I’ve been busy making videos of late, here are the last few. Some tutorials, a few rants and a bit of fun 🙂
On my quest to remind people of all the cool stuff that they are not yet using from games in their gamification, I have come across something very important and something that I had not noticed until a recent project.
Gamification very, very rarely includes consequences…
Allow me to explain.
We say that games allow for experimentation and failure – this is true. In gamification we are seeing more of this. However, in games there are consequences. You lose a life, drop all your possessions, lose health etc. Eventually, you even hit “Game Over” and have to start again.
A project I was working on recently needed this kind of feel, it was quite literally teaching in an environment that was life and death. So, the students needed to feel that whilst in the safe environment of gamificaiton, they could experiment and fail, there were consequences for repeated failure – for not learning from their mistakes!
There is a saying in business “Fail Fast”. I disagree with this. You can fail as slowly as you want, as long as you learn from your failure! I often say;
“Don’t fear failure, fear those who don’t learn from it!”
Fear of failure is not that bad a thing, if you don’t want to fail then you will try harder not to. I am not saying punish failure harshly or make them feel stupid, but just make sure that the player knows they have failed and maybe make it sting a little. Maybe, take points away or give them lives they can lose. Even if the screen just starts to become dark and foreboding as they fail more.
Holding their hand is fine, but you don’t need to cuddle them for the whole experience!
All of this research into play and talking about play has been for a reason. I wanted to try and open up the idea of making more play-like experiences rather than more game-like experiences. I was trying to introduce some of the basics that separate games and play. For this there are three important differences between play and games that we need to keep in mind.
In play, the goals are often less defined or not consciously apparent. Whilst there may be rules that dictate how play progresses (social rules, physical rules and so on), there are not that are there to deliberately challenge you or make things harder.
So to make things more play-like, you need to drop the predefined rules and goals as much as possible.
That is one part, the other part that is actually relevant to both game and play-like systems is to create a safe environment. Part of what makes play so compelling is that there is a reduced level of real danger to the participants. Animals playing don’t tend to deliberately hurt each other, they know that it is play. Kids playing are not afraid of the tower they are building falls over. It may be annoying, but it is not going to get them in trouble or cause any real issues. Even in games, dying in game is just a matter of losing a life – you can start again.
More importantly is that failure leads to learning and improving performance next time. But only if failure does not lead to a harmful punishment.
In the real world this all seems a little unrealistic. What company is going to let people just go off and do their own thing without fear of failure. Well…. Google for one. You must remember the 80/20 rule they made so famous a few years ago? The idea was that 20% of an employees time could be spent working on their own things. They did not have to produce anything, as long as they were trying. There was no punishment if their experiments failed, but if they succeeded they could find a great deal of support. Products like Gmail game out of this, just as an example.
It may not seem like play, but it has play-like elements. There are no system / company set goals (Make a product). There are no rules set by the system / company that make it harder or system defined obstacles (Do it by Friday and in budget). There is a safe environment as failure is not punished and there is no expectation of success. Also and this is massively important, they had autonomy – they could choose what they wanted to work on. They were also given trust.
I have deliberately used the phrase “Play-Like” here. This is not play, but it is closer to play than work would normally be. Play and Games have one really important thing that makes them what they are, the concept I introduced last week – Lusory Attitude or a playful attitude and mind set. Really it is an exercise in learning from play (playification?), just like we learn from games in gamification.
I have promised in the past not to write about the dangers of extrinsic rewards anymore. However, can’t stand reading about gamification being a failure anymore, when the articles proclaiming this almost always start with “gamification is about awarding points, or physical rewards to people for doing dull tasks”.
No quoting from Dan Pink or Deci and Ryan this time, just facts based on experience.
If you offer a reward, especially a material reward that has value to people, you are setting yourself up for failure. Every time I have seen a ‘gamified’ campaign that offers someone like an iPad as a prize for participation, it has had problems. The worst culprit is when the prize is offered for nothing more than activity (so no actual creativity needed).
This carrot approach leads to one of two main outcomes. The first, rubbish input from people wanting the prize. Offer a reward for commenting, and you get hundreds of “Great. Awesome. Amazing.” type comments. Offer rewards for likes or votes and you get hundreds of meaningless votes. Worse than that, you get people gaming the system and colluding to generate votes and comments.
The other outcome is just plain cheating. Fake comments and votes are one one thing. Creating groups and allies to force / fake the desired outcome is par for the course and within the parameters of most systems. However, if you offer a reward that has real material value to people, they will do anything to get it. Hack the system, disrupt people (yeah – remember my disruptor user type?), break any rule they can and basically run rings around you to win.
The effects are more damaging than you may first consider as well. What happens to the other players? They see a small group of people gaming the system and they just think “what’s the point?”. They stop using the system and you are left with just the ones trying to get the prize.
My advice to you? Listen to the people like me (and many others like Mario Herger, Roman Rackwitz, Marigo Raftopoulos, Yu Kai Chou to name but a few), in gamification who keep saying stop using rewards. Read about the damage that extrinsic rewards can have on anything creative (incentivise and creative do not belong in the same breath!). Listen to your gamification designers when they suggest other ways to encourage participation and activity, chances are – they know what they are talking about. Most of all, stop trying to bribe people to do things. If they can’t find an intrinsic reason to be involved (RAMP), you won’t get the best out of them, and may well end up getting the worst!
