Readalong: Reality is Broken, Ch 12 – Missions Impossible
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
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 Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Summary
Experimental games like The Extraordinaries, Groundcrew, and Lost Joules give players the chance to experience epic wins in their daily lives.
Compared with games, reality is unambitious.
Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together.
Analysis
The Extraordinaries was a great example of a micro-task on-demand app for non-profits. It hasn’t taken off since its launch in 2009, though the company did raise a seed round of funding in 2011.
My guess is that Kickstarter and Patreon are filling this void.
Groundcrew was an early version of Fiverr or TaskRabbit for the real world. Players can ask for help in the real world, even for something as basic as a latte, and another player can bring it to her.
I agree with McGonigal’s focus on designing social participation tasks as well as human intelligence tasks.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk seems to have grown into the lasting and scalable version for human intelligence tasks.
Lost Joules doesn’t seem to have a successor, except that many smart environmental devices come equipped with their own usage data interfaces (think Nest).
Overall, McGonigal was right about the scalability of seemingly impossible missions, but some areas, like climate change, global economic crises, food insecurity, geopolitical instability, and rising rates of depression are still open to gameful design at a large scale social level.
One quip I have with this chapter is its focus on the large scale. I doubt McGonigal intends to suggest that small wins in our daily social lives don’t matter.
But by focusing only on the large scale she does suggest that many things need to be bigger and better to draw our motivational attention.
In my personal life, there are many small things I do to contribute to progress on a social level in my community (like small talk, volunteerism).
Through the Octalysis Framework, these “missions impossible” connect directly to Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling — the drive to be part of something bigger than yourself. When people believe their participation matters to a cause greater than their own interests, they push through obstacles that would otherwise stop them. The social participation tasks McGonigal describes also tap into Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, where working alongside others toward a shared goal amplifies motivation.
What do you think?
What social movements could benefit from a more focused behavioral design?
Let me know in the comments or on Octalysis Prime‘s community.
Related Reading
- Readalong: Reality is Broken, Ch 13 — Collaboration Superpowers
- Readalong: Reality is Broken, Ch 11 — The Engagement Economy
- Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling
- The Octalysis Framework
- Five Examples of Gamified Crowdsourcing
- Books by Yu-kai Chou
This continues the Readalong by Erik van Mechelen of Jane McGonigal’s ‘Reality is Broken’ with insights from Yu-kai Chou’s Octalysis Framework. For in-depth discussions of this book and others, join Octalysis Prime.
tl;dr We need to create more moments and chances for epic wins.