You can usually tell when someone is trying to persuade or influence you.
However, I actually like the idea of being influenced or persuaded to do things that I want to do.
Is this true for you?
In general, it feels good to be included in interesting, unusual, or fun events or gatherings. It piques your curiosity when a friend who knows you well sends you information or a book or a gift that makes your life better. And when your friends forget to invite you, you get upset.
So, if you care about being influenced, then your friends do too. It’s part of our makeup as humans. We are nodes in social spheres of influence: individual to family to friends and society. And you are a node across many of these networks.
This post is written by Mike Finney from finneycanhelp.com. He is also an active member of Octalysis Prime.
Applying Octalysis
Octalysis. It’s fantastic! It’s actionable! As Major-General Stanley might say, Octalysis is the very model of a modern major framework.
Although impressive and quite understandable, how can we take this understanding of human motivation and increase our personal productivity? Octalysis Prime‘s Lifestyle Inertia Design (LID) to the rescue!
If you’re an Octalysis Prime member like these wonderful people, you can access the LID videos. The videos are a treasure chest that’s hidden inside of the Productivity area. While being entertained, you can get the knowledge straight from Yu-kai Chou’s lips to your ears!
If you’re not yet an Octalysis Prime member, some of that knowledge is here in this article. However, what’s shared here is a mere shadow of what is to come when you join.
Creating unpredictability and curiosity through a shiny chest of coins seems simple enough. Everyone loves gold. And loves spending it.
But what if you couldn’t spend your hard-earned money?
Collection before utility
The coins on Octalysis Prime were implemented before they could be used.
This was a risk.
Motivationally, you could wonder what to do with these coins. You could discover there is no use for them (yet) and get angry or demoralized. Why do I keep coming back for these stupid coins?
Who knows, maybe we will give some of the Octalysis Prime pioneers a say in this coin-based creation!
How to get coins (the mechanics of an activity loop)
The coins are awarded by checking back into the Island after 20 hours have passed. (The chest magically fills with coins after you return from your other adventures on the island 20 hours later, but not a second before!)
Clearly, this is part of a habit-building activity loop. Just for returning to the learning environment, you are rewarded. Hopefully, you continue to learn while you’re there!
To learn how to implement coin-based activity loops and other designs (even before they have explicit utility), check out the ongoing conversations in the Octalysis Prime Slack community.
Yu-kai wanted to differentiate the knowledge he had acquired from 10,000 hours of playing and studying games (not to mention his consulting work with hundreds of companies) from other organizations who were jumping on the gamification trend without the expertise.
Thus, the title of the book.
But Game Technique #1: Status Points, still matter.
Let’s start with status.
Status is a huge motivator in many areas of life. Recognition of status stems from our neurobiological ‘settings’ as humans. Even lobsters, who diverged from humans 350 million years ago, have hierarchy and have status in that hierarchy. Once a lobster loses a fight, it won’t fight the same lobster again. In your experiences, you don’t have to make your hierarchies quite so rigid.
Octalysis Prime Community Game Techniques: January 2018
Every week in Octalysis Prime, members share game techniques they find in the wild.
Each week, a game technique is selected to the Short List for 2018 OP Community Game Techniques.
Here are January’s…
Fog of War
This is an approach to anything represented by a map, a technique used in strategy games and some RPGs.
In it’s most simple form, the entire map starts hidden by the Fog of War.
When the player moves himself or his pieces, the fog disappear, revealing the map underneath.
Adds an element of unpredictability (CD7) and choices regarding exploration with instant feedback (CD3).
