playful

Snakes and Ladders: Gamification Hell or Heaven?

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Snakes and ladders1 Snakes and Ladders Gamification Hell or Heaven

I recently made a very strong statement on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn about snakes and ladders and whether it was a game..

Snakes and Ladders is not a game and we should stop using it in gamification and serious games.

Obviously, it was designed to provoke some comment, but boy was I surprised with the level of interaction I got over the three channels. The LinkedIn conversation may still be going on!

As expected, there were those who agreed and those who did not. Some were using Snakes and Ladders in training very successfully, others agreed that it was a pile of pants.

My justification was as follows: Snakes and Ladders gives the player no agency, no control of the outcome. The player has no influence at all over how the game will play. There are no challenges and no skill needed either.

However, those who felt this was unfair pointed out that as a mechanism for delivering content, it was a great platform. Attaching external values and storytelling to the ups and downs of the game were easy metaphors for many real-life experiences. The unexpected rises and falls of a career for instance.

What was more interesting, in the end, was that the discussion slowly turned into a more philosophical debate about the nature of games.

Lusory Attitude Is Back in the Spotlight

I have spoken a lot about the nature of play, highlighting that play is subjective and contextual and relies on “Lusory Attitude“, ie a playful state of mind. It seems that the same is true of games. Snakes and Ladders may not seem like a game to an adult, but to a child it is magical. They approach it with a lusory attitude, never noticing they have no control. They are absorbed in the competition, the story being played out as the climb ladders and slide down snakes.

I was reminded that anything can feel like a game if you approach it with the right frame of mind. Our job as gamification designers is to create experiences that help to frame the solution in a way that allows our users to approach and engage with that lusory attitude. A narrative that carries a shallow game mechanic, a series of extra challenges that make the core delivery mechanic more interesting, fake choice that makes the user feel they have some level of agency and control etc etc etc.

Is it gamification heaven or hell? It depends how you use it, just don’t be lazy and use it as the only nod towards games in your solution!

Social Media

The other nice lesson was about the nature of social media – it works best when you remember the social bit 😉

Below are links to the various conversations – there are some real nuggets of gold in there, thanks to everyone who got involved!

The LinkedIn Conversation

The Facebook Conversation

The Twitter Conversation

Play in Context

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As you may know, the concept of play is very important to me. I feel that it is one of the true keys to engagement in adults, but as I was speaking about recently, adults often have no idea how to play. They have the intrinsic desire to play battered out of them by the “real” world. Unlike children, they don’t see the potential for play in the world around them. Some blame work for this – they often say that the opposite of play is work. However, I prefer to go with Dr. Stuart Brown’s (founder of the National Institute of Play)  analysis in this case, that the opposite of play is actually depression.

Work is actually very similar to play and even more similar to games. The main difference is perception. I spoke about lusory attitude a while back, this is where you approach a non-play situation with a playful attitude. Just this change in attitude can change your perception of a situation. So with the right attitude, work can seem much more playful or gameful (note – these are not the same thing!!!)

Playfulness vs Gamefulness

Playfulness and Gamefulness both need a safe environment first and foremost. Playfulness requires a great deal of freedom and a lack of explicit rules imposed by the system or environment. Gamefulness is a little less freeform, there are explicit rules that are maintained by the system. A small example to give some context.

A child builds a tower because it is enjoyable to see what happens when you stack one block on top of another. It is also pleasant to feel the texture of the block in their hand. It makes them chuckle if they knock the tower down by mistake. This is playful. There is no deliberate aim, the child is just letting curiosity lead them. Even without any structure, they are learning a great deal. Their dexterity is better, they learn the best way to stack the bricks and they learn how many they can stack before it gets unstable.

As their skills at stacking blocks increases, this simple and playful act will get less interesting. They know how to stack them, can stack all the bricks they have without them falling down and have even added some other bits. They have mastered stacking. They need more to entertain them now. So they add some rules and create a challenge for themselves. Now they have to create a few shorter towers and see how many blocks they need to throw to knock them all down. They have taken the playful activity and made it into a game. The addition of these explicit rules and challenges has made it gameful.

Play Sits Between Chaos and Control

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about play. It occupies my mind on long trips, quiet moments of reflection and when I should be asleep. I have come to the conclusion that it sits between chaos and control in the context of the world. It is not totally without rules, but it is also not totally beholden to them.

This conclusion got me thinking about where play actually sits in our understanding of the world and how we react to it. I realised that it is not quite as simple as chaos and control, it also had a lot to do with intent. Did we explicitly mean to do something or is it more implicit in nature. It occurred to me that play also sits between implicit and explicit desires and actions. We play at a conscious and subconscious level. This lead to the old faithful 2×2 grid of doom 🙂

Play in Context

I mapped out a few other concepts to give this more context. I see anarchy as a deliberate act that leads to chaos for instance. Art is implicit to the artist, that is it comes from the soul. However, it has to have a level of control from the artist. They have to get their ideas down in a way that fits their vision – that takes control.

Fear is an internal emotion that often comes from a lack of control – from chaos, not understanding what is happening around us. And we all know what fear leads to (puts on a Yoda Voice) “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” At the far end of this, we find depression. A complete loss of all control in every way.

Ahem. Self-expression is also internal but sits between chaos and control. Think of an artist who covers themselves in paint and rolls around on a sheet of paper. Whilst they have an idea and have some level of control – there is a random, chaotic nature to it as well.

Up the other end of the scale, we have games. They have a much more explicit control of the player’s experience. The reason this is not to the far top right, is because there the player still has some freedom in most if not all games. However, with work this is much less the case – especially in more “traditional” jobs. Explicit Control rules!

As you can finally see, Play sits somewhere in the middle of all of this. It is implicit, explicit, chaotic and controlled all at once. Hey, I didn’t say it was simple!

So What?

This is all very philosophical, but there is actually a useful point to this. To get the best out of people you need to allow them a level of autonomy, but not so much that it descends into chaos, but also a level of control, but stop before they are unable to make decisions for themselves. This balance helps to give them the freedom they need, within a framework that supports them.

And don’t forget to register for the Product Gamification Summit 🙂

 

Design compelling experiences, not addicting

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A worrying trend I have noticed in gamification is people talking about making addicting experiences or applications.  You hear phrases like “Addiction loops” and “Habit forming”.

I am pretty sure that their intentions are good,  90% of the time. They are describing experiences that people will want to come back to again and again. The key word is want. If you create an experience that people want to return to, you have done your job well. If people have to come back because it is a key tool to their job, or something they have to use on a regular basis, you have done a good job if people find it usable, pain free and at time an enjoyable experience.

Addiction creates a need and this is very different. If we look at the definition of addictive, it starts to paint the picture.

Addictive: (Of a substance or activity) causing or likely to cause someone to become addicted to it: a highly addictive drug

Is that what we really want people to experience in gamified systems. Do we want them to feel they need to keep doing something because it satisfies a psychological addiction? I have personally never heard the word addiction in a story with a happy ending! It tends to sit in sentences such as “addiction to gambling”, “addiction to alcohol”, “addiction to drugs”. Creating addiction could be considered a little evil – and we wonder why certain people dislike gamification and gamifiers.

How about we forget about trying to be clever and creating psychological tricks to hook people. Let’s concentrate on creating compelling systems, ones that are actually well made. Easy to use, good user interface and user experience, rewarding and meaningful in some way. Make it playful or gameful. If people have to use the system, create meaning for them, explain it to them and make them understand the purpose of it all.

Then, use gamification to enhance these well made systems, not to try and patch up poor experiences.

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