Category: Gamification Study

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.

Continue reading White Hat vs Black Hat Gamification in the Octalysis Framework

(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 3rd Experience Phase of Gamification: Scaffolding

Earlier I have covered the first 2 experience phases of player’s journey: Discovery, and Onboarding. Scaffolding is the 3rd experience phase of a Player’s Journey.

Scaffolding starts once a player has learned the basic tools and rules to play the game and has achieved the “First Major Win-State.”

This phase is a bit difficult to cover in one writing because it’s the regular journey and activity that the user engages in, and anything goes during this stage based on what your product or service actually is. I’ve written a fairly long post here about this phase but it will be very core to my gamification concepts so for those who are learning about Octalysis and hope to design something engaging, you should read through it.

Scaffolding: the Regular Journey

Regarding the scaffolding phase, one thing to note is that more often than not, it requires the exact same (or very similar) actions on a regular/daily basis, and the Gamification designer must answer the question, “Why would my users come back over and over again for the same actions?”

Rewards, Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

This is where people think about Rewards.

Rewards are great because they continuously motivate people towards a goal, even if it means repetitive activity.

However, it is a bit too focused on extrinsic motivation instead of intrinsic motivation.

Therefore, there are different types of rewards to engage more core drives beyond the reward itself.

In an earlier post, I have defined 6 Contextual Types of Rewards, including Fixed-action rewards, Random rewards, Rolling rewards, and more.

Keep note that usually extrinsic rewards are better at attracting people to participate in the first place (Discovery and Onboarding), but towards the Scaffolding and EndGame, you want to transition to intrinsic motivation as much as possible.

Let’s explore the Scaffolding Phase within the 8 core drives of Octalysis.

Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling

Continue reading 4 Experience Phases in Gamification – Phase 3 The Scaffolding Phase

(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.)

Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity

Unpredictability & Curiosity is the seventh Core Drive in the Octalysis Gamification Framework and is the main force behind our infatuation with experiences that are uncertain and involve chance.

As mentioned in earlier chapters, our intellectual consciousness is inherently lazy, and if tasks at hand do not demand immediate attention, the neocortex delegates the mental legwork to our subconscious mind, or “System 1” according to Economics Nobel Prize winner and psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

The intellectual consciousness only wants to be disturbed when it is absolutely necessary, such as when a threat is present or when the brain encounters new information it hasn’t processed before.

Indeed, Oren Klaff, author of Pitch Anything, states that during meetings, people pay attention to what you say until they can fit you into a pattern that they have previously recognized. Once they fit you into a recognized pattern, they immediately zone out. Therefore, it is important to give a pitch that continuously serves unexpected and unpredictable information to keep people engaged.

Coupled with this is our natural curiosity to explore. Exploring the unknown, though dangerous, helped our ancestors adapt to changing environments and discover new resources to survive and thrive.

Jesse Schell, game designer and author of Art of Game Design: A book of lenses, even goes as far as defining the word “fun” as “pleasure with surprises.” Why is the “surprise” element so important in *fun*?

In this chapter, we will explore how this Core Drive of Unpredictability & Curiosity drives our behavior and how a system designer can effectively design this into their experiences.

Gambling and Variable Rewards

If I told you to play a game, where you continuously press a button and every ten times you press it, you give me $5, would you play it?

The rational reader would not only turn down this offer but would feel utterly insulted that I tried to dupe you into playing in the first place.

Now what if the terms change, and I told you that out of a hundred people, two people who play this game will win $10 back?

You may ponder this a little bit, but still reject it. The offer is not as insulting as before though, just not economically attractive.

But what if I told you that every time you press the button, you may periodically win some money back, and there is an extremely small but possible chance of winning $10,000?

I can’t exactly predict what my smart rational readers would do in this case, but I do know that every single day millions of people throughout the world play the game I mentioned above. Most commonly known as slot machine gambling, players are consistently losing money every time they pull a lever or press a button, but are engaged, even addicted, to the unpredictable chance of winning a lot of money back. With the *right* risk/reward incentive, the game suddenly becomes so much fun!

Studies have shown that we are more engaged in an experience when there is the possibility of winning than when we know our odds for certain.  If we *know* we will receive a reward, our excitement only reflects the emotional value of the reward itself. However, when we only have a chance to gain the reward our brains are more engaged by the thrill of whether we will win or not.

Gamification and the Skinner Box

There’s a substantial amount of research on how the unknown and the unpredictable intrigues and engages our minds. One of the most famous motivational design case studies that explored this phenomenon is the Skinner Box

The Skinner Box was an experiment conducted by the scientist B. F. Skinner, who placed rodents and pigeons in a box with a lever in it. In the first phase, whenever the animal presses the lever(the *Desired Action*), food came out. As long as the animal continuously pressed the lever, food would continue to be dispensed. The end result is that when the animal was no longer hungry, it would stop pressing the lever. This makes a lot of sense – the animal is no longer hungry and does not need food anymore.

The second phase, however, introduced unpredictability into the test mechanics. When the animal pressed the lever, there was no guarantee that food would be dispensed as it did before. Sometimes food came out, sometimes nothing came out, and sometimes even two pieces of food came out.

Skinner observed that with these mechanics in place, the animal would constantly press the lever, regardless of whether it was hungry or not. The system was simply messing with its brain: “*Will it come out? Will it come out? Will it come out?*”

Here we see that satisfying our burning curiosity is intrinsically motivating to our primitive brain, sometimes more so than the extrinsic reward of food. Have you ever seen a person so addicted to gambling that he forgot that he was tired, hungry, or even thirsty?

I often hear critiques of how the Points, Badges, and Leaderboards in gamification simply turns the world into a large Skinner Box, where people are manipulated to mindlessly doing meaningless tasks. I feel the more profound lesson from the Skinner Box is not that Points and Badges motivate people, but that unpredictable results stemming from Core Drive 7 can drive obsessive behavior. 

Glowing Choice (Game Technique #28)

Within Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity, the game element “Glowing Choice” (#28) is an often used example of how to lead players in the right direction by appealing to their curiosity (this is especially utilized in the Onboarding Phase).

Most players don’t enjoy reading a huge manual or watching a long video before beginning a game; players would rather have the option to jump right in and test things out- this is where the Glowing Choice comes into play. In many role-playing games, when a player is uncertain what the next Desired Action is, a specific computer character might be highlighted with a glowing exclamation point that prompts the player to engage with him/her.

Once engaged, the character will reveal the following quest or the next clue to help the player move forward in the game. The player now knows the next Desired Action.

Contrasted with the Desert Oasis game technique mentioned in the Core Drive 2 chapter where the designer highlights a Desired Action by clearing out everything surrounding it, the Glowing Choice technique is about making the Desired Action shine like a bright star in the midst of a complex environment.

You can apply this method with apps by placing a strong emphasis on a key feature that represents the Desired Action that users need to be guided towards. Many apps do this by having a question mark on top of the key feature, or an arrow that points directly to what they want their potential customers to focus on.

I always tell my clients, “Never allow your users to accidentally stumble upon a bad experience.” If users cannot figure out what to do within 4 seconds then they will become disengaged. If a user clicks on any button or tab and reaches a dead end, they are penalized for doing the Desired Action.

A great implementation of the Glowing Choice technique is seen in the game Candy Crush.

Like we discussed previously, if the app detects that you have not made a move within a few seconds, it will start to show you a possible action by having the option glow. Now any person who has spent some time on Candy Crush will know that following those actions will mostly likely lead you to failure, as they are almost never the optimal move. Some people wonder if these choices are there to purposely guide people into failure.

In reality, Candy Crush is not purposely trying to lead users to failure; they correctly recognize that having users move swiftly through the game even if this leads to a loss is far better than having them feel stuck and uncertain of what action to take. When a player loses, she plays again. When a player is stuck, she may very well leave the app and go check her email. The Glowing Choice helps keep the game flowing.

The key to good design is that users don’t need to think about committing the Desired Actions. In fact, users should have to think hard and decide to not take the Desired Action if they don’t want to do it. If there was a huge animated pointing arrow that tells you to click on a certain button within an app, the user can still choose to not click it, but her brain has to work harder to avoid it.

Once your customer clicks on the question mark or the arrow, the question mark should disappear. The players can then click on the next highlighted feature to find out what it does and why it helps them.

There are many successful apps and games that implement the Glowing Choice game technique to guide users through the Onboarding experience and the discerning designer should examine how they implement it.

Mystery Boxes (Game Technique #72)

One of the most common ways to utilize Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity is through reward structures. Instead of giving users Fixed-Actions Rewards where the steps to obtain them are well-understood- a strategy that focuses on Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession through the “Earned Lunch” Game Technique- you can build unpredictability into the experience by altering the context of how the reward is given or the nature of the reward itself.

In games, there are “loot” or “drops,” which are random rewards that appear once the player achieves a win-state such as opening a treasure box or defeating an enemy. Oftentimes, this unpredictable process is what drives players in the Endgame Phase. I call this technique Mystery Boxes or Random Rewards.

With random rewards, the participant receives an unknown reward by completing a required action. Using this technique recreates the excitement that children have on Christmas Eve. They see the gifts under the tree and know that they won’t find out what they are until Christmas morning. The anticipation of getting the gift, even though they have no idea what’s in the boxes, is part of what makes the experience so exciting.

One example of this technique can be found at holiday parties in the form of  the White Elephant gift exchange. Also known as the “Gift Swap”, this game provides a mechanism for distributing inexpensive or undesirable gifts (often from previous holiday seasons) among participants.

The exchange starts with each participant providing a wrapped gift for the gift pool, and then drawing (unpredictability in itself) a number to determine the order in which they will select a gift. The first person selects and opens a gift from the pool. The next participant can then either select from the pool of unopened gifts or “steal” the opened gift from the first participant, who then has to reselect a replacement gift from the pool.

The next player has the option to select from the pool or “steal” either gift from the previous players. This goes on until the last player selects the last gift or steals from one of the others, which causes the individual whose gift is stolen to open the last gift. Again, in this case, everyone knows that once they complete the game, a reward will be earned, but what the reward is can only be known at the end.

A second example of Random Rewards can be seen with the company Mystery Box Shop. Customers join the service via subscription and pay a monthly fee. Similar to Woot’s “Bag of Crap,” at the first of each month a package containing 5 to 10 “fabulous curiosities,” is shipped out to the customer.

The contents of each package follow the theme for that month. Recent themes include “Never Grow Up,” “Hallowawesome,” “Another World,” and “Old School.”

Promising to be cool, curious, odd, or even bizarre, each Mystery Box provides an element of curiosity. Consisting of a mixture of clothing, toys, gadgets, snacks, electronics, and who knows what, each delivery is like opening your presents on your birthday. It keeps customers coming back for more.

Easter Eggs (Game Technique #30)

Different to Mystery Boxes, Easter Eggs (or Sudden Rewards) are surprises that are given out without the user acknowledging it beforehand. In other words, where Mystery Boxes are unexpected rewards based on a certain expected trigger, Easter Eggs are rewards based on unexpected triggers.

Participants love the element of surprise and because these rewards are so unexpected, the added feelings of excitement and good luck make the experience truly enjoyable. Sudden rewards incentivize customers to keep coming back in the hopes that they can inadvertently feel the same excitement again.

Easter Eggs are effective in two ways: They get great word-of-mouth because everybody loves to share something exciting and unexpected that happened to them that day. They’ll tell their friends about what they got and their friends will want to participate in the hopes that they’ll get an Easter egg as well.

Easter Eggs also create speculation of what triggered it in the first place. If the Easter Egg seemed to be random, participants will wonder how they can replicate the experience in order to “game” the system. They will start to develop theories about how they won, and they will commit the assumed Desired Actions over and over again to either prove or disprove these theories.

A good example of an Easter Egg is the “Chase Picks up the Tab” program. Once enrolled in the program, whenever a Chase customer swipes their Chase credit cards (the Desired Action), there is a very small chance the customer will get a text from Chase that says (paraphrased), “Chase just picked up the tab! Your $5 will be credited back to your account. Have a nice day.” Though the reward dollar amount is not great, it compels consumers to regularly swipe with their Chase cards instead of other cards because customers want to see if they can “win” again this time. Oftentimes, users will also tell their friends about their win, which may compel them to sign-up to this “game”.

Rolling Rewards (Game Techniques #74)

Another type of reward context that is fueled by Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity is the Rolling Reward, or sometimes called the “Lottery”.

The key idea of rolling rewards is the rule that somebody has to win each period, and so as long as you “stay in the game” for long enough, the chances of you winning increases linearly.

In small settings, Rolling Reward designs are seen in forms such as “Employee of the Week” where employees work hard, hoping that one day they will be the one that earns that status and recognition (note: Mario Herger in his book, Enterprise Gamification, suggests that Employee-of-the-Week programs won’t work in countries and cultures that frown upon individual recognition).

Another form of Rolling Reward is when an employer or big client states, “After this project, one of you will get a free vacation to Maui for two weeks!” In fact, at most workplaces, the thought of being promoted one day is in itself a Rolling Reward – someone has to become the new Vice President: I hope its me.

On a larger scale Rolling Reward programs have low barriers to entry and the rewards are substantial (think state or national lotteries), but there’s a very slim chance to win, regardless of how long you spend playing the “game”.

Yes, individuals can increase their odds of winning by performing more of the Desired Action, such as purchasing additional tickets, or collecting additional entries but again, the larger the program, the more difficult the odds.

The reason why lotteries work so well is because our brains are incredibly bad at processing small percentages. We can’t conceptually understand the difference between “one in ten million” and “on in a hundred million.” We just register both odds as “a very small chance” without really comprehending that you could be winning the “one in ten million” prize ten times before you can win the “one in a hundred million” prize!

Robert Williams, a professor who studies lotteries at the University of Lethbridge states, “we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.”

And as a result, as long as there is some chance, people are willing to invest small amounts of money to obtain a gigantic reward.

Rolling rewards work on a number of levels. For starters, because they have moderately low barriers to entry, they can easily attract a large number of participants. Furthermore, if a participant actually wins, they may easily become a fan for life, simply because they feel that they were chosen to win. Like described before, this is the “calling” part of Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling.

Core Drive 7: The Bigger Picture

Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity is a powerful black hat core drive that is intrinsically thrilling. For any engagement design, it is productive to ask yourself, “Is there any way to add a little bit of randomness and chance to the process?” By using techniques that generate curiosity, companies can drive their customers to engage with their product and with techniques that design for unpredictability, companies can retain these customers for much longer into the Endgame Phase.

Working with White Hat Core Drives, Core Drive 7 is a great way to inspire Epic Meaning & Calling, complement Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, and improve and increase the values of Ownership & Possession. Working with other Black Hat Core Drives, Unpredictability & Curiosity matched with Scarcity & Impatience, creates obsessive and addictive behaviors, while generating the negative emotions of fear and worry if properly matched with Core Drive 8: Loss & 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.)

Driving Obsessive Behavior with Scarcity & Impatience

Scarcity and Impatience is the sixth core drive of the Octalysis Framework, and is the drive that motivates us simply because we are either unable to obtain something immediately, or because there is great difficulty in obtaining it.

We have a naturally tendency to want things we can’t have. If a bowl of grapes were plainly on the table, you may not care about those grapes; but if they were on a shelf just beyond your reach, you will likely be thinking about the grapes regularly: “Are they sweet? Can I have them? When I can I have them?”

Personally, Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience is the Core Drive that intrigues me the most, and is also the last Core Drive I learned about. Its fascination lies in the fact that it is completely unintuitive, irrational and emotionally difficult to utilize.

This post is to explore this Black Hat/Left Brain Core Drive, understand its powers, and some game techniques that harness it towards behavioral change.

The Lure of being Exclusively Pointless

South Park, a popular American animated sitcom created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, has many lessons to teach us about human behavior, especially the irrational ones (once you get pass the potty-mouth cussing and unnecessary gory scenes).

In one of the episodes, Cartman joins NAMBLA, the controversial main character Eric Cartman decided that he was too mature for his other fourth grade friends, and went online to find adult friends that are more mature. He ends up being recruited to the organization called NAMBLA, short for North American Man/Boy Love Association (which in fact, is a real organization). The “mature” members of NAMBLA then asked Cartman to bring all his friends to a party they are hosting in his honor.

Not knowing the true nature of what he is getting himself into, he sent out invitations to all his classmates besides his usual close friends, Stan Marsh and Kyle Broflovski. He then starts to brag to them about how he is going to his mature grown-up friends party but he’s not inviting them. The below conversation is a classic that speaks to our Core Drives.

Stan: We don’t want to go to some stupid adult meeting anyway!
Cartman: Well that’s nice, cause you can’t go!
Kyle: We don’t want to go!
Cartman: You can’t go!
Kyle: We don’t want to go!
Cartman No. You can’t go! Hey, Clyde, Butters, check this out! [Leaves]
Stan: Dude, maybe we do need to start being more mature.
Kyle: yea, I guess we need try to get into that club too.

What you see here is a classic example of scarcity through exclusivity. Even though Stan and Kyle were genuine when they said they weren’t interested in joining some adult party, when reinforced in the face that they don’t qualify for the party, they developed a natural sense of motivation towards the party, even though nothing about the party itself became more appealing.

The concept of exclusivity was taken to a whole new level in another episode titled Cartmanland, In this episode, Cartman inherits $1 Millions from his deceased grandmother, and decides to use almost all of it to buy a struggling theme park just to entertain himself without being stuck in lines.

Instead of trying to improve its business, Cartman makes a full 38-second TV commercial to show how amazingly fun “Cartmanland” is and emphasizes that no one besides him can enjoy it. “So much fun in Cartmanland, but you can’t come!” is the catchy slogan.

After realizing he needs more money to hire a security guard to keep his friends out, Cartman starts to accept two customers a day to pay the security guard. Then he starts to realize that he needs pay for more things such as maintenance, utilities, and other operations, so he started to open it up to three, four, tens, and then hundreds of people everyday.

Since people all saw how they couldn’t get into Cartmanland, when they learned that it is starting to accept more people, they rushed to get in.

Eventually, everyone wanted to go to Cartmanland and it went from a near-bankrupted theme park into one of the most popular ones ever. Experts within the episode even called the “You Can’t Come!” campaign to be a brilliant marketing ploy by the genius millionaire Eric Cartman.

Unfortunately, with more people in his precious park, Eric Cartman became miserable and eventually sold the park back to the original owners, and then lost his money afterwards.

Even though these are exaggerated examples, in this post, you will see that our brains naturally have a tendency to pursue things just because they are exclusive.

To seem more South Park Gamification examples , check out Top 10 Gamification Lessons learned from South Park.

On the other side of popular media, in the movie Up in the Air, Protagonist Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney, is a corporate “downsizer” that flies all over the place to help companies lay off employees. In a conversation with the young and ambitious status-quo disruptor Natalie Keene, played by Anna Kendrick, Bingham gives us a lesson about the value of scarcity, status, rewards, and exclusivity, as he talks about his obsession with airline miles.

Ryan Bingham: I don’t spend a nickel, if I can help it, unless it somehow profits my mileage account.
Natalie Keener: So, what are you saving up for? Hawaii? South of France?
Ryan Bingham: It’s not like that. The miles are the goal.
Natalie Keener: That’s it? You’re saving just to save?
Ryan Bingham: Let’s just say that I have a number in mind and I haven’t hit it yet.
Natalie Keener: That’s a little abstract. What’s the target?
Ryan Bingham: I’d rather not…
Natalie Keener: Is it a secret target?
Ryan Bingham: It’s ten million miles.
Natalie Keener: Okay. Isn’t ten million just a number?
Ryan Bingham: Pi’s just a number.
Natalie Keener: Well, we all need a hobby. No, I- I- I don’t mean to belittle your collection. I get it. It sounds cool.
Ryan Bingham: I’d be the seventh person to do it. More people have walked on the moon.
Natalie Keener: Do they throw you a parade?
Ryan Bingham: You get lifetime executive status. You get to meet the chief pilot, Maynard Finch.
Natalie Keener: Wow.
Ryan Bingham: And they put your name on the side of a plane.
Natalie Keener: Men get such hardons from putting their names on things. You guys don’t grow up. It’s like you need to pee on everything.

Beyond the collection, status, and achievement (Core Drives 2, 4, and 5), one thing that was very important for Ryan was that “I’d be the seventh person to do it. More people have walked on the moon.” This shows that because it’s something that he (along with billions of others) couldn’t get right now, he valued obtaining it more. It was simply more appealing because of how exclusive that was.

Persuasively Inconvenient

As the above example shows, our brains naturally and intuitively seek things that are scarce, unavailable, or fading in availability.

Oren Klaff is a professional pitcher and fundraiser who claims to close deals through a systematic way he calls neuroeconomics, a craft that combines neuroscience and economics, digging deep into our psychology, appealing to what he calls the croc brain, and utilizing various Core Drives such as CD5: Social Influence & Relatedness, CD6: Scarcity & Impatience, CD7: Unpredictability, and CD8: Loss & Avoidance (the discerning Octalyst may identify that there is a heavy focus of Black Hat Core Drives here. We will explore why sales and closing deals mostly appeals to Black Hat Core Drives, while workplace motivation mostly appeals to White Hat Core Drives in other posts).

In Klaff’s book Pitch Anything, he explains the concept of Prizing, and how it ties into three fundamental behaviors from our croc brains:

1.      We chase that which moves away from us
2.      We want what we cannot have
3.      We only place value on things that are difficult to obtain

He claims that instead of ABS – always be selling, salespeople should practice ABL – always be leaving. If you are always leaving the discussions, it means that you are not desperate, are highly sought after, and do not depend on this deal. You are the Prize. Klaff claims that, when you do that, money will flow in as the ultimate commodity to win that Prize.

Through his methods, Klaff has raised over $450 Million and claims to continue so at a rate of $2 Million a week.

It is oddly true that often times, as we place inconveniences on something, it becomes more valuable in our minds. In Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, the author Robert Cialdini shares how Colleen Szot revolutionized her infomercials by simply changing the call-to-action line from “Operators are waiting, please call now,” to, “If operators are busy, please call again.”

Why would this be? In the first case, viewers can imagine operators sitting around, waiting to answer calls and take orders for products that may be of marginal value. In the second case viewers will more likely perceive that the operators will be struggling to answer a flood of calls and keeping up with the demand on orders.

Even though this message suggests an inconvenience to buy a product, the perceived scarcity of the viewers is enough to get people motivated enough to quickly make a call before the product runs out.

Oren Klaff also brings up another example in Pitch Anything where BMW released a special-edition M3 that required the buyer to sign a contract promising to keep it clean and take care of the special paint. Without this promise in writing, they won’t even allow you to buy the car! In this case, BMW is prizing itself so that the buyer would believe it is a special and exclusive privilege to drive the car, even though the buyer has all the money available.

Maybe that’s why the hard-to-get strategy is so prevalent in modern society conversations. It’s not just a way to show personality, but it actually drives real results as it inspires people to chase harder.

Gamification Techniques in Scarcity and Impatience

Magnetic Caps (Game Technique #68)

Continue reading The 8 Core Drives of Gamification #6: Scarcity & Impatience

(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.

Breaking Down User Experience Further

Many companies design their product or services as one big experience. That kind of makes sense – after all it is one product.

However, when it comes to user engagement, I believe that’s a big mistake. When it comes to motivation, the reason why you are using a product on day one is often very different from the reason why you are using the product on day 100 – the goal you are trying to fulfill are different, and even the features you see are different!

Most people become involved with a game or a product, not as a single encapsulated event, but through a series of stages where they grow to understand it better. The user experience will develop gradually as familiarity with features and structure is gained. At the same time, an individual’s perception may change as they develop a different perspective through each stage.

Another way of looking at this is to view it as a user’s journey through evolving phases of product perception or experience. With each phase the product appears to be different – in essence, a unique, different product. We can best describe the process in terms of four distinct phases, represented by the 4 Experience Phases of Gamification – the core principles within Level 2 Octalysis.

The 4 Experience Phases of Gamification are Discovery, Onboarding, Scaffolding, and Endgame.

The Discovery Phase is essential, for it is the reason WHY people even want to start, or at least investigate a product or service. It is the ATTITUDE towards a product during the initial awareness stage.

The Discovery Phase starts off when people hear about the product and ends when people signup to use it.

Differences to other Literature

As the first experience phase in Octalysis Gamification, Discovery may seem to differ from other gamification and game design literature out there. With Human-Focused Design (Octalysis) the first phase of a user’s journey is to become aware of the journey.

In Kevin Werbach’s framework, the initial phase of a system is “Identity,” which is the initiation of an identity within the game. This could involve the creation of an account, signing on for a service, and choosing your profile type – basically the “Who You Are.” From there he moves on to the second phase, Onboarding (In Amy Jo Kim’s three phase system, the player experience starts off with Onboarding).

My view is that “Identity” would actually qualify as part of Onboarding, as when you “Onboard” someone, you have them figure out what the game is and where they stand in the game. However, in my view point, a real experience towards a product or service starts well before you buy the product or sign up for the service (or create your identity).

Your experience towards a product or service starts when you first hear about it, hence the Discovery Phase.

The Core of Marketing Gamification

Continue reading 4 Experience Phases in Gamification – Phase 1: The Discovery Phase