Gamification — A Play In Three Acts
Prologue
Last week marked the third anniversary of GamifyCon, a one-day conference all about Gamification and Serious Games. Various teams showed their takes on Gamification in a wide range of applications, exchanged experiences and knowledge. The day was accompanied by talks, one of which I’d like to focus on in this post.
Sebastian Deterding, amongst other things researcher at the University of York, had the best introductory talk about Gamification I have ever heard up his sleeve.
Act I — What the heck is Gamification?
Remember when you were a child and you walked somewhere with your parents? They were talking about grown-up stuff you didn’t understand or didn’t care for, so your stroll would be pretty boring. So you thought of ways to pass time. Like how you’re not allowed to step on cracks on the ground, or are only allowed to set one foot down per tile.
That is the purest form of Gamification. You take a boring task and improve it in a way that actually makes you enjoy that task. It’s fun, even!
Act II — Well okay, but, why should I use Gamification?
Now, you might think, why make everything fun? Just kidding, I sincerely hope you didn’t think that. Why? Because fun! That should be the only explanation you need.
Need more? Well, okay then: From a business standpoint, all you had to do previously was convince your customer to „BUY“. That was it. Simple message, move along. But customers have changed and now you want them to do more than just buy. You want them to Like, Share, Subscribe, Comment, Add, whatever you can think of. The business to customer relationship has shifted from a simple one-way communication to actual back-and-forth interaction.
Then you’ve got new markets like health, self-improvement, and sustainability as well as new production values (Engaged, Enrolled, and Disengaged — there was a study showing how disengaged employees reduced the income of a company by 32%).
And the big one. New research results.
What we had so far in several interaction-based environments (employer to employee, customer to business, even parents to children, „user“ and „program“ — yes, that’s a Tron reference) was a thing called „Theory X“. Theory X describes a situation in which the user only does what they are asked because they get something materialistic in return. They don’t do it because they want to and are lightyears away from doing it because they have fun doing it.
Here’s an example that will most definitely ring a bell: „Sign up for our Newsletter and win an iPad!“. Now why are you subscribing to that newsletter? Because you care for what’s inside? Probably not. More likely you sign up for that newsletter and then either unsubscribe as soon as the raffle is over or it will forever find its way into your Spam folder.
And then there is „Theory Y“. Which is basically the exact opposite of Theory X. Theory Y advocates that the user does what they are asked because they want to do it. Because to them it’s fun.
It all comes down to „Why?“. It all comes down to MOTIVATION. What is it that motivates the user to do what the program wants?
Theory X represents extrinsic motivation. ← This sucks
Theory Y represents intrinsic motivation. ← This is awesome
What you want your users to feel is intrinsic motivation. They should feel great about what they’re doing, great about themselves.
Act III — Okay, I’m sold. So how can I achieve Gamification?
So how can you achieve intrinsic motivation? The three keywords here are competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
Competence can be conveyed by learning. And learning can be made fun by adding interesting challenges. You mix goals with rules and utilities and voila — you get an interesting challenge. Now as soon as you add feedback to the result, the user will experience competence.
Might sound a little bit abstract, but the talk offered a really handy example to make this clear: Imagine you are managing a Facebook page for just about anything. Now here comes a user with a question. You don’t answer their question immediately, but wait for another user else to eventually come along. Oh, and here they are. They answer the question (correctly), so now you can jump in and be all like „User #2 is exactly right, User #1“. That user just had a competence experience because his knowledge was attested by the highest possible authority in this regard.
Autonomy might be the most important factor in intrinsic motivation. Most of the time, the things you enjoy are really fun because you do them voluntarily, on your own terms. And: If you fail, nothing horrible happens (assuming you’re not bungee jumping or something of that sort). So you always want your users to feel safe. Not succeeding in a challenge the first time around should never be considered a failure, but an opportunity to learn. Learn to master the challenge, and by that, again, experience competence.
To get a user to fail confidently, you need to establish mutual trust. And the more they can relate to you, the more they can trust you, because you’re on the same page. If you share values, you get this familiar feeling and feel more comfortable.
Once they feel related, they will experience the confidence to execute autonomy, and by doing things their way, experimenting, learning, they will get to achieve competence.
Epilogue
„In an age of motivation, if we want passionate users, we should switch from a primarily extrinsic to a primarily intrinsic motivation. Create compelling challenges and maintain a safe space with shared values and mutual trust that allows experimenting.“ (Sebastian Deterding, Conclusion to his talk at GamifyCon 2017, loosely translated from German)
