(Below is a manuscript snippet of my book, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. Please subscribe to the mailing list on the right to order the book when it launches. This post may be moved into a Premium Area after a certain period of time).
Newton’s Pride is Not Just a Fruit. It’s Got Gravity.
Epic Meaning & Calling is generally best communicated during the Discovery and Onboarding Phase of a Player’s Journey. You want to communicate very early on exactly why the user should participate in your mission and become a player.
Apple Inc. is one of the rare companies that truly understands the Core Drive Epic Meaning & Calling, and they managed to instill that into consumers without it being user-generated, an open platform, or pushing for “a charitable cause.”
Every once in a while, I’ll have friends who excitedly tell me, “Hey Yu-kai, I am saving up to buy the next iPhone.” I would respond, “But you don’t even know what’s in the new iPhone! What if it sucks?” My friends would usually respond with, “I don’t care. I’m going to buy the next iPhone.”
Isn’t that a strange phenomenon in a world where electronic consumers are spoiled by all the options out there, with many alternatives touting the same or even better capabilities than the iPhone but only at a fraction of the cost?
Why are people so crazy about Apple products?
What we are seeing here are people who are self-identified as an “Apple Person,” and therefore they need to do what “Apple People” do, which of course, is to buy the newest Apple products.
This is also why you would regularly see hordes of “Apple Snobs” walking around and making comments like, “Oh, I never have that problem because I have a Mac.” “Hmm, well, that’s what you get for not using an iPhone.”
I myself have been guilty of this too (proudly!). When confronted with the argument that many Android phones have better specs and lower prices than the iPhone, my response has usually been, “Well, I don’t know about the specs, but I do know that, when I’m using an Android phone, I feel sad; but when I’m using an iPhone, I feel happy. Perhaps that’s worth something.”
So the Multi-Billion dollar question is: How does Apple do this?
Besides having a stellar and smooth product with an intense focus on the details of design, Apple has been one of the few electronics companies that actually try to sell a higher meaning.
Lets examine two of the most successful Apple commercials in history.
Waze is an immensely popular GPS app that is changing how we navigate traffic through crowdsourcing real-time traffic and road info.
Receiving an average five star rating by thousands of people, its fans have taken the mundane experience of driving and turned it into an enjoyably immersive adventure with a rewarding social experience.
Let’s take a deeper look into how Waze accomplishes this by applying an Octalysis analysis to its design and mechanics:
(Below is a manuscript snippet of my book, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. Please subscribe to the mailing list on the right to order the book when it launches. This post may be moved into a Premium Area after a certain period of time).
The First Gamification Site that I was Addicted to
eBay.com is an online auction site that was founded in 1995, fairly early in the internet era. It became one of the largest Dot Com boom successes, and till this day is one of the leading tech companies.
Less known to most people, is that eBay is also one of the earliest eCommerce companies that built gamification in its core DNA.
If you just think of creating a generic ecommerce site, it’s not necessarily intuitive to have a competitive bidding system, a mutual buyer-seller feedback interface, a “path to level up” through achievement symbols such as Yellow, Purple, and Gold Stars, as well as Power Seller statuses.
Interestingly, eBay was the first platform to trigger my first business. Without eBay, it is very likely that I would not have become an entrepreneur, and as a result you would not have this book to read.
At TEDx Lausanne, I had the pleasure of sharing how gamification can radically improve our world for the better. For a TED-talk style crash course in the potential of gamification, check out my presentation here:
Most people are aware that malaria is a deadly disease caused by mosquitoes. But what is not common knowledge is that nearly half the world’s population is at risk for contracting the disease. Every year, over a million individuals die from it and seventy percent of these fatalities are children. What may also surprise you is that malaria vaccines don’t yet exist. However, the tragic deaths associated with this disease can be simply prevented by sleeping under a $3 mosquito net!
Malaria is prevalent in areas that are warm and damp. These conditions are ideal for mosquitoes to thrive and are found in places around the world- specifically Sub Saharan Africa, India and southern Asia. Malaria is considered to be a minimal threat in North America (case in point: mosquito nets are sold by chains like Cost Plus World Market as bedroom decorations rather than for protection).
Simply lecturing about the facts and statistics of malaria may not be enough to garner effective action but vivid and immersive experiences may change how we understand and take action on this epidemic.
As an example of social gamification at work, the Emmy Award winning animation studio, PsyOp partnered with Against Malaria Foundation to develop a free mobile app called Nightmare: Malaria to spread awareness on this issue and raise funds for life saving mosquito nets.
Released this past December, Psyop is banking on their game to generate enough enthusiasm to secure millions of nets for at-risk individuals across the globe. And with enough participation, it may succeed at lowering the death toll significantly by the end of 2014 and beyond. Here’s how they’ve designed the game to be both engaging and informative:
(This is a post by one of the very few people who hold a Level-1 Octalysis Certificate in Gamification: Average Joey. To check out their other writings, go to the StartMyQuest Blog!)
The “Eye-Opening” Gamified Alarm Clock Industry
Alarm clocks. We have a love, hate relationship with them.
There are alarms that fly around sending you on a blurry chase in the morning or ones that wake you to the gentle rising of a fake sun. These innovative alarms rely on harder or softer sensory feedback to get you up, but some of the most exciting wake-up solutions are coming from a growing market of gamified alarms and app designs.
I present to you here, 8 of the most engaging gamified wake-ups to help illustrate the gamification techniques at each point around the Octalysis Alarm Clock.
1) Epic Meaning & Calling: Shadow
The team behind “Shadow” have got epic meaning nailed with an epic goal for building the world’s largest database of dreams for the betterment of humanity, no less.
2) Development & Accomplishment: Wake n Shake
Wake n Shake is one of the gamified alarms heavily using achievement symbols in its design.
3) Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback: Sleep Cycle
The “Sleep Cycle” iOS app doesn’t just work as an alarm, but tracks and records your sleeping hours enabling you to analyse and adjust your sleep-play.
4) Ownership & Possession: AlarmMon
The AlarmMon app gets you to set-up your alarms with the different choices of cute characters to build your own wake-up experience from scratch.
5) Social Influence: Spotify The Social Alarm Clock
This alarm from Spotify is still in concept stage, but shows an app that will give you the ability to create and send re-mixed alarm tones and wake-up messages to friends.
6) Scarcity & Impatience: Starbucks Early Bird
As soon as you accept the ‘Starbucks Early Bird’ wake-up it gives you a 1 hour countdown to get yourself down to the nearest store to claim a discounted cup of coffee or build up points towards future ones.
7) Curiosity & Unpredictability: Brian Blessed Alarm
For pure mischief (Game technique #51). I give you the ‘Brian Blessed’ alarm. Will it be Shakespeare, an insult or Brain on a rocket?
8) Loss & Avoidance: SnuzNLuz
The SnuzNLuz alarm still stands out as putting the most interesting and perverse twist on the idea of charitable giving as something you’d want to avoid!
Points, Badges, and Leaderboards – Do they really work?
Over the past several years I’ve been playing around with different Gamification widgets and platforms to experiment with a Points, Badges, and Leaderboard (PBL) system for this blog.
Now, as I’ve described many times before, even though PBLs aren’t the greatest thing ever (my book day titled “Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards.” Go figure.), they have an important place in Gamification. What makes them particularly tricky is that, depending on how its designed, the PBL game can be encouraging or insulting to users.
A Good PBL system can Engage the User
A good PBL game encourages the user to engage and dive deeper into content, seek out relevant information, and connect with and ultimately return to the host site (i.e., like my blog).
Take Khan Academy for an example. Their ‘Learning Dashboard’ entices users to take a series of lessons on a range of topics, gaining skill progress points, and achievement awards for completing challenges, while amassing energy points for having watched tutorials and completed quizzes. All of these mechanics ultimately encourages the user to learn math, science, etc.
My goal is similar: educate and engage users on human-focused design and gamification techniques. To transform a regular visitor into a bona fide gamification aficionado takes some time. A well designed PBL game would certainly add some cachet for the visitor to keep on reading my articles, watching my videos, and engaging in conversation with yours truly (something I definitely take a lot of enjoyment in and garners many PBL points).
Why I Chose the Captain Up Platform
And so, after having looked into various PBL platforms, I finally settled on Captain Up, an Israeli startup that rewards users for exploring your site and sharing it with your friends. Using a customizable selection of badges and point awards, the platform tracks which users are engaging most within the community and broadcasts their standing via a leadership board.
Why did I choose Captain Up over other alternatives?
Well, on top of having nifty designs, they have a lot of things I can customize – levels, points, achievements, and actions. I can even reward people for interacting with specific elements on any page- a very important mechanism as I seek to draw visitors’ attention to my Octalysis Framework and tutorial vids (both of which provide a solid grounding in the core drives and mechanics of Gamification).
As a gamification designer, I really like to customize my own system, instead of an out-of-the-box-no-tweaking system. I can even create new badges or levels based on images I upload myself!
I’ve been experimenting with different game design concepts and ideas these past few months, and so far, the most recent PBL design (found on the right hand side of the page) has been working very well with a test group of a couple hundred readers signed up to play and are now regularly engaging in my site’s content.
Dangers of a Gamified PBL System: Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation
Since the topic of Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation is one of the most common ones in the field, I won’t go into too much detail about them. But basically, the risk of many PBLs systems is that it shifts motivation from Intrinsic (I want to learn about Octalysis and other great gamification content!) to Extrinsic (I want to level up and earn that badge!).
Eventually, people could be doing it just for the points, and whereas they would love to read more about gamification to begin with, if I suddenly removed the PBL system that they are attached to, they might lose interest of reading this content altogether.
There are many ways to prevent something like that from happening, but there are thousands of ways to get it wrong – which is what many companies don’t understand right now.
How to Design an Engaging Game
The default setting rewarded a few points for watching a video and commenting on my blog posts, and a lot more for tweeting and sharing the post on Facebook. The platform is generally sound, especially since I indeed get more value when my readers are sharing my content to others. However, I felt the default points/rewards economy was not optimized.
The first thing I changed, was making commenting on my blog worth 100 points, and watching a video worth 40 points. Facebook Liking and Tweeting were only worth 25 and 10 points.
When I changed my system around, the kind folks in Captain Up asked me, “Isn’t 100 points way too much for just commenting?”
Good question.
Communicating a Game Worth Playing
During the Discovery and Onboarding Phases of a Player’s Journey (the beginning two phases) the first thing you want to communicate to users is whether this is “a game worth playing?”
With the rules you set, you are establishing an interaction with the user and communicating your values.
If you give people a bunch of points just to do marketing for you, or reward them virtual items for every little stupid thing, users will feel like the game is shallow – this is not a game worth playing. Users have no interest in a game if they know the game designer is just trying to benefit himself instead of caring about his users.
For instance, if there are points, progress bars, and badges for “How much money you donated to the site owner,” people will feel insulted by your lame attempt to use them for solely personal gains.
People know that sharing on Twitter/Facebook mostly benefits me, and so I don’t want to tell them that my game is about sharing. When I state that commenting on my site is worth more than anything else, I’m expressing that I value interacting *with you* more than anything else. I want to communicate with you, and that is what I value.
And if you don’t want to talk to me, at least watch my videos so you can learn something! And of course, if you are willing to share my content with your friends and family, I would be very grateful too, but I’m not going to use that as a large carrot in my site.
This tells users that the key of this game is “engagement.” I want you to be engaged, learn a lot, and participate in a community. THIS becomes a game worth playing.
