The Beginner’s Guide to Gamification (15 of 90): Scarcity & Impatience

Gamification Video Guide #15!

Hey guys! Finally made the 15th episode. Woot!

It probably won’t take long to notice that the video is done in a different style and done by someone else! That’s right. We have our good old pal Nikita, whom I met on Twitter, to gracefully put together this new video with techno music and better graphics of my face.

There’s been a lot of transitional learning, basically me figuring out how to get something so intimate as me talking straight for 10 minutes (which is me really talking for 1 hour cut down into 10 minutes) and hand that to someone else. Would he make me look fatter? Would I sound dumber? What if he put in a scene where I was using the bathroom??

All those are difficult questions to answer in life and fortunately the video turned out good (besides my usual shakiness…grr, must walk better…or walk the talk!)

Nikita is Russian (studying in London) so he can take some harsh comments (I already emptied my magazine on him and he is still standing strong like a terminator). If you see how things can improve (or if you like the techno music a lot less than the mysterious suspenseful ambience that I previously put in), let us know!

Work’s been busy (still procrastinating on hiring me to be your consultant?), so I figured I had to transition it to someone so that I can actually realistically finish my amazing series one day.

Nothing else is that new….speaking in Florida, speaking in China (best hospitality I ever received from a company – thank you Huawei!), speaking in India (lots of drama with getting a visa), speaking in Europe, launched the Octalysis Tool so people in Barcelona don’t have to make the Octalysis chart with string, trying to figure out how to make money for my blog so I can at least pay for it’s own operations, got accepted to speak at SxSW (thank you HelloBar and all my awesome readers!), book coming out hopefully early next year, said sweet things to my wife…yea really nothing that new or special is going on these days. It’s the usual boring stuff any Gamification Gosu faces. I wished there was something that made my life awesome.

Gamification Video Outline (Because SEO is important!)

Oh yea, this video covers:

  • Scarcity & Impatience as the 6th Core Drive of Octalysis Gamification
  • Facebook uses this to make things exclusive and drives up demand
  • Games use this core drive to monetize: dangling works!
  • Torture Breaks will make people think about the experience all their time
  • Scarcity & Impatience is a lot of Black Hat Gamification. You want to balance them out with White Hat Game Techniques.
  • The demand curve for traditional economics theory often becomes a C-Curve
  • A super secret key point about Scarcity & Impatience that I’m not going to tell you about, just so you can understand Scarcity & Impatience 😉

 

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23 thoughts on “The Beginner’s Guide to Gamification (15 of 90): Scarcity & Impatience”

  1. DeBeers (diamonds) sure used “scarcity” to drive their business and it has been successful for more than 100 years.

  2. Haha=)) Very cool done with your words at the end of this episode! About – Watch the next one, and you’ll get the secret knowledge) Yu-Kai, you know that all your followers here really await 90 episodes?! I am the one who believes you can make it happen, even despite there are only 21 ready now=)
    And about scarcity&impatience in personal life – I also started to understand why does this Damn Clash Of Clans game (which I and my wife play together) is soooo demanding extra time to farm another 10 000 Dark Elixir, it almost takes 4 hours!!! So a couple of months ago we started to buy crystals for real money to buy Dark Elixir to have stronger heroes=)) So black hat works here indeed! And, white hat is also there because we buy stronger heroes to win in Clan VS Clan battle, where we fight together with our friends against some clan from another country – so here Social influence starts working. And accomplishment also – because each next level, you are so hardly trying to get, grants new possibilities for you, you may get extra pionts in clan wars and etc…
    So that is why Clash of Clans is so popular (almost 100 millon users). Yu-Kai?! Did you consult those game-designers?=)
    Now bigger picture really appears in my brain, and thank you for this Master Yu-Kai=)
    Hoping to get all these ideas applied in real business, for example, in new product for B2C market… Wonder how it works.

    1. Haha, I tend to not work with a lot of gaming companies, since I like to take that knowledge to make THIS world better. And yes, I plan to finish all 90 episodes with my upcoming program Octalysis Prime! It will start with a KickStarter soon! 🙂

  3. Yu-kai I found next techniques under this drive, however in doubts about examples.

    Price/Options pacing
    Moats

  4. These videos add energy and thus happiness to my life! 🙂 Yes, that sounds over the top. Yet, it’s true. I will even occasionally make the intro. background music / sounds every so often. They make me smile. 🙂

  5. DR1 achintngm Yu-kai Chou  well.. Yu-Kai already knows all.. and me too.. it’s just v r bored  😉

  6. achintngm DR1  “gaming gamification” finding the exploitation points in logic… Yu-kai Chou  If Yu-kai requests I will write up the hack…

  7. This episode again shows clearly the fallacy of traditional linear thinking about demand curves (as demonstrated by behavioral economics again and again: E.g. Dan Ariely et al).

    The key is to understand when linear explanations DO have value and when they don’t. In scarcity situations it’s clear what paradigm wins!

  8. There’s a lot to do in life. So what, if the scenes are shaking sometimes? Yes, we want quality. However, I will take something-shaky over nothing.

  9. Nice video, thought I was getting a little dizzy as you walked thru the forest… Working on a  pre-launch project now and sent my CEO (yesterday) a core drive 6 & 7 plan and used the mailbox app as one of the examples, so I felt good to see you mention it in this video. But my favorite part of the video was clearly the applepine scene (closely followed by the shot behind the aging airport res station with the dot matrix looking printer).

    Of course this comment is motivated by my desire to break into the top 20 all time yukaichou.com point leaders… (aka achomplishment).

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