Amazingly the question “But what if people get addicted to the solution and stop working” has come up in more than one conversation with clients over the years.
It’s an interesting question, that is worth thinking about. At first, it is easy to dismiss this as silly. When you think about it, thousands of games are released each year – about 9000 just on Steam in 2019 – the majority of them are totally unknown or fail. So how on earth is your gamified system going to become more important to people than the games they want to play or their work?
Then when you start to think about it, there is an element to consider. Your gamified system is likely more interesting than their day job. If you are good at gamification design, you will know how to do that – that’s the point, making stuff more interesting! So if you have a system where you can collect points and convert them into prizes, as a simple example, then that may well be more interesting than doing real work! We call this Overjustification Effect. Very simply, this is when the rewards are more important to you than the work. It can be seen when you apply rewards to games. The game should be intrinsically enjoyable, but if you add an unbalanced reward, many people will stop playing because they enjoy the game and only play to get the reward.
Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation
If you design your system to heavily rely on extrinsic rewards to motivate activity, then Overjustification effect can be an issue. People start to only do the work for the rewards, which can, in turn, lead to a decrease in quality of work.
How to Address This
The first solution is to not rely as heavily on extrinsic rewards! Build the system to encourage activity with feedback and nudges rather than overt bribery.
Don’t worry too much about the potential issues. After all, if you make a solution that is so enjoyable that people want to do it rather than their work, you should probably be making “real” games for entertainment!
Reduce the availability of the solution. If you have to use extrinsic rewards, then only allow access in short burst. For instance, there are some games that I will load up on the morning to get my daily streak reward but then will close until there is a convenient time to play. You could set your system to only allow a set number of actions per day, to reduce the risk of people overusing it.
This always struck me as a fabulous way to look at teaching in general and one that I used myself as a JuJitsu instructor, mentor and everything else I have done that involved passing information to others.
Getting what you want is very rarely as important as getting what you need. In fact, getting what you need more often that not allows you to then earn what you want. In martial arts, like most things, you need the foundations, the boring things. The form work, the katas, the hours and hours of repetitive grind. The same is true in games. You need to get the basics before you can do the interesting things. You may not want to do them, the tutorial level is often not the most exciting, but you need them to be able to then go on and do what you want to do in the rest of the game.
Think about Minecraft. You need to learn the rules of the world, what blocks to combine, what animals provide what resources, what pick axes need to mine what rocks. Until you have those basic essentials, you cant go and build those amazing structures you want to build or create working Babbage difference engines!
Another thought occurs that relates to gamification around want vs need. Often we don’t want to use extrinsic rewards, we know the research and we don’t want to fall foul of the consequences. But sometimes, that is exactly what we need! If you have limited time and budget and are tasked with creating an increase in activity, especially around simple repetitive asks, extrinsic rewards are exactly what is needed. Once that is working, you can, of course, look at expanding this to more intrinsic methods.
I might change my old mentor’s quote slightly now,
“I’ll provide what you need so you can discover and earn what you want for yourself”
The biggest change is that I am now no longer part of Capgemini. I am now at G2G3 working on gamification – so a dream come true for me! I want to take a moment to thank everyone at Capgemini that supported me over the last 5 or so years.
Loads more to come, but you will see more content coming from me around work and from the G2G3 blog with luck.
In the mean time I have spent a while going back to the start of what gamification is and why I find it so important and interesting.
Why the Fuss about Games?
I had a conversation recently about what games are. There are too many cans of worms to open on the definition side of things, but what interested me in the conversation was there was an idea that games are there as pure escapism. This was triggered by a certain level of discomfort over the recent coverage of “That Dragon Cancer“, a game that aims to take a player through a child’s 4 year battle with cancer from the perspective of a father. Hardly the most enjoyable concept and it is unsurprising that some have felt slightly uncomfortable.
For me, games are the next step in the evolution of media. We had word of mouth, songs, written word, books, recorded music, radio, film, T.V. – the list goes on and on. For me, it is all coming to a head with video games.
Before video games, most media was unidirectional. The story or message was presented directly to the viewer with no interaction. Games and video games change that completely. Now the story and the message can be directly influenced my the player. With the help of the games designer, they can shape the way it is presented to them. Because of this interactivity and two way conversation with the designer, the player can gain a much deeper understanding and empathy with the source material. Rather than just witnessing it, they experience it for themselves.
For me, this is why games are so important and why I spend so much time exploring them and trying to understand them. They show that to truly learn and understand, you have to be involved in the conversation, not just listening to it. When you can apply that thinking to other areas of the world, you suddenly start to see how powerful and simple a concept it really is. Involved everyone on the conversation, not just the author!
Note, when I am talking about user types, I am referring to my classification user types found here!Since I released the User Types Hexad, I speak less about the extrinsic group outside of calling them Players. To help;
Status in the realms of gamification is a funny thing. It is something that we all agree is important, but seem divided on its nature. Some talk about it as an intrinsic motivator others extrinsic.
In the animal kingdom status is simple, the higher your status the more good stuff you can get. The Alpha dog gets more food, gets more women and has more chance of their gene pool continuing than any other animal in the pack. What may seem like a very extrinsic symbol of power and prowess is in fact the most basic of animal instinct, pure intrinsic motivation, life. It does come at a price, the higher the status the more people will come gunning for you.
And so it is in out day to day lives. People with higher status get more. Status can be many things in our lives. Intelligence, looks, the school you attended, where you live, money – all have a status attached to them. Some help you to find partners, other better jobs and so on. Status is important and has a high motivational value – whether we think it does for us or not.
In gamification this all needs to be simplified a little. A gamified system at work is unlikely to lead to you finding your next partner, or making you better looking. However, status when it is well thought out within the system, can still be a good driver.
The way I see it, there are two basic kinds of status. Visible and hidden – Extrinsic and Intrinsic.
Visible vs Hidden
Visible or Extrinsic status is the easier one to deal with. This kind of status can be awarded with all of our favourite extrinsic rewards. Leaderboards, points, achievements and rewards. All of these help to define a persons status in your system. The top person on the leaderboard is obviously (in most cases) doing something good as the system defines it. They are the ones who you should go to to ask things, they are the best at what they do. For some, this is a high motivator. In my classification of user types, this kind of status can be important to three different types, Consumers, Self Seekers and Networkers. They want the status because of what it can give them, not what it means to others.
Consumer types, want status because it gives them access to more “stuff” via the system.
Self Seekers see status as a way to show others that they are the best, this in turn will encourage other users to come to them more often – thus earning the self seeker more credits, rewards etc.
Networkers are a little less obvious. For them, social connections mean rewards, therefore social status is of high importance. They higher their social status, the higher their perceived importance. This leads to things like higher Klout scores, Kred scores and the like. This all leads to one thing, rewards.
Hidden or Intrinsic status is more subtle and a little harder to implement. Intrinsic status is all about using status to fulfil individuals in a way that does not always need to lead to some sort of tangible rewards.
Achievers often look for status, but not as a way to show off their prowess to others, but to prove to themselves that they have achieved something. Higher status in something proves that you are on the way to mastery, a massive intrinsic motivator for an achiever type.
Philanthropists look at status as way to guide more people to them. They get pleasure from giving what they can to others (in a gamified system this is often in the form of help). If they are top of the leaderboard for questions answered and have the most votes from other users, they are likely to get more people asking them for help. This all helps the philanthropist user find purpose.
Socialisers have a fairly obvious desire for status. Higher social status = more people to connect with. For them, it is about the enjoyment of meeting and interacting with new people, not getting an extrinsic reward, joy is very intrinsic! This puts social status clearly in the realms of relatedness.
As you can see, for the more intrinsically motivated users, seemingly extrinsic status actually fulfils much more intrinsic desires for them.
However you choose to use status in your gamified system, it is obvious that it is important to many types of users, just in different ways. The same method of awarding and displaying status will work for multiple user types, you just have to ensure that as well as the reward aspect of the status, you include some form of social discovery element. If all people with status get is rewards, then socialisers and philanthropists will have nothing to engage them.
This is a great example of using extrinsic rewards to support intrinsic motivation.
Is status intrinsic or extrinsic? How about we settle for a little bit of both.
