4 Experience Phases in Gamification – Phase 4: The Endgame

Endgame Design

Endgame: The Final Phase for Experience Design

(Below is a snippet of Gamification Book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. If you like this blog post, you will LOVE the book.

The Endgame is the 4th and final experience phase of Octalysis Gamification. The Endgame is all about how you retain your veterans and obtain more longevity in your experience.

This is the phase where users have done everything there is to do at least once (according to their perception), and they are figuring out why should they stick around and continue to play the game (especially when there are newer more exciting alternatives out there).

Many have said that, in World of Warcraft, the real game starts when your character has reached the max level. This is not intuitive for non-gamers, because the basic assumption is that once you reach the max level, there is nowhere to go. In the case of well designed games, that actually is the beginning of a multi-year journey.

Unfortunately, not many companies design for the Endgame, which I believe is a huge mistake. Your veterans are usually your best monetization vehicles, your best community moderators, and also your best evangelists.

The problem is that they have been there as long as they can remember, so why should they still continue to stay on board? Have you designed anything that specifically keeps them engaged and motivated?

The game-term Endgame

Often times there is a misunderstanding towards the term “Endgame.”

Some people think that this means the game is about to end, and ask, “What about games that are meant to last forever such as infinite games?”

In reality, in the gaming world, the term Endgame is not where the game ends. The Endgame is where a user has reached the highest level and is transitioning from the basic day-to-day scaffolding mechanics to a new set of mechanics that only advanced-level players can infinitely do.

The Endgame is about endless fun

In Plants Vs Zombies, once you finish all the levels twice, the Endgame is about custom challenges that you can unlock and conquer. In the Diablo series, it’s “Diablo Runs” where players band together to defeat the final boss multiple times a day in order to get enough loot to perfect their gear. In FarmVille, it might be using all your gold and plants to create masterful artwork and take a screenshot before they all wither out.

Gamers sometimes complain in many games that the game developers need to do more work because there’s really nothing to do in the Endgame, which means they have done everything but long for more. Some games may have the general journey (Scaffolding) of striving toward the max level, and the endgame lies in player versus player battles, or Group Quests of Max Level Players taking on extremely difficult challenges.

Differences from other Models

My terminology is also different from other gamification professionals’ last phase of a player’s journey. Kevin Werbach and Amy Jo Kim call the final phase of the journey “Mastery,” as the player has now achieved the highest level of play.

While I think the phrase Mastery is accurate, I believe that the term “Mastery” creates a feeling that it is actually the end of the journey – you have achieved mastery and are looking for something else to master now. With “Endgame,” it is still a “game” you play and try to master. It suggests that the journey keeps going.

So let’s examine how the endgame can be more engaging based on the 8 Core Drives of Octalysis

Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning and Calling in the Endgame

During the Endgame, it becomes much more difficult to install more Epic Meaning and Calling into the process. Continue reading 4 Experience Phases in Gamification – Phase 4: The Endgame

The 8 Core Drives of Gamification #8: Loss & Avoidance

loss-and-avoidance

(Below is a snippet of Gamification Book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. If you like this blog post, you will LOVE the book.)

The 8th Core Drive of Octalysis Gamification

For a video walk-through, check out: Episode 17, Loss & Avoidance

Loss and Avoidance is the eighth and final core drive in my Octalysis Framework. It motivates through the fear of losing something or having undesirable events transpire.

A concept within many popular games is to stay alive in order to advance to the next round. Depending on the game’s design, dying or injuring your character means that you’re now forced to start over or lose something significant – be it coins, money, the number of lives you have, or other setbacks that make it more difficult to reach the Win-State.

This aversion towards loss is obviously not limited to games. There are many situations in the real world where we act based on fear of losing something that represents our investment of time, effort, money, or other resources. To preserve our ego and sense of self, Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance sometimes manifests itself through our refusal to give up and admit that everything we have done up to this point has been rendered useless.

Even new opportunities that are perceived as fading away can exhibit a form of Loss & Avoidance. If people do not act immediately on this temporary opportunity, they feel like they are losing the chance to act forever.

A common example can be seen in the coupons that arrive regularly in the mail. Let’s say you receive a coupon that gives you a 10% discount to a popular chain store that you have no interest in visiting, and the coupon is labeled to expire on February 12th.

Your brain may be absolutely certain that, if you let the coupon expire, the very next month you will receive the exact same coupon that expires on March 12th. But you might get an annoying feeling that you are somehow losing something if you don’t use the coupon before the expiration date. Rationally it shouldn’t matter, but you are compelled to think about the offer a little more. As a result, you become a bit more likely to go to the store for a discount that you may not truly care about.

Cropping your Losses in Farmville

Many social games effectively employ Core Drive 8: Loss and Avoidance to motivate players towards taking the Desired Actions. In the now familiar example of Farmville, if we look at the early part of their onboarding stage, we can see that avoidance design was already integrated into the system, inducing users to “log in” multiple times each day.

The first few minutes of Farmville seems very positive as the player spends time creating their avatar and starts working on their farm with an initial pool of free *Farm Cash*. However, Farmville soon demands that each player maintain their crops and livestock through routine farming chores – mostly in the form of coming back and clicking on the crops and livestock to harvest their products.

If you don’t return to reap your harvest within a given number of hours, as determined by the crops’ profiles (you can choose which crop to plant, which plays into Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback), you will lose your invested hard work and be shown demoralizing images of crops withering and dying. This mildly depressing incident upsets the user, compelling them to log back in frequently to keep their crops alive. The player becomes proactively involved in avoiding this negative outcome.

Gamification Farmville Dead Crops

When players lose their crops, it not only costs them Farm Cash to replace but also their time, as they have to replant and maintain new crops again. Each time you see the discouraging images of dead crops, you are hit with the triple whammy of having lost your time, effort, and resources.

Many years ago I was astonished at how effective this design could be, as my technology abhorrent mother suddenly became obsessed with playing Farmville. Back then, my mother was the type of person who thinks that technology is a source of evil that is polluting society and crippling authentic relationships; she still barely checks her email.

But in 2009, due to her close friend’s enthusiastic recommendation – a nice example of Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, my mother signed up on Facebook and started to play Farmville. The beginning of the Onboarding phase was smooth and fun, as she used the game to relax her mind and connect with her friends.

However, after a few months of playing, my mother would sometimes wake up at 5:00am in the morning simply to harvest her crops and prevent them from withering. It became so bad that when my mother needed to travel out of town, she would call up my cousin and ask if he could log into her Facebook account and help manage her farm. She needed to make sure her crops didn’t die. (Though she also used to ask me, being a son that was lacking in “{chinesefont}孝{latinfont}” as discussed in Chapter 5, I eventually deferred the responsibility so I could focus on my “other” important work).

At the time, this blew my mind. I initially thought the reason for most people to play games was because they had too many responsibilities in the real world and needed to immerse themselves into a fantasy world to escape those responsibilities. However, here you have a brand new set of virtual responsibilities that add on even more stress and anxiety to daily life. It didn’t make any sense.

Of course, today I understand the nature and power of Black Hat Motivation. For a period of time, Farmville was able to successfully increase its Daily Active Users Metrics and lower short-term turnover with this type of Loss & Avoidance design. That is, until users hit a “Black Hat Rebound,” where they eventually burn out and find the courage to pursue freedom outside of Farmville.

Flipping other Core Drives Off

Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance complements many of the other Core Drives for an interesting reason: often it manifests as the reversal of the other Core Drives. You don’t want something bigger than yourself to fall apart (Core Drive 1), hence you act; or you don’t want to look like a loser in front of your friends (Core Drive 5), hence you make a purchase.

Some may argue that this doesn’t constitute a separate Core Drive. As an example, critics might point out that people are driven back to Farmville because they want to feel a sense of accomplishment or ownership and that the loss of either feeling is simply the removal of these drives. However, from a design standpoint, it is important to consider Loss & Avoidance as its own Core Drive.

This is because gaining something and preventing a loss is incredibly different from the standpoint of motivation. Studies have shown over and over that we are much more likely to change our behavior to avoid a loss than to make a gain. It forces us to act differently and plays by different mental rules. In fact, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman indicates that on average, we are twice as loss-averse compared to seeking a gain. This means that we have a tendency to only take on a risk if we believed the potential gain would be double the potential loss if the risk were realized.

Through using the Octalysis Framework, this differentiation improves behavioral design by specifically identifying opportunities to integrate proactive loss-avoidance mechanics that generate a more subtle set of motivational dynamics.

A Caveat: Avoiding the Avoidance

Continue reading The 8 Core Drives of Gamification #8: Loss & Avoidance

The 8 Core Drives of Gamification #5: Social Influence & Relatedness

social pressure and envy

The 5th Core Drive of Gamification

(Below is a snippet of Gamification Book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. If you like this blog post, you will LOVE the book.
For a video walk-through, check out: Episode 14, Social Influence & Relatedness)

Social Influence and Relatedness is Core Drive 5 within my Octalysis Gamification Framework, which is related to activities inspired by what other people think, do, or say. This Core Drive is the engine behind themes like mentorship, competition, envy, group quests, social treasures, and companionship.

This Core Drive also includes the “Relatedness” part, which deals with things like attachment to emotional associations and the feeling of nostalgia. For instance, if you see a product that reminds you of your childhood, you have a higher chance of buying that product. Similarly, if you meet someone from your hometown, you would also be more inclined to sign up a deal with this person.

Social Influence & Relatedness is a Right Brain Core Drive that bases its success off the common, and sometimes inevitable human desire to connect and compare with one another. When utilized properly, it can serve as one of the strongest and long-lasting motivations for people to become connected and engaged.

With the proliferation of new social media tools and platforms, more and more companies are working on optimizing Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness during the Discovery and Onboarding Process.

Almost every consumer app these days urges you to “Invite Your Friends” upon joining their service. However, just because the social platform is there to spread a message, does not mean there necessarily are engaging content and context that are share-worthy. There are many pitfalls as Social Influence & Relatedness is a double-edged sword and needs to be done carefully.

Mentorship (Game Technique #61)

In my book, I share how powerful mentorship could be in a game setting such as Parallel Kingdom, but it is also consistently effective in every medium of activity that requires sustained motivation.

During the rigorous process of joining a Fraternity in American universities, most fraternities have a Big Bro/Little Bro system where an experienced member in the organization will be matched up with a new potential member going through a semester-long training process known as “pledging.” The Big Bro is there to serve as a mentor that provides not only directional guidance, but also emotional support to make sure the time-consuming process of pledging becomes more bearable. This practice has lasted for over a century and shown to improve the Onboarding experience of members joining the organization.

Having a mentor also helps employees throughout organizations become more attached to the culture and environment, effectively increasing work satisfaction and decreasing turnover rates.

Unfortunately, most organizations require the individuals to become proactive on their own in finding mentors, and only individuals who are lucky get matched with a good mentor within an organization (or in their lives in general). It is beneficial for companies to create a systemized mentorship program that is fluid based on individual matches and compatibility to improve the experience and productivity within an organization.

The other benefit for Mentorship is that it also helps veteran players stay engaged in the Endgame Phase. In the Four Experience Phases of a Players Journey (relevant in Level 2 Octalysis) we learn that the Endgame is the most neglected and one of the hardest phases to optimize for. Good mentorship design in the Endgame also makes veterans feel as if they’ve worked hard enough to prove their status and show off their skills.

While the benefits of utilizing Mentorship within an organization are apparent, how can one utilize Mentorship to motivate customers who are outside of the organization?

Mentorship as a Booster to Customer Support

Mentorship can be an amazing way to super-charge a consumer-facing website, such as eCommerce marketplaces or online communities.

Generally, the best way of establishing trust from users online is to show that other veteran users have been using/benefitting/profiting off of the site and loving it for a long time.

Also, the majority of most online community support calls are not really about technical problems or bugs, but “how do I do this?” questions, where the operator just patiently walks the users through, “First click profile. Then click seller’s dashboard. Good. Now click on the button that says Gullible.”

This model is not very effective because:

  1. Users are not exactly enthralled by talking to “customer service” operators because they believe the customer service team does not really empathize with their problems and do not understand their needs.
  2. Costs for customer service can run very high, especially when the majority of them are solving these “how-do-I” interface problems.
  3. Newbies of the site don’t feel emotionally engaged with anyone on the site and feel no incentive to behave better in the community.
  4. The veterans of the website do not feel the fulfillment of reaching higher status and may become less engaged.

The solution? Get veterans to do “interface” support for newbies!

What if each time the veteran logs onto the website, there will be a little overlay widget where he can move a slider that says, “I am available for mentorship” and offer himself to become available for Gchat or Facebook Chat like conversations for newbies on the site?

For instance, lets say whenever a newbie seller on an eCommerce marketplace has a question, he has the option to connect to a veteran seller who’s been there, done that, and is exactly what the newbie sellers wants to be like one day on the site.

Of course, if the veteran expert can’t answer the questions, the newbie can immediately press a button that says, “Talk to an actual customer rep,” but newbies generally would love to get the opportunity to talk to a veteran who not only can help them solve their interface problems, but also give them tips and advice on how to become more successful sellers in the marketplace, such as applying better selling tactics. Needless to say, this is what the eCommerce company would love also, as each seller who skipped the boring tutorials can now learn how to become great sellers in an engaging fashion.

At the end of every month, the eCommerce site can then calculate how many “mentorship hours” the veteran did, and apply that to some type of fee discount or free shipping that the veteran, who likely sells in large volumes, would love to get.

This is economical for the eCommerce site because compared to the massive savings from expensive support costs, fee discounts or free shipping plans would be like a rounding error.

That way, the veteran gets his status perks and bonuses, the newbie gets his questions answered while feeling a social bond towards becoming a better seller, and the site saves a massive amount of support costs while having more engaged and professional sellers in the ecosystem.

What a massive win-win-win.

Group Quests (Game Technique #22)

The game technique Group Quest is very effective in collaborative play as well as viral marketing because it requires group participation before any individual can achieve the Win-State.

A successful game that utilizes this is World of Warcraft, another fanatically successful and addictive game made by Blizzard Entertainment.  In WoW, there are many quests that are so challenging that it requires an entire team of 40 max-leveled players to work together, each specialized in their own responsibilities, before they have a chance of beating the quest. In well-designed instances, even though the 40-player requirement is not imposed by the program, the users simply find it difficult to win if they had 39 players.

This motivated many players to group up together into clans and guilds and orchestrate raids on a regularly basis, ensuring that people will login regularly and not drop out due to the social pressure.

Farmville by mobile-gaming giant Zynga is also another game that has quests that require users to invite a group of farmer friends to produce a certain amount of crops within 24 hours. The game forces you to not only invite your friends to join, but to participate with you, which is more powerful than a spammy “I just started playing this game. Click on this link!”

Groups Quests have been found in games for decades, but only more recently has it been adopted into the business world. In late 2008, the new company Groupon realized that it would be highly motivating for businesses and consumers if they created group quests that allow consumers to get dramatic discounts when a threshold of enough people taking the Desired Action towards the Win-State is met.

They tout 60% off discounts if “over 200 people buy this deal.” Naturally, people who wanted the tremendous discount invited their friends to “go in on this together,” making the company a huge explosion.

According to Forbes in 2010 Groupon was “projecting that the company is on pace to make $1 billion in sales faster than any other business, ever.” That’s not bad for utilizing a time-tested Game Technique in business.

Of course, due to some mismanagement and operational issues, Groupon (while still having $2.57 Billion in Revenue in 2013) did not reach the expectations that it set itself up for, but similar Group Quest models such as Kickstarter and Indigogo are becoming very popular services that group funds innovative projects that could not raise money from institutional investors.

Brag Buttons (Game Technique #57) vs Tout Flags (Game Technique #64)

Bragging is when a person vocally (and relentlessly) expresses their accomplishments and achievements, whereas touting is when a person implicitly showing people that they’re accomplished without really saying it.

Intuitively encouraging users to brag about and tout their achievements comes in handy when it comes to recruiting new players and keeping veteran players active, but the two actions are appropriate in different scenarios.

A Brag Button is an obvious Desired Action that users can take in order to broadcast what they feel accomplished about (driven by Core Drive 2). In other words, Brag Buttons are little action tools and mechanisms for users to broadcast how awesome they are to others. Take the game Temple Run, for example. Whenever a game is over, there is a quick and easy way for users to take a screenshot of their high scores and share it on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Soon after, people were competing with those who were scoring in the millions and users scoring in the millions were proud to post their score for everyone to see.

In many games and websites these days, you’re always encouraged to share more with your friends at every single Win-State. Most of these Brag Buttons are ignored though, because it again is not fueled by Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment (the dynamics and relationships between each Core Drive and how they power each other is studied in higher level Octalysis). You want to implement the Brag Buttons at the Major Win-States when users actually feel awesome about what they had just completed.

A Touting Flag, on the other hand, is an obvious display that shows the achievements of the users. In other words, the user simply has to put up the Flag, and without doing more things, everyone who walks by would acknowledge this great achievement.

Touting Flags are seen when you walk into someone’s office, and on their walls you see all types of awards, certificates, and credentials. These professionals don’t necessarily want to brag about how they graduated cum de laude from Stanford University and have a Level 4 Octalysis Certificate to everyone all the time, but by having it on their walls, they implicitly tout it.

In that sense, adding the title Ph.D after one’s own name is usually considered a Touting Flag, but once they verbally introduce themselves as “John Doe, Ph.D,” they’re pressed that Brag Button.

In gaming, Touting Flags can often be seen as trophies, badges, or avatars. In many games, some avatar gear or items can only be obtained after certain difficult milestones, such as beating a certain secret boss, inviting 100 friends to the game, or simply being in the game since Day 1. This allows everyone else to clearly see that this user is a target of envy (which is not necessarily bad for motivation) without the person annoyingly bringing it up all the time.

Keep in mind that there needs to be some level of Relatedness when someone brags or touts about something. When there is a mutual understanding toward the difficulty of reaching a certain level, people are more likely to brag or tout about their score because they know others how difficult it is to reach that achievement. Of course, if people see others constantly bragging about their achievements in a game, they start to become more motivated by Social Influence, as well as Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity, as they would like to try to see what they can get themselves in the game.

Temple Run does a great job on that process of gaining new users through bragging and stood high up in the leaderboard of Apple’s top featured apps for weeks in a row with a 5/5 star rating. Not bad for a monotonous game of constantly running forward.

Unfortunately, the interface for Temple Run 2 dimmed down the option of the Brag Button, which I believe would result in lower probability of someone sharing based on the Glowing Choice and Dessert Oasis game techniques we discussed in Core Drive 2.

Social Treasures (Game Technique #63) and the Thank-You Economy (Game Technique #45)

Social Treasures are gifts or rewards that can only be given to you by friends or other players.

In Farmville, there are certain types of virtual goods that are unobtainable in almost all ways – including the option to purchase it with real money. The only way of getting the item is if a friend clicks on a “Give to Friend” button and, without losing anything, the item appears out of thin air and is given to a friend. The result of this type of design is that, when people want these unique Social Treasure items, they would just give it to each other, and both sides win. This, of course, pushes people to get their friends to join the game, so they would have more friends to obtain Social Treasures from.

Soon, people were requesting items from their friends nonstop on Facebook, badgering them to give them various items. It became a nuisance and an annoyance for Facebook users, but even if it was overwhelming, it effectively attracted more users to the game.

I remember there was a time around 2007, where people kept on posting on my Facebook wall and requesting that I give them a Goat in Farmville. After receiving a few of those, I got annoyed, and simply responded with, “I don’t play Farmville.”, thinking that it would effectively stop these people from asking again. Unfortunately, the response I received was, “Hey! That’s okay!! Just create a Farmville account, and I can give you a Goat too!!”

It was strikingly interesting to me that this person thought that somehow I too would value a Goat so much that it would motivate me to create a Farmville account. This was a temporary loss of empathy and failing the child development psychology test of guessing what other people would do. If you are curious about the experiment, search for, “   “ online.

Social Treasures can been seen commonly these days in games such as getting more Lives from Candy Crush (in fact, my wife noticed that her niece in Taiwan was playing games at 1AM in the morning when she told everyone she was studying late because the niece sent out a Candy Crush request to all her Facebook friends asking for more lives), more “rerolls” in a slot or dice machine that is found in the Angry Birds Franchise Role-Playing Game “Angry Birds Epic,” and many more.

In the real world, the most common form of a Social Treasure is a vote. Besides your own vote, you cannot (legally) get yourself more votes, even if you were ready to spend money. The only way for you to obtain more votes is if other people give them to you. When you implement a voting system, it would be beneficial to also promote the website to explain to the friends of users why the users are competing and why they need votes. Quite often, you can even see people creating Facebook Events titled “Please Vote for Me!” that posts the link of the website. Others send messages saying, “Please vote for my picture for cutest puppy picture so I can win a year’s worth of free dog food!” This is tremendously useful for the hosting company because it exposes their name to heavy traffic and attention. .

A similar extension of the Social Treasure game technique is the concept coined by Gary Vaynerchuk called the “Thank you Economy.” This is based around the idea that if you design a system that encourages users to continuously and generously give, there’s a social pressure to give back somehow, creating a type of in-system viral coefficient.

In the gamified navigation app Waze, when you keep seeing people sharing information about road and traffic conditions, you become a bit more motivated to share some roadside information yourself (a little bit of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback). Afterwards, you would often get a “Thank You!” from a user that is also driving in the area, creating a good feeling of Oxytocin, or the chemical in our brains that give us the feeling of wellbeing from companionship and trust in relationships. As a result, everyone starts to share more, as well as thank each other more.

Based on this concept, system designers should try to create an ecosystem that fosters the environment of generosity and reward that generosity. People will get attached easier because more often than not, people are not appreciated enough in their daily activities. If through your service or system people are getting that warm feeling of giving and being appreciated, you likely will have a thriving and sustainable system.

Conformity Anchor (Game Technique #58)

Earlier we already talked about the power of Social Norming, and certain game design techniques implement that power into their products or experiences. I call it a Conformity Anchor.

The Utility SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company oPower is a great example of Conformed Anchoring. oPower is tasked with the mission of reducing energy consumption in our planet. Inspired by the work of their Chief Scientist Robert Cialdini, who is one of the leading experts on Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, as well as Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience.

oPower has discovered that, the best way to motivate households to consume less energy is to show them a chart on how their best neighbors are consuming, and what their neighbors are consuming.

With this interface, oPower reportedly reduced 2.6 terawatt hours of electricity through 16 million households worldwide between 2007 and 2013, the equivalent of $300 Million Dollars. They were personally endorsed by President Barrack Obama, named a Technology Pioneer at the prestigious World Economic Forum, and was on the CNBC Disruptor 50 List.

One interesting observation oPower had was that by applying Conformity Anchors to the utility billing process, the top energy savers actually started to consume more energy because they felt they could relax a bit and be more like the norm. As a result, the company started to apply smiley faces to those who are above average, and two smiley faces to those are at the top, in order to reinforce Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment. Of course, there’s a lot more oPower can do to add other Core Drives to the process, but so far the smiley faces seem to do their jobs 🙂 .

Water Coolers (Game Technique #55)

Another way to reinforce Conformed Anchoring is by establishing Water Coolers in your experience. In American corporate office culture, the water cooler is often the place where people take a small break from work and chat about a variety of non-work related topics. Much of the conversations are gossip or complaints related, but it actively gets employees to bond with one another, and has become a well-recognized terminology in the U.S.

One example of a Water Cooler is adding a forum to your site. Forums are very helpful for community to bond, share ideas, and for this purpose, broadcast a social norm.

When I was first playing the game Geomon, I was skeptical about buying virtual goods with real money. Without paying, I could only capture 10 monsters. After that, when I wanted to capture more monsters, I would have to evaporate an old one. That Scarcity design (Core Drive #6) tempted me to spend some money, but I held on and painfully continued to play without spending. However, when I went to the forums of the game (which surprisingly, two years after the game shut down, is still active), I found out that many people talked about how they were spending their premium gold coins (which are purchasable by real money) as if buying them was a common practice.

After that, I was influenced by the social norm established in the forum and had no problem spending a few dollars to unlock a few slots so I could capture more monsters that I wanted.

In the game Battle Camp, spending is even more so established as a social norm. Players who spend money are referred to as “Coiners” and many troops would post messages such as, “We only accept coiners” or people would plead, “I’m not a coiner, but I’m literally on every hour that I’m not sleeping. Please let me join your troop!”

One thing to take note of, is that when you introduce a forum-like Water Cooler system into your experience, it could easily be plagued by emptiness and inactivity. Generally, forums are not very good at creating a community, but are good at mingling that community once it is established. When people come on a new forum and sees that it’s mostly empty, that spells negative social proof (a big sin that we have learned in this chapter), and it will only demotivate people towards the Desired Actions. Rather, first create a strong community with a lot of pent up things to say, and then introduce the Water Cooler to unleash that social energy, which hopefully would place the Conformity Anchor at the place that benefits your system.

Social Prods (Game Technique #62)

The final technique we’ll cover in this Chapter is the Social Prod. The Social Prod is the least amount of effort to create a social interaction, often times a click of a button. Good examples are Facebook Pokes/Likes, Google +1s.

In the early days, Facebook provides a small “Poke” button that does not do anything other than notify the user that you’ve “poked” them. At first, it seemed pretty pointless. I just got poked? What does that mean? The advantage of a Social Prod is that the user does not need to spend time thinking about something witty to say, nor be worried about sounding stupid, but simply presses a poke button to start an interaction.

When you get poked, you don’t know what it means either. But you don’t worry about it – you just poke back. Now both of you feel like you have interacted socially without having to spend any effort at all.

One of the key but non-obvious examples of a Social Prod is the Linkedin Endorsements. The professional social network LinkedIn generally does very well with Left Brain (Extrinsic Tendency) Core Drives such as CD4: Ownership & Possession (it’s your life/career) and CD2: Development & Accomplishment (these are real achievements).

However, they haven’t been able to successfully implement any Right Brain (Intrinsic Tendency) Core Drives, which is why there’s not “engaging experience” on LinkedIn. People just create profiles and then leave it sitting there for months – there’s just nothing to do on LinkedIn.

This is why in the past few years, they have been focusing on CD 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, such as showing you how much you have in common with certain people, recommendations, and endorsements.

LinkedIn Recommendations are actually considered Social Treasures, as they are truly valuables that only other people can give you. Unfortunately, they take time and work to generate, and so Recommendations action hasn’t picked up over the years.

Endorsements on the other hand, are Social Prods – they are designed to be fairly meaningless but easy to do. In the early days, there are buttons that allow you to endorse people in batches of four, allowing you to quickly endorse dozens of people without even thinking who they were.

When you are on an individual profile, it generally shows you a list of half a dozen expertise that you can endorse a person for.

However, most people have no idea whether this individual is good at all the activities listed there or not. But if you want to just endorse that one skill you truly do endorse, you cannot simply select that skill. You have to start clicking on the “x”s to slowly cancel out the other ones before you can just endorse the one you know about. Most people don’t want to do that much work, and as a result simply click the “Endorse All” button.

This shows that by design, LinkedIn does not want endorsements to be meaningful. It’s simply to meant to be easy and thoughtless – the definition of a Social Prod.

And as a result, people are endorsing each other in a proliferate manner; others are getting multiple emails a day saying, “Your friend Jun just endorsed you.” and therefore feel the reciprocal urge to go on LinkedIn and endorse their friends back.

Even though these endorsements don’t really mean anything from a career standpoint, but simply mean how likeable you are as a person, now by aimlessly endorsing each other endlessly, there is finally something to do on Linkedin. Oh yes, they introduced a content strategy too, so now you can read on LinkedIn too!

Conclusion

Social Influence & Relatedness is one the best studied and practiced Right Brain Core Drives in gamification (with Development & Accomplishment being the counterpart Left Brain Core Drive that is well-studied).

Most people recognize that spending times with friends is an intrinsically fun activity, even if they have yet to grasp the engaging factor of Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback or Unpredictability & Curiosity.

But when everyone’s going after social, and every website trying to make users invite their friends, your system has to be much better thought out to truly create a rewarding experience. Once you master Social Influence & Relatedness, you will be in even better position to reinforce Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience.

The 8 Core Drives of Gamification #2: Development and Accomplishment

Gamification Accomplishment

Where Game Mechanics and Game Techniques Default:

(Below is a snippet of Gamification Book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. If you like this blog post, you will LOVE the book. For a video walk-through, check out: Episode 9, Development and Accomplishment.)

Development & Accomplishment is the Second Core Drive of the Gamification Framework Octalysis.

This is the Core Drive where people are driven by a sense of growth towards a goal and accomplishing it.

Many people have memories of their kindergarten teachers giving them golden star stickers to emphasize good behavior. Even though the golden star stickers don’t always become real prizes such as brownies, kids still become extremely intent on how many stars they are getting, and whether they deserve more or not. That’s a very straightforward demonstration of the effects of Development & Accomplishment, and how easy it is to add into an experience.

This is also the most common implementation of gamification we see in the market, as most of the PBLs – points, badges, and leaderboards – appeal heavily to this drive.

Development & Accomplishment in Games

Almost all games show you some type of progress towards the Win-States. Games break down a user’s challenges into stages – check points, enemies, gems, levels, and bosses. This helps the user feel like there is always progress, and one achievement is coming after another.

Our brains have a natural desire to feel progress, to experience growth, and to see numbers go up. We need Win-States, and it is only a Win-State when it is concrete (being a “state”) and it demonstrates overcoming of a challenge (that’s the “win.”)

If a game is just a long and consistent 40-hour journey without clear stages and bosses to recognize accomplishment, the game is often not very engaging.

To display that sense of Accomplishment, some games show you a points, others show you levels, badges, stages, progress bars, better gear, victories etc.…the list goes on.

However, just because you see progress towards something does not mean you feel accomplished.

The key to Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment is to make sure users are overcoming challenges they can be proud of.

Jane McGonigal, renowned game designer and Ph.D. in Performance Studies, defines games as “unnecessary obstacles that we volunteer to tackle.”

McGonigal points out that the challenge and limitation is what makes a game fun. For example, if golf were just a game with a goal without any limitations, then every play would just pick up the ball and put it into the hole. Everyone would score high, and everyone beyond the “putting a round peg through a round hole” game will probably not be very engaged.

By adding unnecessary obstacles, such as requiring the use of a strange stick, certain distances, and landscape hazards, golf becomes fun because the player actually feels accomplished once such challenges are overcome.

Gamification aims to bring that feeling of Development & Accomplishment into everyday experiences within your product or service.

LinkedIn Progress Bar

One of the simplest and best-known examples of Development & Accomplishment in the industry is the LinkedIn Progress Bar.

As the largest professional social network in the world, LinkedIn realized that its value is only as good as the information people choose to put in it.

However inputting one’s profile and job history on LinkedIn is tedious, and users quickly drop out early on in the onboarding process.

LinkedIn realizes that simply making the interface easier for users to maneuver is not enough. They needed to make the interface more motivating. As a result, LinkedIn introduced a little Progress Bar (Game Technique #4) on the side of users’ profiles to show people how complete their profiles are.

Our brains hate incomplete things dangling in front of our faces. When we see a progress bar that is taunting us as only being 35% of a professional, it gives us that extra push to finish the Desired Actions and become complete again as a human being.

The amazing thing is, word has it that this progress bar only took developers 2 hours to code, but improved LinkedIn’s profile completeness by 55%, an amazing change considering how they have spent millions of dollars into getting this same goal. If every single two-hour employee effort produced a 55% increase in your core business metrics, wouldn’t that be something?

Gamification with Twitter

Twitter is yet another great example of Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment.

Most people remember Twitter’s innovation being the limitation of 140 characters (which is an interesting balance between Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience combined with Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback), but few people remember that another one of Twitter’s key innovations was the one-way follow.

Back in the day, social connections were mutual – either both sides agree to be friends, or no relationship existed.

When Twitter was launched in 2006, it came with this new one-way follow system, allowing users to follow the message updates of people who are awesome, without these awesome people following the users back.

Because of the one-way nature of the relationship, many people saw getting many followers as a true achievement – meaning that everyone wanted to listen to your valuable opinions, even though you don’t give a rat’s pancreas about their opinions.

People tried as hard as they could to “earn” followers – tweeting out witty comments, sharing valuable links, and retweeting others to gain attention. Some even pressured their non-tech friends to follow them, just to look better on Twitter. This became a game for many, where the goal is to reach the highest amount of followers and retweets.

Then, at one point, influential people started to compete with each other to see who had more followers. At the beginning, the implicit comparing came between influencers in the tech world, such as Guy Kawasaki or Robert Scoble.  This is the condition of most new tech companies – people in Silicon Valley as well as bloggers loved the platforms, but the mainstream population doesn’t even know it existed yet.

However, because of the “Accomplishment” nature that is baked into Twitter’s DNA, Twitter finally caught massive mainstream attention when celebrities like Ashton Kutcher joined the mix of “follower competitions” against other celebrities, and most notably, the official CNN Breaking News Twitter Channel.

In 2009, Ashton Kutcher, publically challenged CNN Breaking News to see who can first reach 1 Million Followers. Both sides, not wanting to lose the competition, started promoting Twitter and their own Twitter profiles on all their media outlets, hoping to be the first to hit that golden Million. Ashton Kutcher’s fans, who loved his movies but had no idea what Twitter was, also started to write blog posts and make Youtube videos telling everyone else to follow him.

Towards the end, Ashton Kutcher did achieve his victory of reaching 1 Million Followers on Twitter before CNN Breaking News. Again, because he considers this to be a true accomplishment, he brags with joy and pride.

CNN Breaking News, on the other hand, behaves in a sportsmanlike manner, as a big company should. In the above screenshot, you can see that by the time Ashton Kutcher won, CNN Breaking News had 999,652 followers, only mere hundreds away from winning.

Instead of bitterly saying, “So close! We were only off by a few hundred,” they gracefully announced to the world “Ashton Kutcher is first to reach 1 million followers in Twitter contest with CNN” with a “Congrats” on the tweet below.

This contest has turned out very positive for the brand names of both CNN and Ashton Kutcher, but the biggest benefiter is Twitter, whom received millions of dollars worth of free press into an audience that was unfamiliar with their platform.

Football vs Soccer

The understanding of Development & Accomplishment might also explain to us why American Football is by far the most popular sport to watch in North America, especially compared to Soccer.

The stereotype goes, compared to Europeans, the average American is more audacious, impatient, and expects more instant gratification. That may or may not be true, but for the sake of argument, lets go with that statement. Of course, you as my reader are definitely not considered “the average American,” both in a humorous and logical sense, especially if you are not an American to begin with.

In Soccer, it’s a bit harder to keep track of progress and development for the average American. Sure – you can see where the ball is on the court, but it gets kicked back and forth so much, swapping between sides and players, it’s not completely obvious who is winning and who’s gotten ahead when the score are equal.

Furthermore, after a long grueling battle, many games end up with 0 points on both sides, or at most one to two points, making it hard for the American audience to enjoy the feeling of Development & Accomplishment.

However, in “American” Football (the one where you use your hands), not only are points and scores more obtainable – 51 points vs 28 points, milestones and progress are also broken down to 10-yard runs that happen every few minutes, helping the American audience digest the progress of the game easily. “Oh, he made another 10 yards. YEAHHHHHHHH!!!!”

Not only that, each 10 yards is even broken down further to three to four attempts, so there is a level of suspense and a Countdown mechanism (Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience) to add small challenges and wins within the game.

American Football also often pauses the game whenever something noteworthy happens, in order to remind viewers, “Something just happened! Now is the time to be happy and chest bump your friends!”

Breaking down all the places to cheer, celebrate, and watch more commercials, no wonder American Football is the most popular and biggest moneymaker sport in American.

If you just slap on Badges, Badges will slap your Users

I’ve often talked about how points and badges can ruin good gamification design as the so-called “gamification experts” slap them onto everything they see. However, they are useful tools and have their place in a gamified system.

Badges are what I call “Achievement Symbols” (Game Technique #2). As mentioned, Achievement Symbols can come in many forms – badges, stars, belts, hats, uniforms, trophies.

The dead horse has been complaining, but I’ll reiterate that the important thing about Achievement Symbols, is that they must symbolize “achievement.”

If you go on a website and click a button, and then suddenly a popup springs out and says, “CONGRATULATIONS!!! You just earned your ‘Clicked On My First Button Badge’! Click here to see other cool badges you can earn!” Are you going to be excited?

Probably not.

You may even think, “Well this is pretty lame…what else is there? A ‘Scrolling Down Badge’? A ‘Click on the About Us Page Badge’?” You’re almost insulted.

But if you did something that you feel like you uniquely earned by utilizing your creativity and solved a problem that not everyone could solve, and as a result received a badge to symbolize that achievement, you feel proud and accomplished. Now the motivation is valid.

Achievement Symbols merely reflect achievement, but are not achievements by themselves.

A similar example comes from where badges came from – the military. If you join the military, and immediately get a badge on your chest, “Joined the Military Badge!”

And on the next day, another badge gets pinned on your chest that says, “Survived My First Day Badge!” followed by “Made my First Friend Badge!” “Made Five Friends Badge!” You probably won’t feel accomplished and wear all these badges to your social gatherings. You are more likely to feel insulted.

But if you performed acts of valor – you risked your life to save a fellow soldier, and as a result received a Medal of Honor on your chest, you are likely to truly feel proud and accomplished.

Keep in mind some of those “insulting badges” do work great for children, because as small children, these are actual feats and accomplishments. More often than not, making your first friend is not something you have a parade about when you are a grown person.

Therefore, when I work with clients on gamification, I never ask them, “Do you have badges?” I ask, “Do you make your users feel accomplished?” Having badges (or any game element in itself) does not mean users are motivated towards the Win-State.

That’s why we focus on the 8 Core Drives.

 A Point on Points

Similarly, Status Points (Game Technique #1) are for keeping score of progress. Internally, it allows the system to know how close players are towards the win-state. Externally, it gives players a feedback system to also keep track of their progress.

As a great candidate for “Feedback Mechanics” in the Octalysis Strategy Dashboard, showing people their score and changes on small improvements often motivates them towards the right direction.

However, how you craft the gaining and losing of points, as well as meaning behind the points can significantly change the users’ perception of your product. Done incorrectly, it can cause the user to devalue the entire experience and distrust your intentions as a systems designer.

Many companies think that giving users tradable points that can be redeemed for rewards would make a system motivating. After all, now there is an “economy!”

What companies don’t always realize, is that running an economy is a very complex thing. You have to carefully consider the correct labor to time to exchange to reward ratios and constantly adjust the balance to make sure people actually value your points and currency system.

Adam Smith, known as the “Father of Economics,” suggests in his book Wealth of Nations that the beginning of all Value is Labor. Because people have put in time and labor into the process and “mined out” points, it inherently has value for those who do not wish to spend the same amount of time to obtain those points.

The Federal Reserve Bank or Central Bank of any country knows that an economy is extremely sensitive and requires finesse. They understand that if they just change interest rates by a measly 3%, consumers, banks, insurance companies, real estate developers, and businesses will all behave drastically different.

For a company to just think that, “We have an economy and therefore we are engaging!” is a very dangerous statement.

Leaderboard Game Mechanics

Leaderboards (Game Technique #3) is a game element where you rank users based on a set of criteria that is influenced by the users’ behaviors towards the Desired Actions.

Even though Leaderboards are meant to motivate people and bring in status, if designed incorrectly, it often times does the exact opposite.

If you use a site for a few hours and received 25 points, and then you see on the Top 20 list, number 20 already has 25,000,000 points, that probably does not motivate you to try harder.

In fact, it could very likely demotivate you and you won’t even want to try.

This was an issue that Foursquare, a geolocation mobile app that gamified the check-in process, had many years ago. Often times, a new user may check into a new coffee shop, and then realize the “Mayor” there has already achieved 250 check-ins and increasing everyday. “Fighting for the Mayorship” is probably not something the user would be interested in, because he knows the odds of developing progress and feeling accomplished is very low.

What users need is Urgent Optimism, another term coined by Jane McGonigal, where the user feels optimistic that she can accomplish the task, but also urgent as she needs to act now.

When you setup a leaderboard, there are a couple variations that have shown to perform better.

First, you always want to position the user in the middle of the leaderboard display, so all she sees is the player right above her, and the user just below her. It’s not very motivating seeing how high the Top 10 players are, but it’s incredibly motivating when one sees someone who used to be below her suddenly surpasses her.

Another variation of the leaderboard is to set up Group Leaderboards, where the ranking is based on the combined efforts of a bigger team. In that case, even though not everyone is competitive and needs to be at the top, most people don’t want to be the laggard that drags the team down, so everyone works harder through the sense of Social Influence & Relatedness (Core Drive 5).

The next variation is to set up constantly refreshing leaderboards, where every week the data would refresh; hence no one falls too far behind and always has a renewed sense of hope, leading towards that Urgent Optimism.

Finally, it’s a good idea to implement micro-leaderboards, where only the users’ friends or very similar people are compared. Instead of seeing you are ranked 95,253 out of 1 Million users, you see how you are the top 1 or 2 among 22 friends.

The point is that the user must quickly recognize the action item towards getting the win-state. If there’s no chance of achievement, there is no action.

Conclusion

Since Development & Accomplishment is the easiest Core Drive to design for, many companies focus on this Core Drive. Consequently, many of the Gamification Platforms out there are specialized in appealing to this Core Drive too. However, if you do plan to implement these game elements into your product, make sure you do that carefully and elegantly. Always focus on how you want your users to feel, not what game elements you want to use.

The 8 Core Drives of Gamification #3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback

Gamification Creativity

The Creative Core Drive in Gamification

(Below is a snippet of Gamification Book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. If you like this blog post, you will LOVE the book. For a video walk-through, check out: Episode 10, Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback #1 and Episode 11, Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback #2).

Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is the Third Core Drive in Octalysis, and is the Core Drive that really emphasizes on “Play.”

Some of my fondest memories growing up are of when I got to play with Legos and engage in forming, destroying, and re-building basic building blocks in an infinite amount of combinations.

It gave me and millions of others around the world great joy and fulfillment simply because it allowed me to be creative, immediately see the outcome of my hard work, and re-calibrate my efforts over and over again to bring my imagination to life.

I believe that people are by nature creative beings, and we yearn to learn, imagine, invent, and partake in creative processes where the journey in of itself brings happiness.

The beauty of this Core Drive lies in its evergreen ability to continually engage us at all moments in our lives.

If you recall the structure of Octalysis, with the top-down Core Drives being White/Black Hat, and Left/Right Core Drives being Extrinsic/Intrinsic, you will notice that Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is the “golden top right,” where it is White Hat – meaning long-term positive emotions, as well as Right Brain – meaning an emphasis on Intrinsic Motivation. Unfortunately, this Core Drive is also the hardest to implement correctly.

The Endgame Evergreen Core Drive

Every once in a while, an attendee at my speaker events would ask, “Yu-kai, I want to add gamification to my company, but aren’t most games short-lived? Don’t people get bored of a game after playing for a while? If so, wouldn’t that be bad for my business?”

It’s true, many great games are played for two to eight months, and then they move on to new games. However, it’s because the game did not design for motivation for the Endgame, which is the fourth and final phase of a Player’s Journey. And remember, since you never HAVE to play a game, if it is not engaging in the endgame, you move on to other games.

Many well-designed games, like Starcraft, managed to engage the mind of players for over a decade, until the sequel was released. Other games like Poker, Golf, Chess, Mahjong, all have stood the test of time, and is still popular after centuries of trial.

Now there are many ways to design an engaging Endgame, but the reason why so many of these games stand the test of time, is largely because they utilize Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback.

In a study done by Queen Mary University of London and University College London in 2013 comparing the effects of different games on the brain. After six to eight weeks, the study showed that students who played Starcraft roughly an hour a day improved their memory, visual search, informational filtering, and other cognitive skills.

When a user can continuously use her creativity and infinitely come up with new ways to do things, the game designer no longer needs to constantly create new content to make things engaging, as her mind is the evergreen content that absorbs her attention continuously. That’s the power of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback in retaining users for the long haul.

Some Game Techniques to implement Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback

Below is a list of Game Techniques that utilize Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback within games and also in gamification projects.

Boosters (Game Technique #31)

Have you ever played the game Super Mario and felt blissfully excited when you picked up a mushroom or flower that made you stronger (such as breaking blocks with your head or throwing fireballs)? These are considered Boosters in a game, where a player obtains something to, in a limited capacity, help them achieve the win-state easier.

Different from simply leveling up or acquiring new skills, Boosters are usually limited under certain conditions. You can enjoy the brick-breaking and fire-throwing as long as you stay out of harms way. Once you get hit by an enemy, you return back to your “natural state” prior to boosters.

Boosters such as getting a jumping star in Super Mario is limited by time, and for the next dozen seconds (I actually went on Youtube and counted the seconds just to write this), a player would rush as quickly as he can (sometimes falling into pits) as he enjoys the adrenaline rush of using his limited invincibility (with a touch of Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience).

That feeling of being empowered with new but limited power-ups is exhilarating and is an extremely strong motivator towards the desired action. Very few people are willing to stop the game while the Star Invincibility effect is still.

In games like Candy Crush, Boosters are also very powerful mechanics, especially towards its monetization. A player can earn (or buy) limited amounts of boosters that help overcome some of the most difficult challenges in the stage, such as getting a Bubblegum Troll to defeat the menacing chocolates, or a Disco-Ball like Color Bomb to remove all candies of a certain color. Without different boosters and power-ups, the game would not nearly be as engaging as it is today.

One key concept to note is that, when users are paying for boosters, even though it could make winning incredibly easy, they are not purchasing a victory. If a person pays money, and all she sees is a screen that says, “You won the game!” she would not be very excited per se. Rather, she would prefer to buy a powerful sword that kills all enemies quicker and faster. In reality, users are purchasing the feeling of being very powerful and accomplished (Core Drive 2), and being empowered with new capabilities.

Milestone Unlock (Game Technique #19)

One of the most successful gaming mechanics within games is something I call the Milestone Unlock. When people play games, they often set an internal stop time in the form of a milestone – “Let me beat this boss and then I’m done.” “I’m close to leveling up, let me level up and I’ll stop.”

What the Milestone Unlock does, is that it unlocks an exciting possibility that wasn’t there before once that milestone is hit.

In some RPGs (Role Playing Games), whenever you level up, you learn a new set of skills. These skills are awesome and generally help you kill monsters faster, with more style, or it would have made your earlier gameplay a lot easier.

Once players level up (their “stop time milestone”), they naturally want to see what these new skills are, test them out a bit, test them out on stronger enemies, enjoy how powerful they are, and then realize they are so close to the next milestone that they might as well get there first.

This is when people plan to stop at 11PM but end up playing till 5AM in the morning.

 Milestone Unlocks in Plants vs Zombies

Plants vs. Zombies is a dynamic “tower-defense” game geared towards forming a strategy to utilize resources and “plants” to solve puzzles of zombie attacks. In the spirit of Core Drive 3, the game embodies an aspect of allowing people to incorporate their creativity to come up with various solutions towards solving the same problem. Interestingly, this is the only “fighting” game and the only “zombies” game that both my mother and my wife got very into.

 In terms of Game Techniques, Plants vs Zombies utilizes Milestone Unlocks to the extreme. When you complete each level, you will usually unlock a new Plant to help you defend against Zombies.

Not by coincidence, that new plant is often the exact plant that directly counters the toughest zombie on the stage you just beat and it would have made your life a lot easier if you had it earlier!

Of course, this is not the time to stop playing. If you didn’t start the next stage and try out these new found powers, you would be thinking about it all night long in your beds!

Poison Picker/Choice Perception (Game Technique #89)

Many studies have shown that people like something more when they are given a choice, even if the options are not as appealing compared to a single better option.

When children turn two years old, they quickly discover that they possess a special power called “Free Will.” And once they discover this power, they start to exercise it with great fluency. “NO!” That’s when the meaning of the Terrible Twos becomes apparent. It almost seems like it doesn’t matter what you suggest, the child will say “No!” to it.

“Which one do you want?”

“……”

“Do you want A?”

“NO!”

“Okay. Do you want B then?”

“NO!”

“Well, you have to make a choice. A or B?”

“NO!”

“So you don’t want anything. I’ll take them away okay?”

“NO!”

Negotiating with children is serious parenting work. You have to make the child think that whatever happens, it’s a result of her own decision and not someone else’s suggestion (interestingly, that bit of us does not change as we grow older). When the child does not know what she wants, that’s the hardest, because she can’t make a choice on her own, but she still hates it if she went along with someone else’s suggestion.

When I was little, my mother would have me learn how to play the piano. It was very frustrating for me, and many times I would cry out in anger. After two years of piano, my mother saw how much misery it caused me, and told me, “Okay, if you hate it so much, you don’t have to play the piano anymore. But you have to play an instrument. What would you like to play?” At the time I saw a popular singer in Taiwan named Lee-Hom Wang play the violin on-stage at a large concert, and it made an impression on me. I therefore told my mother that I wanted to play the violin.

After I switched from playing the piano to the violin, things didn’t necessarily become easier, but because I made a choice to play the violin, I sucked it up and played with a much better attitude. After all, if I also hated playing the violin, that means my previous choice was “wrong,” and people hate being wrong! When I would start to whine and complain, my mother would ask me, “So you hate playing the violin then?” I would immediately shoot back with, “No! Who said I hate playing the violin? I LOVE playing the violin! I just need…more practice.”

What a win for the parent!

The key to the Choice Perception is that the choice itself is not necessarily meaningful, but merely makes a person feel like they are empowered to make a choice. In my case, I was still forced to play an instrument – I did not have the choice to stop learning – but because I felt that I could choose which instrument to play, I felt empowered.

When I say the choice is not meaningful, it could mean that either the user is presented with a good option and a bad option, inviting the user to naturally choose the better one (again, often times a user will feel happier compared to just being forced to take the better option); or it could mean the options are all so limiting that it makes very little difference what the options are.

Obviously, because of the lack of meaningful choices, Choice Perception is something that is not as ideal in an implementation, since it does not truly bring out the creativity of the user, and at times you could offend users too if the options are too blatantly meaningless or insulting. However, for many businesses, it is slightly easier to implement into its systems than actually having Meaningful Choices.

Sometimes a business would use an anchoring price to create a choice perception towards which package the consumer will buy. Lets say buying a burger at a fast food store is $10, and buying a large container of fries is $10. A consumer may look at that and think, “Wow! This place is a rip off!” But then he sees that there is a “Burger + Fries” package for only $11. The consumer now feels like this is a no-brainer, and quickly buys the package.

In reality, the single burger and fries prices are there not to sell themselves, but to make the combo package look much better. Even though there is really no “meaningful choice” in this besides people with strong dietary preferences, if the fast food store just offered the package combo with the other choices, a consumer is less likely to buy it. They need to feel like they had a choice, and then take the “better” one.

Plant Picker/Meaningful Choices (Game Technique #11)

Beyond choices that allow people to feel like they are empowered, there are choices that are truly meaningful and demonstrates preferences that are not obviously superior over others. These techniques I call “Plant Pickers” because, just like deciding what to plant in a garden, it is often a preference on style and strategy, something that fuels Core Drive 3.

I mentioned above how the Milestone Unlock is such a huge component in Plants vs Zombies good game design. Another aspect of its success is the Plant Picker. When you start a stage in Plants vs Zombies, you are faced with a challenge – a wave of zombies, each with different strengths and capabilities. There are a limited amount of plants you can “pre-pick” before a game, there are sun-resources that allow you to plant a plant, and there are a limited amount of squares that you can plant the plants at.

To beat a level in Plants vs Zombies, there are a variety of ways and strategies that each work extraordinarily well (among many ways that don’t work very well). A player can choose to power up the economy first with sun-gathering plants with fewer defense plants; lay out the field with basic pea-shooters; save up to use more powerful plants that do mass damage; completely focus on explosives and traps; or use stinky onions to herd all the zombies into one lane before wiping them all out with penetrating attacks.

Oftentimes, one would beat a level with one strategy, just to replay it to test out another new strategic idea that the player figured out. The process of being able to select many options, each with unique strength and weaknesses, resulting in a variety of style and creativity-based strategies, is the core essence of the Plant Picker.

Unfortunately, Plants vs Zombies 2 completely forgot about its original design roots and turned Plant Pickers into Poison Pickers, with some plants being overpowered, while having other plants being completely useless.

In additional to Plants vs Zombies, if you read much of my work, you will know that I believe the game Farmville is not a “fun” game to play but generally a mind-numbing machine that brilliantly utilizes all the right game mechanics to bring out our Core Drives (and my goal is to help people learn these mechanics and do good with it!).

However, there is one element of Farmville that I think is positive and fun for the right reasons – it allows everyone to creatively express themselves through their Farms.

When Farmville players play the game for long enough and have unlocked all sorts of plants and colors, some of them even become Farmville Artists to express their creativity and create amazingly beautiful pieces of art through the digital pixels of Farmville (using Paint might still be more efficient, but Hey! The canvas is your farm!).

Because there are so many things you can do with your crops, this element of Farmville can be considered an Evergreen Mechanic, where users can continuously stay engaged without adding any additional content, just like how paint and a paintbrush can be Evergreen material. The only problem is, your work of art will be there for a few hours, and unless you reap the plants, they will all wither and die soon.

Here are some pretty noteworthy pieces of art:

Here’s a recreation of the Mona Lisa

Amazing Spiral Design

And this is a very creative idea of building a QR Code with your farm!

Conclusion

As you can see through the multiple Game examples provided, Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is a great Core Drive on many different levels as it taps into our innate desire to create and be inspired by our imaginations.

When effectively implemented, this core drive becomes a key evergreen engine that can be the difference between a short-lived flower and a timeless Redwood.

The Strategy Dashboard for Gamification Design

Gamification Strategy Dashboard
yu-kai chou gamification expert

(Below is a snippet of Gamification Book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. If you like this blog post, you will LOVE the book.)

At this point, we have a built a strong foundation for understanding the 8 Core Drives, their natures, and how they individually and collaboratively influence our behavior. However, this does not necessarily mean this knowledge can be easily applied to designing an engaging gamified experience that also fulfill business metrics. For that, we need another tool.

After some of my talks on Octalysis, some people ask me, “How do I actually start to design a gamified campaign with the 8 Core Drives? I can now create an experience that’s interesting and engaging but I’m not sure how that will drive business success.”

In order to design a successful project, they need the Octalysis Strategy Dashboard.

The Octalysis Strategy Dashboard is a constantly evolving document that clarifies the most important aspects of your gamification campaign by focusing your attention on the critical elements that will ultimately direct your efforts for maximum impact.

The Strategy Dashboard contains five critical elements:

  1. Business Metrics, leading to Game Objectives
  2. Users, leading to Players
  3. Desired actions, leading to Win-States
  4. Feedback Mechanics, leading to Triggers
  5. Incentives, leading to Rewards

Your Strategy Dashboard is not meant to be as comprehensive or as static as a business plan. It should provide a minimum amount of critical information to help you execute an actionable gamification campaign that drives your business metric goals.

It may take less than one or two hours to first define your Strategy Dashboard but can take months of iterations as your product or service evolves.

Let me explain each of the dashboard’s critical elements in turn:

  1. Business Metrics = Game Objectives

Business Metrics are the key numbers and results that the business wants to improve on. These are high-level items that the company may present to their executives or investors in order to show the campaign’s success.

Some Business Metrics include revenue, daily active users over monthly active users, time spent on site, retained users, registrations, etc. Again, these are the numbers that indicate success for your business. If these numbers are growing, your business is in good shape.

When defining Business Metrics, make sure they are quantifiable and prioritized in order of importance.

If you can’t Measure it, you can’t Manage it

Sometimes I have clients who ask me which gamification platform they should use to develop their campaign.

I believe the answer depends on what problem they want to solve. The problem isn’t that there is a lack of gamification. If that’s the problem, then it doesn’t matter what platform you use, as long as you include any kind of gamification your problem is solved!

Business metrics cannot be fluffy statements such as, “We want to make people feel great!” It has to be measurable and quantifiable. You need to be able to track success, benchmark against other campaigns, and even run split tests to see which of your efforts produce the best results.

Boiling the Ocean gets you no Tea

Business Metrics also needs to be prioritized in the order of importance to your business.

Most companies want all of their metrics to grow exponentially: they want a lot of revenue, new users signing up, more user time spent on their site; they want everything.

However, at this stage it is crucially important to focus on defining your top Business Metric, your number two Business Metric, and so on. Because when it comes to designing for motivation, often times you can only optimize for one Business Metric at each interface and so you have to refer back to your dashboard and be disciplined enough to choose your most important one. You can of course improve all the other Business Metrics to some degree too, but you can only optimize for one of them.

A good example of this is a login interface on the front page of your website. Is your top Business Metric to increase new user signups or to maximize weekly return rates? If you have decided the former is a higher business metric, you may design the interface that provides a text box for easy user registration with a simple “Sign-up” and “Sign-up through Facebook” button next to it. You would include a smaller section that says, “Already a user? Login here.”

If your top Business Metric is to maximize daily returns, then the interface may be the opposite, with a small section that says, “Not a user yet? Signup here!” This design may not be the best solution to maximize daily returns for all scenarios but you can see how an interface can often only allow for a single optimization of a key Desired Action.

If you look carefully at various front pages, you will see that Facebook, Pandora, and Twitter’s home pages are optimized for new user signups whereas Amazon and Paypal’s home pages are optimized for return user sign-ins. As eCommerce solutions, Amazon and Paypal decided that there is a higher return when an existing user logs in and spends money as opposed to having a random person sign-up just to see what they’re platforms are about. More often than not, that first-time user won’t result in strong commercial activity as that of an active user.

Obviously their other business metrics will also be increased through this optimized interface, but we want to always design in the main Desired Action for the user so that they always have a clear sense of how to reach the Win-State. If you try to get users to do everything on one screen, users will face decision paralysis, leave your site, and go back to their comfort zone.

If by implementing your gamified campaign, your Business Metrics have not improved, then you have failed the Game Objective.

  1. Users = Players

Continue reading The Strategy Dashboard for Gamification Design

The 8 Core Drives of Gamification #4: Ownership and Possession

Gamification Ownership

The 4th Core Drive of Octalysis Gamification Design

(Below is a snippet of Gamification Book: Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. If you like this blog post, you will LOVE the book. For a video walk-through, check out: Episode 12, Ownership and Possession – Part 1 and Episode 13, Ownership and Possession- Part 2).

Ownership and Possession, the fourth Core Drive in Octalysis Gamification, is based on the principle that because you own something, you want to improve it, protect it, and get more of it.

This Core Drive is related to elements such as virtual goods and virtual currencies, but it is also the primary Core Drive that makes us want to accumulate wealth. Also, on a more abstract level, if you have invested a lot of your time to customize something to your own liking, or a system has constantly been learning about your preferences and molding into something that is uniquely yours, you generally will start to feel more ownership towards it.

Ownership and Possession is positioned to the far left of Octalysis, and therefore represents the Core Drive that exhibits the strongest influence on the Left Brain (again, this is not scientific but more symbolic) or analytical thinking. Here, decisions are based on more logical, calculating thought and the desire for possession as the primary motivating factors. When you do “rational calculations,” often times you are evaluating the gain and loss of certain desirables, such as money, instead of considering your “feelings” from other Core Drives.

In Farmville, you’re constantly striving to increase the value of your assets by developing your land, establishing higher crop yields, and improving the quantity and quality of your livestock. You can further develop your property’s infrastructure and dwellings – establishing that country manor on your dream estate.

Because of that, you want to constantly invest more time and energy into expanding your farm by getting more cows, plants, and more fruits, but also buying items such as stables that you could put your horses in or grooming services to make them look “prettier.”

So, much of the time, when your user obtains this sense of ownership, it becomes extremely powerful. It’s theirs. And they now have a strong motivation to change it, to increase it, and to improve it.

Wait, it’s mine? Hold on, I do care then!

Our brains have a natural association with things that we own. Pretend for a moment that you generally prefer most other drinks over beer (this exercise may be very difficult for some readers). If we were at a party, and I gave you a bottle of beer, you may respond, “Oh that’s okay. I’m not a big fan of beer.” I then respond with, “Nah, just take it! I’ll put it here next to you.”

At this point, you may still not care about this bottle of beer. You may even just not drink it and abandon it there when you stand up and leave. But if at that moment, someone walks by and picks up the beer and begins to drink it, you will likely feel an urge to say, “Hey, what are you doing?”

The guy may respond, “Well it doesn’t look like you were going to drink it anyway. What’s the big deal?”

Again, even though you didn’t care about the beer and may be abandoning it altogether, you may still feel the urge to say, “Still, that’s not cool. You should have asked.”

Once you have a sense of ownership over something, it starts to take a different course in your value system and begins to motivate your behaviors differently. If a beer you didn’t care about could get you to become upset with someone, imagine how much more you would be influenced if it was something you deeply cared about (for instance: beer).

A friend of mine, Chris Robino, once explained to me that, while he was in school, he was never any good at math. It was boring and annoying.

However, once he started running his own business and started adding a dollar sign in front of the numbers, the numbers and math suddenly became very engaging, and he started to master everything he needed to know quickly. With his new sense of mastery over money, he quickly built his business into a successful and lucrative consulting firm.

Chris Robino once jokingly said, “Once the numbers started to represent my own money, I instantly became a genius.”

Similar to the beer example, the nature of motivation and engagement completely shifted when our brain realizes it is now related to something in our possession.

Motivation Design: Few Degrees Removed

One of the strange phenomenon I’ve seen in game design relating to Ownership & Possession, is the aspect of fighting in relationship to gender preferences. Most game designers agree that females are less likely to enjoy games that have violence in them.

However, it seems like even though girls don’t necessarily like playing games where they are fighting, they have a higher tendency of liking games where they are nurturing and training pets that fight. It seems like girls don’t generally like to fight themselves, but many girls enjoy it when someone else is fighting for them. If you look at games like Plants vs Zombies or Pokemon, which are “fighting” games that are also popular among girls, those mostly involve the player having someone/something else fight. Of course, the cute graphics help make it more personable.

So it turns out, the best type of design in fighting games that appeal to more female players, are ones where there is a cute customizable avatar that represents the player, but instead of having the avatar fight monsters, have the avatar train other pets to fight those monsters. With a few degrees removed from the actual violence, female players have a higher tendency of enjoying the challenge and strategy more in fighting and competitive themes.

Gamification Design: Status Points and Exchangeable Points

At this point it is productive to explain two main types of points that a gamified system can give to its users. On one end, there are Status Points (Game Technique #1), where users see in a score keeping sense how well they are doing. Status Points for the most part can only go up as the user hits more Win-States and it cannot be traded for other valuables. This appeals more to Core Drive #2: Development & Accomplishment.

On the other end, there are Exchangeable Points (Game Technique #75), where users can utilize the points in a strategic and scarce manner to obtain other valuables.

Within Status Points, there are also smaller divisions such as Absolute Status Points (which measures the total amount of points earned in the journey) vs Marginal Status Points (which are points that are specifically set for one challenge or one time period, and can be reset once that challenge and time period is over), as well as One-Way Status Points (it can only go up) vs Two-Way Status Points (it can also go down as the user fails to achieve the Win-State).

Within Exchangeable Points, there are also differences between points that can only be redeemed with the game system for valuables, or it can be traded with other players in the system or perhaps people outside of the gamified system.

Each of these decisions has pros and cons, and many good gamified systems (and games) have a combination of the above.

As mentioned before, when you have Exchangeable Points, they become currencies, but simply having a currency economy doesn’t necessarily mean the experience is engaging. The key here is to consider how much labor was put into the process, whether the labor was skilled or unskilled, how widely accepted is the currency, and the long-term value of what can be exchanged with the currency.

Having something be openly tradable, even though may engage users in many aspects as they strategize how to create synergetic trading to maximizing outcomes, could sometimes destroy scarcity design (which is Core Drive 6) and hurt intrinsic motivation.

Ownership in the Workplace and the Web

A good example of a more abstract sense of ownership can be found in the workplace. Many people in the workplace feel like they don’t have ownership of their work. They’re just doing what their boss wants them to do and they don’t really get to feel that it’s their own project.

However, when the manager installs more ownership into the employee by giving her more control and tie the success of the project more closely with the employee’s own success, that’s when people work until 1:00 AM in the morning. They become tireless. They keep thinking about their work. They make their spouses upset by ditching other responsibilities (interestingly, some spouses unintentionally make their significant others feel less ownership over their households, resulting in decreased motivation in improving, nurturing, and protecting the home). The project is now their baby and obviously that’s also why people work harder on their own companies compared to just having a “job.”

A feeling of Ownership & Possession can manifest itself on the web too. Oftentimes, if a website gets people to invest time into building something, like a personal profile or avatar, users have a much higher chance of developing personal ownership within the effort.

When they start customizing their avatar or their website profile, they invest a lot of time and feel “this is my avatar, this is my profile.” Now they develop a stronger relationship to it and they now want other people to see it (reaching into Social Influence & Relatedness) – but they also want to spend even more time and sometimes money to make it look snazzier, with a better picture, and a nicer background.

Of course, there’s always a balance, because during the Onboarding process, even though it is advantageous to get people to spend time customizing things, users are still not committed to your experience, so it is often better to send them to the First Major Win-State first before users are required to customize things of their preference.

Game Design Techniques in Ownership & Possession

Above we have learned more about the motivational and psychological nature of Ownership & Possession, but to make it more actionable, below are some Game Techniques that heavily utilize this Core Drive to engage with users.

Build From Scratch (Game Technique #43)

When you create a product or service, its often good to get your users to increase their invested ownership and possession in the process (unless the objective is to get the users to take the Desire Action and then move on quickly to other systems). This is why it is often advantageous to have them involved in the development process early on – to “build from scratch.”

Building from scratch means that instead of giving them the entire setup – giving them the fully furnished house and the character from the beginning, you want them to start off decorating the house from scratch; pick and place the beds in the house for themselves; choose a hair color and style for their character; and select their preferred fashion statement. As I said earlier, when people are building something from scratch, they feel like, “I own this. This is my thing.”

But if you start off by giving them a perfectly enchanting character or a fully decorated home, they may not become as involved otherwise. Even if you tell them, “Hey, you can redecorate it or add things to it,” people will likely feel less ownership and be less engaged.

There has been studies indicating that people feel more attached to their cheap IKEA furniture even compared to other expensive high-end furniture, primarily because they spent more time building the IKEA furniture with their own hands. That feeling of personal ownership motivates them to talk about their IKEA furniture more often with friends too.

As mentioned above, if the Build-From-Scratch technique distracts people away from the First Major Win-State, then it is not good design. Either you want to give users the option to Build-From-Scratch as well as some quick template options that will allow users to customize later on, or you want to make sure that the Build-From-Scratch Technique itself is a First Major Win-State.

Collection Sets (Game Technique #16)

One of the most powerful and effective ways to utilize the Ownership and Possession Core Drive is through Collection Sets. Say you give people a few items, characters, or badges, and you tell them that this is part of a collection set that follows a theme. This creates a desire in people to collect all the elements and complete their selection set.

One example is in the game Geomon by Loki Studio (I was an advisor to them. Loki Studio was acquired by Yahoo! and Geomon was unfortunately shut down so you won’t be able to play it).

In Geomon, there’s the theme of the four-season deer. There’s a spring deer, a summer fire deer, and winter ice deer.

If you by chance captured one or two of these four season deer, it’s rather awkward to just stop only having a few of the full set. Now you’re willing to do a lot more work to get the other deer, which could mean that you need to be painfully waiting for a few months when the right season comes again. You may talk to people, negotiate, and even throwing in a few dollars just to finish that collection.

What’s mind-blowing about this level of ownership, is that people felt so attached to the Geomons (or Espers) they captured and trained in the game, that when the game announced that it was shutting down, the players (whom mostly consisted of high school students) banded together and raised a committed sum of $700,000 to see if they could keep the game going. That was quite an impressive figure which was mainly motivated by Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession as well as Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance.  In fact, in higher level Octalysis studies, you will see that building Core Drive 4 often reinforces the power of Core Drive 8.

Monopolizing Billions

Another great example is seen in the McDonald’s Monopoly Game. McDonald’s wants people to buy more burgers, so it created the McDonald’s Monopoly game where every time you hit the Win-State of “buying a burger,” you will get a piece of property on the Monopoly Board.

Once you accumulate all the properties, McDonald’s will give you great cash prizes and rewards. Now, like most of these collection games, there will be a few pieces that are extremely rare, and as a result, people are willing to spend real money to acquire these properties.

That’s somewhat odd, because people are not paying money in exchange of the reward. They are paying money in exchange for a “part” of the reward, which by itself is technically not worth anything. But because people are so desperate about completing a set that is almost finished, they are highly motivated to complete it as strong Endgame play.

The easy and common example of this is seen online through collecting badges. Once a person collects over 60%-70% of the possible badges (which again is usually in the Endgame Phase), most people would be highly motivated to pick up all the badges, just so they could feel complete.

When you give users rewards, don’t just give them items that have no motivational longevity. Oftentimes giving them collection pieces will result in longer-term engagement.

Of course, when a user fully expects a full reward either because of your own advertising or because of what your competitors do, giving them a Collection Set piece can sometimes backfire and end up insulting the user. Always be mindful that gamification is not a cookie cutter solution but always relies on thoughtful design based on context and the player in the system.

The Alfred Effect (Game Technique #83)

The Alfred Effect is when users feel that a product or service is so personalized to their own needs that they cannot imagine using another service.

As we march towards a fast-food world of more convenience and off-the-shelf options, people start to long for a deeper experience that is uniquely their own. That’s why some wealthy people would spend ten times more to customize a product to uniquely fit their style and preferences.

Through Big Data, we are now able to provide users that sense of personalization by having smart systems constantly learn about their preferences and habits.

In a game, the system is constantly learning about the user and customizing the experience based on past behavior. A game would know, “This player is on level 3; he has learned these four skills, but not these six, picked up these three items, defeated these monsters, talked to these two characters, but these other three characters. As a result, this door does not open.”

A game remembers almost everything a player does in the game, and modifies the experience based on it. Gamers take this level of personalization for granted: if at level 3, the game forgot some details of what the player did in level 1, the player would often become furious and quit the game.

In the real world, most sites just give you the same static experience, no matter what you do. Some more advanced sites provide different experiences based on region or gender, but most are on a very barebones basis.

But when a user feels like a system has been learning everything about them and customizing towards their needs, even if another service out there offered better technologies, functions, or prices, the user still has a tendency to stay with this system, because this is now uniquely “my system.” Nothing else understands me like my system.

These days, some of the biggest sites are implementing the Alfred Effect into their experiences, but most of them are still not ideal. Sites like Amazon are known to understand your preferences based on all your activities and recommend different products to you; Google Search now shows search results that are personalized for you based on your history; Facebook shows you content that you or your friends would most likely care about; and Netflix can predict which movies you will enjoy better than you friends can.

On a less automated form, some people have spent time adjusting their Operating Systems or Browsers right to their needs. Others have their own systems of Dropbox Folders in place that fits well into their flow of work. Even a person’s workstation that is customized properly to fit her habits can create more engagement and attachment to it.

When you have implemented a good level of the Alfred Effect in place, even if new products, technologies, or platforms that are better than yours are introduced to your users, they still have a high tendency to stay with their own uniquely tailored system.

Protector Quest (Game Technique #36)

Among other more standard game techniques, there are also less common Game Techniques, such as implementing the Protector Quest. Protector Quest is a concept based on the occurrence that people start to develop a relationship with something that they are protecting. Here a bit of Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness is present too.

Consider a game where you might start with a flock of sheep that you have to protect from wolves and aliens. As the game starts, you have to get rid of all the wolves that are approaching and then get rid of all the aliens that are trying to kill the sheep.

Eventually you begin to feel an attachment and a connection to the sheep, since your brain needs to justify your actions as meaningful. Why would you spend time defending something that isn’t good?

Now the object being protected can be anything that the designer wants the user to develop a relationship with. It doesn’t have to be sheep. It could be snails too. If you’re protecting the snails, which aren’t normally thought of as that friendly or likable, from the wolves and aliens, you will likely develop a subconscious liking of these snails that you worked so hard to protect.

If you give users or employees a Protector Quest where they need to keep an object or file safe from harms way, or you give high school students an egg to protect for a week, people will often become attached to the object or file as they freak out when the object or file comes under danger but is saved.