by Yu-kai Chou
There are many more fascinating topics on human behavior and good design that excite me more in the chapters to come. Even though it breaks my heart to spend precious time writing about this non-productive topic, I don’t want my readers to be unaware of the greater “Gamification World.”
The War on Words
Back in 2011, gamification notables Gabe Zichermann and Sebastian Deterding had a public debate on gamification concepts.
Some background info: Gabe Zichermann is a brilliant marketer, speaker, CEO of the largest Gamification conference in the industry, the GSummit, and is one of the leading evangelists of Gamification and its commercial use.
Sebastian Deterding is the Ph.D. academic that studies the deep theories and motivations of game design and Gamification. He is considered one of the most respected thought leaders in the space.
In this debate of epic proportions, Sebastian Deterding publicly examined each chapter of Gabe Zichermann’s book Gamification by Design, and explained why he considered each chapter to be flawed and/or inaccurate13. Hyperbolically speaking, his blog post on the subject was almost longer than the book itself.
One of Deterding’s critiques was that, contrary to what Zichermann states in Gamification by Design, serious games and advergames should not be considered examples of Gamification. For those who are unfamiliar with these terms, Wikipedia defines serious games as, “a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.” In other words, games that are generally built for a productive purpose, such as training, education, healthcare, and the like (Hence, the term “serious”).14.
BusinessDictionary.com defines advergames as, “A video game which in some way contains an advertisement for a product, service, or company.”15 These are games that basically act as interactive advertisement campaigns which draw potential customers onto a website or into a business. When I refer to “shoot-the-duck banner ads” as early and embarrassing forms of marketing gamification, those banner ads are technically classified as Advergames.
As you can see, both definitions have the word “a [video] game” in them, which seems to go against the core essence of what “gamifying” something means. In my own writings, I talk about how you can gamify anything that involves human motivation, as long as it is not already a game, just like how you can’t liquefy liquid. You can however, apply better game design to games.
So because advergames and serious games are “games,” by that standard you can’t really gamify them. Right?
Semantics vs. Value
To me this discussion is non-productive. I would rather spend my time learning about and harnessing the power of games to change the world for the better, instead of debating over classifications of terms. What good have you created in the world when you spend your day arguing if something is “a game made for traveling” or “travel gamified”?
But there are people who would say, “No. That great example is a serious game! Gamification is just limited to these things that are really lame.” Why do people first define gamification as something lame, and then call it lame? For many years I have also worked on serious game projects and advergames, and if I can utilize that knowledge and experience to help the world, why limit what I can do as a gamification professional just because of some definitions?
I’ll share a little secret with you: For the most stringent academics out there, though I claim to have twelve years of gamification experience, I’m actually a fraud. Technically, I have three years of serious games experience, three years of loyalty program experience, and six years of gamification experience, consisting of two distinct periods. Throughout the entire time, I was driven by the exact same vision of applying game principles to impact the world. Call me lazy, but I’d rather just refer to my work as gamification and start producing results that make a difference in the world instead of arguing about what I can and cannot do as a gamification professional.
I’ve written about how I (along with many “gamification professionals”) am not a big fan of the word “Gamification.” This is mostly the term that the industry has adopted. I have preferred the term “Human-Focused Design” (as opposed to Function-Focused Design), which is a design process that remembers the human motivations within the system.
On a similar note, I also dislike the term “serious games,” as it implies that pure games are not serious – something that millions of serious gamers out there would heavily disagree with. Think how many sports athletes would be offended if they played basketball for a charitable cause, and people called that the “Serious Sports” industry.
Then there are the more “corporate-appealing” terms like Motivational Design, Behavioral Economics, or Loyalty Programs, which have many blends and overlaps with the vague term “gamification.” Many out there claim that Loyalty Programs are not considered gamification but would then argue that airline reward miles are one of the best examples of gamification.
Further following the battle semantics, many game-based solution enthusiasts like Sebastian Deterding and Jane McGonigal disagree with so many principles from most of the “mainstream” gamification experts and platforms, that they came out and expressed that, if that was gamification, they wanted nothing to do with it. They prefer the term “Gameful Design” to the word Gamification, which they sometimes regard as the ascended form of gamification1617. Along with Deterding and McGonigal, many other critics of gamification claim that implementations of mainstream gamification are uninspiring and manipulative.
At the end of the day, instead of arguing about what is and isn’t included in umbrella terminologies, wouldn’t it be much more productive for everyone to say, “Lets make everything better with the lessons we’ve learned through so many hours of game-play in our lives”?
Of course, people inevitably have long discussions on semantics, and therefore it makes sense to have a structured way of thinking through the entire conversation so you can communicate with your colleagues or superiors.
Tomato: Fruit or Vegetable
In my opinion, serious games and advergames should actually be included in gamification, as they are utilizing game design to achieve a non-game productive result.
There’s often a blurry line between the “is a game” versus the “is not a game” spectrum. For instance, sometimes it is difficult to say whether something is a “game” that trains people, or rather just “training that is gamified.” You could say that a game that trains employees to have good conduct is a “serious game,” but you can also say that they decided to gamify their training program. According to my own definition, it feels like you could “gamify” training by introducing a “serious game,” but you can’t gamify that very serious game once it is created. Now since it is already a game, you can only apply better game design to it instead of “gamifying” it. You can see how this conversation can quickly become non-constructive.
In my own TEDx talk in Lausanne, Switzerland, I brought up 8 world-changing concepts in gamification, each representing one of the Core Drives in the previous chapter18. I mentioned that my favorite gamification example for Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback was the “Serious Game” FoldIt. To some, that statement might have caused a heart attack.
My example for Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness was DragonBox, which is a learning game; for Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance, it was “Zombies, Run!” which is a fitness game to motivate you to run more. Some don’t consider them gamification examples since they are already games (as opposed to just plastering badges on something boring).
Again, if there is a way to utilize things we have learned from games to make the world better, why work so hard to limit yourself in how you approach it? The audience clearly did not care and were inspired about the potentials of evolving everything in our lives into something fun and dynamic, or more game-like.
And for the record, a tomato is biologically classified as a fruit, but is culinarily treated as a vegetable. It probably matters more to the e
xpert horticulturist than to people who just care about preparing and eating a healthy and delicious meal.
Explicit Gamification: Games that Fulfill Non-Game Purposes
Moving away from what is and isn’t gamification, I think it is more productive to differentiate types of gamification into two ways based on how they are executed and how different types of players respond to them. The two types of gamification implementations in my own work are “Implicit Gamification” and “Explicit Gamification.”
Explicit Gamification involves strategies that utilize applications that are obviously game-like. Users acknowledge they are playing a game, and generally need to opt into playing. An example would be Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 ½ weeks to Save the World19. This is an interesting and quirky “Advergame” launched by Old Spice, where a renowned basketball legend tries to save the world by accomplishing a series of challenges in an 8-bit video game world before the anticipated “end of the world” in 2012. Of course, Old Spice powerups and placements can be seen repeatedly within the game. This is a clear example of not only applying game design techniques into marketing, but using a game itself to do the marketing.
McDonald’s Monopoly Game is also a good example of explicit gamification20. Everyone knows they are playing a game but the key purpose of the game is to get people to return to McDonald’s and eat more french fries - nothing subtle there. We will examine McDonald’s Monopoly game in more detail in Chapter 9 regarding Game Technique #16: Collection Sets.
Other interesting examples of Explicit Gamification include the famous serious game FoldIt that facilitated AIDS research21, as well as AutoDesk’s Undiscovered Territory22, a game created for selling their very expensive 3D imaging software. There are also explicit gamification examples such as Repair the Rockaways23, which is a game similar to Farmville, but the number of bricks that are available is determined by how much is donated to support Hurricane Sandy repairs.
Again, these examples are all games where people play and opt into, hence “explicit” gamification. The advantage of designing for explicit gamification is that the product is generally more playful and it allows the designer to have more freedom of creativity. The disadvantage is that it could be seen as childish, non-serious, or distracting to some target users such as enterprise firms, banks, or manufacturers. Some corporate managers, upon seeing graphical game-play, immediately feel an aversion to it, though if designed well, the interactive “game” can keep the target user engaged for longer and lead to better business results. Also, more often than not, implementing great explicit gamification usually requires more resources in order to create a high quality game.
Implicit Gamification: Human-Focused Design that Utilizes Game Elements
Implicit Gamification is a form of design that subtly employs gamification techniques and the 8 Core Drives of Octalysis into the user experience. Implicit Gamification techniques are filled with game design elements that are sometimes even invisible to the user. This is like a doorknob, where the best designs are the ones that you aren’t even aware of but simply use to open the door.
Implicit Gamification examples are often discussed in gamification literature, such as the LinkedIn Progress Bar24, the intrinsic motivation that drives Wikipedia25, competitive bidding and feedback system via eBay26, social comparison and motivation in OPower27, and Unpredictability and Scarcity within Woot!28.
Upon seeing the progress bar on LinkedIn, most people won’t say, “Ah, they’re making me play a game! I don’t want to play games.” The Progress Bar just gently builds a Win-State for the user to see and motivates them to get closer and closer towards the goal. Of course, many of the points, badges, leaderboards, and levels are seen commonly in implicit gamification.
The advantages of implicit gamification is that it is technically easier to implement and can be appropriate in most contexts. The disadvantage of implicit gamification is that this very convenient implementation can often lead to “lazy” design where the subtle game dynamics are incorrectly designed for and sloppily put together. This would lead to something completely ill-formed or ineffective in terms of driving business metrics.
Implicit vs. Explicit Gamification
At the end of the day, one type of gamification is not inherently better than the other. The proper use of Implicit or Explicit Gamification depends on the purpose of the project as well as your target market. Some groups like participating in games; some don’t. Some want to have that adrenaline rush when purchasing, while others want to expand their creativity and master a learning curve. Of course, all 8 Core Drives can be implemented into Implicit and Explicit Gamification campaigns, which we will explore in the following chapters.
While it is not useful to argue what gamification includes and excludes, it is very important to understand what types of implementations are most appropriate for your design project based on the objectives, the contextual landscape, and cultural expectations. Again, at the end of the day, gamification should never be a cookie-cutter solution. All games have game elements and game mechanics in them, but most games are not successful, and only a few well-designed games become highly engaging. Gamification requires sophisticated design to actually be effective and create a long lasting relationship between the player and the game maker.
4 Application Fields of Gamification
Now that we have covered the different implementation methods for gamification, we will explore the various applications of gamification in several industries.
In general, the majority of my clients represent four fields that I consistently see innovating time and time again, indicating a tremendous amount of application and growth in these sectors:
Product Gamification
Workplace Gamification
Marketing Gamification
Lifestyle Gamification
Product Gamification
Product Gamification is about making a product, online or offline, more engaging, fun, and inspirational through game design. Most companies struggle to create products that customers fall in love with, continue using, and passionately share with their friends. Some of these products have great “functional” purposes, but don’t focus on the motivation and Core Drives of their users.
In a previous era, consumers didn’t have adequate information and were accustomed to slow gratification. Along with immense barriers for starting new companies, it was not as detrimental for a company to simply assume that customers would use their products - provided that they were marketed correctly. However, people today are spoiled with instant gratification through the Internet, with immersive empowerment and real-time feedback through games, and the constant connection to their social network. Your users, customers, and employees are becoming less tolerant of badly designed products that do not take into account their motivations, especially when they have a variety of competitive alternatives they can choose from.
Many corporations and startups excitedly tell me, “Our product is great! Users can do this; users can do that; and they can even do these things!” And my response to them has been, “Yes, you are telling me all the things your users can do. But you have not explained to me why the user would do it.”
That’s the problem with a majority of company products – great technology and functionalities, but no traction. People don’t have a reason to go out of their way to use the product. Sometimes, a startup founder tells me, “Hey, Yu-kai, there’s no reason why people wouldn’t use our product. We save them money, we save them time, and we make their lives better.” On lucky days, customers themselves would even say, “Yeah, there’s no reason why I wouldn’t use your product. It saves me money, it saves me time, and it makes my life better. I’ll definitely sign-up sometime tomorrow.”
For those who have run startups or launched products before, you know the crucial part of the entire phrase is the ending. When people say they will do it “tomorrow,” more often than not it means “never.” This is because at this point they are motivated by Core Drive 8
: Loss & Avoidance, and specifically by something I call Status Quo Sloth (Game Technique #85) – they are avoiding a change in their habits and behavior.
Remember how we talked about how Gamification is actually Human-Focused Design learned from decades, even centuries of game design experience? When you are launching a new product, its motivational standing is very similar to a game. No one has to play a game. You have to do your taxes; you have to go to work; and you really should go to the gym. But you never have to play a game, and let’s be honest, oftentimes you shouldn’t.
Because games have invested an amazing amount of creativity, innovation, and resources into figuring out how to get people to want to spend more time on them, there are definitely many great lessons you can learn from games for your own products. The key here is to make a product so exciting that customers become obsessed with using your product and are compelled to share how exciting their experiences were to their friends.
Workplace Gamification
Workplace Gamification is the craft of creating environments and systems that inspire and motivate employees towards their work. More often than not, employees show up to work every day just so they can earn a paycheck (Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession) and to not lose their jobs (Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance). As a result, employees only work hard enough to earn their paychecks and to not lose their jobs (if you recall, Core Drives 4 and 8 are great examples of Left Brain, Extrinsic and Black Hat Motivation).
In fact, Gallup’s 142-country study shows that only 13% of employees are categorized as “engaged” with their work29. In comparison, 24% of the workforce is categorized as “Actively Disengaged,” which means they are so unhappy with their work that they minimize their productivity, spread negativity, and even sabotage productive efforts that require them to do more work to keep their jobs.
