However, autonomy becomes constrained as tasks are completed and fewer choices remain.
A choice that allows you to select only a subset of available tasks – allowing you to skip certain tasks or entire categories - is often a meaningful choice, especially if it opens the door for negotiation (either with the task-setter or with the other students or workers). Dividing housework chores is a classic example of this.
Informed choices
The information available when making a choice determines the skills required to make that choice. With no information, your choice amounts to luck. A little information provides odds calculation, aka gambling. A lot of information provides room for tactics and strategy. Complete information requires calculation.
Choices made by luck are not meaningful. For example, if you can choose to work on project A or B, but you can’t know what the projects are until you decide, the choice is not meaningful.
Choices made by gambling are marginally meaningful, though they may be entertaining. For example, if you’re offered a choice of a new teammate, and all you know is that one is a Java programmer named Sue who comes from New York and the other is an app developer named Ted from El Paso, you know only enough to take a gamble.
Tactical and strategic choices are generally meaningful, though they may not always work out.
Choices made using complete information are always meaningful if you are really free to make the choice. The choice “work or get fired” is not a free or meaningful choice (that’s a choice with only one good option); the choice “either write this specification or program an installation script” is.
Note that information that exists, but is too unwieldy or too time-consuming to obtain, has the same effect as information that does not exist.
Opportunity cost and value
Most choices involve an opportunity cost: if you choose one thing, you lose out on all of the options that you didn't choose, unless these options are saved for you for later. Opportunity costs present meaningful choices of assessing value.
Some of the best choices involve assessing value, for example: learning; discovering workable solutions from seemingly equal options; managing resources, such as time, money, equipment, or people; or managing risk.
Play
Real autonomy is the freedom to customize, personalize, self-distract, and develop your own plan. Of course, too much play can lead to nothing getting done; that's why games, as opposed to free play, have rules and goals. The goal-setter and settee can work together to provide as much autonomy as possible while remaining focused through a shared sense of purpose.
Straight gamfication tools are not specifically suited for adding autonomy, but will come in handy when I discuss adding mastery in the next post.
Comments are welcome.
[1] Gamification can provide brief moments of autonomy, such as allowing you to choose how to redeem points you have collected. These kinds of choices do not substantively affect the tasks you must perform.
[2] This is slightly different with regards to creative freedom. Creative freedom thrives best on an infinite palette limited by a few guidelines. For example, "do anything" is hard to deal with; "draw a tree" is empowering.
Number of choices
Choices that have only one good option are not meaningful choices. For example, a multiple choice test offers choices, but typically all but one of the choices is wrong.
Obscuring the right choice by making it complicated also does not provide a meaningful choice. In many games, a single option is best, but it takes a lot of math to figure out which one. This simply serves to bog down play while the player works out the solution (or the player gives up and chooses randomly).
Providing too many options produces the opposite problem but the same frustration, since the player must spend a lot of time before he or she can make an informed decision.
The correct number of choices is between 2 and 7 (give or take), depending on how hard the choices are to evaluate. More than 7 choices tends to overwhelm [2]. The depth of the choices and the time spent evaluating them should be commensurate with their importance.
Order / subset of choices
Choices about the order in which to perform a series of mandatory actions are mildly meaningful. It’s nice to be allowed to choose the order in which to perform certain tasks, allowing you to tackle the difficult ones when it suits your schedule. However, autonomy becomes constrained as tasks are completed and fewer choices remain.
A choice that allows you to select only a subset of available tasks – allowing you to skip certain tasks or entire categories - is often a meaningful choice, especially if it opens the door for negotiation (either with the task-setter or with the other students or workers). Dividing housework chores is a classic example of this.
Informed choices
The information available when making a choice determines the skills required to make that choice. With no information, your choice amounts to luck. A little information provides odds calculation, aka gambling. A lot of information provides room for tactics and strategy. Complete information requires calculation.
Choices made by luck are not meaningful. For example, if you can choose to work on project A or B, but you can’t know what the projects are until you decide, the choice is not meaningful.
Choices made by gambling are marginally meaningful, though they may be entertaining. For example, if you’re offered a choice of a new teammate, and all you know is that one is a Java programmer named Sue who comes from New York and the other is an app developer named Ted from El Paso, you know only enough to take a gamble.
Tactical and strategic choices are generally meaningful, though they may not always work out.
Choices made using complete information are always meaningful if you are really free to make the choice. The choice “work or get fired” is not a free or meaningful choice (that’s a choice with only one good option); the choice “either write this specification or program an installation script” is.
Note that information that exists, but is too unwieldy or too time-consuming to obtain, has the same effect as information that does not exist.
Opportunity cost and value
Most choices involve an opportunity cost: if you choose one thing, you lose out on all of the options that you didn't choose, unless these options are saved for you for later. Opportunity costs present meaningful choices of assessing value.
Some of the best choices involve assessing value, for example: learning; discovering workable solutions from seemingly equal options; managing resources, such as time, money, equipment, or people; or managing risk.
Play
Real autonomy is the freedom to customize, personalize, self-distract, and develop your own plan. Of course, too much play can lead to nothing getting done; that's why games, as opposed to free play, have rules and goals. The goal-setter and settee can work together to provide as much autonomy as possible while remaining focused through a shared sense of purpose.
Straight gamfication tools are not specifically suited for adding autonomy, but will come in handy when I discuss adding mastery in the next post.
Comments are welcome.
[1] Gamification can provide brief moments of autonomy, such as allowing you to choose how to redeem points you have collected. These kinds of choices do not substantively affect the tasks you must perform.
[2] This is slightly different with regards to creative freedom. Creative freedom thrives best on an infinite palette limited by a few guidelines. For example, "do anything" is hard to deal with; "draw a tree" is empowering.
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