Actionable Gamification Read online

  Little did I know back then that this lonely passion from 2003 would become one of the hottest new industries and buzzwords that people now commonly throw around as the term “Gamification.”

  Why Gamification?

  Gamification, or the act of making something game-like, is certainly not something new. Throughout history, humans have tried to make existing tasks more intriguing, motivating, and even “fun.” When a small group of people casually decide to compete against each other in hunting and gathering, or simply start keeping score of their activities and comparing it to their past records, they are adopting principles that are prevalent in modern games to make tasks more engaging.

  One of the earlier works done on adapting gameplay practices within the workplace can be traced back to 1984, when Charles Coonradt explored the value of adding game-play elements at work through his book The Game of Work. 3

  Coonradt addressed the question, “Why would people pay for the privilege of working harder at their chosen sport or recreational pursuit than they would work at a job where they were being paid?” He then boiled it down to five conclusions that led to hobbies being more preferable to work.

  Clearly defined goals

  Better scorekeeping and scorecards

  More frequent feedback

  A higher degree of personal choice of methods

  Consistent coaching

  As we dive deeper into our journey together, we will learn about how these factors boil down to specific motivation Core Drives that can be intently designed for.

  On the other hand, some early forms of marketing gamification can also be seen in the form of (regrettably) “shoot the duck” banner ads on websites, where an image ad tempts users to click on it by displaying a duck flying around. These tactics have probably tricked many people, myself included, into clicking on them once or twice upon seeing them. Later on, eCommerce sites like eBay and Woot.com all adapted sound gamification principles to become hugely popular examples of how game mechanics and dynamics can really make a process fun and engaging (in later chapters, we will examine how both eBay and Woot.com utilize great gamification design to make purchases exciting and urgent).

  Of course, as “games” evolved throughout the centuries, the art of “making things game-like” naturally evolved too. Through the advent of the Internet, Big Data, pluggable frameworks, and stronger graphics, our ability to design and implement better gamification experiences has drastically improved to the point where we can now bring sophisticated and subtle game-like experiences into every aspect of our lives.

  In recent years, the term “gamification” became a buzzword because the gaming industry shifted from making simple games that only target young boys, to social and mobile games like Farmville and Angry Birds that also appeal to middle-aged executives as well as senior retirees alike.

  As people discover that everyone from their nieces to their grandmas are playing games, while companies like Zynga, King, and Glu Mobile are having impressive Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), they begin to see the social power of gamification. At the same time, gamification has also been damaged by the lack of sustaining success from companies like Zynga, largely due to bad design, which we will examine closely in Chapter 14 on White Hat vs Black Hat Gamification.

  The term “gamification” rose to prominence when organizations such as Bunchball and Gamification.co branded their services with the exotic word, which spurred a whole new industry: one that gives managers, marketers, and product designers tools for creating engagement and loyalty in their experiences.

  Human-Focused Design: The Better Term for Gamification

  In my own view, gamification is the craft of deriving fun and engaging elements found typically in games and thoughtfully applying them to real-world or productive activities. This process is what I call “Human-Focused Design,” in opposition to what we normally find in society as “Function-Focused Design.” Human-Focused Design optimizes for human motivation in a system as opposed to optimizing for pure functional efficiency within the system.

  Most systems are inherently “function-focused,” that is, designed to get the job done quickly. This is like a factory that assumes its workers will do their jobs because they are required to, not because they necessarily want to perform the associated tasks. However, at its core, Human-Focused Design emphasizes that people aren’t rudimentary cogs in a system.

  We have feelings, ambitions, insecurities, and reasons for whether or not we want to do certain things. Human-Focused Design optimizes for these feelings, motivations, and engagement as the basic foundation for designing the overall system as well as its functions. (Note: I originally created the term “Human-Focused Design” to contrast with “Function-Focused Design” in 2012, but it should not be confused with “Human Centered Design4,” or “User-Centric Design” by IDEO5.)

  The reason we call this design discipline “Gamification” is because the gaming industry was the first to master Human-Focused Design.

  Games have no other purpose than to please the humans playing them. Yes, there are often “objectives” in games, such as killing a dragon or saving the princess. But those are all excuses to simply keep the player happily entertained inside the system, further engaging them enough to stay committed to the game.

  The harsh reality of game designers is that, no one ever has to play a game. They have to go to work, do their taxes, and pay medical bills, but they don’t have to play a game. The moment a game is no longer fun, users leave the game and play another game or find other things to do.

  Since game designers have spent decades learning how to keep people consistently engaged with repetitive activity loops towards “purposeless” goals, games are a great source of insight and understanding into Human-Focused Design. Indeed, depending on how you qualify a game (think of chess, hide-and-seek, and Monopoly), you could stretch back centuries to learn what game designers can teach us on creating compelling, playful experiences.

  Through gamification, we can look through the lens of games to understand how to combine different game mechanics and techniques to form desired and joyful experiences for everyone.

  The Conquests of Gamification

  Games have the amazing ability to keep people engaged for long periods of time, build meaningful relationships between people, and develop their creative potential. Unfortunately, most games these days are simply focused on escapism – wasting your life away on something that does not improve your own life nor the lives of others - besides the game makers of course.

  Now imagine if there is a truly addictive game, where the more time you spend on it, the more productive you become. You would be playing and enjoying it all day. Your career would improve as your income increased, you would experience better relationships with your family, create value for your community, and solve the world’s most challenging problems. That is the promise I believe Gamification can fulfill, and it is the vision I continuously strive for throughout my life.

  In a few short years, gamification has reached a social tipping point and is starting to creep into every aspect of our lives - from education, work, marketing, parenting, sustainability, all the way to healthcare and scientific research:

  The U.S. Armed Forces now spends more money on recruitment games than any other marketing platform.

  Volkswagen generated 33 million web visits and 119,000 new ideas through its People’s Car Project to design the “perfect car”.

  Nike used gamified feedback to drive over 5,000,000 users to beat their personal fitness goals every day of the year.

  With Beat the GMAT, students increased the time they spent on the website improving their test scores by 370% through a gamified platform.

  In 10 days, Foldit gamers solved an AIDS virus protein problem that had confounded researchers for 15-years.

  According to the Entertainment Software Association, 70% of major employers are already using gamification to enhance performance and training at their companies.


  In a similar report, the market research firm Gartner predicted that 70% of Fortune 500 firms would use Gamification by the end of 2014.

  The list goes on and on. In fact, I have compiled a list of over “90 Gamification Case Studies with ROI Stats” from reputable and “serious” firms like SAP and Cisco on my blog YukaiChou.com. This list has been one of my most viewed pages to date because enthusiasts and practitioners are constantly looking for actual metrics that prove that gamification can create a return beyond simple aesthetics. The page can be accessed at YukaiChou.com/ROI.

  In my own experience, I also see the trend on the rise too. Just a few years ago, only a handful of people approached me to talk about gamification. Nowadays, I am starting to get invitations to speak or consult in a variety of verticals and industries from every continent except Antarctica.

  Unfortunately, in the same report, Gartner also predicted that 80% of those gamified efforts will fail due to bad design, which we will also explore in depth in this book.

  So the question still remains: what exactly can gamification do? Does it actually create value and return measurable results, or is it just a new gimmicky fad without lasting impact? More importantly, how can my own company improve our metrics just like all those case studies mentioned above, instead of failing miserably like the 80% predicted by Gartner?

  As stated in the Introduction, this book is not about explaining why gamification is valuable and why you should use it. I won’t be devoting much time in explaining its validity because there are enough books out there that already do that quite well. My goal is to explain exactly how to be successful in applying gamification principles and techniques to real world situations. I aim to address these pressing questions and help you design experiences that actually motivate behavior, instead of simply adding some “game shells” on top of a failed idea in the hopes of a miracle. Life is too short to waste on playing bad games.

  On that fateful day in 2003 when I decided to quit playing computer games, I never would have guessed that I would end up devoting my life’s work to studying it so many years later. The value games can provide us far exceeds simply killing time. Now is the time to harness that value and make the most out of our time.

  The journey begins here.

  Chapter 2: The PBL Fallacy

  A Story about Social Media

  The landscape of gamification development must be viewed within a historical context to see why gamification mechanics themselves don’t ultimately lead to effective design. Let’s start by taking a look at social media6.

  Google Trends search for “Social Media”

  Due to the proliferation of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, the versatile term “social media” overtook “social networking” in 2007 and became a new buzzword. When enough interest and excitement in an industry hits critical mass, there will always be people and agencies proclaiming themselves as experts, to capitalize on the trending buzz. It really doesn’t matter what the new buzzword is – SEO, SaaS, Cloud, Big Data, you name it - the terms are so new that while no one can truly be an expert, everyone is in the running to be considered as one.

  And so these “experts” saw the growth in “social media” platforms and services as heralding the dawn of a new era in technology, business, and culture. They made sure to demonstrate the importance of its influence through viral growth models and by collecting case studies that show companies obtaining huge successes due to their social media savviness. “Everyone is now a publisher” became the motto, and how companies leveraged the phenomenon became the focus. The pitch was very inspiring and logical.

  Unfortunately, being an “expert” only went so far. When companies actually hired these social media services to run their marketing campaigns, they found that all these “experts” could do was create Twitter profiles and Facebook Fan Pages (I’ve even seen services that charge thousands of dollars just to create these accounts).

  However, the real question wasn’t how to publish but what to publish. Content strategy was still a mystery in the early days of the social media revolution. For content, the “experts” would simply ask their companies to send them worthy updates for posting. Every once in a while they might even provide some customer support using the companies’ Twitter accounts or share pictures on their Facebook Fan Pages. But overall, the industry felt a little disillusioned by this new “fad,” as the miracle they were expecting in ROI (Return on Investments) just wasn’t being realized.

  What most people didn’t recognize then was that social media is much deeper than simply possessing and posting on profile accounts. That’s just the outer shell of its influence and impact. Today, we know that great social media campaigns focus on how to create value for the audience by sharing information that is insightful and engaging, has a personal voice, engages and sincerely interacts with each potential customer, and much, much more. In essence, the beauty of social media was in how you designed and implemented a campaign, not in the bells and whistles you used. It was the informal and formal dialogue you had with your community that ultimately taps into the platform’s unique possibilities.

  Having knowledge of good social media principles does not necessarily mean someone can execute them correctly. Take popularity for example. Most people know the principles of being a“popular” person – be outgoing, funny, confident, in some cases compassionate, etc. But when you look around your community or network, you find that there are still only a few people who are truly “popular,” while some may even appear to be sleazy as they try. Helping a brand become popular is exactly what true social media experts would be doing if both principles and execution were aligned.

  Fortunately, social media does have the power to make a company radically successful and the trend stuck around. (There are still dozens of successful social media case studies appearing on a monthly basis.) Today, most companies now subscribe to the belief of, “If your company doesn’t have a social strategy, it will become irrelevant.”

  What connection does this have with gamification? We will soon see that the early days of social media almost completely mirror the gamification industry today.

  An Obsession with Grunt Work

  As I mentioned in the last chapter, games have the amazing ability to keep people engaged for a long time, build relationships and communities among players, and cultivate their creative potential. Still people often ask, “Do games really have the power to motivate people?” Consider this: many feel that children today do not have strong work ethics. They complain that kids nowadays don’t have discipline, are easily distracted, and don’t show persistence when encountering challenges.

  But when it comes to playing games, these same kids have what most people would consider amazing work ethics. Many of them wake up secretly behind their parents’ back at 3AM in the morning, just to play a game and level up their fictional characters.

  What’s the motivation behind this? If you have ever played RPGs (Role-Playing Games) before, you would know that the act of “leveling up” often requires defeating the same monsters over and over again in the same stage for hours on end. Even mobile games like Candy Crush or Angry Birds require the same repetitive action (bird-throwing and gem-matching) for weeks or months in order to level up and progress. In the gaming world, this is appropriately called “grinding,” and it is fun and addictive for children and adults alike.

  In the real world, this is often defined as “grunt work.” Generally, no one likes to do grunt work, and it requires strong work ethic and will power to complete it. But kids, who again are assumed to have no discipline or work ethic, are somehow sacrificing sleep and risking punishment to complete seemingly pointless grunt work for fun.

  Why? Because they are excited about leveling their character up. They want to get that extra +5 strength and gain a new game skill to beat a challenging boss that they couldn’t defeat until they reached a high enough level. They do it because they see the big picture, the “why” they are doing it. They like tha
t sense of accomplishment, as well as the use of their creativity in developing and optimizing certain strategies. They desire these feelings so much that anything that stands in the way, be it grunt work or otherwise, is worth doing and doing urgently.

  Now, imagine a world where there is no longer a divide between what you need to do and what you want to do. Where everything is fun and engaging, and you actually want to wake up each morning to tackle the challenges ahead. Grunt work takes on a new meaning when understood as an affect of powerful motivational factors. This is the promise and vision that good gamification design can create.

  Secondhand Sushi Making

  Despite the many case studies on gamification that demonstrate the potential and promise of its great impact in the world, there are still many more examples of poor practices, failed attempts, and misconceptions. When I started my gamification career in 2003, it was a topic that no one really understood or believed in. People thought I was just creating more excuses to play video games

  Fast-forward twelve years and gamification is now a leading design methodology for industries across the globe. Though it gives me great pleasure to see that my once lonely passion became mainstream, it troubled me that experts who were working in gamification didn’t seem to understand games very much. Yes, they might have played Candy Crush a little, or even Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. But if you ask them what games have they been completely immersed in and obsessed with for long periods of time, you get very short answers.

  As with social media, once gamification became a buzzword, it attracted many who saw it as an opportunity to corner an emerging industry. I’m a firm believer that you should immerse yourself in an experience in order to best understand it. Yes, you can derive insight by closely observing those who are going through the experience. But that is like watching someone eat sushi and asking them to take a survey about it, rather than eating the sushi yourself. You’re not going to get the same findings, and if you try to replicate that experience simply based on the survey, you’re going to impart a “superficial sushi taste” to the product you’re designing.