Beginner’s Guide to Gamification (10 of 90): Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback

What makes LEGO, Minecraft, and Plants vs. Zombies endlessly replayable — even without new content? They all tap into Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, arguably the most powerful (and hardest to implement) motivation driver in the Octalysis Framework. In this episode of the Beginner’s Guide to Gamification, Yu-kai Chou breaks down how creative autonomy drives long-term engagement, and why most products fail to harness it.

About the Creator of the Octalysis Framework

Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.

Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.

His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.

What Is Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback?

Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is the third Core Drive in the Octalysis Framework. It is the drive that makes us feel engaged when we can use our own creativity and immediately see the outcome, allowing us to try again and again to reach an ideal result.

A classic example is LEGO. You give people basic blocks, and there are infinite ways to put them together. The experience can entertain people for an indefinite amount of time without the content ever getting old.

This happens because people are naturally creative beings. We like to imagine, invent, and create. Both the process and the outcome bring us happiness.

(Click here to view all the Video Gamification Episodes)

Games That Master Empowerment of Creativity

Think about games like Minecraft and Second Life. These games are engaging because they allow you to create your own world, your shelter, and even your own looks. The creative freedom is the product itself.

Draw Something: A Lesson in Creativity and System Abuse

Draw Something was fun for a long time because it allowed both sides to use their creativity and see immediate results.

The reason it eventually dropped out was twofold: lack of fresh content (or challenges), and players gaming the system by simply writing the correct word instead of drawing. That’s a crucial gamification lesson. When a system is “gamable,” it devalues the experience of those who play honestly and demoralizes the entire player base.

Plants vs. Zombies: Creative Problem-Solving

Plants vs. Zombies, like any “tower-defense” game, is about utilizing current resources and “plants” to solve a puzzle of zombie attacks. This allows players to use their creativity to develop different solutions to the same problem, making it fun to engage with over the long term.

FarmVille: Art from Farming

In FarmVille, one of the best evergreen mechanics was the ability to let users make art with their farms. Even a simple farming game becomes endlessly engaging when players can express themselves creatively.

Diablo III: Endgame Creativity Through Optimization

In the RPG game Diablo III, the Onboarding and Scaffolding Phases rely heavily on Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning & Calling), Core Drive 2 (Development & Accomplishment), Core Drive 5 (Social Pressure & Envy), and Core Drive 6 (Scarcity & Impatience).

But during the Endgame stage, Core Drive 3 (along with Core Drive 4 and Core Drive 8) becomes dominant.

Once a player reaches a high level, they constantly think up new ways to play the game better: matching different skill combos, passive skills, boosters, and gear to create the ultimate build for increasing DPS (damage per second), tanking, life leech sustainability, or minion strength.

That process drives many players to pull out Excel spreadsheets to calculate the optimal combination of everything, try it out, and adjust accordingly. Yes — there is a dedicated community of gamers online who use Excel spreadsheets to play games better.

When a game or product can get users to voluntarily open Excel and figure out how to optimize their performance, I’d say it does this Core Drive pretty successfully.

Why Core Drive 3 Is the Hardest to Implement

Even though Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback can be the most powerful Core Drive, it is the hardest to implement into a company product, primarily because it involves attention and commitment.

Most people these days have short attention spans, and unless you design your Discovery and Onboarding phases well, people will not want to commit their attention long enough for Core Drive 3 to kick in.

Other gamification experts like Sebastian Deterding (and Jane McGonigal) have argued that gamification does not nearly reach its promise, and they prefer terms like “Gameful Design” as an ascended form of gamification. However, the examples they list (relating to fun, learning, mastery, and problem-solving) mostly emphasize Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. As mentioned, that is the hardest Core Drive to implement correctly.

Real-World Applications of Creative Empowerment

Foldit: Solving a 15-Year Science Problem in 10 Days

Some great examples happen in the crowdsourcing space, where a large group of people with diverse backgrounds solve one problem together.

My favorite has been Foldit, where a 15-year AIDS-related protein structure problem was solved within 10 days by gamers using creative problem-solving.

DIY.org: Kids Learning Through Creation

DIY.org gets kids to learn by empowering them to do and create many things. The platform channels Core Drive 3 by making the learning process itself an act of creation.

Workplace Empowerment

Even in the workplace, when you empower your workers to use their creativity and see feedback quickly, you get engaged workers.

Many corporate workers have told me about wanting to become entrepreneurs simply because it’s frustrating to wait 10 months for feedback on their ideas as proposals crawl through bureaucracy.

Google’s 20% time was a famous example. It allowed employees to express their creativity through side projects and see results quickly. That’s Core Drive 3 in action within a corporate environment.

Design Principles: Flow and Boosters

When designing for Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, there are a few key principles to keep in mind:

Maintain Flow

Flow requires a balance between the learning curve and the challenge. If something is too hard, players withdraw or get anxiety. If it is too easy, players get bored and leave. A good gamification designer needs to make sure the flow state for Core Drive 3 is well-calibrated to maximize engagement.

Use Boosters (Game Technique #31)

A good way to incorporate Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback into a design is through what I call Boosters (#31): things that make progress easier.

Boosters are effective because players now have to plan what type of boosters to obtain through what activities. This planning itself is a creative exercise.

For example, when users are accumulating “points” on a site, but the site also offers badges, trophies, or “knowledge scores” that can supercharge points acquisition, users start planning how to obtain the right badges and trophies to fulfill their objectives more efficiently. The meta-game becomes as engaging as the main game.

Conclusion on Core Drive 3

It’s always good to incorporate as many Core Drives into a design as possible. Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is particularly powerful because it gets users to discover their creative side, inspires people, and can become an evergreen mechanic that keeps users engaged for long periods of time.

If you can get your users to voluntarily think, plan, experiment, and iterate, you’ve built something with lasting engagement. That’s the promise of Core Drive 3.

Episode Navigation

← Episode 9: Development & Accomplishment | All Episodes | Episode 11: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback (Part II) →

Related Reading

• The Complete Octalysis Framework
• Beginner’s Guide (9 of 90): Development & Accomplishment
• Beginner’s Guide (11 of 90): Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback (Part II)
• Beginner’s Guide (8 of 90): Epic Meaning & Calling
• How to Reach Flow within the Octalysis Framework
• Boosters: The Game Design Technique That Completes the Engagement Loop

WOULD YOU LIKE YU-KAI CHOU TO WORK WITH YOUR ORGANIZATION?