A few side projects and stuff for you to enjoy.
Yeah I know, a bizarre title for a blog. Anyone who follows me on twitter will know that I am a bit obsessed with finding a decent shave. I have always hated shaving with a passion. My skin always comes out in a rash, it is time-consuming and just a ball ache.
I have tried most types of the modern razor, from single blade Bic disposables to Mach 3 to Fusion. Every time a new razor came out with more blades and promises of the “closest shave since out last product”, I have bought it.
Then I decided to grow a bit of a beard, but also decided to keep it trimmed around the neckline. This was when I decided that a razor with a massive number of blades was impractical, it was impossible to get a decent line, so I decided to go old school and get an old fashioned double-edged “safety razor”. After an initial cost, the blades are infinitely cheaper to buy than the cartridge type, which is a bonus.
Shaving was a grind. I would wash my face, put some foam on and shave as fast as I could then throw some aftershave on. With a decent Mach 3, I could be done and dusted in 10 minutes with a decent finish.
With the safety razor, it is a bit different. I have to prepare properly first. Without preparation, the razor will destroy my face. So warm water and a thorough wash, giving the bristles a few minutes to soften. Next, shaving foam. After that, a shave with the grain. More foam and a shave across the grain. Finally, more foam and a shave against the grain with some little touch ups.
Following that, a cold flannel and a wipe over with an alum block. Next up, some aftershave. Finally, a light layer of moisturiser.
This whole process takes about 20 minutes or so, much longer than my old shave. It also requires a whole lot more patience and skill, mistakes end with quite a lot of pain and blood!
Now for the crux of the tale.
Before I started this new routine, I hated shaving. Now, I look forward to the process. I look forward to seeing if my skill has improved and I can get a better shave. I look forward to getting to a point where I can use a more “aggressive” razor and get an even closer shave. I am on a new path to mastery, and it is in its own little way – fun!
The wonderful Andrea M. Kuszewski writes in one of her many fantastic articles about 5 ways to maximise your cognitive potential.
I would say that these are also key ways to find enjoyment in activities as well. I will be writing about fun again very soon, but going back to the quote I used in a recent blog from Roman Rackwitz – “If I ain’t learning, it ain’t fun”. Changing my routine, I triggered 3 of those 5 points. Seeking Novelty, challenging myself and doing it the hard way. The change to a new method was the novelty, it is certainly a challenge to slash my face open and it is definitely a harder way than the simple disposable cartridge razors!
Making a simple change to my routine, challenging myself and forcing myself to take a harder route has brought a level of fun and interest into something that was previously a grind. We can apply this to gamification. Change things from the normal, make people think differently and challenging them. Don’t always hold their hands, make things a little harder for them.
Take them on a path to mastery, mix it up a little and see how many of those 5 points from Andrea you can hit in your system, whether it is shaving or encouraging people to use your CRM in the “correct” way!
Oh and if you are interested, I use the Edwin Jagger Double Edge Razor DE89 – pictured above
The Razor – Edwin Jagger Double Edge Safety Razor DE89
https://www.theenglishshavingcompany.com/edwin-jagger-de89kn14-knurled-de-razor-chrome.html
The Blades – Astra 100pc set
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASTRA-SUPERIOR-PLATINUM-DOUBLE-EDGE-SAFETY-RAZOR-BLADES-x-100-PIECES-/142198801232?hash=item211bb58350:g:m1IAAOSwImRYQahv
The Alum – Edwin Jagger Alum Block
https://www.theenglishshavingcompany.com/edwin-jagger-alum-block.html
The Shave Gel – King of Shaves Sensitive Gel
http://www.boots.com/king-of-shaves-alphagel-shave-gel-unmenth-150ml-10087110
The After Shave Balm – Nivea for Men Sensitive Cooling Post Shave Balm
http://www.boots.com/nivea-men-sensitive-cooling-post-shave-balm-10175515
Gamification often takes and claims inspiration from game design. One of my side hobbies is making the occasional game, as well as spending the last seven years reviewing games for my site yars.co.uk. I thought I would just put a few gamification ideas into context based around my personal knowledge of games and game design. I am y no means an expert, but I hope you will find it interesting.
First up, points. I have made games with point systems and I have made games without. Generally I use the points as a way to represent progression and skill – ie, the higher the score, the further your skills have progressed. This is intrinsic on its own, it is a way for the individual player to see how they are doing and if they are improving. This only works if the points reset each time, that way the player can easily see that if they score higher next time – they have improved. Cumulative points don’t allow you to do this, they just show how many points you have collected over time, which is a little less useful. You could consider a personal leaderboard, that just shows the player their scores over time for an exercise- thus easily showing them their improvement.
As well as this, I have combined points with group leaderboards to allow people to show off their score and compete with others to gain higher scores. For some this competition is fun and is a way to compare their skills to those of others.
The key learning from the use of points and leaderboards has been that they are not the reason people play the games. They play because the games are enjoyable – fun if you will. They offer challenge, require skill and keep the player informed of progression. Without the points, they would achieve some of this, but many players would suggest to find a continued reason to play if there was no way to measure their progress!
The other type of game I have played around with is based purely on narrative. These were games with a purpose, they were intended to make some kind of point. The picture below is from a game called Context. It asked you to make decisions with carrying degrees of context, giving you more of the story as you made each choice. No points, no leaderboards, however every choice had an outcome that had some meaning.
My current project is a simple card game that I am designing with and for my 7 year old daughter. The development of this has taken time, with me creating complex and what I thought was interesting mechanics and rules initially. Over time, these have been cut away to a few simple core mechanics that allow the game to be picked up quickly by my daughter, but takes time to actually learn the tactics for. I suppose this advice would be keep it simple to pick up, but ensure there is depth as well.
So, two weeks and I have maintained a blog per working day. Yay me.
The question is, why? Why have I suddenly gone from one blog per week to one per day. I don’t need the coverage or the readers – they have all been more than happy with one per week. I certainly don’t need the extra work or hassle that comes with generating more interesting (ish) content.
The reason was to challenge myself and push myself out of a rut I was in with my blogging. For about 3 years I have posted one blog per week, usually on a Monday. This was normally a well thought out piece of writing that was either an expression of a new idea I had had or something that I felt would be of interest and use to my readers. However, the routine was beginning to kill the creativity. I was binning ideas because it was the wrong day for them or because new ones were taking their place too fast.I was too set on this idea of one per week.
So I set my challenge. Allow all those ideas out as and when they come to me. I climbed out of my rut. Now, I will just blog as and when ideas come to me. With luck they will be interesting. This also means that I can work on deeper ones in the background without feeling I have to blog about them immediately – as other smaller ideas will be there in the mean time.
I have won my personal challenge and have learned from it. I don’t need the routine as much as I need the outlet.
We all need to challenge ourselves, otherwise we get stuck and often realise too late to change it. Challenge yourself daily, after all that is what you are asking of most people in a gamified system – so apply it to yourself. It doesn’t have to be a big challenge. It may just be to put the post where your wife has been asking you to put it for months. It could be to read two stories to your children at night. It may be to finally start writing a blog.
What ever it is, when you have completed your challenge congratulate yourself. I didn’t realise how important that was until I took part in BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits week. Say out load – “well done me”. It really does help cement the feeling of achievement.
What follows is an exploration of what happens when you start to map player journeys in games onto Flow theory and then try to bring that into the workplace. Just for fun! It was inspired by Mr Scott Golas after seeing last weeks post on relatedness. It may or may not have any worth, but it has been fun to develop. Click images to see the bigger versions or you can see the presentation at SlideShare
Mihayi Csikszentmihalyi suggested the concept after seeing that under certain conditions people’s experiences became optimal. This is to say that everything around them was lost as they concentrated on the job at hand. This can be seen in many artists who just “get into the grove” as they work. Time stops, nothing else matters and when they finally come out of it, they have no concept of how long they have been working.
He identified some key factors that could lead to such a phenomenon.
In 1997 he provided the world with the following visual representation of his theory. It is worth noting that the centre point of this chart is where we tend to be on average.
When talking about games, the tendency is to simplify this idea, concentrating instead on the concept of flow as a channel between boredom and anxiety or frustration.
As we can see here, if a challenge exceeds the abilities of the current skill level, it can lead to frustration.
If the skill level is increasing faster than the challenge, it leads to boredom. Both of these will normally end with the player leaving the game.
Amy Jo Kim wrote about the idea of The Player Journey. “Great games are compelling because the player’s experience and expertise changes over time in meaningful ways.” The graph shows this as a journey towards mastery. You start off easy, to get into the game. The difficulty then moves up a bit as things become more habitual within the game. Eventually you are into a phase where you have learned all the skills you need to achieve master of the game. Again, this takes the idea of skills and challenges increasing over time together.
If we combine the ideas of Flow and Player Journey, you can begin to see how a game, in theory, should behave in an ideal world. You start off with a challenge that is acceptable for a new comer who is starting in the game – on-boarding. Over time, you increase the challenge as skills increase. Most games tend to build up each level to a boss battle of some type.
In this graph we could imagine that each peak is a boss battle. This is can really be seen as a test of the skills you have just been learning. As you progress in the game, the challenge increases as your skills increase. In our ideal game that keeps you in a constant “Flow” state, you never cross over into boredom or frustration. In gamification, this has being seen as the ideal path to take when designing your experiences.
But, is it actually how games play? Not all of them. You could argue that a game like Call of Duty, one that is linear in nature, follows a similar path. You start off slow (ish), build up to some adrenaline pumping moment, then you lull back down to a more sedate pace, before ramping up to the next set piece etc. Mastery of the game is often achieved quite early on, but the action around you prevents you from dipping into boredom more than the challenges do – much like watching a film.
Then you have a game like Tetris. There are no lulls in the progression with Tetris. It just gets faster and faster. Whilst the early stages are quite easy, it quickly overtakes your skill level. At first, this can be very frustrating, however, as you keep playing you start to skill up to the challenge. Eventually, even though it will still always beat you, you hit a point where it is enjoyable and you no longer care. Time stops, parents nagging go quite, there is just you and Tetris– flow. At this point, you are into the Mastery phase of your Player Journey.
Then you have more RPG like games, World of Warcraft comes to mind. In these, the on-boarding seems to go on forever. Grinding away at very low challenges to get to the good bits. When you get to them though, the challenge often ramps up and you find that the skills you have been learning in the “boring” bits lead to exciting challenges that you can just about handle. However, these challenges are often scattered and there can be significant time between them. Also, there are many times when you just don’t have the required skills to complete them.
So whilst you are building your skills you do spend more time grinding and skimming along the boring edge of our chart. There often comes a point where your skill level is just right for the challenges. This may have been the result of a steep learning curve, but relative to your skills this, this does not lead you to the frustration zone. This is where you start to head into mastery of the game. The challenge continues to increase, but at this stage your skills are a match for the pace.
Then there is a game like Hexagon on iOS. This is a game that just starts off hard and gets harder. It is unforgiving and unrelenting in its challenge. The strange thing is, games like Hexagon can still get people coming back for more.
Many people, it seems, would rather be frustrated but seeing some progress in skills, rather than bored, devoid of challenges but getting better at it.
If we take a look at this with a gamification hat on. The ideal would be to have all work sitting in the Flow channel. But is it feasible to expect a persons skill set to increase over time? Personally I think this is the secret to keeping a happy employee. Keep the challenge there and keep their skills if not increasing at least up to date! Nothing is worse than the challenge never increasing and your skill set ever decreasing through lack of use.
Using this kind of thought process for employee induction, you can see that this ideal journey can be achieved. Letting the employee learn about the company and their job in a “game” like way will help to keep them interested along the journey.
Swap boss battles for training or CBT style testing and we have a very similar looking chart to out “ideal” game flow.
However, after this it can become a little more difficult – especially for the more seasoned employee. If someone comes to your company with 5 years experience, then (if we are to believe the 10,000 hours to mastery theory from Malcolm Gladwell), they will actually start high up on the skill level. Even with a high starting skill, the challenge is likely be high at the start. However any experienced employee in a new role will hopefully be motivated enough to get past that.
It is what happens from there is really important. How do you keep your experienced “masters” engaged. You have to keep the challenge and skill level as balanced as possible. If we look at a player journey over time, it will dip into the boring zone and the frustrating zone regularly. What is important is to make sure that the challenge is always there and that over time the skill set does not dwindle. Balance is the key.
What we don’t want – and what many people who are switch jobs will cite as a major reason – is the challenge to dwindle over time as well as the skill set. If an employee is not using their skills to complete appropriate challenges, they will leave!
I Hope so!!
The key is to make sure the skill and challenge levels are always heading in the right direction.
