Day 1: Sunset District San Francisco

Sunset District in San Francisco is beautiful. I was expecting "urban"; it looks like England small-town urban, not big city urban.

This morning, with little jet lag except for a head buzz, I left my AirBnB apt on 31st and Lawton and walked to the Safeway on Noriega to buy groceries. Despite rumors to the contrary, the supermarket has everything kosher I could possibly need, except meat. It is possible to find thousands of kosher products in pretty much any supermarket across America and Canada without any difficulty. The only problems will be meat and wine (this supermarket actually had kosher wine, as well as some Hebrew National hot dogs).

Dropped off the groceries and walked down Lawton to the beach. All of the houses are pastel and pretty. The streets are clean. The air is foggy and chilly. Birds chattering, little in the way of traffic, and everyone drives very slowly. At least half of the population appears to be Asian (Korean or Chinese, I'm guessing). On the streets with stores (Irving, Noriega), store after store has signs in both English and Chinese, with hundreds of Asian-style restaurants and Asian food markets.

Sunset District, Lawton St looking from 31st Ave

Street names are etched into the sidewalk. Street signs have house number ranges on them.

 

The beach was nearly entirely deserted with the odd jogger or two. It's clean and expansive.

Off the end of Lawton is the Pacific Ocean

One of my only fellow life forms on the beach

There were red rose singles dropped on the beach every thirty feet or so. Was this due to something happy or something gone awry?

I walked north and crossed over to Golden Gate Park, also very lovely in the corner that I saw.

Entrance to Golden Gate Park

In the park

I tried to get a SIM card in a Verizon store, but they don't sell SIM cards, only phones with plans. While waiting in line I struck up a conversation with a mom and teen who were buying a new iPhone 5S to replace their two year old iPhone 4S; the only way to renew their plan is to buy a new phone, apparently. I was already considering whether to spend money to replace my own tired one, and was looking at picking up a Samsung Galaxy S3 from Amazon. When I asked, they said that I could just have their old one for whatever I felt, since they would probably toss it out otherwise.

Sad. It's weird how these phones cost a huge bundle if you buy them unlocked but since they are given out for free with service plans they become valueless.  Even programs that encourage you donate old cell phones often just recycle or safely dispose of the materials in them (which is better than having them dumped in a landfill, I suppose).

I picked up a SIM from T-Mobile.

I also checked out the synagogue I will be visiting this shabbat. They are setting me up for dinner and having a communal lunch, as well as hosting a rabbi-in-residence.

Shabbat shalom.

Day 0, continued in Philadelphia, San Francisco

  The room for Catholic worshipers at Athens airport.

The room for all other worshipers at Athens airport.

The re-booked flight had kosher food for me, but not the guy next to me who didn't think to ask for it (like me, he knows that airlines need 24 hours notice to supply kosher food, but apparently it doesn't hurt to ask even with only 8 hours notice). The flight was fine.

I watched The Way Way Back. A shy and awkward boy goes to some place for the summer with his sister, and his mom and her new boyfriend. He hates his mom's boyfriend, and he makes some unrealistic personal progress over the course of a few weeks. This is an unexceptional movie that doesn't have anything new to say. It was mild cliche entertainment, but not at all compelling. Like these movies do, it had a few ok scenes.

I interacted with four TSA agents at PHL. Number one was ok. She checked my passport and boarding pass and sent me to the disrobing line.

Number two put me on the side when I opted out of the porno-scanner. She called the third agent to come and process me. She was friendly.

Number three apparently didn't hear number two's call for pat down; after two minutes, I asked who we were waiting for and had to get number two to call number three again. Number three took my bags off of the X-ray machine conveyor belt and put them onto a different X-ray machine conveyor belt that was currently not in operation (so that my bags weren't holding up the line).  He then began reciting a legalese script about what he was going to do and with what part of his hand he would touch my niggly bits and do I have any sensitive parts, etc. When I interrupted him and said I was fine and he should just go ahead, he RAISED HIS VOICE, told me in douchebag mode (angry, aggressive, assertive, threatening) that if I did not let him finish, he would have to call other agents over to continue the procedure. I told him to go ahead and continue the script, and he started the spiel over from the beginning in loud douchebag voice. After he was done, including the chemical test for bomb residue, he walked away.

I began putting on my shoes and belt, etc, when TSA number four, suddenly noticing me from about ten feet away, RAISED HIS VOICE in douchebag mode and yelled at me that I CANNOT PUT MY ITEMS ONTO [second] X-ray machine conveyor belt and I must remove them immediately. While struggling with my belt, I started to say that I wasn't the one who put them there, but I didn't get out four words of this before he raised his voice EVEN LOUDER like a policeman about to shoot me and told me that I cannot place my items there and I had to get them off of there immediately. Wow.

You can find basic kosher items like drinks, nuts, fruit, and cookies in the Philli airport.

A moving K'nex sculpture at Philadelphia airport.

The flight to SFO was half empty. The captain came out and informed us that 4-5 people had to move from in front of the wing to behind the wing for the plane to be able to take off. [1] Then we would all have to move to the right side of the plane if the plane need to make a right turn. [2]

SF: As usual, I am still moving blindly through life when it comes to making good decisions. I decided to take the Shuttle service from SFO to my AirBnB place, because I was late and I thought it might be faster (and easier than navigating a train and a bus and some walking at this time of night). Mistake, I think. The guy drove no more than 25 miles an hour, usually less, and I was second to last one off. He also ignored the instructions given to him by his guidance system and the dispatcher (I saw him delete all of these from his little pad before starting) and then got lost and drove in many circles. It took an hour fifty to get to my place.

The AirBnB place, which was the cheapest place anywhere near the SF Ortho synagogue, appears to have been a fantastic win. The guy running it is a Korean guy (I think he runs it with his wife, too), and the place is awesome. All I needed was a clean bed. The place is clean, pretty, has it's own entrance, linens, TV and cable, fridge, breakfast, washing machine and dryer, Wi-Fi, etc. It's totally like a BnB. And did I mention cheap?

36 hours travelling. Tired boychick.

[1] This is true.

[2] This is not so true.

Day 0, continued in Greece

You might wonder why, on my flight from TLV to PHL to LAX to SFO I am posting a picture from the Athens international airport that says "Welcome to Greece".

Apparently, a number of people smelled fumes on the plane out of TLV and got sick, including the lovely Bahai girl sitting next to me on our unexpectedly short flight. She didn't throw up, but she felt close to doing so.

So we diverted to Greece and had to collect our luggage (I don't have any checked in) and rebook entirely new flights. We landed in Athens at 2:00, they let us off the plane at 2:45 (after emergency medical people dealt with some of the sick 'uns) and then we queued up at the US Airways ticket counter. By 5:00, about 10 people had successfully booked new tickets, with hundreds more waiting in line. I know they woke those two poor US Airlines people to come help us out, but 30 minutes per person is just a tad slow. No one has had any sleep or eaten since Israel.

Lucky for me, some woman in line called the US and re-booked her ticket directly with the US Airways ticketing office and then gave out the number to others to do the same (she even lent her phone to me to do this, since mine doesn't work here). So, while the line is still going and probably will until, oh, July, I am already re-booked. Another 15 minutes of cajoling the airport workers, and they also opened boarding lines for those of us who had re-booked, so we could get our boarding passes (US Airways won't open any lines until 3 hours before the flight; they can't check in luggage yet, but I don't have any haha). And we got a 15 EUR voucher for food (or, in my case, cans of coke I'm guessing).

My new tickets skip LA entirely and go straight to SFO from PHL, arriving 2 hours later than the original itinerary. So instead of 7 hours in LA, I now have 9 hours in Athens, but it's all in the airport. I was planning on buying a Ready SIM in LA, which is not available in SFO, so I'll need an alternative plan.

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

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.