What is gamification?

The use of game elements and game design techniques in nongame contexts.
Examples of gamification: Nike+ application: longest run, fastest run, compare to previous times, track what youre doing, and establish goals and challenges. Success gets trophies or medals. It also has the ability to compete against friends or gain encouragement. It makes running more like playing a game. Zombies Run: Game where you are being chased by zombies. Goal is to get people to take phone with you and run. Phone tells you that youre running away from zombies and you have to run away from them. Adds another dimension to running. More immersive than Nike+. Game elements: the toolbox that you can work with. For example Empires and Allies, a Zynga social game on Facebook: Points: keeping score Levels Resource collection Quests: find missions for rewards Avatar: show character Social graph

These all go towards making up the experience of E and A on Facebook. We can see game elements in games, but the exact same elements in non-game environments. Game design techniques: not just a jumble of elements, but designed for the purpose of being fun. A way of thinking, not just a set of practices. Non-game contexts: anything other than the game for its own sake. When you play a game you play to have fun in the game. However, if you play for an ulterior objective then this is a non-game context. Business Fitness Health Education

Why is it important? 1. Its an emerging business practice: lots of diverse companies are doing it. 2. Games are powerful things: they have a real pull on us. 3. Lessons from psychology, design, strategy and technology.

Brief History 2002. Serious Games initiative: actual games that are played for a non-game purpose. Games for Change: playing games for social good. For example playing someone in the ArabIsraeli conflict 2003. Conundra consulting promoted gamification of consumer products. Beginning of notion. 2005. Bunchball founded which was the first modern gamification platform; they incorporated points and leaderboard mechanics. 2010. Gamification took off. Gamification became an agreed term, and a presentation by Jessie Shell on the takeover of gamification. Jane McGonigal did a TED talk. Examples and Categories Three main areas where it adds value External: to the firm or organisation. Applications for customers, or potential customers. o ClubPsych. Website for a show called Psych, to engage people with the show. Uses game mechanics and elements like avatars, leaderboards, and rewards. Resulted in major increases in usage and sharing. Internal: to people within the company already. Notably crowd-sourcing, which is internal within a community. o Windows 7 Language Game. Deploying localisation testing overseas within a game framework. Over 4,000 employees took part for free. Behaviour change: situations where someone wants to do something, but cant do it. o Speeding boards. Seeing feedback on your speed causes people to slow down. o Lottery for speeding. Have a lottery on the speeding camera and feedback board. Average speeds decreased from 35 to 28 mph when implemented in Stockholm. Conclusions 1. Gamification can motivate. 2. Applications in many domains. 3. Encompasses many techniques. Week 1 What gamification isnt: Making everything into a game or an immersive 3D world. Use of any games in business, like McDonalds Monopoly. Any games in business, like Solitaire.

Simulations (these are serious games) like in dental or medical training. Just for marketing or customer engagement. Just PBLs (points, badges, leaderboards). Game theory, which is the study of strategic decision making using analytical processes and mathematical models.

Gamification is: Listening to what games teach us. Learning from game design, and areas like psychology, management, marketing and economics. A way to understand motivation and human behaviour. Appreciating fun and its power. Defining gamification academically. http://bit.ly/o6aX1U. Distinguishing between games and fun, whole and parts. What is a game then? So what ties together things like hopscotch, CoD and water polo? Wittgenstein: in Philosophical Investigations he showed the example of games to point to the difficulty of using language. He says you cant define boundaries. Suits: we can define every possible game based on three concepts: 1. Pre-lusory goal: objective like hitting a ball over a net 2. Constitutive rules: the rules of chess 3. Lusory attitude: means something to the players and a want to follow the rules A game is voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles. Huizinga: the game is separated from the real world. The lines around a soccer field demarcate players and spectators. When you sit down and start to play a video game you enter the game. When youre in the magic circle, the game rules matter you need to be in the magic circle to be motivated to play. Games and play Is there a fundamental difference between games and play? Play is the aimless expenditure of exuberant energy. Schiller Play is in a constraining environment. A game is a closed formal system that engages players in a structured conflict, and resolves in an equal outcome. - Swain and Hoffman A game is a series of meaningful choices. Sid Meier Games and play in my life: Games: coding on CodeCademy, Rugby Play: surfing YouTube, messing around with scrapbook Key components

 Voluntariness Learning or problem solving Balance of structure and exploration Video Games Weve come a long way from the beginnings of Pong. We now see a huge rate of growth with social games like CityVille it took 6 weeks to reach 100 million users. (What games stick in my mind? Sim City from when I was a young kid in Australia. The unbelievably infinite possibilities of the game and what it could do.) Changing Impact Big and evolving industry, which has double the Hollywood box office revenues and also faster growth. Online games will outsell retail by 2013. China is a huge growth market. Virtual goods are beginning to be worth real money: $7.3 billion globally. 44% of UK/US adults have played a mobile game in the last month. Mass medium with over 100 million Angry Birds players for over 12 billion minutes a month. Mass phenomenon for all social groups. Average player is 30, and 47% are women. Just a game? Real world building blocks E-business 2.0: analytics (data from users), cloud (games in the cloud), mobile (mobile gaming with huge growth rates). Social: leveraging social graph Loyalty programmes: frequent fliers and credit card rewards using gamification Management and marketing research: customer segmentation and analytics Games are getting real The real world is moving into the game (Americas Army, by the US Army). o The most successful recruiting tool ever. Games are moving into the real world. o Gold farming in WoW to turn virtual assets into money. o Can be as many as 400,000 people making money as gold farmers in China. Games were always real! o Monthly sales competition = challenge o Frequent flier tiers = levels o Weight watchers = team o Loyalty card at Nandos = Reward o American Express platinum = badge

Week 2 2.1 Why Gamify? Dodgeball example and its problem? Classic social media issue none of my friends using it so doesnt reach critical mass. Dodgeball has engagement gap. Not a lot of variety: check-in, or dont. Less engaging. No progression. Didnt get anywhere by virtue of what you did. Checking in for 100th time was the same as 1st. Social interaction. Habit: make it a habit with people; remove thought process from checking in. FourSquare: Implemented gamification into the check-in process. Implemented the mayorship idea: most check-ins in location gives mayor badge. Created friendly competition, and reward to checking in. Progression, choices and badges (with their own levels). 20 million users, $70 million in VC

2.2 Thinking like a game designer Think like a game designer resolve to look at issue as a game designer Dont need to actually become one! We dont need the technical skills. Different to thinking like a gamer. We all play games in one way or another, but gamers dont think about the structure due to the immersive nature. Reflection: three structural elements that make the game successful? Consider participants as players: words matter. They have subtle implications for the nature of the relationship. Players are at the centre of the game, and the world revolves around you. Players need to feel like they are in control, and have a sense of autonomy. Players play. Free motion within a set of constraints. Our goal is 1. To get people playing: easy to get into the experience. 2. To keep people playing: how do I create a genuinely engaging experience? 2.3 Design Rules The Player Journey: the conceptual path they follow through the game which has a beginning, middle and end. Onboarding: entering the game and finding out what to do. Scaffolding: training wheels to overcome complexity that would otherwise create issues. Pathways to mastery: achieving real skill within the framework of the game.

Plants vs Zombies Guides: do this, do that Highlighting: pointing things out Feedback: good job, well done Limited options: simplification in the initial stages Limited monsters Impossible to fail!

The way the game explains how to do it makes it a lot less complicated and weird. In just a few minutes, anyone can figure it out. Balance: Game design involves the game being constantly in balance. Not too hard, not too easy, players in balance in the game. Monopoly: keep everything in balance with properties. When you pass Go you get $200 this is for balance. If money werent continuously injected, you would quickly run out. Prevents monopoly and recession. Create an Experience TurnTable gamified the experience of listening to music. It turned live streaming into being in a club with other people that you can rate. Created an experience richer and deeper than going into iTunes. 2.4 Tapping peoples emotions What really makes games engaging? (the emotional component) Games are engaging because they are fun. In every job that is to be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The jobs a game. Mary Poppins Fun isnt limited to entertainment; we can enjoy it in lots of different contexts. What kind of things are fun? Learning something interesting Solving a problem #winning Doing not much in a nice place Being with people you like Receiving recognition from other people Admin and paperwork Using imagination and being creative Role playing Customising stuff

How can we use the different kinds of fun to produce an emotional response? 2.5 Understanding fun

Nicole Lazarro: emotion in games See white paper and poster. There are four different kinds of fun which appear in game like contexts. They are not mutually exclusive. 1. Easy fun: fun because its casual, nice and easy. 2. Hard fun: challenges, problem solving, completion, overcoming obstacles. Fun represents accomplishment. 3. People fun: the fun of interacting with others, being on a team, and socialising. 4. Serious fun: doing meaningful things good for people, planet, community, and self. Might not be something other people find fun or meaningful. Marc LeBlancs 8 types of fun 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Sensation Narrative Fantasy Challenge Fellowship Discovery Expression Submission

Also see A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. Takeaways 1. Fun can (and should) be designed. Its not just out there, it is created. 2. Fun can be challenging. It isnt always easy, positive and simple. 3. There are different kinds of fun. 2.6 Finding the fun Gamify things that might not seem like good candidates. The funtheory.com The worlds deepest trash-can. Collected 72kg of rubbish, which was 40kg more than nearby bins. Piano stairs. Getting people to go up the stairs instead of the escalator. Bottle bank arcade. Getting points at the bottle bank. LinkedIn Important that you fill in your profile fully, but this is boring. They added the profile completeness bar. o Not really a game, as it doesnt have rules and objectives like we consider. o But its a little bit game-like, and just enough so to encourage people in meaningful ways to fill in their profile bar. o Profile completeness went up by 20%. Has game elements like feedback, progress and completion. Week 3 3.1 Breaking games down There are loads of different elements within games, just as there are in a house. Noughts-and-crosses is a really popular game. Lets think about the game and its elements: Game board Players and teams The tokens (X vs O) The rules Competitive game Turn based Win and draw states: three symbols in a line is a win. No progression or scoring: no level 1 or 2, or scoring, you merely win or lose.

The game (the elements, rules, and aesthetics) is created from: 1. The experience (what the player feels): the overall impact of the game. 2. The elements (the bits and pieces): the game

3.2 The Pyramid of Elements Around the elements is the overall experience; the whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. For example, the aesthetics, sound, visual aspects, and what ties the game together. The game dynamics are the most high level conceptual elements in a gamified system: the hidden structure. (Not the rules, which are game specific.) The dynamics include conceptual elements that provide the framing for the game, such as Constraints Emotions Narrative: the structure that pulls the game together. This can be explicit or implicit, and gamification relies on things like consistent graphical experiences. Progression: giving the player a sense of improvement or progression. The game mechanics move the game action forward. Challenges Chance Competition Cooperation Feedback Resource acquisitions Rewards Transactions Turns Win states

Dynamics Mechanics Components

The game components are specific initiations. Achievements Avatars: character representation Badges: achievement representation Boss fights: high level monster Collections Combat Content unlocking Gifting Leaderboards: score lists Levels Points Quests: do things for reward Social graphs: seeing friends Teams Virtual goods

Marc LeBlanc created the MDA framework for understand games: Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics. See: MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. Lessons to take from the Pyramid Variety of options in implementing a gamified system Lower level implementations tend to rely on higher level concepts in the pyramid. 3.3 The PBL Triad Some game elements are more common than others, and these shape gamification. Points Badges Leaderboard Virtually every standard gamification implementation uses PBLs they serve a variety of different functions, and more than expected. Samsung Nation has PBL at the core. But, they are not everything. Points Score: relative position of players Determine win states Connect to rewards: 5000 points to get a reward (Air Miles?) Provide feedback: good or bad, relative or objective Display progress: progress dynamic Data for the game designer: used to enhance game or system Fungible: universal currency with other points

Badges Representations of achievement to self and others Flexibility of badges: open canvas for rewarding anything Style: they are graphical, and can be styled and designed Signalling importance: shows whats important and significant in the game Credentials: just like diplomas Collections: wish to collect badges, adds extra structure Social display: status symbols

Mozilla Open Badge framework: informal learning that doesnt fit into the traditional notion of college. Leaderboards Ranking: within the competition Personalised leaderboard: position-relative or friend-relative Can they actually demotivate people? Can make people give up as it focuses on zero-sum competitive challenge. 3.4 The Limitations of Elements

The elements are only part of what you need to know. Throwing elements onto a business process doesnt make it fun and engaging. The elements are not the game. Dont overemphasis reward. Not all rewards are fun; not all fun is rewarding. Generic site users dont differentiate, and get burned out with others. Google News gamified reading news. They added badges for subject areas. They argue Keeps track of reading for self and friends Data for self and friends But these arent massively compelling reasons. The badges also have no reward or achievement. What about Meaningful choices Puzzles: thought, creativity? Mastery: any pathway to confidence/expert status? Staircase for its own sake? Community: social interactions are powerful in games

3.5 Interview with Bing Gordon: ex-Electronic Arts executive 1. Why should CEOs know about gamification? (a) The new normal for people born after 1971, who are used to games and their interfaces. You need to understand the lens they see the world through. (b) A lot of game design principles underscore a lot of communication and motivation theory. As a CEO the job is to inspire and communicate with employees, and game design brings useful stuff to the table. Its to maximise effectiveness with customers and workers. (c) The importance of instant feedback. 2. Where should we go to figure out gamification rules? No books on game principles per se; there are some books on golf. Blogs and thinking of interaction designers. The easiest way is to play a great game. The things working in the best games are the best principles. 3. What do people consistently misunderstand about gamification? (a) The primary motivation of games is winning competition, whereas cooperation trumps competition 3:1. (b) High score listing/ranking is a de-motivator, not a motivator. You only get motivated 90% to success. 4. Is gamification just a fad? The ups and down of businesses are a fad; the Zynga stock drop after IPO is just an example of this. This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. Gamification is a fun way to apply communication theory, which has been relevant since Adam and Eve. 5. Wheres the key to differentiation if gamification becomes the new normal? The digital generation believes in being the best version of yourself in a peer-to-peer world that isnt hierarchical. Week 5: Motivation and Psychology 5.1 Motivational Design

Psychology is central to what makes gamification effective, specifically motivation. This is what makes you do something versus something else. Different things motivate different people: money (reward) is a common reason. However, lots of people do things for reasons other than reward: sports, for example. MLB.com Badges You get badges if certain things happen when youre watching the game. Some comments from hard-core baseball fans: I was obsessed with MLB.coms badges, this curious sidebar diversion I felt like a moth to a flame Collecting virtual items with no observable purpose and no ultimate reward or benefit does seem like an appropriate pastime for a blog such as ours. The badges had a motivating effect. This got people interested, it seems. However, how many people were actually engaged? Motivation is complicated Theres no answer that says what way to motivate people is. In gamification we need to be aware of lots of them. For example: Apple Stores How to motivate people to buy computers? What would motivate people to buy more computers in a retail store? Make it quick, easy, and simple? Along came the Apple store People need to come in and browse. They need to be able to use them. We need to create a lounge experience. There will be a lot of helpful people who arent necessarily sales staff. Well create a place you want to linger. Apple store is the highest grossing retail chain in the United States. 5.2 Behaviourism In behaviourism, whats inside someones head is off-limits. We can test what goes into someones mind, and what comes out. Its had success, but it has real limitations. There is a stimulus: something gets done from the outside. This causes a response: we see behaviour in response to the stimulus. The stimulus is linked to the response: dogs salivating on a bell ring (Classical conditioning/Ivan Pavlov) There is also operant conditioning where the stimulus and response generates learning (Skinner and rat experiments). Over time, behaviourism lost sway for a number of reasons. However, in cases people will indeed respond to stimuli and learn. Behavioural economics

This is a new branch of economics, but has the same approach of thinking about what people do, rather than why they do it. Lets look at what people do, not theory. People make mistakes consistently. Loss aversion. People are more afraid of losing $100 than of winning $100. Power of defaults. Success of opt-out rather than opt-in donor registers. Confirmation bias. Takeaways from behaviourism Observation: look at what people do. Feedback loops: feedback produces a response which can motivate behaviour. Reinforcement: learning occurs by reinforcing stimuli. 5.2 Behaviourism linking to Gamification Watch what people do: people dont always behave in the way you might think. Importance of feedback: when you do something, you get points. o LinkedIn profile completeness bar. Where you are and how to get to the next step. Consequences create results through conditioning. People learn to associate results from what happens. o Farmville crops withering. Getting people to, as a habit, check in to Farmville and water their crops. o MLB.com badges. Action results in a badge, and they learn how to feed good. However, rewards are just on type of game mechanic. However, a lot of components are rewards: achievements, badges, collections, content unblocking The Dopamine System Why do people talk about addiction with something that has no tangible value? It relates to the structure in the brain associated with pleasure and learning. The brain releases and responds to dopamine, giving a sense of pleasure. Behavioural gamification creates rewards that maximise engagement based on dopamine release and the addictive quality. 5.3 Reward Structures Many different things can be rewarded. FourSquare rewards for checking in, being part of a swarm, being in a bar, etc. There are different categories of rewards. Cognitive Evaluation Theory Tangible/intangible rewards: physical things versus the non-real things. A badge is intangible, but money is tangible. A boy scout patch is a tangible reward, a well done is intangible. Expected/unexpected rewards: sometimes we know its coming, and sometimes its a surprise. Expected rewards arent so cool, but a lot of things in gamification are expected.

 Contingency o Task non-contingent: not having to do anything o Engagement-contingent: reward when you do something o Completion-contingent: reward when you finish something o Performance-contingent: reward when you finish something to a certain standard There is a lot of complexity that can go into reward design. 5.5 Reward Schedules Continuous rewards: you get a reward each time you complete an action. o Not particularly interesting. At some point it will cease to reward, as it is automatic. Fixed ratio: if the activity happens a number of times you get the reward, e.g. you get an award the 1st time, 3rd time, 5th, 7th time, 9th time. Fixed interval: after a fixed number of action completions, e.g. every 3 units. o Fixed rewards have a limited value, as the brain picks up on the schedule. Variable rewards: no fixed schedule. o Most interesting for gamification, as our brains love surprises. Examples of gamification rewards Quest: time on site. Fixed interval as you get it after a certain time. Merit: site visits. Fixed ratio as it happens every certain number of times. Variable rewards We tend to respond powerfully to variable schedule rewards. There are different ways that these can be variable. Surprise: dont know theyre coming Competitive/non-competitive: based on competition (or not) Certain/uncertain: if you know a reward is contingent on something, or whether there is a level of chance involved. Codecademy badges are certain, MLB.com badges are uncertain. Variable Schedule Reward Machine: The Slot Machine This is about tangible rewards which are variable. An effective slot machine is tuned so that it is random, but the reward comes just enough so you dont give up. Week 6 6.1 Limitations of Behaviourism What does it leave out? A lot. Why do people slow down for the speed display? People see their speed and through feedback But is it just them becoming aware? Is it avoiding potential punishment? Its not about changing behaviour and learning, its getting caught.

Why does the lottery work? Well, people like lotteries, so lets do them everywhere. But this leaves a lot out what is it about the lottery that is motivating? We have to go beyond behaviourism, because were dealing with what people think and feel. Operant conditioning fell out of favour in Psychology. You can tend to think of people as a black box, and not as a player. The focus on reward has issues. 6.2 Dangers of Behaviourism Potential for manipulation. Slot machines are a great thing for casinos, but not good for gambling addiction. If we design systems optimised to addict, we shouldnt do so ethically. Hedonic treadmill. Once you start focussing on rewards for pleasure, you have to keep doing it as people will learn to only respond to reward. Wont systematically change things. Requires constant reward. o Monkey experiment with tone before variable grape juice reward. Dopamine began to be released on tone, not on grape juice. o -> You need to be anticipating rewards to get dopamine hit. Overemphasis on Status. Gamification leverages a love of status, such as Frequent Fliers, where you have a high status as youre at the top of the status. But not everyone constantly does stuff for status. 6.3 Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation We need to start distinguishing between different types of reward and motivation. Intrinsic rewards: doing something for its own sake Doing the thing itself is fun, engaging or rewarding. I love just sitting on a beach and taking it all in I want to do this thing for the sake of doing it. SAPS Reward Categories: Zichermann Status: it will make us valued and respected by people. Access: access to something other people dont have. Power: able to do things that others cant do. Stuff: things you get in response to actions. Extrinsic rewards: doing something for a reason other than itself Its about the reward, not the thing itself.

Two claims: 1. Do higher up things first, as its cheaper. Status has no real value. Rank ordered in terms of companies designing systems. 2. Rank ordered in how powerful motivators these things are. Where do gamification rewards fit within the system? Are they intrinsic or extrinsic? 6.4 How rewards can demotivate?

Rewards acting as extrinsic motivators can crowd out the intrinsic motivators. The result is a decrease in motivation: the over-justification effect. The reward substitutes for the intrinsic motivation. Drawing: kids were given rewards for drawing. The idea changed from being to draw for nothing, to draw for reward. Going back to drawing for fun was difficult for the previously intrinsically motivated kids. Day care pickup: intrinsic motivation for picking up kids on time is exchanged for economic reward. Over-justification studies generally focus on interesting tasks. Reward types matter: o Tangible types are at the greatest risk of replacing intrinsic motivation. o Unexpected rewards have little chance of replacing intrinsic motivation. o Performance-contingent rewards can go both ways. 6.5 Self-Determination Theory People arent necessarily motivated by rewards. Intrinsic motivation is more powerful. Spectrum of motivational types (less motivation -> more motivation) 1. Amotivation. Complete indifference 2. Extrinsic motivation. a. External regulation. Only thing motivating you is someone else telling you to do something. No you in doing this, but purely for external cause. b. Introjection. Taking external motivators and making them our own, for example with status. Im taking other peoples view and using it for myself. c. Identification. Identifying with something and its goals, but not necessarily enjoying it. For example, using maths in later life. d. Integration. Complete internal alignment between my goals and the thing Im going to do. 3. Intrinsic motivation. No reason other than the intrinsic reward. Worthwhile and motivating in itself. The motivation spectrum What does it take to make something intrinsically motivating? According to selfdetermination theory there are three factors. Competence. Sense of ability and accomplishment within the activity. Autonomy. Being in control, making the choices, without external influence. Relatedness. Activity is connected to something beyond yourself. Fitocracy: using gamification to intrinsically motivate people to exercise. Using a spectrum of motivational types to intrinsically motivate - showing competence: Congratulations! You earned 581 points Badge Level up Youre now Level 3, awesome!

 Share your workout to friends Using autonomy: Choose your own interests by custom building challenges you are in control of experience. Quests are things you can take on yourself, but have different points levels. Relatedness: Strong social element Better with friends Meet other fitocrats Groups we think youll like This is not just about you alone, but is about a community activity: bigger than you.

Ideally gamification should be based on an attempt to appeal to intrinsic motivation. Week 7: Gamification Design Framework (A design framework to apply gamification concepts) 7.1 The Design Process What actually is design? Design is a general approach to addressing challenges. Design Thinking: this should be a process all business engages in for any process, and its worth understanding the major principles in order to apply them to gamification. Purposive. It has a goal/objective, and everything in the process has to tie into that purpose. The design needs to constantly refer back to the goal. Human centred. It is designed around real people who are players in the game. Everything should be based on the person, and we need to think about the experience. Balance of analytical & creative. We need to be creative and analytical in balance. You cant reduce some things to a formula. Just analytics will result in a dry and informal process, missing opportunities for creativity and innovation that lie outside the formal. o Abductive reasoning. Inference from insufficient information. Making an intuitive leap that is based on a foundation of knowledge. Iterative. It inherently expects we wont get it right the first time. We try, fail, learn and try again. Over time we improve through the process, beginning with prototyping that gives the skeleton of the game play. We playtest, which gives a sense of the structural elements of the game to real people. These are some basic guidelines for design as a process. For gamification, a 6 step process has been developed for implementing gamified systems: the D6. 1. DEFINE business objectives. What is this system designed to accomplish? What are its goals? 2. DELINEATE target behaviours. What do we want people to do? 3. DESCRIBE your players. Human centric, player centric design is important. Who is going to be using this? What are they like? How can the system respond to different types of players?

4. DEVISE activity loops. Structure the core micro and macro game play aspects. 5. DONT forget the fun. 6. DEPLOY the appropriate tools. Use the right elements and structures and put them in place. 7.2 Objectives and Behaviours: the first 2 steps Business Objectives The goals for the gamified system: what is this for? Learn to code in JavaScript (Codecademy), complete online courses (Coursera). Lets look at FourSquare. Social sharing. Habit formation for the mass of users. Influencer marketing. If youre a mayor you get vouchers or deals, as you may be an influencer because you clearly frequent a space a lot. How do we do this? 1. Make a list and rank it include all possible objectives. 2. Eliminate means to ends. Collecting badges isnt an objective, normally. Get rid of stepping stones that arent business objectives. 3. Justify objectives. Target Behaviours: what should the customer do? Specific to company and situation. Success metrics. What are the win states for achieving the goals of the system? What will let us know we have achieved the goals? Analytics. What are the ways of measuring the path towards the success metrics? o DAU/MAU. Daily average users over monthly average users, which is a ratio. What is the average number of people on your site on any given day? How does this compare to how many people come back? For example, 2 million daily average / 10 million monthly average = 20%. This ratio shows us how engaging the site is. The closer to one, the more engaging the site. o Virality. People referring friends to use the site. The rate at which people tell other people who then come to the site. o Volume of activity. How much activity is happening? How many badges are won? How many points are earned? Shows level of engagement with the site, and what people are doing. 7.3 Players Who are these people? Not just what they look like in the game, but what do we know about the players? Standard demographics: age groups, location, income Psychographics: their behaviour, what they like buying and doing. Motivators? What motivates people. We can look at the different kinds of players in a system. Bartle MMOG Player Type Model

Richard Bartle, University of Essex, came up with this when he was studying early MMOG. He wasnt trying to make general statements, but his framework has proven to be very durable. But, it must be taken with a grain of salt. Achievers: acting on the world. Want recognition, and want to do something in the game world and therefore gain recognition. Explorers: interacting with the world. Seeing what happens when you do stuff, and push on the limits of the game just because its there (Edmund Hilary). Socialisers: players who interact with others. Being in teams, talking and chatting with others, and the social experience is more important than achievements that result. Killers: acting with other people. Want to stomp on other people, or impose themselves on others. Can be healing others, or killing others.] This doesnt mean we are all born into one of these quadrants. We are probably in all of these, and we move back and forth from all of them. We dont need to segment players, just understand how they might respond to various structures. 7.4 Activity Loops A game has loops just as a computer program does. We will look at two kinds of activity loops which we call: engagement loops (micro-level) and progression loops (macro-level). Engagement Loop: the process of motivators appearing, someone taking an action (or not), and then getting feedback. This then becomes a motivator. We need to structure the loop in gamification design. A well designed system keeps this loop moving. Progression Loops: a look at the structure of what happens to users in the site. For example, there are a series of small challenges as a part of a larger challenge.

Feedback

Motivation

Action

For example: Codecademy breaks up the Blackjack game into smaller parts to complete in order to build the program. This is start to finish, through intermediates, to give the user a sense of ease in individual steps, and sweep and potential of motivational big step. The players evolution in the game can be seen as rising and falling. It begins with onboarding, then alternating climbing and rest continue. Over time, tremendous gains towards mastery have been done. A well designed game and gamification system has well-structured engagement loops to ensure feedback goes to motivation, and progression loops that allow people to move from beginner to mastery. 7.5 Fun and Tools

A lot of gamified systems forget the fun, especially if its a PBL system where you focus on behaviourist loops. Its easy to forget one of the key points is that it must be game like. We often have to ask ourselves, is this fun? Is this engaging? Fun is important. PBLs are not necessarily un-fun. The challenge is making sure these things are deployed in a way that unleashes some of the versions of fun we talked about. Samsung Nation: Have fun discovering everything Samsung.com has to offer. Why is this something exciting? If the activity underlying it isnt fun and engaging, then youre going to have issues. But fun can be anywhere. LinkedIn progress bar: Fun in feedback, knowing you only have a bit more to get to the next level. Not life-changing fun, just amusement and engagement. Protein Folding: you get points for finding the best folding patterns of proteins. As a result, several serious breakthroughs have resulted in medical science. The final step in the design process is to deploy. The key is to use the right tools. There is a rich palate that a designer can work with. PBL examples can be successful, but there are a lot more things beyond that which are possible. Once all the right questions have been asked, we now need to think about the different options and choose the ones best suited to the challenge at hand. Week 8: Design Choices 8.1 Taking Stock Lets take stock at a high level on what gamification is. There are two different kinds of gamification. Both are true examples, but they are very different models. Is a slot machine a game? No. There is no sense of meaningful choices, or sense of play. You just pull the handle, and it gives you money or not, based on random determination. Fundamentally, its like flipping a coin. Yes. A lot of gamification looks like a slot machine. Theres surprise, trying to find a pattern, randomness, engagement loops, and people find stuff exciting about it. It can be called a game of chance. There are two different things going on when we use the term gamification. Doing. Gamification is about doing things using games and game structures. o Marketing and economics. Disciplines about measuring behaviour and having structures. o Incentives. o Satisfying needs. o Game elements (inductive). Building up from the bottom. o Status. o PBLs. o Rewards.

Making users do things. Things they want to do on their own but dont get. Giving motivational help to move people along a path. Feeling. Gamification is about how you feel about doing something. o Game design and cognitive psychology. Whats going on that makes someone interested in something. o Experiences. What you encounter inside. o Fun. More than meeting basic needs, there is something experiencial and indivisible. o Game thinking (deductive). Starting big and going down. o Meaning. o Puzzles. Learning and challenges, but involve more than PBL. o Progression. Mastery, competence, and more about the journey than the reward. o Making players awesome. Figuring out what it is that helps someone achieve full potential. More focused on user goals than external goals. o Both perspectives are valuable. Be aware of the two approaches, and where they come together and where they diverge. 8.2 Is Gamification right for me? There are four questions to ask. 1. Motivation: Where would you derive value from encouraging behaviour? If motivation matters, gamification is a good thing in the situation. Motivation is important in situations that involve deep creativity, unique skills, connections, or teamwork not just rote-work, but something complex and deep. However, its also important where the task at hand seems dull, boring or repetitive. Motivation here has a lot of impact. 2. Meaningful Choices: Are the tasks involved potentially sufficiently interesting? Intrinsic motivation and self-determination give us the idea of autonomy. 3. Structure: Can we gamify the system by using rules or algorithms? Does this lend itself to a digital system that encodes the rules to the problem set? It cant be vague, subjective, or unclear. 4. Potential conflicts: What other motivational structures are there? Can we avoid tension with these? Salary is the most basic of these motivations; others are the desire to not be fired. When applying to learning, we need to think about conflict with grading. Lee Sheldon gamified his courses, and gave people points and levels. This has to be designed around existing incentives, so it couldnt be done alongside normal letter grading. 8.3 Designing for the Collective Good StackOverflow is a site for programmers, which revolves around questions and answers from a community. How do you get people to answer others peoples questions about coding? StackOverflow did that; the site has over 2 million users, with 5000 questions per day. The field of programming is almost by definition one of constant learning. Programming is supposed to be fun

Know your players. Understand the community involved in the activity. Whats meaningful is different in different communities. FourSquare badges are colourful, fun, graphical, whereas StackOverflow badges are very different. Its about numbers and information, not clutter. The three categories are gold, silver and bronze. The system is designed to incentivise pro-social behaviour and to help the group. The design of StackOverflow makes helping your fellow programmers the most effective way to win Points in the system are called reputation. These are gained from others, who vote up your questions and answers. There is exchange and gifting, both very social things. So then the problem becomes how do you encourage groups to do whats best for the world rather than their own specific, selfish needs? Game elements pull against the tendency for groups to collapse into selfishness. Points give you more abilities, moving you towards the state of moderator, not more access. Badges are about doing things that are good for the site: vote 100 times, edit 500 posts, etc. This is all to incentivise things that are in the interest of the group, not the individual. All the gaming elements are there in service of a higher purpose I believe it ultimately helps me become more knowledgeable and a better communicator while also improving the very fabric of the web for everyone. Try to find ways to have the gamification elements push towards the greater good, and this will more likely result in a deep and enduring gamified system. 8.4 Designing for happiness Positive psychology: developed by Martin Seligman (U. Penn), which is to do with what makes people happy and fulfilled. How people feel better about themselves, as opposed to what happens when something goes wrong. There are five aspects for being a fulfilled, successful individual: flourishing. Gamification has an opportunity to tap into these. Positive emotions Engagement Relationships Meaning Achievement

Flow is the idea of a state where we are engaged in what were doing to the extent that we lose ourselves in it, and are completely engaged to the best of our abilities. This occurs as often in work as it does in play. Its not something that can be made to happen, but occurs organically when an activity has certain characteristics.

 Too difficult activities cause anxiety. Too easy activities cause boredom. In the middle is the flow channel, where we have an activity that is not too easy, not too hard, especially when the difficulty is variable. There are other conditions. Clear goals. Balance between perceived challenged and perceived skills. Emphasis on perceives it feels like its just hard enough. Its about how you feel, not objective difficulty. Clear and immediate feedback. This is feedback allowing us to get to the point where you are completely immersed. 8.5 Amy Jo Kim Author and workshop organiser on gamification and applied game design. Whats with the current gamification phenomenon? Its a wave of interest in gaming because of a lot of reasons. Gamification as a word may go away, and the toolkit will be implemented as a part of normal stuff, just as AI is now. Gamification will be many different techniques inspired by games. The wave will grow bigger to become an integral part. Player types her perspective Taking Bartles model and applying it everywhere is silly. There are a lot of systems, but they are for utility and not a descriptor of the be all and end all. Its an appropriate model for some types, but they dont work a lot of the time in non-MMOG situations. Amy Jo Kims Social Engagement Verbs (inspired by Bartles player types) Explore: right out of Bartle Compete: similar to achievers, but more specific. Collaborating: very much what he calls socialisers, but with a game perspective. If you try to choose what game mechanics and strategy to apply this is really useful. Express: self-expression is a huge driver in social media. This is a primary player type people who play with avatars, etc. The following are specific words built around these. We can map out the core actions in the product against the chart, and see where

they fall. Then map this against who were trying to reach. If were talking all male sales staff, theyre comfortable with competition. However, middleaged mothers would be suited to collaboration. Take Bartle as a starting point, and adapt for your world.

Whats the opportunities around the idea of collaboration as opposed to competition? Game: a system in which players engage in an artifical conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome. Rules of Play This defines zero-sum games very well: games where we are opponents. I win, and you lose. Head-to-head battles: boxing War simulations: chess Rank-ordered competitions: Olympic sports Gambling: poker (you play against the house)

But this definition doesnt work for a lot of games. What about the Sims? Theres no quantifiable outcome Game: a structured experience with rules and goals thats fun to play Engagement Design This is defining zero-sum games, where we are partners: its either win-win or lose-lose. Playground games: skipping Party games: draw something Martial arts Charity walk: were all winning together

Mistakes people make when leaving social media/game design and coming into gamification Funnels and engagement loops are familiar to web people, as is loyalty. They are not familiar with the fact that the gaming experience changes over time; the player journey necessitates different things to respond to peoples increasing commitment and skill. Sustainable gamification has the experience evolving over time. The three stages of newbie, regular and expert allow you to think about the first day or week, then two months in, and then the expert, or the elder. What will the most skilful players be able to do? How are they engaged? Think about engagement loops at all stages of the cycle to drive retention throughout. Week 9: Enterprise Gamification 9.1 Enterprise Applications We now look at internal applications of gamification: specifically gamification in large business.

Sometimes this is done consciously, or unconsciously. Constellation Research talked to 50 early adopters, and found a wide variety of different uses. Intranet (or extranet) Engagement Gamification here works in the same way as an external forum. Game elements encourage people to contribute, respond, and improve just as they do in StackOverflow. SAP external network gamified to enhance forum quality.

Productivity Enhancement This is helping people to do their jobs. Gamification can provide feedback and motivation that is helpful to employees improving their job performance. Call centres encourage agents to deal with calls quickly and well. Agent screens have leaderboard, levels, customer satisfaction numbers, and achievements all focussed on improving performance, as well as highlighting elements aesthetically. This data is then monitored as KPIs by management. Is this always helpful? Can it be negative?

Efficiency Enhancement Efficiency is about making people work better by doing everything efficiently. Email is a good example, as people do it all the time as a secondary responsibility. Gamification can improve the process efficiency. Timer showing email time, progress bar for time, and point system. You get points for quickly dealing with email; this incentivises email efficiency. Creating virtual currency around email sending has a cost.

Knowledge Management Deloitte WhoWhatWhere: encourage consultants to find out more about each other. Consulting firms have people all over the world with lots of knowledge, who dont know about each other. Gamification encourages people to share this information. Human Resources Hiring: identifying the best candidates Onboarding: getting people going early on Acculturation: getting people engaged in enterprise culture and reinforcing it Corporate training: using game mechanics to encourage learning Employee recognition: informal employee rewards T&E: travel and entertainment people get a fixed amount of budget, and not using the full amount means you can do stuff with it. Encourages efficiency with expenses.

Innovation DWPs Idea Street is a government initiative which is an idea marketplace that people can come up with. People can buy and sell shares in those ideas, and they created a stock market

style marketplace. DWP generated a large number of good ideas and therefore delivering better service. Serious Games Siemens created PlankVille, which is a manufacturing plant operation simulation, which can help people understand how to be more effective in plant management. 9.2 Workplace Motivations What motivates people at work? Standard rewards: pay, bonuses, praise, responsibility These are almost entirely extrinsic motivators, designed as compensation. So it cant be the whole story. Skill Development This could be motivated by extrinsic rewards (better salary, etc), but can also be intrinsic. LiveOps creates virtual call centres using applications, and has lots of part-time staff. These are often people to develop new skills, so they built their own gamified site but its geared towards skill development. This is we want to help you learn how to be better at the job. Information Objective Logistics has gamified the restaurant industry, and can track restaurant waiters and provide feedback to employees (and company) via metrics like ranking and satisfaction. Corporate Citizenship There are things done in a company that arent about the job. A good example is the Microsoft Language Quality game. Thousands of employees did this voluntarily. A lot of the motivation was because they were doing things that were better for the company. Fun Zappos (online retailer) uses the face game to help you recognise fellow employees by name. 9.3 The Game vs The Job Where is the dividing line between the game and the job? The players might be more focussed on the game than the job; the game may push them one way and the job another, which leads to problems. Imagine a call centre gamifies a system using PBLs. If you get done with a call within 30 seconds you get 10 points, and completing n calls in an hour gives you more points. People will play the game instead of doing a good job. Instead, a structure that gives points for customer satisfaction and streaks will encourage optimisation on satisfaction. We need to gamify based on business goals. Citizenship Behaviours Situations where people will do good things at work to be nice to colleagues/company.

Altruism Conscientiousness Civic virtue: part of a larger community Common courtesy Sportsmanship

These can be tapped into for the benefit of the company. The language quality game tapped into the desire to make Windows a quality product. Applying citizenship Where do productivity games work well? Core skills Unique skills In-role Citizenship (1) 1. Core roles involving citizenship. A skill that everyone has (speaking your own language) but doing something to do with corporate citizenship. 2. In role responsibilities with future skills. Training and improving behaviour. There are two big gamification applications to the workplace. One is groups (communities and trying to get mass participation) and the other is individuals (improving skills or performance). Enterprise gamification requires close attention to nature of the game and how this matches up to the workplace. 9.4 Playbor Is the game truly voluntary? Playbor is the combination of play and labour. Is it a game or work? Games surely have to be voluntary? Being forced to do something isnt so fun. Target checkout clerks get a rating of Green, Yellow or Red, and this shows up with scores on the checkout. Is this a game for the cashiers? Or is this a private big brother, and has nothing to do with fun, voluntariness. Where are the game aspects in that? The Disney electronic whip is a leaderboard system for laundry workers. Workers dont like it all, as it is seen as standing over them and punishing them for not working really hard. How can gamified systems be designed to promote beneficial elements but not to demoralise workers and have negative effects? The system needs to be perceived as voluntary and transparent. What are the elements deployed? Pure ranking and scoring is a terrible way to promote engagement and collaboration in favour to competition. 9.5 Daniel Debow Daniel Debow now works for Salesforce Rypple. Rypple amplifies behaviour. It focuses on goal settings, coaching, recognition, and forms an easy way to gather feedback. Its a modern approach to social performance management. Future skills (2)

Why is gamification valuable? Rypple never set out to build a game, even though they hired game designers. They wanted to design a great experience, and thinking about what people engage with. Game designers were careful not to be putting game mechanics all over stuff. If all it takes to make a game successful is putting game mechanics in, then all games would be successful. Most games fail because the underlying game play isnt rewarding. How do you find things that are intrinsically rewarding? Sometimes its obvious, sometimes not. Look at data and behaviour. Then try things! Rypple allows people to ask for feedback, and its not a sustained behaviour. People like to give feedback, but how do you design it so people dont feel bad about the feedback they get. People would send emails to each other, have meetings, or get physical badges. People value the meetings more than others: the fact that peers say that what you did was important. You dont know things until you try. Whats different about enterprise application versus marketing? (1) Rewards often drive behaviour. One of the most common gamified rewards in spreading a product is introduce your friend: they get $10 and so do you. This was used by DropBox and PayPal. Rypple wanted to do this inside an organisation. Because it was free, managers could use it without going through HR. They used the same principles, as customers were so valuable. This should make it spread like crazy, but it made people use it less. It was because people felt uncomfortable endorsing a product for money. (2) The willingness to engage in seemingly frivolous behaviour is very much dictated by organisational culture. The ability to design badges depends on this. People also moderate their behaviour because they know people are watching. They dont want to engage in behaviour that deviates from corporate culture. Can these things work in traditional companies? 1. Social companies are very driven and business focussed companies. Its a workplace that isnt a mid-West industrial company, but there are still similarities. 2. Lots of customers have less famous names that arent Facebook. 3. Some of the most established companies are interested as they have the same problem, and want a solution that resonates with the current workforce. 4. Its not like people dont play games at work already. At Goldman Sachs people get deal toys its basically a badge. Job titles and roles are partly a status symbol. Levelling rewards like corner offices and parking spots. How do you avoid the mechanics making things cut-throat? There are a few techniques.

1. Be empirical. See what happens! We have theories about how people behave, but they are often empirically wrong. 2. Get people who have actually designed games involved in the problem. Real context and real designers, not just businessmen. 3. Think of gamification as an amplification tool.

Week 10: Social Impact & Behaviour Change 10.1 Gamification for Good? Can gamification make the world a better place and improve peoples lives? Well obviously. Gamification is a motivational tool, and its near irrelevant what it motivates people to do. Games produce positive energy, sociability, and focus. There is a lot of potential good in making things more game-like. Purely trying to find fun and engagement in any task may have social value. What about a context where the application is deliberately focussed on beneficial impact? Inherent relatedness (one of the three components of intrinsic motivation): being part of something bigger than the individual. o Not always simple to unlock this power. o We know about things we should do, but we most often dont. o We need to activate this sense of relatedness. Gamification is about rewards for doing good: does gamification put a premium on doing something for the short term? Can we crowd out or over-justify the things we would do for philanthropic reasons? Behaviour change: most examples here are about changing peoples behaviour. 10.2 Social Good Applications Lets think about the potential we have and the different types of approaches. Health and Wellness Zamzee: Hope Laps is a non-profit that uses games and gamification for health reasons. This is a pedometer that measures physical fitness, in a similar way to Nike+. This is interesting because it is targeted at low-income teenagers. Activity levels are tracked and keyed with game elements, which include points, badges, levels, and rewards. This produces real results. SuperBetter: this is about improving peoples lives and overcoming issues. The game was created to motivate Jane McGonnagal to overcome concussion and improve her situation. Classic elements use quests, allies, power-ups, and also bad guys. An example of helping people get and do better. Energy and Environment oPower: you see feedback on how you are doing with your energy consumption. You also see relational data, which is related to other people nationwide and also your neighbours. The

social dimension (peer pressure) is very powerful to get people to engage in new behaviours. Goals, leaderboards, and quests are elements involved. Recycle Bank: gamified system of rewards to encourage people to recycle. These can be redeemed for rewards. This is a standard gamification that has been widely implemented. Education (student motivation is a massive challenge) Quest to Learn: an entire school that is structured around games. Gamifying existing systems by changing the way we mark see The Multiplayer Classroom which deals with High School and Higher Education. Gamifying the credentialing function: traditionally done by diplomas and standardised tests. Mozilla foundations open badge initiative is a way to use game elements as a way of showcasing skills and accomplishments. Government Governments can act as enterprise, so this makes sense for departments just as anyone else. Government provides customer service by interacting with citizens. Government can use gamification to promote its policies. The White House commissioned a project looking at how games and game elements can promote policy goals. Twenty-three government agencies attended a meeting to discuss this. 10.3 Social Impact Techniques CAPRI (Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives) System to prevent congestion at peak times around a University campus. Standard feedback & reward approach: levels and monetary rewards with credits. Monitoring is automating: GPS smartphone tracking negates need for self-reporting. Communal pressure: use of the social graph to show relation to friends. Chance: credits can be redeemed for using in a game, where you have a chance of a bigger reward that is random and not guaranteed.

Kukui Cup (University of Hawaii) This is a system to create competition amongst students in residence halls to see who can use the most power and be the most efficient in their energy use. Competition: entire process is built around trying to do better than peers. Here, there is no external, existing kind of structure, and the competition is about taking pride in winning. The competition has less potential to be dangerous. Practically Green The company motivates sustainability types of actions. Impact: showing the consequences of activities, and seeing the metrics within an entire company. This can be a powerful motivator: seeing what youre doing.

10.4 Behaviour Change Whats the secret to sustainable behaviour change? This is really applicable when were talking about social good, but is relevant to all forms of gamification and also elsewhere. Habit Formation A habit is something we do automatically, that we do without really thinking about. Fogg Behaviour Model Three elements: Behaviour = motivation + ability + trigger Motivation: the more we want to do something, the more likely we are to do it Ability: the more we are able to do it, the more likely we are to do it Triggers: the things that push us at a particular moment to engage in an activity. o High ability and motivation means triggers are more likely to work. o Low motivation and ability means triggers are less likely to work. We can plot everything on these three axes. Triggers Motivation and ability can trade off against each other: if motivation is high, then you can do hard things. If motivation is low, it has to be an easy task for people to do it. Trigger timing: the thing that, at that moment, gets you to take that action. o We have to have the trigger when someone is ready and able to take that challenge. Trigger types: there are three kinds o Sparks: triggers that increase motivation o Facilitator: triggers that increase perceived ability o Signal: motivation and ability is high, we just need a reminder Applying this to gamification Engagement loops (motivation action feedback) lead to motivation Progression loops (onboarding levelling mastery) lead to perceived ability: we improve actual and perceived levels of ability. Good games trigger effectively. 10.5 Susan Hunt Stevens Susan Hunt Stevens is the founder of Practically Green, and a long time tech executive and entrepreneur. Were looking for a perspective on getting people to engage in sustainability activities using gamification.

Practically Green is getting people to embrace more sustainable activities. They bring transparency to the social graph, allowing competition, collaboration, learning, sharing and congratulating. The levelling system allows people to see where they are in the rankings there is no sustainability benchmark, so gamification makes one. How do we figure out what to do and how itll help us improve? Points: these allow us to move up the levels. How do we reward people for doing things to do with sustainability that they wouldnt see rewards for in normal life? You guessed it, badges. The system wasnt made with gamification in mind, but it just happened. It also brought fun into the process. This brings in more people into the process. What does it take to make people engage in long-term processes? There are games that people play for lifetimes, but most games are played for 12-18 months. Most people seem to be engaging because they are a part of a community that is doing something for the good. The people you play with are what brings you back. How do we avoid crowding out intrinsic motivation? No redeemable points, no currency around points. The more tangible the reward mechanism, the more incentive there is to cheat and game the system. How do you give people status, access recognition and power more than stuff? Stuff leads to cheating.

Week 11: Criticisms & Risks 11.1 Pointsification This is an effectiveness criticism. Gamification is taking the thing that is least essential from games, and representing it as the core of the game. PBLs arent what get people to play, and what stimulates motivational things weve talked about in the course. Motivation is an inadvertent con. Its suggesting that what is good about games is points and leaderboards. This is totally wrong. Many gamified systems rely principally on PBLs and surface level game mechanics. They dont give the sense of intrinsic motivation and engagement that is going to produce sustained results. We can address the criticism. This focuses in on a limited set of gamification examples and practices. We can take this to heart, without letting it seriously harm gamification. Does gamification actually work?

If gamification reduces to pointsification, does this mean it wont produce the engagement to drive real change? Real research on effectiveness is limited. Some social scientists have started to do research, and we will see this coming out soon. If its just about shallow elements, we have a lot of potential for engagement decay. People will get bored by the surface level mechanics, if that is all that drives them. Crowding out, or overjustification. Gamification is the high fructose corn syrup of engagement Kathy Sierra It seems great because its sweet and cheap, but as we learn more it turns out to be harmful. It will push people away from intrinsic motivation to external reward. FourSquare was a massive gamification success story. The badges on top of social location powered FS to massive adoption. However, in 2012 they did a redesign to change the interface of the system in a way that significantly deemphasised the game elements. Why? PBL became less central as the social element came to the forefront. PBL was an engagement and adoption technique. Implications Names are powerful: people dont like the word gamification as it implies this is about games. Yes, it is in a way, but its not entirely. Bad gamification is bad. Behaviourist gamification is subject to the limits and dangers of rewards. There is more to games than gamification, and vice versa. Gamification draws on psychology, design, social media and business. Caveat ludor. Make sure to always keep in mind the difference between pointsification and gamification. 11.2 Exploitationware Gamification is too effective, and can get people do things outside of their interest. For example, our Disneyland leaderboard example. Ian Bogost made a post on his personal blog where he made 2 arguments. Gamification is an intentional con: a way to try and make people think their job doesnt suck, even when it does. It is inherently a technique that can be used to make people confused, and focus elsewhere than compensation and meaningfulness. Gamification proposes to replace real incentives with fictional ones. Real incentives come at a cost but provide value for both parties based on a relationship of trust. By contrast, pretend incentives reduce or eliminate costs, but in so doing they strip away both value and trust. The problem is use of gamification either inadvertently, or deliberately as a trick to force people to do something.

CowClicker shows the emptiness of systems that rely purely on engagement loops. Actually, 50000+ people started playing the game. People were topping the leaderboard, with huge amounts of currency which they accumulated from clicking on cows. In designing gamification, we have to look at: 1. Focus on the business objectives. Whats the purpose of encouraging people to do something, and how does it tie to a deeper goal? 2. Who are the players? Focus on the people involved in the game, and dont treat them as people sucked into playing something with no/little point. 11.3 Gaming the Game There are a lot of mistakes you can make, but one of the most common is to forget who the object of the system is: players! And players are people! Nicole Lazarro says that gamification can kill. On the on-ramp to the San Francisco Bridge, you see a pricing system based on congestion, aimed to encourage people to go across at less busy times: at 0659 its $6 and 0700 its $4. If you go to the bridge at 0659 everyone is swerving off the road in order to save $2. This can cause accidents! We have to realise how people will respond to system. Cheating People may figure out a way to achieve their own aims in the system that arent the aims of the game designer. Well-designed games with social elements tend to dissuade people from cheating. Beneficial cheating? How can you have cheating in a game where you end up with better results? An Innovation Market was made in Lloyds Bank. Insider trading started to happen this is outlawed in the financial markets as it damages trust. This virtual insider trading was a way of strengthening teams around great ideas. This is what the system was about, not about the virtual money. The critical thing is to recognise that people act in different and spontaneous ways to different stimuli. Even if people arent doing what the game designer wants them to do, exactly, theyre demonstrating autonomy and adding to intrinsic motivation. 11.4 Legal Issues There are some legal issues to do with designing a gamified system. We have five potential issues 1. Privacy. We get a lot of player information in our gamified system such as profile information, as well as information about everything they do in the game. We have very detailed and personal information. Laws vary wildly between jurisdictions: in the US there is little restrictions, and in Europe there is a lot more legislation.

2. Employment/labour law: exploitation via a gamification system. One of the issues brought up in Target unions talks was the leaderboard system in the checkout. Once again jurisdictions matter. 3. Deceptive marketing. What can you do to market something? If the gamified system isnt clearly designed to market, then we have to be careful. This is especially relevant in market focus gamification. 4. Intellectual property. IP law regulates access to digital assets. Virtual goods are potentially protected by IP law, and this is an issue in any digital system. 5. Virtual property law. What happens if a user spends a lot of time and effort (and often money) to get virtual stuff? But it can be easily taken away by the developer. So what rights do they have over it? The courts so far have said this is a licence (something you get contractually), not property. a. The CARD Act (US) regulates gift cards, which might be similar kinds of virtual currencies to those used in gamified systems. 11.5 Regulatory Issues As well as legal issues, there are some regulatory concerns. Practice might be allowed, but only under certain restrictions from government agencies. Paid endorsements. This happened with bloggers who were getting paid by companies to write paid reviews. FTC mandated that you have to disclose why youre endorsing something. Many gamification systems provide opportunities for points through social media recommendations. Banking regulations: do we have a currency or freely tradable good? Are we even allowed to do this without being registered as a bank? Probably not that common, but worth keeping in mind if we have money/trading structures. o Record-keeping o Reserve requirements o Currency manipulation o Anti-fraud o Money laundering o Consumer protection o Taxation and accounting Gambling and sweepstakes o National regulation of gambling: inter-state gambling is basically prohibited. You can gamble in designated areas, and in government sponsored lotteries. In other countries you have greater/lesser regulation. Distinction between games of skill and chance. Chance is gaming, skill isnt. o State regulation of sweepstakes (in the US) Week 12 12.1 Beyond the Basics How have we completed the goals? 1. What is gamification? What actually is it, and how does it fit into other things that are similar like serious games.

2. Why might it be valuable? Marketing, HR, enterprise, and social impact examples all show how game elements and design feed into value and goal reaching. 3. How can we do it effectively? Different forms of gamification, step-by-step design frameworks to apply it, and the negative sides of what can happen. 4. What are some specific applications? Massive breadth of areas where we can apply gamification. Where are we going next? Lets look at things to be done that relate to game design but are broader. Theyre big topics that are worth touching on. Inducement prizes: rewards where the goal is to encourage people to do something. The winner gets money, instead of everything. We use competitive instincts. Collective action Virtual economics: how economic pressures can be applied to virtual goods, and how we can create a functional economy. The future: where is gamification going to go? Will it be good or bad as it scales up? 12.2 Inducement Prizes Orteig promised a $25,000 prize to the first person to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. Prizes are a way to either reward certain behaviour (Nobel is prize for past action) or to encourage, A contest to motivate a result Alternative to direct funding What are the advantages? Economy and efficiency: the Orteig prize was $25k, but people in total spent $400k chasing the prize. Creativity and flexibility: when the Exxon Valdise tanker ran aground, there was a prize for someone who could figure out to pump solid oil. The winner was a guy who used lessons from pouring concrete, and someone they wouldnt have gone to with R&D money. Gamification Inducement prizes are about motivation. This is a kind of reward structure. Fun? Its clearly an extrinsic reward. SDT theory factors are all here: competence, autonomy and relatedness. Inducement Prize Initiatives TopCoder X Prize Foundation DARPA Grand Challenges: military organisation which has a self-driving car challenge which has been very successful. America Competes Act: this encourages and makes possible these competitions on a wide scale. What does it take to design one of these competitions effectively?

 Multiple individuals/teams capable of competing: enough people have to be able to compete and win. If only one person can do it, then hire them. Costs sufficiently small: cheap enough for people to spend their money chasing. Everyone except winner loses out. Balance of scale and incentives (Karim Lakhani): in designing an inducement prize you want it to be as big as possible, but with a decent chance of people winning. Opportunities to leverage results: we want to actually do something with the winners. 12.3 Virtual Economies Gamified systems + currency = virtual economies

Persistent virtual rewards Tradable/redeemable points In-game transactions/markets

All of these can exist in gamified systems.

VIRTUAL GOODS

VIRTUAL CURRENCY

VIRTUAL ECONOMY

Virtual goods are a widespread phenomenon. Virtual goods can be unlocked as a way to monetise the game, as a way to easily achieving things. The virtual goods market is estimated at $7 billion in 2010, which will grow to $13 billion by 2016. Loyalty programs as virtual currency. Airpoints dollars?!?! o They assume that just the currency thing is enough, and you dont need any fun. Tangible rewards have serious limitations, dont forget. Balance is critical in economics: economics are driven by scarcity Scarcity is a variable in a gamified system defined by the designer. Where you can use virtual goods and currencies, you need to make sure you have scarcity. Sources: put money into the economy Sinks: take money out of the economy Dangers in building virtual economies do exist Real money costs real money duh Remember the hedonic treadmill and crowding-out Intrinsic value from rarity and surprise

12.4 Collective Action Amazon MicroTurk The Amazon MicroTurk Exchange provides a crowdsourcing arena. You can get people to do human intelligence tasks where computers cant do it. There are over 200,000 HITs available each day on Mechanical Turk. Applying Gamification FoldIt (www.fold.it) Competitive Collaborate

Bottom-up

Top-down

Grant

Employee s

Inducement prize

Crowd-sourcing

This service was developed by biomedical researchers working on 3D protein folding. Its very computationally difficult, but people are really good at figuring it out as people like doing puzzles. This is a game like system that asks you to figure out the most efficient layout of proteins. The researchers have motivated thousands of people to do this. It has really successfully managed to do this. DigitalCoot (from MicroTask) Using gamification to check OCR output for digitisation of Finnish National Library works. The ESP Game Shows people picture, and says what is this? You give the same thing to two different people, and see if theyre right. The point is to improve image search. Its hard for a computer to look at a picture and say thats a sheep! We want to meta-tag for search engines. People are just told that something is fun, and this is why they should do it. What situations lend themselves well? Task can be split up easily Task is better done by humans than computers Motivational elements can be done by gamification: money, love, fun? 12.5 Into the Future No one knows the future; gamification is a young field that is changing very fast. Lets imagine what will happen if gamification becomes pervasive in society. Sight, by Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo

This is the best example for what could happen if it became universal. It shows an integrated gamification of life in a dating situation. Choices: these are forks in the road that we have to choose. Empowering or manipulative? Do we help, or take advantage? Shallow or thoughtful? Is it just PBL or do we look at other mechanics? Doing or feeling? Behavioural or cognitive? The future of gamification is up to us. Gamification hasnt been around very long, and not many people know as much about it as class graduates.