reward

Gamification, delayed gratification and rewards

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Reward vs investment Gamification delayed gratification and rewards

There has always been this common thought that if you have to work harder for something or you have to wait for it, the reward will be all the greater in your mind. Now for the most part. that is absolutely true. The anticipation of some sort of reward 1 is a massive trigger for dopamine and can make the reward all the more… well, rewarding – which we like!

The Marshmallow Test

However, not everyone is able to wait for a reward. There was a fantastic experiment in the 70s now referred to as the Marshmallow Test 2. The set up was that children were sat in a room and a marshmallow was placed on the table in front of them. They were given an offer. Eat this one marshmallow now OR wait until I come back and you can have two marshmallows. It is worth watching the videos if you need a smile!

The really interesting part of this was what happened to the children over the years, you see they followed their progress for 40 years! What they found was that the children who could wait for the second marshmallow, who could delay the gratification, were more successful in just about every way over the years 3! Their mindset allowed them to take short term pain for long term gain.

Another interesting study that is very relevant here was done around 2012 and it looked at how experience, or as they called it “environmental reliability 4“, affected the marshmallow test. The set up was similar, but before the test began the children were split into two different groups. They were both offered certain things, like extra crayons for colouring in pictures. The difference was, one group got given the things they were promised, the other was not. When they then ran the marshmallow test on these groups, the group that had been getting things they were promised showed a much great ability to delay gratification and wait for the second marshmallow. Their expectations and trust were such that they felt confident that the researcher would return. The other group had no reason to trust the researcher, so ate the marshmallow straight away!

They proved that delayed gratification was a cognitive process. We assess based on experience whether it is worth waiting or not.

Applying this to Gamification

There are a few big takeaways from this that we can apply to gamification.

  • People will wait for rewards if they feel they are worth it.
  • People will wait for rewards if they trust that it will come.
  • Anticipation can lead to greater gratification from a reward.

But, we need to be able to apply this in a reliable way. The diagram below gives a quick outline of how you can be done.

Reward Value vs Relative Effort and Delay

 

If you make someone wait for a reward, make sure it is worth them having. That does not mean the reward has to be larger, rather the value they place on the reward is larger.  Take a relationship. Relationships take work, they take time. When you first meet someone it is rare that you are suddenly best friends. But take the time and work at it and the friendship can become incredibly rewarding.

Goals that are in the distance can be hard to focus on. I wrote a while ago about something called Construal Level Theory.

Construal Level Theory

The basic idea is that events that are about to happen are perceived as concrete in out mind. It is easy to visualise them and work on them. Distant events are perceived as abstract, they are much harder for use to give urgency or importance to because they feel less real. Think about exams. Two months before an exam, revision seems less urgent – the exam is an abstract concept to us – it is not here so is not quite real. As we get closer to the exam, revision may start to get more important. The day of the exam, it is very real and you start to wish you had been revising for two months after all!

Along the way though we need signals that we are following the right path. Going back to the relationship, if we start to feel that the other person is not returning the friendship, that there are no signals that it is going well, we will begin to drift away and the friendship will fail.

So, whilst waiting for the big prize, people need to have smaller ones to nudge them along. These will have less value to them but will help to keep them on the right path.

In our gamified system, the small, regular nudges come in the form of things like points. They have less value to the user, but they show the user they have done something right. Slightly larger nudges would include more visible and potentially more valuable rewards (think badges that represent certain smaller achievements). These could me considered as short term goals (remember SMART?) Finally, after hard work and patience, the larger reward. These will be less common but should represent some real level of achievement or be attached to a larger value reward of some sort.

Along the way, there is nothing wrong with randomly giving a larger reward that has not been “earned” as a way to just have the system say “Thanks for sticking with it”. These will give the user a nice sense of feeling they are valued. Avoid making people work hard and wait just to get a low-value reward. They will not appreciate this at all!

Perceived Value

It is very important to appreciate that the perceived value of things can reduce over time. What someone will work really hard to achieve initially, they may not be willing to work as hard for a second or a third time. They will expect the value of the final reward to be greater each time, especially if they are expected to work harder. So when you think about your system, as the difficulty and skill requirements increase, so should the value of the long-term reward! We could consider Reward vs Investment. The investment could be time, effort, emotional etc.

A theoretical example

 

Reward vs Investment Example

Take a look at your system and see where your rewards sit on the grid

Instant wins are not always the most rewarding. Learn how to use delayed gratification to increase the value of rewards in your system.

Big thanks to the Gamification Hub group on Facebook for the discussion around this. A must visit resource if you are interested in gamification!

Works Cited

  1. Kuszewski, Andrea. “The Science Of Pleasure: Part III.” Science 2.0. N.p., 26 Aug. 2010. Web. 06 Feb. 2015. <http://www.science20.com/rogue_neuron/science_pleasure_part_iii_neurological_orgasm>.
  2. “Stanford Marshmallow Experiment.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2015. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment>.
  3. Clear, James. “40 Years of Stanford Research Found That People With This One Quality Are More Likely to Succeed.” 40 Years of Stanford Research Found That People With This One Quality Are More Likely to Succeed. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2015. <http://jamesclear.com/delayed-gratification>.
  4. Kidda, Celeste, Holly Palmeria, and Richard Aslina. “Download PDFs.” Rational Snacking: Young Children’s Decision-making on the Marshmallow Task Is Moderated by Beliefs about Environmental Reliability. Cognition, Jan. 2013. Web. 06 Feb. 2015. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027712001849>.

Randomness, Serendipity and Gamification

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Recently I have been trying to write a few games, just for fun, with my daughter. There area  couple of card games and I am trying to make a single player board game.

Making a game with a 7 year old is an interesting experience. I got asked to go into her room as she had a new game she wanted to play. She had made a game board with LEGO. You had to get from one end to the other, with certain bricks having modifier effects on the game (move faster, move slower etc). She said I could go first, so I asked “how do we decide how many spaces to move?”. I expected a dice or something, but no. Her answer was “just pick a number between one and ten”!

I was baffled, but did as I was told. I chose the biggest ten, assuming she would do the same, as this was the quickest way to win. However, she chose seven – she genuinely randomly chose a number in her head!

It was at this point I began to realise just how important randomness is to enjoying games. I couldn’t just choose random numbers, it made no sense to me as I could win by just choosing the biggest or the “right number”. Of course, I let her win, but still! If you have my sort of brain, where you like logic, you analyse the situation and work out the best solution – i.e. how to get to the win state fastest. Now, if there had been a dice added, that would change the dynamic. Rather than being able to choose the best route, you would have to work out based on the random number you had been assigned by the dice.

This got me thinking about randomness in general and how it is or could be applied to normally predictable things. So I built a random story builder. It has about 15 books in it from Project Gutenberg and randomly chooses paragraphs from the books and puts them on the screen. Of course most of the outcome is rubbish, but every now and then you get a great combination of a Grimm fairy tale, Dantes Divine Comedy and Frankenstein that makes you chuckle. It has no practical use (except as a more interesting version of Lorem Ipsum), but it is a bit of random fun.

Another example of this sort of fun is Rory’s Story Cubes. These are a series of dice with icons on them. You role the dice and have to build a story using the icons to inspire you. I play this with my daughter all the time. I also use them to try and inspire new ideas when my mind is drawing a blank. The random nature of the dice means that you have to remove all of your pre programmed ideas of structure and go with the flow.

Steve Jobs, it turns out, was a great believer in serendipity. This is the idea that random happenings can lead to great and unexpected outcomes. He built the offices at Pixar studios with central toilets, ensuring that people from all over the company would randomly run into each other. Marissa Mayer famously banned working from home, citing (among other things) that incidental meetings around the office lead to new insights that would not happen otherwise. On the site, I have a link called “Page Roulette” which will just take you to a random page. You may like it, you may not – but it is fun to find out just because it is a journey into the unknown. I love the “random article” button on Wikipedia for this exact reason!

In gamification, we are no strangers to randomness, I have spoken about random reward schedules (and their potential dangers) in the past. But this is generally relegated to just surprises than changing something that is usually totally predictable into something that isn’t.

When planning your user journey, think of ways to take people out of the predictable linear from time to time. Give Free Spirit Explorers something to look forward to! When building your systems, think how you can create moments of serendipity, where ideas and people may randomly collide to create wonderful new innovations.

Indirect Incentives: Good or Bad in Gamification?

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First things first, what do you think of the new blog theme? Playing with the Hueman theme to see how it goes. I have also removed a large number of poppy uppy things!

Recently I heard an interesting idea on how to indirectly incentivise employees to do a particular voluntary task. The plan was that every x percent of people who did the task would translate into a charitable donation from the company to a charity voted on by the employees.

My first thought was “great, they finally get that you should stop trying to incentive everything with competitions or gift vouchers!” However, after I thought some more, I began to feel that this was still a bad idea…

First of all, let’s look at a couple of types of incentives.

  • Material Incentives: These are rewards that have a direct material value to a users. Money, prizes that sort of thing.
  • Non Material Incentives: These are rewards that have no direct material value. Points, Badges, virtual currency.

These are both direct incentives, the user gets some sort of personal benefit from getting them.

  • Indirect Incentives: These are incentives that the user gets no personal benefit from. Charitable donations, sponsoring a puppy in Outer Mongolia – that sort of thing.

Initially it looks like indirect incentives are the perfect storm. They appeal to the altruist / philanthropist in us all. They cost less as you are not giving everyone a reward. There is competition, there is social pressure (you don’t want to be the one that lets down the puppies in Outer Mongolia) and more.

So, do the task and feel good about helping a charity…. right?

I’m not sure. An incentive is still an incentive – it is still an extrinsic reward. There is still the risk that you will get people only doing the task for the reward – direct or otherwise. You still potentially sacrifice quality for quantity.

What’s worse here is that whilst it is voluntary, not doing it doesn’t just affect your chances of a reward, now it affects charity. This is in fact Shamification. So you are being forced to do something that is meant to be voluntary by being made to feel socially guilty if you don’t.  Again, this will get people responding just to not be seen as not responding. This again boosts quantity over quality and possibly creating negative or resentful feelings!

Another factor here is many will see this as “You have money to save puppies, but not to give me a financial boost? How much do you really value me doing this task then?”.

What are the answers then?

Honestly, I don’t really know – but here are some things to think about when you consider any types of incentive, direct or indirect.

  1. Any incentive is still a reward and will potentially have an effect on intrinsic motivation
  2. Incentives need to be meaningful to the user.
  3. Incentives need to make the user feel they are valued.
  4. Making people feel guilty is not going to endear them to you. If something is voluntary, don’t associate guilt to not doing it!
  5. Value quality over quantity. For example; if you are using an incentive to get people to do a survey, consider why they are doing the survey. Are they doing it for the reward (or to avoid shame) or because they think you value their opinion and they want to give it to you? Whilst you may want 100% participation, surely you would rather have 20% of people engage and give valuable input, rather than 100% where at least 80% is just people doing it because they feel they have to.
  6. Don’t use incentives at all…. Consider how you can make better use of intrinsic motivation (RAMP).
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