by Yu-kai Chou
That is something pretty scary to think about. It means that, chances are, a quarter of your company is poisonous! How can any organism be competitive at anything if 24% of its body is composed of cancer cells?
Contrary to popular self-denial, it is actually not the employees’ fault they are disengaged. Companies like Zappos and Google (especially in the old days) are known to get their employees motivated, driven, and excited about their work on a daily basis3031. I firmly believe that everyone has the capacity and the longing to become motivated and driven for something that is worth their cause. It is bad environmental and cultural design that turns good employees into toxic cells.
Of course, you don’t need a Gallup study to know how disengaged employees are at work. Just think about how often people close to you complain about their work or their bosses. Think about the movie Office Space, the quintessential comedy about life in a typical bland, rigid, and oppressive company in America32. The movie was such a great hit and now a cult classic because people can actually relate to the frustration and disengagement of the characters in the movie (a good example of the “relatedness” piece within Core Drive 5 at work).
Why does that matter? Because research has shown that on average, the companies with disengaged and unmotivated employees only obtain 50% of profits and only 40% of revenue growth when compared to companies with engaged and motivated employees.33 If I told you that you could double your profits and improve your revenue growth by 250% without opening new markets and without introducing new breakthrough technologies but by simply making your workplace more engaging and motivating, would you do it? Most people would say yes. But from my own personal experience, there will still be people who say no, simply because, “I don’t want my employees playing games. It’s a distraction!”
Workplace Gamification is critical for today’s economy and the future of creative innovation. The Gen-Ys entering the workforce (and they are thirty now) are used to being in environments that provide them Epic Meaning, Relatedness, Autonomy, and more. This will only get worse as the even-younger generation enters the workforce, so it is wise for companies to start setting up the correct motivations systems as early as possible to avoid the devastation of having a surplus in labor but a shortage in talent.
Marketing Gamification
Marketing Gamification is the art of creating holistic marketing campaigns that engage users in fun and unique experience designed for a product, service, platform, or brand. Not too long ago, people clicked on online ads because, more often than not, they couldn’t tell the difference between ads and content. But nowadays, users are becoming more sophisticated in filtering out unwanted promotions, decreasing the effectiveness of many advertisement campaigns (thanks in large part to ad blocker apps too).
Then you have TV commercials, where everyone simply tunes them out, switches the channel away, or just fast-forwards if they have a TiVo. As for other traditional methods like ads on billboards or newspapers…don’t even get me started.
In the past decade, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) have proven to be fairly effective techniques for gaining exposure and improving sales. In fact, a search engine is just a large leaderboard, and the industry of Search Engine Optimization is simply the game to climb to the top of that leaderboard. This works because 1) you can target the right people who are searching for your exact solution, and 2) you can target them at the right time they are searching.
However, SEO and SEM still lack the trust component in online marketing. If a website you trust and have followed for two years sells something you need, you are likely not going to go searching for a random site on a search engine to purchase from.
Enter Social Media Marketing. Through platforms like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, brands are able to build relationships with potential customers, create unique value, and establish trust that leads to future engagement. Unfortunately, social media platforms are just the delivery channels for engaging content; in and of themselves, they do not motivate or successfully engage with users.
This is where Gamification comes in. Marketing Gamification specifically utilizes game elements and strategies throughout a player’s journey by first focusing on why a user would engage with you in the first place. Marketing shouldn’t just be one action done from the marketer and one response back from the customer, but should be an entire ecosystem where both the marketer and customer are able to experience fun and feel continuously engaged through a variety of interactions.
Marketing Gamification utilizes the platforms and vehicles described above as well as others: SEO, Social Media, Blogging, Email Marketing, online/offline competitions, viral vehicle strategies, and reward schedules to continuously engage users throughout an engaging and gamified experience.
Lifestyle Gamification
I mentioned in Chapter 1 that my life completely changed when I was struck by an epiphany that I should treat everything like a game. Since gamification is great at motivating people towards certain activities, why wouldn’t you apply that to motivate yourself?
Lifestyle Gamification involves applying gamification principles and the 8 Core Drives into daily habits and activities, such as managing your to-do list, exercising more often, waking up on time, eating healthier, or learning a new language.
There are also many technological enablers that make Lifestyle Gamification more popular, including big buzzword trends such as Big Data, Wearable Tech, Quantified Self, and The Internet of Things34. The interesting thing about all these trends is that it enables all your activity to be tracked allowing you the ability to manage your Feedback Mechanics and Triggers.
Games have historically been able to track every single action that a player makes. A game would automatically know that this particular player is on Level three, she has picked up these four items, learned these three skills, talked to these six characters, but not those other three characters, and because of that, this door does not open for the player.
A game remembers everything you have done and customizes your experience based on that. In real-life, most of your “data” is not recorded, and so it is hard to craft a optimized lifestyle. The trend with wearable tech and quantified self finally allows us to track more of our own behavior on a daily basis. Of course, even companies that claim they wield the power of Big Data don’t yet compare to the level of customization that gamers take for granted. Many still stick to generalized demographics and non-actionable reports, instead of creating a unique experience for each user in real-time35.
Lifestyle Gamification branches into a few sectors such as Career Gamification, Health Gamification, Productivity Gamification, and Education Gamification. It can be utilized to gamify big picture activities such as accomplishing your life goals, or very tactical activities such as using a dice to determine how you should reward yourself (which is derived from Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity).
Since Lifestyle Gamification fundamentally changed my life, I am extremely passionate about how it can help people achieve their dreams through 1. Finding their game, 2. Analyzing their initial stats 3. Formulating their skill trees, 4. Connecting with allies, 5. Finding the right quests, and 6. Beating the game. Since this is a huge topic that warrants its own book, I won’t be spending time in this book covering the topic in detail.
So far we have laid out a wide net that covers many terms, concepts, Core Drives, Experience Phases, natures of motivation, and implementations of design. Don’t feel intimidated. For the next few chapters, we begin to dive deeper into all the things we already talked about, which will allow you to have an even better grasp of the foundation of the Octalysis Framework.
To get the most out of the book, Choose only ONE of the below options to do right now:
Easy: Think about what areas in your life that you would like gamification to help you improve. Is it Product, Workplace, Marketing, or Lifestyle Gamification?
Medium: Identify a gamification example you h
ave encountered before. Is it Explicit or Implicit Gamification? What are the pros and cons for using that type of implementation?
Share what you come up with on Twitter or your preferred social network with the hashtag #OctalysisBook and see what ideas other people have.
Chapter 5: The First Core Drive - Epic Meaning & Calling
Now that we have established a foundational overview of the Octalysis Framework, it is time to dive deeper into each Core Drive and discover the power and enchantment within.
If there is only one thing you remember after reading this book, it should be to focus on motivation by thinking through the 8 Core Drives instead of focusing on features and functionalities. Of course to do that, you need to be familiar with the 8 Core Drives to wield them correctly, otherwise you may even end up hurting user motivation.
The Core Drive High Above
Epic Meaning & Calling is the First Core Drive of Octalysis Gamification. This is the drive where people are motivated because they believe they are engaged in something bigger than themselves.
Games often trigger the Epic Meaning & Calling Core Drive. In many games, an intro narrative communicates that the world is about to be destroyed, and somehow, you as the player are the only one qualified to save the world. That immediately creates excitement and motivation towards the adventure.
What about real life? Do we ever encounter scenarios where we are driven by Epic Meaning & Calling?
Have you ever wondered why people contribute to the non-profit website Wikipedia? What would make someone spend hours updating a site that doesn’t pay her or even help her build her resume?
Why are people so loyal to Apple products, to the extent that they know they want to buy the next product, even before they know what it is?
Why are school rivalries so engaging, driving radical behaviors such as pranks, streaking, violence, while also leading to profit for the schools?
Can higher purpose also be designed into parenting styles beyond the usual reward and punishment system?
Interestingly, these questions can all be answered by the powerful White Hat Core Drive of Epic Meaning & Calling. In this chapter, we’ll attempt to address many of these questions and provide more understanding of this selfless Core Drive.
The Encyclopedia that Pwned Me
“Pwn is a leetspeak slang term derived from the verb own, as meaning to appropriate or to conquer to gain ownership. The term implies domination or humiliation of a rival used primarily in the Internet-based video game culture to taunt an opponent who has just been soundly defeated (e.g., “You just got pwned!”).” - Wikipedia36.
When I founded my first startup company in 2004, I was really excited about finally being an entrepreneur and wanted to promote it everywhere. I learned that anyone can update Wikipedia because it is user-generated, and thought it would be a stellar idea to have my company included within the vast knowledge of Wikipedia. I excitedly spent an entire day crafting a great and informative section about my company - describing when it was founded, by which amazing prodigies, and the problems it set out to solve.
Once completed, I proudly clicked the “publish” button. And there it was: I saw my own company as a Wikipedia article. Woohoo! We were officially on Wikipedia now! What an Epic Win!
However, my bliss of “finally making it in life” was short-lived.
About three minutes after my posting, my post was flagged by a “member of the Wikipedia community,” stating that this entity was not significant enough and therefore does not deserve to be on Wikipedia. Five minutes later, a couple others agreed to that point of view, and my post was deleted.
Just like that, my full day’s worth of work disappeared within ten minutes.
The first question that came to my mind after the many “dot dot dot” moments and the three ||| lines across my forehead was, “Who are these people? Do they even have lives??”
It sure seems odd that a fairly large group of volunteers go on Wikipedia regularly, not to be enlightened with mind-blowing knowledge, but to police the platform for pests like me who are trying to sneak irrelevant or unimportant content into the Wikipedia.
If you have ever hired interns or entry-level employees and have paid attention to their motivations and feelings, you may know that asking people to do “auditing work” on mountains of pages and to flag outdated content can present an awkward situation. You know that no one enjoys this type of grunt work. These bright young interns and employees really want to learn great skills from you and your company so they can grow as professionals. But there is negligible learning associated with such mundane work. Someone in the company has to do the work, and the entry level interns naturally should be the ones that perform the tasks that no one else wants to do.
As a result, you try to tell them to do it as a matter-of-fact, so they may go with the flow without thinking about the demoralizing nature of it. Or you may choose to spend a lot of time explaining to them how this is important to the company and how their work creates great impact. You could also try to make the project sound fun and exciting. At the end of the day, you know in your heart that this is dreadful work, and the young colleague simply needs to “pay their dues” before they can get other interns to do the same.
But when it comes to Wikipedia, people are volunteering their precious time outside of their jobs to do the exact same thing without getting any “real” benefits! When you come home from work, there are lots of things you can do - practice your daily boss-complaining ritual, watch TV, Skype with your significant other, or even play games. People choose to police Wikipedia above all those other activities because they feel like they are protecting humanity’s knowledge - something greater than themselves.
When it comes to Epic Meaning & Calling, it’s not about what you want as an individual nor about what makes you feel good. Individuals participate in the system and take action not because it necessarily benefits them, but because they can then see themselves as heroes of a grander story. It’s about playing your part for the greater good.
And if playing my part does not require me to sacrifice my life as a martyr but simply involves me to spend a couple hours a day monitoring weird activities on Wikipedia, that’s a huge bargain and something worth doing.
According to an MIT study, obscenities that are randomly inserted on Wikipedia are removed in an average of 1.7 minutes37. These unpaid guardians are definitely keeping humanity’s knowledge in check diligently.
However, based on my later acquired understanding in human motivation, I also had the hunch that instead of getting paid for pouring hours of their precious labor into Wikipedia, they are also more likely to pay Wikipedia instead.
After some research, whoopee, I discovered that people who have spent time editing Wikipedia are almost nine times more likely to donate to Wikipedia compared to people who only benefit off it by consuming the valuable information (28% vs 3%)38. What’s more, donors who don’t edit the site have all donated far fewer than three times, while a whopping 80% of donors who have also put labor into Wikipedia have donated five times or more.
Time and time again, we see that, when your system or product demonstrates deep and sincere passion towards a higher vision, others will want to believe in it and get on the journey with you, even if it means foregoing financial compensation (which is Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession).
Even to this day, when people ask me, “Why don’t you enter yourself and your Octalysis model onto Wikipedia? You’re fairly well-known in your industry right?” I usually try to sidetrack the conversation, as the mere thought of doing so brings back scarring memories of having such an authoritative community unanimously vote that I was not worthy of being mentioned.
“Nah, I’m not that well-known.”
Newton’s Legacy is Beyond a Fruit
Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling is generally best communicated during the Discovery and Onboarding Phase of a Player’s Journey. You want to communicate very early on exactl
y why the user should participate in your mission and become a player.
Apple is one of the rare companies that understand this Core Drive, and they managed to instill this into consumers without being user-generated, being an open platform, or pushing for “a charitable cause.” Every once in a while, I’ll have friends who excitedly tell me, “Hey Yu-kai, I am saving up to buy the next iPhone.” I would respond, “But you don’t even know what’s in the new iPhone! What if it sucks?” My friends would then respond with, “I don’t care. I’m going to buy the next iPhone.”
Isn’t that a strange phenomenon in a world where electronic consumers are spoiled by a plethora of options out there, with many alternatives touting the same or better capabilities than the iPhone but only a fraction of the cost?
Why are people so crazy about Apple products?
What we are seeing here is that these friends of mine (and I suspect yours too) have first self-identified as an “Apple Person.” Therefore, they need to do what “Apple People” do, which is to buy the newest iPhones and Macbooks, as well as act like “Apple Snobs” by walking around and making comments such as, “Oh, I never have that problem because I use a Mac.” I myself have also been guilty of this.
When confronted with the topic of many Android phones having better specs and lower prices than the iPhone, my response has usually been, “Well, I don’t know about the specs, but I do know that, when I’m using an Android phone, I feel frustrated; but when I’m using an iPhone, I feel happy. That’s probably worth something.” (By the way, in my opinion, it is often unfair to compare the market share of iPhones to Android Phones as a success measurement, since the iPhone is sold by one company, while Android Phones are sold by over a dozen companies throughout the world. When people freak out about “Oh look! There are more Android users than iPhone users now!”, that’s basically saying that all these non-Apple smartphone companies combined have surpassed Apple. Big deal.)
