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The Gamified UK Behaviour Change Model

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Gamified UK Behaviour Change Model The Gamified UK Behaviour Change Model

Yeah, a bold title – but AI told me it was true and ok to use!

Over the years I have looked at various behaviour change models and have used them in varying degrees. Early on, if you look at my blog and books I used BJ Fogg a lot. These days it is referred to as B=MAP; Behaviour = Motivation * Ability * Prompt. It used to be B=MAT – T being trigger. I think prompt is better as it covers more ground.

More recently I have been using COM-B model for behaviour change. This was created by Susan Michie, Maartje M van Stralen, Robert West. I liked this model because there was a lot more behind it and it introduces capability and opportunity, splitting out ability into “Can you personally do it” and “Is it possible to do”. I then adds this to motivation to create a flexible model. Read More ...

The Engagement Channel Model 2.0: Fun, Flow and Engagement

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Fun. A three letter word you won’t hear me mention often when discussing gamification! Why? Well, fun is really subjective. What you find fun, I may not. However, for the purposes of this blog, we will assume I like fun as do you and when I mention fun – it means something you will find fun!

With that out of the way, here’s the thing. If you look at Flow or my Engagement Channel stuff, you will see that to enter flow and be truly engaged, the challenge of whatever you are doing should match or slightly exceed your current skill level.

As with my Engagement Channel model, you can soften the impact of a challenge being too much by adding meaningful rewards and you can soften the impact of your skills being greater than the challenge, by adding personal challenges.

However, in games I am seeing more and more games that drop you straight into a scenario where the challenge instantly far outweighs your skills. By all our models, this should lead to instant frustration and most likely disengagement – but it doesn’t always. For some reason, there are some games that I play, that no matter how tough they are and how far off my skills are from the challenge – I keep coming back over and over again. Why? Because they are fun to play!

Does this mean there is another dimension to the Engagement Channel or the our view on Flow?

BJ Fogg

If we look at BJ Fogg’s famous Behaviour Change Model, we can see that there are three main dimensions in his B=MAP formula. Behaviour = Motivation x Ability x Prompts.

Basically for a behaviour to happen, motivation, ability and prompts all need to align. If a task is hard, but you have high motivation to do it – the right prompt will start to encourage the behaviour. If the task is easy, your motivation can be lower with the correct prompt. A third factor can influence the outcome without anything else changing.

So, how can I steal this idea and start to add a new dimension to my Engagement Channel Model. Well, I’m glad you didn’t ask!

The Engagement Channel Model 2.0

To simplify the original concept, what I am now proposing is that fun can act as a buffer between engagement, frustration and boredom, essentially widening the Engagement Channel.

Now, I am not trying to tell you what your users may find fun, what I am saying is the older I get, the more I realise that fun makes a huge difference to your motivation to do things, even if they are really hard or if they are slightly boring. Adding that element of fun can make all the difference.

Behaviour and Behaviour Change

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One of the things you often hear around talk of gamification is the term “Behaviour Change”. At one time, gamification experts and platform providers began to get nervous of the word gamification and started to talk about “Behavioural Science” and “Behaviour Change Platforms”. I remember writing a post somewhere about what would happen if you could not use gamification as a word and even suggested behaviour change as one of the options.

However, over the years I have realised that this is probably a bit naive and possibly arrogant. Behaviour is a complex thing and one that does not change easily, especially when you are trying to do it with nothing but shiny trinkets with a cut and paste bit of JavaScript!

What follows is a very brief overview from a non-expert. Use it as a base to start your own research into the topic!

What is a Behaviour

First things first, what is a behaviour? As it happens, this is an area of some contention in the scientific world. As I did my research, I even came across an article called “Behavioural biologists don’t agree on what constitutes behaviour” [1] in which the researchers did an analysis of 174 expert responses to the question of “what is a behaviour” and got huge variation! They proposed a somewhat cumbersome meta definition of behaviour:

behaviour is the internally coordinated responses (actions or inactions) of whole living organisms (individuals or groups) to internal and/or external stimuli, excluding responses more easily understood as developmental changes

However, I very much like the definition offered by Hobbs Campbell, Hildon & Michie [2]:

“anything a person does in response to internal or external events.”

For our purposes, we would add the following as well

“For a behaviour to occur there must be a trigger, a process and an observable response”

Those of you who have read my blog for a few years will notice that last part is very, very like my definition of a game mechanic!

The trigger could be environmental, internal, deliberate or pretty much anything that, within the context of the behaviour, could induce it. The process refers to the various mechanisms involved in the behaviour occurring. This could be voluntary or involuntary. The response is the behaviour physically occurring, it is what can be observed or at least measured in some way.

Context is key for all of this to happen, it is not random!

An Example

A simple example of a behaviour would be this. A person drinking an alcoholic drink.

Let’s break that down into trigger, process and response.

  • Potential Triggers: Offered a drink. Compulsion / addiction
  • Process: The person weighs up the pros and cons of having the alcoholic drink based on the information they have available. Is it appropriate in the current situation or environment? Is it healthy? Is it sensible? Would a nonalcoholic drink be more appropriate?
  • Response: The person drinks or does not drink the alcoholic beverage.

    • Read More ...

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