The Case of Turner Prize: Are Too Many Ties Devaluing the Concept of Competition?

CNN reports on the winners of this year's Turner Prize, an annual prize presented to a British visual artist. All of the finalists asked to be given the prize jointly, as a group, and so all of the contenders "won" in a competition in which no one lost.

This, combined with what some people see as a pattern in recent years, has irked some people. These people see this "tie" and equate it with the concept of spoiled Millennials who get "participation trophies" or prizes for trying. What has happened to cutthroat competition and actual winning.

The Arguments For and Against

The arguments against the Turner prize tie, in this case, are that the refusal to announce a single winner is indicative of snowflakes, who can't handle being losers. That too many winners devalues the concept of winning, and of competition in general. And that it lacks drama.

The arguments in favor are rather specific to this event. The artists decided that their works were complementary, rather than competitive, and did not feel that a competition was the right way to judge them. That felt that they had already "won" by having reached the shortlist for the prize. Alex Farquharson, the director of the Tate Britain gallery which organizes the prize, argues that times have changed and that competition may not be the right format to judge these kinds of works, anymore. Andrew Russeth, a writer for the Daily Mail, writes "This notion of having artists compete in public and one walk away the winner feels a little demeaning and unpleasant."

Some Points to Consider

As for the arguments against, it is important to divide up those activities in which competition really brings out the most effort and the best results versus those in which we have stuck absolute competitions because we were too boring or lazy to provide a better framework. The Olympics doesn't have a single winner, because we don't make the downhill skier compete against the figure skater; the disciplines and forms are too different to compare. So maybe, when it comes to art competitions with very loose frameworks, it is silly to compare different kinds of entries in different subjects, and with different intents. Maybe the Turner Prize is overdue for a restructure.

When it comes to "participation trophies", there are two hands here. On the one hand, participation trophies are not just a Millennial issue; that is lazy, biased journalism, and the usual "look down at the next generation" attitude of Boomers who have suddenly publicized a concept that has existed for generations. Everyone who joins the army (and doesn't screw up too badly) gets stripes and awards during and after service. Everyone who shows up for work gets paid, and often gets bonuses, even if they aren't the number one worker. Even the specific concept of participation trophies is a century old.

On the other hand, participation trophies are not "everyone gets a trophy". They are, unless severely mishandled, a reward for having put in effort. In the same event, different people, i.e. winners, get specific prizes, while everyone who at least put in effort gets the participation trophy. The recipients of these trophies are not morons, and they know that trophies for winning and trophies for participation have different values. But studies show that encouraging effort is better motivation than acknowledging talent. When you tell someone they have won, they stop trying; when you tell someone that they are smart, they often find a way to not be, act, or appear smart. When you tell someone that you see their hard work and you think it is worthwhile, they may end up trying harder, and, sometimes, they may eventually win or get smarter.

However, announcing the Turner Prize as a tie is lazy; if you set up a competition, you should not change the rules in the middle when you realize that the competition was the wrong format. They should have, originally, defined better categories that were more conductive to direct competition, or they should have defined goals for which prizes could be given to all, or a list, of people who met these goals. But, since they didn't, they should have awarded a winner and let the artists figure out how to deal with this.

Competition is not inherently evil. It brings out efforts and results that would not happen without it. When mishandled, it can bring out people too focused on the goal; they might even short circuit the permitted methods to get to that goal. Winning, when handled well, can be a goal or a stepping stone to more effort. Losing, when handled well, is not something to be afraid of. Competition against others should always be, in parallel, competition against ourselves. And for that, a job well done results in a self-award that does not require any external acknowledgement.

MagicGate: Toxic Misogyny Invades Tabletop Gaming

Tabletop gaming has always had its share of women-hate and male toxicity.

Sexes were historically separated from playing together for thousands of years in order to avoid licentiousness. This was simply an extension of the general separation between the sexes. By the 19th and early 20th century, at least in Europe and the US, the sexes had found ways to mingle by means of parlor games, many of which we would consider overly racy today (a great many of them involved kissing and/or groping, for example).

The last hundred years of tabletop games saw women relegated to "women's divisions" (in Chess, for example), "girls" games (aka pink and/or about makeup and jewelry), or even the kitchen in the belief that they don't have what it takes to play at a man's level. They often don't, if you exclude them from serious training opportunities, exclude them from playing against top players, diminish their desires, goals, and accomplishments, require them to deal with unchecked harassment, and require from them a fanatical devotion to play for endless hours with unwashed, excruciatingly rude, and sexist jerks. Despite this, there are always a few women who are able and willing to complete with many of the top men in any game.

I had hope that in our little corner of the world, harassment would get no worse than that, and hopefully better. While anyone of any sex might get killed playing Dominoes in a Jamaica coffee shop or throwing dice on the streets of Taiwan, tabletop games remain a relatively safe, family-friendly, and gender-mixing activity. Chess, Go, and Bridge have women's divisions, but the majority of their competitions are mixed and relatively safe. Wargaming is a men's club, but it's not toxic to women as far as I know. CCG and RPG events are/were known to attract mostly young male jerks, which scared off some women (see above) but I hadn't thought that these jerks' behavior rose to level of toxicity associated with Gamergate. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Women are not only harassed, but sexually assaulted at these conventions; the organizers and police are often unable or unwilling to help them. Apparently the CCG and RPG players who grew up  in their little boys' club are now adult enough to feel entitled and powerful enough to join the ranks of the male toxics, white nationalists, and "pickup artists", just like the Gamergate folks. And just as in Gamergate, douches post harassing videos and posts claiming that woman who complain about harassment are lying for the attention, as a result of which teeming hordes of similarly minded jerks harass them more, and more seriously. And when called on it, of course, they post endlessly, harassing everyone with why they are right and everyone else is lying and "missing the point". Ho hum, how familiar.

Seems like this behavior is getting worse, not better, and I can think of a few reasons why. I just wish that they didn't infect my hobby.

Second Draft of the Book Done

Yay. And less than a year after the first draft.

Third draft means a) getting it edited, b) adding sources for and backing up all of my wild claims, c) adding any important arguments or information from the sources that I noted but forgot to include, and d) adding material anywhere my editors say to, as well as eliminating duplication or restructuring as necessary.

Fourth draft will be to pretty the book up with pictures and games.

Editors? Publishers?

Yehuda

First Draft of the Book is Essentially Done

I am just going to go ahead and say that the first draft of the book is done. Essentially. The only "real" section that I haven't written is the forward.

Unfortunately, now comes the work of the second draft:

• Several sections have to be majorly rewritten. Most sections have to be lightly rewritten. Repetitions have to be moved and consolidated in their relevant sections.
• I'm going to go through all of the research I went through the first time, as well as additional research I have collected in the last 3 or 4 years, and see what I need to add or correct. This may result in a new section or two.
• I'm going to take a lot of the fun contents from my blog, create many more similar content items, and add them as flavor between the sections. Raph Koster, I'm looking at you. :-)

 At what point do I start looking for a publisher? Or do I first ask for people to review and critique?

Yehuda

Vacation Day 2: The Game Professor and the Cave

The Game Professor

In the morning I navigated the Boston MTA, made famous by The Kingston Trio in their 1950s song about poor old Charlie stuck on train due to a proposed fare increase to charge people an extra nickel for getting off the train. Today's MTA uses the "CharlieCard" on all of its services. They're free. With one, I took a bus to the subway and then the subway back to a bus for $2.55 (more than Charlie would have paid, but reasonable by today's standards); without one, the cost would have been significantly higher.

I met the brilliant and gracious Sebastian Deterding at the Pavement Coffeehouse on 44 Gainsborough St in Boston. Sebastian wrote several important sources about gameful design that I used for research on my book. I wrote to him as a stranger, asking if I would be able to catch him lecture or if he would be willing to meet a fan for coffee, and he agreed to coffee.

I wasn't sure what the conversation would be - maybe I would interview him for my blog - but it ended up being about the central tenets of my book. He is the first person in my field with whom I have discussed my ideas. He is not only more educated that I; as a professor he is able to discuss it with a depth that I struggled with, since I live outside of academia. It was awesome (for me, at least).

We talked for 90 minutes. He asked deep questions that presented deep challenges. My ideas held out pretty well, but I need to address these challenges - in the book, or at least for my own sake, in order to be sure that I know what I'm talking about. For example:

I propose a new definition of "game" that I feel captures the essential aspect of game more rigorously than any previous definition. For one thing, my definition describes what a game "is", not what it contains. Sebastian asked me if, in my definition, a game was a) a fundamental reality, in which case "game" pre-existed mankind and humans discovered it, or b) a
human construct, in which case game could be more or less different from culture to culture, or c) my own convenient grouping of ideas/activities, in order to provide new insights into the other topics I cover in my book.

Although I had already written a bit about why I was attempting to define "game" in the book, I had not thought about asking these questions, and thus I had been moving back and forth among these usages without thought. This is the kind of insightful analysis you get from years of experience in defending and presenting your thoughts in academia, and which Sebastian generously shared with a complete stranger in a coffeehouse. I am very grateful.

When I got home, Tal told me that my hair was sticking up and my shirt was on backwards and inside out.

New England

We bought a BBQ, and some kosher food at The Butcherie, and ate at the nearby Taam China kosher Chinese restaurant for lunch. We headed out for what was supposed to be a three hour drive but ended up being a five and a half hour drive through beautiful New England. Once we were far away from Boston, most of our drive was through small towns and one lane highways through the woods. Very beautiful. However, without GPS, we still either got lost or occasionally thought we were lost and had to stop to figure out where we were going.

In one of those stops we managed to connect to Wi-Fi for around 4 minutes, and during that time Saarya was able to download the destination, the navigation, and many of the maps on the route. The phone's GPS works even without Wi-Fi or cellular connection, so long as all of that is pre-loaded onto the phone and so long as you stay on route. It helped us get back onto my pre-printed route. If we were not scheduled to meet the person whose cabin we were renting at a particular time, I would have stopped several more times to wander around in antique stores, roadside vegetable stands, and several pretty lakes and streams. Once you get into Vermont, the vegetable stands become maple product stands. We met the guy and he was willing to wait while we picked up some more food items.

The Cabin

It's really a cabin in the wood that the guy had built himself. Stunning setting and a beautiful property, it lacks only Wi-Fi, telephone, and a bathroom. It uses an outhouse. There is only cold water piped in from the stream into tanks. He provides a bathtub to use - outdoors - with only cold running water. For hot water, you have to fill up some buckets, lower heating coils into them, and wait. This kind of setup might be a first for my kids, and it's been a long time for me, too. We were able to use the Wi-Fi from the house next door, which also  belongs to him.

Dinner was BBQ'd chicken and farmer's market vegetables.

You Watch Sports Because You Like Gambling

Why do people watch and root for sports teams, rather than play games themselves? It's not only that people are lazy. It's because watching sports itches the same spot that gambling does: it's a mental investment in an outcome over which you have no control and whose outcome is directly meaningless.

I say directly meaningless, because you may stand to gain or lose indirectly due to the outcome, if you have, for example, wagered money on it (for this post, I define gambling as the mental interest in a directly meaningless outcome over which you have no control, and wagering as the addition of something meaningful as an indirect result of the outcome; by meaningless, I mean that it has no meaning to you). The gain or loss from the wager is an indirect result of the outcome; the direct result is that the players go back to their houses and the ball gets put back on the shelf (i.e. has no meaning). In contrast, the winner or loser of an election, another event beyond your control in which you might have an investment, has direct, meaningful results, even if some of these results might not occur immediately.

Gambling is the mental investment in a directly meaningless outcome over which you have (or no longer have) any control. Rooting for other people playing a game is gambling: rewarding the brain for events beyond its control. You might know that some outcomes are more likely than others. You may have invested effort into raising or lowering the odds of these outcomes. For example, you may have trained your horse to run well or bought better equipment for your team. But once the die is cast, so long as there exists a possibility that either side might triumph (even against the odds), if you care about it, you're a gambler.

The outcome of a game is always directly meaningless (except, perhaps, boxing). If you see people rowing to see who can get to the far shore first, but getting there directly results only in the ability to claim victory, then caring about it is gambling. If the one who gets to the far side first avoids getting eaten by a shark, the result is not meaningless, and caring about it is not gambling: unless you don't care who gets eaten by the shark, in which case it is. You can always add a layer of meaninglessness on top of a meaningful outcome to transform it into a game. You change a competition into a game by adding the words "I win" to it. Succeeding in the competition is not "winning"; it's simply succeeding. The person who doesn't succeed could just as easily claim "I win" if she knows that the goal post is off the edge of a cliff.

When you become invested in the outcome of a game, or even the outcome of a single play, over which you are not exercising skill or talent, you are experiencing gambling. It's natural, because humans are wired for gambling. Even if you don't know who is playing, you want to see an effort rewarded (or punished) or a skillful performance succeed (or skillfully get opposed).

Why do people watch sports and gamble? Because we're wired to assess, but minimize, risks. Gambling provides the safest risk experience there is: we can experience, observe, and learn with no direct meaningful consequences. Wagerers (who bet money, etc) and players experience this risk more intensely, because they have tied real investment to their actions, making it a deeper experience and more primal; investing in the outcome is more educational and more productive.

Another reason we enjoy watching sports is tribalism, if we identify either with the participants or other onlookers; social connections are another primal aspect to being human. Yet another reason: escapism. Watching an event unfold over which we have no control is similar to reading or viewing a story unfold. So long as the game continues to capture our attention, we wonder what's going to happen next. This means that stories, plays, movies, etc also contain elements of gambling: we have a mental investment in a directly meaningless outcome over which we have no control. And we hope for a satisfactory conclusion.

Learning to gamble is a critical skill, exactly because it provides a safe space for evaluating the risks and rewards of taking chances, a skill that we use in non-gambling contexts throughout life.

The problem with gambling - when it is not tied to something meaningful, like wagering money - and sports watching is that it is time spent on something whose actual outcome is meaningless. It's fun: fun is necessary and even meaningless fun is often desirable. But other than sharpening out risk evaluation skills, it doesn't produce anything tangible. That same time and interest could be invested in research, science, creation, developing talent, developing your mind, participating in games where you have control (and thus are gaining or utilizing skills), and any number of other useful activities, many of which also sharpen our risk taking skills in a relatively safe way. Again: some mindlessness can be therapeutic, but it's not the best choice for all or most of the time, even leisure time. It is, after all, lazy.

Love and Kudos for Anita Sarkeesian

Like Kathy Sierra, Anita Sarkeesian is a phenomenal voice helping to push the world out of chaos and into a brighter future. Kathy wrote the blog Creating Passionate Users, a captivating and inspirational blog about making your products and services - and customer - awesome. Anita records femministfrequency, video blogs about the wide-spread sexism and objectification of women in the media, especially in video games.

Both Kathy and Anita happen to be women. Seven years ago Kathy was driven out of the public sphere by credible violent and sexual threats by the male misogynist low-life miscreants who troll the internet. Now the same is happening to Anita. Don't let the seven years between these events fool you; this kind of thing is happening over and over to other women (and their occasional male defenders) on the same or smaller scales.

It is a rude reminder that the civilized among us live in a world that is surrounded by the far-less civilized. Whether it is Islamic fundamentalists raging through the Middle East cutting of heads, bands of robbers raping their way through Africa, gangs in Italy or California, drug peddlers in Mexico or Columbia, or the racist, sexist, anti-semitic trollers hiding in anonymity in middle America, these are people who are certain that they are better than you and that you have no right to be free from whatever violent actions, threats, and sexual or physical abuse that they choose to direct your way.

The rest of us must remember that, regardless of how liberal or tolerant we are, there are people who are not who will truly not "live and let live". They must be vigilantly and repeatedly condemned at the least, and legally and physically fought when necessary.

Anita's videos are fantastic, of course. Regardless of whether you agree with every point or every example, her contributions to the understanding of tropes in the media is excellent and she should be applauded or intellectually engaged with, not threatened, nor should she or her family be physically or sexually threatened. Like every truth-speaker, the fact that her analysis reveals a systemic problem with the status quo, and results in a violent reaction of those who want it to stay that way and who  pour their filth and hate onto others, is proof that she and others like her are nailing it and must ever-vigilantly continue to do so.

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:

• 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.

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 ...

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:

• 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.

You can remember these elements by their acronym: SEARCH.

[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.

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.

1. 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.
2. You versus a system: solving puzzles, finding solutions in complex situations, creating or fixing mechanical objects.
3. You versus other players: competition, politics, relationships.
4. 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 Csíkszentmihályi. 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.

Gamification: Adding Autonomy

This is my second post on gamification and motivational strategy (see Adding Purpose). A successful strategy can use some form of gamification, as well as other tools, to develop and enhance motivation from within.

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.

Gamification: Adding Purpose

Early success stories in gamification have created a gold rush, which in turn has prompted bold claims about how important and how easy gamification is. This in turn has and will lead to the usual backlash, when gamification implementations don’t deliver. Gartner asserts that 80% of up-and-coming gamification systems will fail, either due to misconception, misapplication, or misuse.

How can you ensure that your gamification system will succeed? By building motivation, not tools, into the core of your strategy. A successful motivational strategy uses gamification, as well as other tools to develop and enhance motivation from within.

Let’s consider purpose [1], one of the three pillars of sustainable motivation according to Dan Pink.

Some tasks can feel like they have no intrinsic purpose, such as tasks performed within the context of a system that someone else controls but doesn't explain, or repetitive manual tasks performed day after day. For example, a teacher may have trouble motivating students to memorize bible verses. Factory line assembly workers may find no meaning in packing boxes eight hours a day. The students or workers in these situations may think that their tasks are meaningless, because they were never told, or can’t remember, the task’s purpose.

In these cases, don’t just reach for gamification. First instill, or re-instill, intrinsic purpose.

Some proponents of straight gamification maintain that game elements alone create purpose: the students and the worker will be more motivated to fulfill their tasks when they receive points and badges for completing the tasks, or because they can rise on a leaderboard. Their argument is that games motivate, so making a task more game-like motivates. In some cases, and with some people, this may work (for a short time). But be wary.

Many people do not find points added to a boring or hated task to be motivating. It is better to inspire purpose from within the task and then use the gamification elements to enhance the participants’ experience. This work may have to come from outside of the gamification system. The gamification system can then add reminders about purpose using well-designed texts and images that inspire during the process.

The teacher understands the benefits of what she is teaching, whether it is a benefit for her students specifically or for society in general. She should communicate this purpose to her students. She can give them inspirational talks and achieve buy-in. She should explain what the point of learning the verses is; in fact, she can ask them to come up with their own reasons. She can provide good cases studies, examples of people who know this information and the good results that came out of it. She can provide fun, involving activities such as role play. The students should come to internalize the lessons as something from which they will benefit. Gamification can then build on that purpose to help the students measure their progress.

The manager can create meaning by reminding the worker on a regular basis the importance of his task: for example, that the box will protect valuable equipment and make happy customers. The manager can reaffirm the assembler’s importance to the product and the company and the benefit that the product serves in the world. Where possible, the manager can add autonomous or playful elements to the work flow (more on that later). Salary and benefits are also meaningful, of course, albeit external. A worker instilled with some purpose will be receptive to a gamification system that adds additional motivation to his job.

Gamification works best when it boosts and clarifies what is already meaningful. Gamification that properly builds on purpose provides feedback about progress; it does not simply reward progress. When gamification only adds an external reward, it had better be damn rewarding, because the player is not going to simply forget if the actual work is meaningless.

[1] Or relatedness in self-determination theory, although relatedness also includes social connections and working for a noble cause.

Gamification Pros and Cons

Note: This post assumes that you already know what gamification is, how it is usually implemented, and basic theories of motivation.

The arguments for and against gamification are aimed at all three gamification philosophies; and it's often hard to distinguish for or against which philosophy the argument is directed. The proponents of one philosophy may join outsider deriders of gamification to argue that the other two philosophies are irrelevant, counterproductive, or bad.

Let’s take a look at the arguments for and against gamification.

PRO ARGUMENTS

Leader boards, badges, points, and missions are proven motivators, in and of themselves. You don’t need – in fact, you don’t want – a game designer. "If anyone tries to sell you a game designer to design your Loyalty 3.0 program [gamification + data crunching], you should run away screaming." – Rajat Paharia, Founder and CPO of Bunchball Inc.

If there is a task that you have to do anyway, wouldn't you rather do it and have fun at the same time? If there is a product or message with which you might be tempted to engage, wouldn't engaging with a game system be an additional motivation to do so? Furthermore, once you have engaged with a game system and the other players who use it, you have invested in earning non-transferable rewards and formed a social group, which induces loyalty and encourages repeat visits and engagement.

Case after case demonstrates that game reward systems work: Warner Bros, Chiquita, SAP, Foursquare, Nike, Starbucks, Bluewolf, LiveOps, Ford, Microsoft, Verizon Wireless, and so on.

People love fast, immediate feedback from systems that have historically been silent. People love conquerable challenges and goals, and they love displaying badges. These kinds of indicators provide intrinsic motivation, such as feelings of accomplishment and success, competition, and interaction with a community.

Yes, there is a problem with a leader board in that only the people who are near the top are really motivated to keep competing. To address this, you can have your leader board display only the area around the current player, so that players are only in competition with others who are doing about the same as them: a localized leader board effect.

Points are a way of feeling proud about the task you have accomplished. Badges are a way of sharing your accomplishment with others to receive social status and support. Games help you do what you want to do anyway, but are having trouble doing because the task is too big, or you’re too isolated, or you can’t see the results immediately. Well-designed games focus you in the right direction and give you the immediate feedback you need to motivate you to succeed.

Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer was on the right track: Work is what you’re obliged to do. Play is what you want to do (actually, "what you're not obliged to do"). Making everyday tasks more fun turns work into play. By fun, I mean the type of fun that motivates people to play games for hours at a time: progress, challenge, competition, problem solving, instant feedback, and so on.

Adding play to things that are not already play, like filling out tax forms or waiting in line at the DMV can and should make life more enjoyable. Furthermore, for play tasks, people spend more time and talent and are far less likely to give up when faced with obstacles. Thousands of people freely solve complex tasks in a playful environment, while paid tasks that feel like work lead to less output and worse results.

CON ARGUMENTS

At best, gamification that serves a corporate interest doesn't serve your interest. At best, it treats you like a mouse in a Skinner box. There is only so long that people are willing to push a lever to get a pellet. In gamification's case, it’s not even a pellet, it’s a virtual pellet. If companies replace good service, lower prices, real value, and attention to quality with virtual rewards, customers will eventually figure out that they are getting less for their money.

Gamification cons customers with illusions, essentially tapping into people’s gambling mentality. Gamification is tempting and engaging to players in the same way that lotteries are; for players, it’s a pyramid scheme. The best people get to the top the leader board, and earn real prizes, but 99% have no hope of getting anything out of the system. Examples given by classic gamification proponents always focus on the people who are winning or topping the leader boards. Sure, pyramid schemes work for a while, but eventually everyone not at the top gets frustrated.

For the companies that want to implement gamification, it’s also an empty hyped up gold rush fad with promises of big rewards based on the few companies that succeeded with it. The first companies succeeded because of the element of surprise; people were excited to find games in unexpected places. As more and more companies offer similar programs, players will tire of it. Who needs 50 points on 50 leader boards at 50 different stores? Social networks were a big rush too, and now only a handful remain.

Points and rewards handed out in a gamification framework are not integrated into the task. In games, you get points for actually doing something, not just for clicking or signing in. Points in video games are tied to in-game bonuses that help you play more and accomplish more (xp => levels and skills, bucks => equipment). This is a positive feedback loop. Points that are earned externally to this loop simply motivate people to game the system to get points, not to do the tasks.

Tasks should be fun and motivating all by themselves. Points are not motivators. External rewards such as points are actually de-motivators. People want to do fun activities; when you add points or other rewards to these tasks, people become de-motivated to do the activities unless they get the points.

Gamification proponents claim that their systems have universal appeal, and give lip-service to the idea that one can’t simply slap points onto activities, but that’s just so they can sell themselves as experts. If you look at their implementations, all they offer, in the end, is points slapped onto activities. They instruct implementers to tailor the system to be fun, but they never explain how to do that. They can’t insist that points are fun, in and of themselves, and then tell you to implement points in a fun way (and then wave their hands when you ask how to you do this). Fun is designed into a system by a game designer.

If you look at the supposed case studies brought as proof of gamification success, they all a) offer real rewards, like cash prizes, which is old school, or b) gained customers quickly only to lose them just as quickly, or c) use playification as their prime motivation, not gamification.

Adding games or play to a non play system is distracting. You're either focused on the task or you’re focused on play, not both. In theory you can do both, but in practice people end up wasting time. Many systems are simply not appropriate for play, and in other systems you just want to get in and out as soon as possible, and not be bothered with added distractions that clutter up the work flow. Not everyone wants to play games; many gamification systems assume you are a video gamer and don’t explain what their systems do or why you would want to use them.

CONCLUSION

The proponents of the three gamification philosophies don't spend much time answering these criticisms; when they do, they answer them in different ways. Straight gamification proponents argue that the system simply works, and they point again to the case studies. Gameful design proponents argue that their systems are built around activities with their own intrinsic motivation; the points they add are therefore meaningful. Playification proponents argue that play can be tightly bound to an activity, and therefore not distracting.

I design games, and I know that games motivate. For me the questions are: How can you best utilize them in ways that motivate long term? What is the ROI of using games and/or play versus traditional methods of motivation? Which approach, if any, is right for which activities?

Gamification, Gameful Design, and Playification

Note: This post assumes that you have already read an introductory article on gamification: you know the definition of gamification and the basic theories of motivation (such as self-determination theory and its derivatives).

The prospect of increased interest, brand awareness, understanding, desired behavior, or loyalty for your process or message is tempting, and within the reach of a properly designed gamification system.

There are three main approaches to gamification: straight "gamification", "gameful design", and "playification".

Straight gamification is importing video game trappings into non-game contexts. Gamification nearly always uses some combination of points (or some other name for points, like "bucks"), badges, leader boards, levels, missions, and so on. This direct approach is based on the fact that a great number of millennials play and enjoy video games. These game elements provide opportunities for mastery, achievement, social comparison, and so on. in non-game contexts, as well.

Opponents of straight gamification argue that most of the fun in games does not come from these elements, so the result is not going to be truly motivating. These kinds of imaginary rewards are only meaningful when they are the result of challenging game play, so they won't hold a player's long term attention. Furthermore, people focused on gaining points are not focused on the message (for example, gamification that promotes recycling may result in a temporary increase in recycling, but won't truly change people's behavior once they get bored with the game.

While these criticisms are valid, proponents of straight gamification are not unaware of the need to make gamification fun and challenging; it's the CEOs and clueless marketers who ask for meaningless point systems who are to blame for poor implementations. Also, the interface is simple to produce, instantly recognizable to many people, and has a proven track record of providing motivation, especially when the content is enjoyable anyway or the players already know each other.

Gameful design, a term popularized by Jane McGonigal, is about adding rewards selectively to challenges that are important and intrinsically rewarding. For example, you know you have to diet, and you feel great when you do, but it's hard; adding gameful design – badges, levels, and so on - to the process of dieting provides an added incentive to make you feel proud and accomplished.

The proponents of gameful design stress achievement and purpose, and believe in adding game elements to important tasks that will help guide us to do what is best for us and the world.

Essentially, gameful design restricts applying gamification to tasks that are purely beneficial to the player (or others), as opposed to straight gamficiation that is used primarily to benefit the designer. Gameful design uses many of the same trappings as gamification; there is no fine line between the two approaches, except with regards to who is designing the system and why.

Playification focuses on bringing the other aspects of play into non-game activities: competition (but not necessarily scores), cooperation, puzzles, physical activity, and so on. Points and badges might be used, but they are not the focus. Instead, the aim is to make non-game activities more fun, in general.

Playification asserts that the play elements contain most of the fun - the most universally enjoyed fun. Even if no one assigns ranks at the end of a 100 meter dash, the play elements (physical challenge, excerise, and competition) contain all of the motivation necessary for people to participate. Even animals enjoy play activities; play spans the entire animal kingdom. It is biological, and the fun is intrinsic to the activity.

In contrast, points elements make no sense without play elements. "You win!" and other imaginary rewards add an additional layer of fun to play, but only to some people, some of the time. "Winning" is a title added to an already achieved success, and a seemingly irrelevant one, unless your enjoyment of success is incomplete without this title.

Play elements are the intrinsic elements that involve autonomy, mastery, and connectedness, whereas points are focused on achievement and rankings (the latter of which is of no motivation to anybody but the winner).

All of the above philosophies have some validity, more or less, and represent different paths that can be taken to add motivation and benefit to everyday tasks.

Yehuda