*New to Gamification? Check out my post What is Gamification & the Gamification Framework: Octalysis*
Click here to see all videos in this Series
Episode 5 Gamification Notes:
- The four Experience Phases of a game.
- Most people treat interacting with a product as one experience.
- The product is good, bad, easy to use, funny.
- You can look at your product as 4 different products
- 1st day of LinkedIn is very different from other days of linkedin
- A good “human focused” designer needs to optimize one product to appeal to all these phases.
- If a product attracts people at the beginning, but as time goes by becomes boring and uninspiring…
- that’s not very useful.
- Similarly, if a game offers an amazing experience after 20 hours of play, but before that its a grinding and boring experience…
- that’s not very useful either.
- Note that the 4 Phases in Octalysis is a little similar to Prof Werbatch’s theory, as I did have the honor to watch his online lectures in coursera. But I made a few changes based on my experience as a gamer.
The first experience phase of a game is Discovery
- This is when people first discover your product or service.
- How did they find it? Was it from a friend? Through the news? Or a clever marketing campaign that you devised?
- Gamifying the discovery phase is a great way to improve your brand name, sign ups, and conversions.
Phase 2 of a Gamer’s experience is Onboarding
- This is when you train them to become familiar with the rules of the game, options, mechanics, and the win state.
- This is what most people focus on because everyone thinks once a customer uses their product for sometime, they would all fall in love with it.
- Mastering the Onboarding Process can get your users to start participate in your game with excitement and interest.
The 3rd experience phase of a game is Scaffolding.
- Scaffolding is a term that Professor Werbach uses to describe the third phase.
- I tend to like the term “mid game” better, mostly from my chess background
- (i also used to be a chess coach)
- But I think I will comply to authority and use his term.
- It sounds fancier too…
- “Now is the time for Scaffolding!”
- Anyhow, scaffolding is the phase where players use all the rules and options they learned during onboarding to try to achieve the win-state as many times as possible.
- This is supposedly where the most “fun” should happen.
- Once you have a well designed win state in scaffolding that appeals to the 8 Core Drives of Octalysis,
- you will start to see player engagement and motivation
- Which of course, helps you with you business metrics.
The fourth and FINAL experience phase of a game is the Endgame
- This is when players have done everything there is to do at least once and are starting to see more repetitive actions to get to the win-state.
- In this phase, if the designer didn’t create a good endgame, people easily get bored and quit the game.
- But a good endgame can be achieved through evergreen mechanics as well as creating a system where the game producers can easily add new content in a system consistently.
- if you mastered the endgame, you will create a lot of contributors, evangelists, and longterm customers.
This concludes this episode. Next episode we will talk about how to combine everything we have learned up to this point and apply Octalysis to the 4 Experience Phases.
After that, you will become a Level One Octalysis Gamifier.
