Gamification

Playfulness, Seriousness and Gamification

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1197684 36768950 Playfulness Seriousness and Gamification

People want gamification to mean certain things to them. They want to take the word and try to bend into whatever they think will sell their next big idea to someone. This tends to lead to people arguing about what it actually is and what constitutes a gamified product. Two such ideas seem to be Playful design and Serious games. Some think that they are gamification, others that they have no place near the word. Personally, I think we should stop trying so hard to define a made up word and just start learning what we can from the people who use it!

Let’s Get Playful

So what is playful design? For me it is taking something that is intrinsically boring and trying to make it a little more fun. I saw a lovely example of this from Playgen. They showed a registration form that was mandatory. Now, I don’t know about you, but I hate filling in forms. Their approach was to try to make the form an interactive experience, a game if you will. Rather than ticking a box to select gender, you had to choose between two avatars. Steps were done in a wizard style, so you were not just given a page of text boxes. Each step was colourful and fun to look at. Once you had finished, your digital self was “born” and the registration was completed.

Now this is not that new an idea. RPG games have been using this for a long time. Choose your character. Use sliders and the like to change the age, height, weight etc. All the while, there is a graphic representation of the character evolving as you fill in your “form”.

The upshot is, that this is talking a pretty boring process, and adding game like mechanics and ideas to make it more engaging. I think that pretty much covers the tick boxes for something being gamified?

Let’s Get Serious

Serious games seem to split the ranks of gamification advocates. Some think that they have no place in the world of “proper” gamification, some (myself included) think they embody it. But first, what is a serious game? A very basic example is a game called Number Invaders. The idea is to help teach children math in a fun and engaging way. When I was a kid, my dad wrote a game for me on the Spectrum ZX called(I think ) the Maths Train. It was based on a game we had at school on the BBC Micro. The idea was that every time you got a question right, the train would move closer to the station. It was simple, but I loved it. Number Invaders takes this idea to the next level. You are given a problem to solve and you have to shoot answer with your space invader inspired ship.

Of course, this is a tiny example of what can constitute serious games. This can be applied to political simulations, stock market simulations and much much more, but they all take the same approach. Take an intrinsically uninteresting or none game like process (eg learning maths, for many not that intrinsically interesting or rewarding), adds game like mechanics and ideas and makes it more engaging. Again, ticking the main gamification boxes for me.

I Don’t Care if You Agree with me

I don’t’ expect or even want you to all agree with me. I just want you to have a think about what I am saying. Gamification is many things to many people. It is a terrible word that should never have been coined, but we have it so have to live with it! Stop being so precious about loving or hating it and get into your heads that it is here, it always has been here in one form or another and it is going to stay. We all need to be on the same page, whether we totally agree with each other or not, we are all trying to do the same thing.

Make the world a hell of a lot more playful, fun and engaging!

 

Gamification The Next Generation: Introduce, Engage, Retain

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The stages of brand engagement

I have been thinking about the stages that a person goes through when becoming “involved” with brands or any system that is being gamified. I may be wrong, there may be more too it. However, as I see it there are three distinct phases. Introduction to the brand (or whatever). Engagement with the brand. Finally retention / loyalty to the brand.

Within gamification, many people talk about the introduction phase, as I see it. Rewards, badges, points and the like. These all help introduce people to the gamified system. For a short period of time, rewards can entertain people and introduce them to certain concepts to do with the brand. We know that this works, but has a short shelf-life if used in solitude. However when trying to nurture brand loyalty, you are not interested in short periods of time.

This is where the real engagement is needed. Once a person is interested in the brand, you need to keep them engaged with it. Ladders and badges can only do this for so long. They need something a little more meaningful to become actively engaged with a brand.

Finally, you want to keep these people. You want their loyalty. When you finish a video game, what happens? Normally there is a hint of a sequel. The company does not want to lose your loyalty to the game, so they start to spread information about the next game. Whilst they do that, they release little extras to keep you playing the old game. However, what is even more important is that after a game has finished, people tend to talk about it. Forums spring up to discuss it. Events occur in social media, and people link together to discuss it. Multiplayer keeps people playing it for longer, not just because of the game, but also because of the community. Community breeds a lot of loyalty and interest. The number of times I have bought a game, not because of the adverts or information that has come out, but because my community are playing it, has my wife in fits of rage at times!

But how?

The first part is easy, introduction. There are dozens of ways to badgify your system or your brand. There are dozens of companies that will do that for you. The next two phases are a little harder. Here I want to talk about a company that I mentioned in GSummit,Bubbles, Badges and the Future. Pug Pharm.

I recently had a demo of their system, Picnic™ Customer Engagement Engine, with company founder Steve Bocska and I have to admit it had me intrigued for a number of reasons. The first was Steve himself. Unlike many people in the gamification world, he is not a marketing person. He is actually a games designer. He has credits on games such as EA’s Simpsons Hit and Run, Ubisoft’s CSI games, Disney Interactive’s Buzz Lightyear and more. The next thing was the approach to gamification and brand engagement. Whilst Picnic does the standard badges and leaderboards, it is the other bits that caught my attention. The way they handle engagement and retention is pretty unique (if it isn’t please let me know as I would love to see how others are doing this).

The demonstration that Steve used, he said was a pretty basic use of the Picnic system (I won’t mention the brand). It had leaderboards and points, but the engaging bit and the fun bit was the use of a system they call i-Cardz. These are a bit like Pokémon or Top Trump cards in digital form. Doing various games, actions and activities, you can collect these i-Cardz. Each one is related to the brand in some way, be it cast members, vehicles or locations. Some are rare, some can only be found at specific times and some may even be unique. These cards are then used to create collections using game boards. The brand can set competitions and activities where you have to say, put your favourite cast members on a cast board or put your favourite vehicles from the series on a board.

It is the next bit that I really liked though. Once you have created these game boards, the system matches you with people who have similar boards. You are given a little leaderboard that shows you how close a match you are to others and gives you the opportunity to connect with them. This is the really clever bit for me, as it starts giving you ready made communities. As I have said, communities control much of brand loyalty.

It all looked fun and Steve had a few facts and figures that gave weight to the fact that people really enjoyed playing the game and getting involved with the communities that were created as a result of it. The website for the show found that they had a marked increase in people staying on the site and getting involved. As a system it was also incredibly flexible in its approach to gamification. I was shown how the creation tools worked and I think even I could use them!

Who wants to be a Chamillionaire

Another example of how important the community aspect is for all of this comes from a very unlikely place. Rapper, Chamillionaire. He has used Bigdoor to gamify his website. People can earn badges and points by sharing stuff from his site. He has cited that there has been a 25x lift in fan engagement since he started to gamify their experience. Each badge that is awarded from the site has some kind of special meaning to the fans. The leaderboards tell other fans who the biggest fan actually is (a point he has used when people have actually approached him proclaiming to be his biggest fan). However, I am not convinced this is the reason he has such a massive following. The thing with Chamillionaire is that he manages his social presence himself. He runs his own brands community and directly engages with fans as much as possible. He has combined the rewardification with proper community to cover both engagement and retention. When the fans have collected everything they can, they will still be loyal because they now that he is loyal to them through his constant, direct involvement with them.

So is there a take away from this? For me it is to never forget the importance of community when you are looking at brands and gamification. That is where a lot of the longevity will come from. The other is to be inventive and fun with the brand. Don’t rely on ladders and badges alone, use more. Give people something that has meaning to them.

Monopoly: A Fun Example of Gamification

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This is a post that I originally wrote for EnGaming – Repoduced with kind permission (go check them out!!)

Time for some fun

Every now and again I like to just write something for fun. After writing lots and lots of gamification articles, I got to thinking of fun / daft examples. People often quote video game references when talking about gamification. However, it was when I saw Jon Guerrera talking at GSummit (via On-Demand I might add) about using Post-It notes to gamify his life, I was reminded a more low tech example I had mentioned in the past. Monopoly.

Right, bear with me, with any luck there will be some profound meaning to this by the end (Lying with a straight face Achievement Unlocked).

If you tear away the fun parts of Monopoly, you are left with buying and selling property. Gamifying that doesn’t sound easy, but that is exactly what Monopoly does. You start by representing the property with cards. Ok, not much there. You may be able to pull off a game of Top Trumps or Gin Rummy.

Next, you put a board in that represents the plots of land and utilities that our property exists in. Using dice to determine where on the board you move put a little bit of randomness and unpredictability into the mix. Unpredictability is a hugely important mechanic as it means that the system is never stale. You never know what is going to happen next, so you can’t begin to predict outcomes. Adding to this randomness there are community cards and chance cards. These offer positive and negative events to the player.

You wrap all of this up in some simple rules. Land on an unoccupied square and you can buy the property (if you have money). Land on an occupied square and pay rent to the owner. Buy houses and hotels for your plots of land and earn more money.

These simple little game design elements and rules turn the life of an landlord into one of the most popular games in history.

The Profound bit (well, the take away bit)

Gamification does not have to be complicated. Tweaking a process here or adding a bit there may be all that is needed to turn a simple un-engaging task into something more. The key in my example is that each addition to the game of Monopoly added something to the overall game play and enjoyment of the players. It was not added gloss and without each of those elements, the game would be nowhere near as good.

When you are looking at gamifying a system, keep that in mind. Are you doing things to the process that in some way enhance it. Look at the journey the user takes through the system or process. Examine the areas where they stumble or where they begin to lose interest. These are the areas that you need to try to enhance in some way. Could (God forbid) adding some form of achievement at that point be the push they need to get past it. Could the process use some kind of technology to make it less daunting? Could you break it down into a few extra steps that flow more naturally than trying to tackle it all at once?

GSummit,Bubbles, Badges and the Future

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I have been catching up on the events of GSummit over the weekend. I was very heartened to hear so many people talking about moving beyond badges and xp systems. They were looking for the next phase of engagement. You just need to look at FourSquare recently ditching its gamified elements to see that we are hitting the first big dip in user interest in this kind of thing.

However, there were still quite a few talking about promoting engagement with the use of simple badging / xp systems. I must admit, at first I was a little confused. Then I realised that I was totally missing the context that these ideas were being discussed in.

Badges still have a place.

When you look at instances where people were talking about badges and the like being of some use, it tended to be related to enterprise. The thing with enterprise gamification is that you have one key thing in the back pocket before you start. An audience. Not only that, you have an audience that has already got one very important motivator. They are doing their job. This may not sound like a motivator, but let me explain.

Think back to before you heard the word gamification. People still turned up to work every day. They still did their job to the best (usually) of their ability. Why? Because that is what you, do. You get a job, you try to do it well and then you go home. At a set point in time, you are paid for doing this. This payment then allows you to do other things, like pay your mortgage and buy your wife nice things. As it happens, in just that little run through you can see game mechanics in use (though I would not call this gamification!!)

  • Go to work every morning – appointment mechanic. Don’t turn up, don’t get paid
  • Do your job everyday – Behavioural Momentum
  • Do your job well – Pride

Anyway, I digress. The people who are seeing success with badges and xp are using them to try to make this daily churn a little more interesting, by setting up a little competition and fun. In this case, it does not seem to have that negative an effect, because it is not trying to replace the intrinsic motivation of doing your job each day (if done properly). Another factor is that these are closed groups of people who are all in it together. In addition, there is nothing to be lost by joining or not joining.

There is sooo much more that people could be doing though. Gamification of a rubbish process makes it more rubbish (ish). What enterprise should be looking at is changing the processes to make them more intrinsically engaging. They should be using gamification to change the behaviour of the company as a whole, but just make it a little bit more fun. It is not all about making everything a game.

It’s all about making everything a game.

So that is enterprise. In brand engagement things are a little different. Badges, points and leaderboards are proving to only improve engagement for a short period of time. What is happening (as with FourSquare), there comes a point where the “I really don’t care anymore” factor kicks in, there is a sharp drop off. Where people are succeeding is where they have seen that there is a drop and offer something more. I had a great chat with Steve Bocska from PugPharm.com who are currently trying to combat this Badge Fatigue or Loyalty Backlash as they call it.

I will talk about PugPharm more at some point, but essentially their Picnic platform tries to make it all a bit more playful. Using badges and ladders to get people into the “game”, they then throw more enjoyable challenges and collectables (in the form of iCards) into the mix. Finally they use those collectables to connect you with other people with similar interests in a social network. Their hope is that this will keep people engaged with the brand or anything else for far longer.

The big players (Badgeville springs to mind) are now trying to give the end user more than just the basics. They have all seen that as the general population is getting wise to the gamification that has been successful up until now, that they need to focus less on trying to influence or manipulate the customer. Now it is about giving them something that they find enjoyable and engaging.

The Bubble has to burst

We are at a crossroads, that much is sure. I can see a bubble waiting to burst with lots of people floating in it repeating the word Gamification over and over again. When it does burst, I really hope that those who are left floating in the remaining bits of the bubble are the ones who are repeating – how can we be different, what’s in it for the customer. That’s when we shall start to really see the more mature and focused side of Gamification that so many of us know is there.

Rewarding Failure – Can It Work In Gamification?

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In a lot of posts, I talk about rewards. My last post discussed the potential dangers of extrinsic rewards when used to try to motivate intrinsic behaviour. So I imagine that most of you think that rewarding failure is a bit of a no brainer. No way. Why would anyone reward anyone for failure?

Banks Do It

A good example this kind of reward can be seen in bonus culture. Think of all of the bankers who were blamed for the recent collapses. Many were quoted as being shocked at the idea that they may not get their bonuses. Bonuses in the banking business are expected. They are used to ensure that people stay in their role. The fact that they failed horribly is irrelevant. They were still rewarded for failure. If that is the case, how do you motivate success?

Kids Do It

I was at the birthday party of one of my daughters friends (five years old). We were doing musical statues with them. Now. At some point in the eighties, the UK ruling party decided that competition in children is bad. It promoted elitism and made children feel left out and demotivated of they lost. To this day we are still feeling this effect. In our game of musical statues, every player got a bag of sweets if they lost. They were rewarded for losing at the game. The idea is that by giving them this small consolation prize, they would not feel down and would be willing to play later. The interesting thing was, quite a few didn’t want the main prize, they just wanted the sweets. So, they joined the game and immediately tried to lose just so try could have the sweets! Rewarding failure actually motivated them to fail! Why go through the effort of trying to win if they only wanted sweets and not the winner’s prize?

Games Do It

The question is, can rewarding failure ever help to motivate success?

When you look at games this is often used to encourage the player to keep going. For instance, you may go bankrupt in a management sim for the first time. The game offers to give you a loan to get you back on your feet. This then give you a little boost that keeps you playing. You are motivated and able to continue.

Can You Do It?

This only works if the end prize is substantially better than the reward given after failure. The reason the examples I have use above fail, especially with the children’s game, is because the prize for succeeding is not all that much more interesting than the prize for winning. Mixed with the amount of effort it takes to play and win, losing is actually the easiest way to get something you want. The other thing to consider is that when using gifts and rewards for failure, you can’t just keep giving them. In our imaginary management sim, if the player is constantly saved by the game, they will quickly tire as there is no longer any challenge. You have to use it sparingly to make the user feel that winning is still important.

As with all things Gamification related, it comes down to execution.

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