Identity and Consistency: forces behind Ownership & Possession

Identity

(Below is a manuscript snippet of my book, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. Please subscribe to the mailing list on the right to order the book when it launches. This post may be moved into a Premium Area after a certain period of time).

The power of our past and our identities

Another interesting effect of Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession is that it also drives us to value our own identities and become more consistent towards our past. After all, there are rarely things we hold more closely than our values, characters, and past commitments.

In fact, science has shown that the longer we live, the more attached we become to our existing beliefs, preferences, methodologies, and even our own names (much of the below research can be found in the book Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive.)

Your Name is Your Game

A surprising study done by social psychologist Brett Pelham discovered that people are much more likely to choose careers that sound similar to their own names. To test this idea, Pelham looked up names that sounded like the word “dentist,” such as Dennis. According to the census data, the name Dennis was the 40th most common male first name in the U.S., while Jerry and Walter were the 39th and 41st, respectively.

Pelham then searched the national directory of the American Dental Association for dentists that have these three first names. It turns out, 257 dentists were named Walter, while 270 dentists were named Jerry, fairly consistent to the statistical base rate. However, there turns out to be 482 dentists named Dennis, which is close to eighty percent higher than the normal base rate of other names.

This means that, if you happen to be named Dennis, you have an eighty percent higher chance of becoming a dentist compared to if you were named something different.

Similarly, Pelham found that names starting with “Geo” such as “George” or “Geoffrey” are disproportionately likely to become researches in the geosciences; hardware store owners are eighty percent more likely to have names that start with the letter “H” than the letter “R,” but roofers are seventy percent more likely to have names with the letter “R” than the letter H.”

Your Name Affects your Location

Moreover, people tend to move to places that are similar to their own names too. People who move to Florida are disproportionately likely to be named Florence, while people who move to Louisiana are skewed towards being named Louise.

Mr. Washington is also much more likely to live on Washington Street than Mr. Jefferson. On that note, I’m glad that I have never considered a career in the medical profession, or else I might end up becoming an Urologist!

Even though no one would recognize or admit that their names played any role at all in determining these important life choices (studies have even shown that we prefer brands and even spouses that remind us of our own name, our attachment to our own identities become so strong that anything connected to that identity becomes desirable to us. It has to be good because, well, it reminds me of me!

The Endowment Effect: forces Behind Ownership & Possession

Endowment Effect

(Below is a manuscript snippet of my book, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. Please subscribe to the mailing list on the right to order the book when it launches. This post may be moved into a Premium Area after a certain period of time).

Endowment Effect – Forces behind Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession

There is quite a bit of scientific research towards how our psychology changes when we believe we own something, which is the basis of Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession in the Octalysis Framework. Much of it is summed up into what Academics call the Endowment Effect.

In his book Thinking: Fast and Slow, Economics Nobel Prize Laureate Daniel Kahneman describes how a certain well-respected academic and wine lover becomes very reluctant to sell a bottle of wine from his collection for $100, but would also not pay more than $35 for a wine of similar quality.

This made very little economic sense because the same wine should hold the exact same value in a person’s mind, and therefore the price to buy and sell should be roughly the same, deducting transaction costs. What we see here is that when a person starts to own something, he immediately places more value on that item compared to others who don’t own it yet.

Endowment Effect in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational

Researchers Dan Ariely and Ziv Carmon took this concept further and decided to test it on Duke University students who were crazed about watching basketball matches against other schools. After a semester’s worth of camping in small tents and checking in regularly whenever a air horn sounded, students who camped in front of the line were still only given a lottery number towards obtaining the actual basketball tickets. After the lottery results came out, some students became ticket owners, while others did not.

The Researchers decided to call up the students who won the ticket lottery and asked what was an acceptable price they would sell the ticket for, while asking the non-winners what was a price they would be willing to pay in order to get a ticket. It turned out, the average student who didn’t win the lottery (but gave the exact same amount of sweat and labor towards getting one) were willing to pay $170 to buy the ticket. On the other hand, can you guess what the average ticket owner was willing to sell it for?

The average ticket owner, whose only merit was that they were lucky enough to win the lottery, demanded $2,400 on average for their tickets. That is fourteen times more than the average buyer price. Clearly, the value of these tickets in the students’ head went through drastic changes the moment they became owners.

In a more lab-like example, Researcher Jack Knetsch asked two classes to fill out some questionnaires while displaying a promised reward in front of the students for the entire duration of the questionnaires. One group was promised an expensive pen, while the other group was promised a bar of swiss chocolate. After both sides have earned their rewards, they were allowed to trade their rewards with the other group. Only 10% of the participants wanted to trade their rewards for the other group’s rewards, showing that most of them valued their own rewards simply because they already owned the rewards.

Endowment Effect: Ownership is what we imagine

James Heyman, Yesim Orhun, and Dan Ariely further showed that the Endowment Effect also comes in effect when we just imagine ourselves owning something. They saw that within auction sites, the longer people remained the top bidder (which means they have imagined themselves as the official owner for longer), the more aggressively they would bid when someone outbids them. That imagined ownership motivates people to fight for their divine rights towards that item they don’t own yet.

This is why advertisers often try to get consumers to imagine themselves owning the promoted products by asking consumers to think about what they would do with those products. Also, trial promotions and money-back guarantees work the same way by letting consumers own the product first without any friction. Since we now know that the value of something becomes much higher after it is in our possession, consumers often feel reluctant to return that product for their money back afterwards.

Endowment Effect: For Sale Not For Use

One caveat to the Endowment Effect is that, if the person owns something as a token “for exchange,” they do not feel attached to the item in a biased way. If a merchant owns hundreds of shoes in the hopes of exchanging them for money, he obviously does not feel that sense of attachment when someone buys the product. Similarly, when consumers part ways with their money to buy these shoes, they also are not pulled back by the Endowment Effect (unless they are already in financial difficulty).

Points, Badges, and Leaderboards: The Gamification Fallacy

Points Badges and Leaderboard- Image of Boy Scout Merit Badges

(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)

A Story about Social Media

The landscape of gamification development must be understood in historical context to see why gamification mechanics themselves don’t ultimately lead to good design.

Let’s take a look at social media.

Due to the proliferation of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, the versatile term “social media” overtook “social networking” in 2007 and became a new buzzword.

Image showing the rising use of the term social media

Many forward thinking tech enthusiasts and startups fully embraced this new disruptive paradigm and its wide applications in content publishing, communications, and information sharing. Corporations whose business models truly embraced “innovation” began to cautiously explore this new arena outside of simply tossing the term around in meetings.

When enough interest and excitement in an industry hits critical mass, there will always be people and agencies that self-proclaim as experts to capitalize on the buzzing trend. It almost doesn’t matter what the new buzzword is – SEO, SaaS, Cloud- the subjects are so new that while no one can truly be an expert, everyone is in the running to be considered one.

And so, these “experts” saw the growth in “social media” platforms and services as heralding the dawn of a new era in technology, business, and culture. They made sure to demonstrate the importance of its influence through models proving the virality of user-shared brand content and by collecting and promoting case studies showing how companies became huge successes due to their social media savviness. The pitch is very inspiring and logical.

Unfortunately, being an “expert” only went that far- when companies actually hired these social media experts to run their marketing campaigns, they found that all they could do was create Twitter profiles and Facebook fan pages (I’ve even seen services that charge $600 just to create these accounts). Not much substance to truly grasp the utilities of this new trend.

Everyone is now a publisher and many would argue that this is a good thing. However there is an important distinction to be made: the real question isn’t how often we publish, it’s what to publish? That was still a mystery in the early days of the social media evolution. For content, the “experts” would ask the company to send them updates “worthy” for posting and every once in a while they might even provide some customer support using the company’s Twitter accounts or share pictures on their Facebook fan page. But overall, the industry felt disillusioned by this new fad, as the miracle they were expecting in ROI wasn’t being realized.

What most people didn’t recognize then was that social media is much deeper than simply possessing and posting on profile accounts. That’s just the outer shell of its influence and impact. We now know today that great social media campaigns focus on how to create value for the audience by sharing information that is insightful and engaging; has a personal voice; engages and sincerely interacts with each potential customer; and much, much more.

In essence, the beauty of social media was in how you designed and implemented a campaign, not in the bells and whistles you’ve used. It was the informal and formal dialogue you had with your community that ultimately taps into the platform’s unique possibilities.

Knowledge of good social media principles doesn’t necessarily mean someone can execute them correctly. Take for example popularity. Everyone knows how to be “popular” – be outgoing, funny, confident, and compassionate, etc. – but when you look around your community or network, you find that there are still only a few people who are truly “popular”. Helping a brand become popular is exactly what true social media experts would be doing if both principles and execution were aligned.

Fortunately, because social media does have the power to make a company radically successful (and there are still dozens of successful social media case studies coming out on a monthly basis) the trend stuck around. In 2014, most companies now subscribe to the belief of, “If your company doesn’t have a social strategy, it will become irrelevant.”

What does this have to do with gamification?

The early days of social media mirrors the gamification industry today.

Continue reading Points, Badges, and Leaderboards: The Gamification Fallacy

MindTime: A Player Type Framework

A map of MindTime's world of thinking

In my centerpiece Octalysis Framework post, I demonstrate how Richard Bartle’s 4 Player Types are incorporated within a Level 3 Octalysis framework by considering which Core Drives are pushing different types of people through the 4 Experiences Phases.

What was not made clear is that I used Richard Bartle’s 4 Player Types as a demonstration; other player personas can be utilized in place of Bartle’s 4 player types such as: Male/Female, Engineers/Marketers, Loyal Fans/Curiousios/Nonchalants, etc. Andrzej Marczewski and Amy Jo Kim have done excellent work around how to design better experiences for target audiences.

In the end, Level 3 Octalysis seeks to analyze and understand how to best design for different types of people within the gamification context.

In this post, we introduce MindTime, a player type framework to help gamification practitioners better design for their target audience.

Continue reading MindTime: A Player Type Framework

Guest Report: Employee Engagement can be boosted with Gamification

employee-engagement-survey-blog-image

Guest Report Author Bio

TechnologyAdvice is a market leader in business technology recommendations. The company provides free and unbiased research and analysis of IT options to help businesses of all sizes find the solutions that best fit their specific technology needs.

Most office workers think digital engagement would boost performance

Survey shows majority of employees would welcome game elements in daily tasks

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Sept. 10, 2014) — Employee engagement is one of the biggest challenges in the business world, yet recent numbers show many companies are missing opportunities to increase worker motivation.

A survey conducted by TechnologyAdvice revealed that more than 70 percent of office employees feel digital engagement software would help them perform better at work. In addition, 54 percent of respondents say they would be more likely to perform a task if it incorporated game elements. Despite these preferences, more than two-thirds of those polled say their company is not using any type of digital engagement platform.

“The majority of office workers believe that engagement programs and the introduction of game elements would help them at work,” said TechnologyAdvice Content Manager Zach Watson, who authored the study. “While the buzz around gamification in the business world appears to have reached its peak, adoption rates remain relatively low. Engagement can be a subjective term with room for interpretation, but it’s clear from our data that better recognizing workers for their contributions, making repetitive work more inviting, and providing a visual record of workplace progress are all major opportunities for current businesses to improve engagement with employees.”

One reason for low adoption rates could be the need for greater consideration of employee personalities and job functions when deploying employee engagement software. Fifty-five percent of respondents prefer to work in a predominantly collaborative environment, including more than 60 percent of those who work in customer service. However, office employees who work in sales prefer a far more competitive environment.

Age is also a key consideration for digital engagement platforms and game elements. Ninety percent of 18-24 year olds and more than 80 percent of 25-34 year olds surveyed believe an engagement program would help them at work. Meanwhile, 42 percent of 45-54 year olds and more than half of 55-64 year olds in the survey do not feel they would benefit from an engagement program.

Wellness programs are the most popular use case, with nearly 30 percent of respondents identifying a health and fitness platform as their most preferred engagement strategy. A points-based rewards system (24.7 percent) and a progress tracking system (17.4 percent) are the next two preferences for participation, ahead of both internal social networks and an office leaderboard ranking system.

The survey was conducted through a random sample of 398 office workers whose main job functions are in marketing, customer service, or sales. The full study and more information on its methodology are available here.

Success! The First Advanced Octalysis Gamification Design Workshop

Yu-kai’s Advanced Octalysis Gamification Design Workshop

(Many thanks to Kevin Smith/Megan Bell The VAULT for providing a special venue for the first-ever Octalysis Workshop!)

A beautiful Saturday morning in the City by the Bay and the first all day workshop on Octalysis is about to begin.  The Chou Force team is prepping the meeting room at The VAULT Incubator in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District.  The venue provides a comfortable, cozy environment for the workshop participants, conducive to learning, the exchange of ideas, and friendly interaction.

Testimonials from awesome attendees

Soon the workshop attendees start to arrive and exchange greetings.  Everyone enjoys the breakfast items and refreshments in anticipation of a great day of learning and interaction.

I purposely decided not to do the typical “breakfast pastries” that I see at every event, but went with Asian-styled cakes of many sorts, followed by awesome SpiceKit wraps for lunch (my favorite in San Francisco).

Each participant selects their preferred seating at a table, on a sofa, or even in a bean bag chair for extra-comfort.  After some final technical preparations, my Advanced Octalysis Gamification Design Workshop starts shortly after 9:30 AM. Continue reading Success! The First Advanced Octalysis Gamification Design Workshop

Why Gaming is Good For You

While gamification and gaming aren’t mutually exclusive, they certainly aren’t disconnected either.

Researchers have been exploring how games impact our brain development and influence everything from our social behavior to our emotional health. What they’ve uncovered is astonishing.

For a quick look at why gaming is good for you, check out the infographic below (who doesn’t love a good infographic?)

As affirmative as this infographic is, the public discourse around the negative impacts of gaming continue to garner a lot of attention in the media.

Check out my recent article for a deeper look at the controversy surrounding violent video games.

Why Gaming is Good for You

Why Gaming is Good for You- an infographic from Frugal Dad
Why Gaming is Good for You- an infographic from Frugal Dad

Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics