Foursquare Archives - Gamified UK - #Gamification Expert

Welcome to my first post holiday blog. Lots going on, not least of which I have now got a draft of my book! You can register your interest in buying it here -> Sign up for notifications about Even Ninja Monkeys Like to Play. I am looking at ways to apply a discount for people who sign up 🙂

Now to business.

Today, two interesting things came to my attention about the state of gamification. The first was Gartner’s Hype Cycle. For those that don’t know, Gartner predict how technology will be adopted over time in a cycle of 5 phases. Below is the description of each taken from their website

Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.

Last year, gamification was heading into the Trough of disillusionment with a predicted 5-10 years before it reached the Plateau of Productivity. I have often stated I am not a massive fan of the hype cycle. I tend to feel it is a self fulfilling prophecy of bullshit – enough decision makers read it to force it to come true.

However, it is interesting to see that in 2015, they have removed gamification completely.

The likelihood is that they just need to save space on the diagram as it as another few years before it moves to their next phase.

What does that mean for gamification? Well, my hope is that it offers us some breathing space without them trying to redefine gamification or even speak about it in any way!

Another interesting thing that I saw just today, was that Swarm has added yet more gamification back into its product. Last year Foursquare split out the check-in features of its popular app and created a new app that just focused on check-ins – Swarm. Foursquare became a recommendation app instead. The split saw the removal of all of the gamification elements that people were supposedly bored of in Foursqaure; Badges, Leaderboards and Mayorships. Many saw this as a huge nail in the coffin of gamification – others a nail in the coffin of Foursqaure.

Well, this year they have been slowly adding gamification back into Swarm! For me, they are still meaningless for the most part (I became mayor of Trevone last week after my fist check-in since 2013 for instance!), but it turns out that people obviously liked the gamified elements. Today’s update on iOS added back Leaderboards!

I have always had mixed feelings about Foursquare’s use of gamification. Many think it is everything wrong with gamification. Points, badges and leaderboards just stuck on something with no context. What makes it interesting for me is that for such a trivial use of gamification, it certainly had an impact – it changes millions of people’s behaviour. Think about it for a moment. Before Foursquare, it was not normal to go somewhere and then take your phone out to tell people you were there. Foursquare used gamification to encourage you to earn badges by doing just that, but added an easy way to do it – the Check-in button. Changing the behaviour of millions is not a failure to me. What they did was stopped working on it and never really found the next phase of engagement. They wanted to be a recommendation engine, but lost faith in the tool they already had.

Can we conclude anything from Gartner forgetting about gamification and Swarm remembering it? Yes – maybe we are finally at a point where gamification is just another tool in our kit and soon we will have to stop trying to justify its use!

Now – go register your interest in my book 😀

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One of the most tedious arguments in gamification is that of Intrinsic Motivation vs. Extrinsic Motivation . Not only is it tedious, it is also one of the most written about topics on the web relating to gamification and is one of the main reasons people cite when they tell you why they think gamification is rubbish. They feel that all gamifiers rely too much on extrinsic motivators.

I have tackled this in various forms of the last 2 years, but not directly written an article mentioning those two words in the title. As such, I am often accused of not understanding the whole argument because I sometimes say that extrinsic rewards don’t always suck. So, here we go, oh and do a search for better articles after you read this one!

Much of what follows is taken from my book Gamification: A Simple Introduction & a Bit More.

Have changed a few bits here to help with context though!

The Psychology of Motivation

Motivation is a strange and often counter intuitive thing. We are brought up to believe that if you want to motivate people you give them something they want. In a job, that would be more money, with kids it may be stickers on a chart for behaviour. Whilst this certainly can be the case, in the modern world it is beginning to become less and less true. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink talks about Motivation 2.0 and Motivation 3.0.

Motivation 2.0 firmly drew on the idea that if you give people more money, they will produce more work. In the days of factories and manufacturing, this was certainly true. These were jobs that required very little creativity.

However, over the last 40 years there has been a great deal of research done into what truly motivates us as humans – our intrinsic motivation. One often cited experiment was to prove something called Over justification (Lepper et al ) . This involved asking three groups of children who enjoyed drawing to draw pictures. These groups had the following conditions.

The first group were told they would get a reward at the end of the activity.
The second were not told about any rewards, but received one as a surprise after the activity.
The final group were not offered a reward and got no reward.

This was repeated over time and the subjects were monitored. They found that the group who expected a reward, spent far less time drawing than the group who were getting no reward. The group that were getting the surprise reward, spent the most time drawing. It also transpired that the group who expected a reward actually produced less creative work. The fun, the intrinsic motivation, had been replaced with the expectation of a reward.

These kinds of experiments have been repeated over the years – each one proving the same thing. In the 90’s a research group led by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, did a meta analysis of 128 different papers on the subject. What all of the research found, was that for tasks that required even the slightest level of creativity, offering predictable extrinsic rewards (e.g. money), had a negative effect, or as they put it

“engagement-contingent, completion-contingent, and performance-contingent rewards significantly undermined free-choice intrinsic motivation”

Does that mean that everyone in gamification is getting it wrong and we need to rethink it all?

Well, not quite. You see there are a few important things to consider. The first is this bit about “free choice intrinsic motivation”. This can be seen as a rather round-about way of describing creativity. What if your task is not creative? Take the example of data entry. You have to do it, most don’t enjoy it, but it has to be accurate every time. Applying a few game elements from the PBL range, may actually help to keep those people a little more engaged. More importantly, it won’t have a negative effect – as long as they are willing participants in the “game”.

Another big thing to consider is that certain extrinsic rewards are needed for us to feel secure (think Maslow) – money for instance. As I talk about in Motivation, let’s get real for a moment , until money is no longer a burning issue for you, it will always be desirable.

Are Extrinsic Rewards Evil?

No, not really. The over reliance of many gamified systems on nothing but extrinsic rewards can be problematic though. The biggest issue is that they just are not engaging for most people over an extended period of time.

When you are bringing people into a new system, they can actually be pretty helpful. They can bridge the gap between learning how something works and finding the intrinsic reasons to continue using it. The points and badges and the like, when done well, can be a light hearted pat on the back for doing well as you move up the User Journey from On-Boarding to Habit Building and beyond. The thing is, that you have to have a system built that gives the user a reason to keep using it once the shine of the extrinsic stuff wears off.

That is where most get it wrong!

Ok, done. I promise I will not write this kind of article ever again. I just had to get it out of my system as I was challenged on it recently. I was annoyed as I had to send several links to the person to show my actual point of view – now I just need to send the one!

More stuff on this from me can be found around the site. A few links to get you going

The Hype is Over – Gamification is Here to Stay

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

The Psychology of Motivation

Are Extrinsic Rewards Evil?