by Yu-kai Chou
If you give people a bunch of points just to do marketing for you, or reward them with virtual items for every little stupid thing, users will feel like the game is shallow – this is not a game worth playing. Users have no interest in a game if they know the game designer is just trying to benefit themselves instead of caring about their community. For instance, if there are points, progress bars, and badges for “How much money you donated to the site owner,” people will feel insulted by your lame attempt to use them for solely personal gains.
People know that sharing on Twitter/Facebook mostly benefits me, and so I don’t want to tell them that my game is about sharing. When I state that commenting on my site is worth more than anything else, I’m expressing that I value interacting with you more than anything else. I want to communicate with you, and that is what I value. And if you don’t want to talk to me, at least watch my videos so you can learn something! And of course, if you are willing to share my content with your friends and family, I would be very grateful too, but I’m not going to use that as a big carrot in my site.
This tells users that the key of this game is “engagement.” I want you to be engaged, learn a lot, and participate in a community. This becomes a game worth playing.
When you design your Status Point systems, make sure it is based on something meaningful - something that the users themselves want to engage in. Or else, points just become meaningless counters meant to stress people out.
Leaderboards (Game Technique #3)
Leaderboards is a game element where you rank users based on a set of criteria that is influenced by the users’ behaviors towards the Desired Actions. Even though Leaderboards are meant to motivate people and bring in status, if designed incorrectly, it often does the exact opposite.
If you use a site for a few hours and received 25 points, and then see on the Top 20 list that number 20 already has 25,000,000 points, that would likely discourage you from trying further.
This was an issue that Foursquare, a geolocation mobile app that gamified the check-in process, had many years ago. Often, a new user would check into a new coffee shop, and then realize that the “Mayor” there has already achieved 250 check-ins and increasing their total every day. “Fighting for the Mayorship” is probably not something the user would be interested in, because he knows the odds of developing progress and feeling accomplished are very low.
What users need is Urgent Optimism, another term coined by Jane McGonigal70, where the user feels optimistic that they can accomplish the task, but also the urgency to act immediately. When you set-up a leaderboard, there are a couple variations that have shown to perform more effectively.
First, you always want to position the user in the middle of the leaderboard display, so all they see is the player ranked right above them, and the player ranked just below. It’s not very motivating in seeing how high the Top 10 players are, but it’s incredibly motivating when one sees someone who used to be below them suddenly excelling.
Another variation that has proved successful is to set up Group Leaderboards where the ranking is based on the combined efforts of a team. In this case, even though not everyone is competitive and needs to be at the top, most people don’t want to be the laggard that drags the team down. As a result, everyone works harder because of Social Influence & Relatedness (Core Drive 5).
The next variation is to set up constantly refreshing leaderboards, where every week the data would refresh and the leaderboard will start tracking progress anew; hence no one falls too far behind and always has a renewed sense of hope, leading towards that Urgent Optimism. Finally, it’s a good idea to implement micro-leaderboards, where only the users’ friends or very similar people are compared. Instead of seeing yourself ranked 95,253 out of 1 million users, you see how you are top five among twenty-two friends.
The key way to effectively integrate a leaderboard is to ensure that the user can quickly recognize the action items that drives them to reach the win-state. If there’s no chance of achievement, there is no action.
Core Drive 2: The Bigger Picture
Since Development & Accomplishment is the easiest Core Drive to design for, many companies focus on this Core Drive- sometimes almost exclusively. Consequently, many of the Gamification Platforms out there are specialized in appealing to this Core Drive too. However, if you do plan to implement these game elements into your product, make sure you do this carefully and elegantly. Always focus on how you want your users to feel, not what game elements you want to use.
Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment is often a natural result after good implementation of other Core Drives, such as Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession, as well as Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience. Often, it also leads to Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, where the user wants to share with their friends that sense of achievement and accomplishment. We will be learning a lot more about these Core Drives in the next few chapters.
To get the most out of the book, Choose only ONE of the below options to do right now:
Easy: Think of an example where Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment motivated you or others to take certain actions. Did it keep people engaged for longer?
Medium: Think of the last time you saw a points or achievement symbol system. Were the points or achievement symbols representing something meaningful? Or were they pointless? What would you change to make them represent a sense of true progress and accomplishment?
Hard: For your own project, create a Status Points and Achievement Symbol economy via spreadsheets. Define what the Desired Actions are, assign point values to these actions based on how meaningful they are to the user, and assign Achievement Symbols based on more creative factors beyond just “Woot! You did the action a hundred times!”
Share what you come up with on Twitter or your preferred social network with the hashtag #OctalysisBook and see what ideas other people have.
Investigate the Experience
In this chapter, I talked about how I completely revamped the Captain Up system on my blog to create a “game worth playing.” Go to my blog at YukaiChou.com and experience the motivation design from the Captain Up widget on the right hand side. After playing with it, read up on the full blog about my design decisions at http://bit.ly/YukaiCup, or simply go on Google and search, “how yu-kai chou designed his blog.”
There are still many things I would like to change and add into the gamified experience if I only had more time. Please feel empowered to come up with ways it can be improved and share your findings with me.
Chapter 7: The Third Core Drive - Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback
“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” - Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations
The third Core Drive of Octalysis Gamification is Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, which really emphasizes on what most people refer to as “Play.” Some of my fondest memories growing up are of when I got to play with Legos and engage in assembling, dismantling, and rebuilding basic structures in a practically infinite number of combinations. It gave me and millions of others around the world great joy and fulfillment simply because it allowed one to be creative and see immediate results. I could admire the outcome of my ideas, while ensuring that I could recalibrate my efforts over and over again in bringing my imagination to life. I believe that humans are by nature creative beings, and we yearn to learn, imagine, invent, and partake in creative processes where the journey in and of itself brings happiness.
The beauty of this Core Drive lies in its perennial ability to continually engage us at all moments in our lives.
Recalling the structure of Octalysis, with the top-down Core Drives being White/Black Hat, and left-right Core Drives being Extrinsic/Intrinsic, you will notice that Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback resides in the upper right “golden corner.” This implies that it is White Hat – meaning it has long-term positive emotions, as well as Right Brain – emphasizing Intrinsic Motivation. Unfortunately, this Core Drive is also possibly the hardest to implement correctly.
The Computer Game that Became a National Sport
In a large stadium, over 100,000 audience members sit earnestly in front of a stage. These players all paid a fine fee to be there and are excitedly waiting for their long time idols to compete with other pros in the league.
Two professional commentators are setting the scene, introducing the background and importance of this match in the overall context of the season, and what it would mean for each opposing player and their careers. They’re speculating on the odds for each player based on their strengths, weaknesses, style of play, and possible innovations that will be revealed during this pivotal match, all while popping in a few jokes here and there.
Simultaneously, over a million people are watching the stage on TV and all over the Internet, with the logos of some of the biggest sponsors in the world prominently displayed.
This is a typical setting for any professional athletic sport. The only difference is, on the stage, below a few enormous screens, there are only two computer “workstations,” each surrounded by soundproof glass. Seated in front of the workstations, two “star competitors,” both around twenty years old, exercise their pre-match rituals before the crucial game.
This is a championship match within the “eSports” industry, a newly emerging field where people around the world watch full-time professional gamers compete against each other.71
This is an industry that was pioneered by Blizzard Entertainment’s big-hit game: Starcraft. Starcraft is a real-time strategy (RTS) game launched in 199872. Upon beginning an RTS game, players usually start off with a few workers that can mine resources. The resources can then be used to create more workers, erect buildings that have different functions, recruit combat units, research science and technology, and/or unlock certain powers, all for the purpose of defending against and defeating other players who are also building their dominions.
Users are constantly making quick decisions based on a scarcity of time and resources. Should they recruit more combat units and march into enemy territory, or invest in slow developing but dominant technologies at the risk of being run down by enemies who alternatively chose to train combat units in the meantime?
Each match in Starcraft (and for most RTS games) lasts around ten minutes to an hour, with each player starting from scratch with every round. This means nothing is accumulated from previous game efforts except for the players’ skills.
Moreover, the “real-time” part of RTS games means that the faster you can make sound decisions and execute on them, the stronger player you can become. Good Starcraft players have the concept of APM – Actions Per Minute. This indicates the number of actions a player can execute every minute. Actions could be anything from ordering a soldier to guard a certain post, or selecting a building to initiate new scientific research.
For new Starcraft players, it is common to only have 10-20 APM, as it normally takes a few seconds to determine what is possible and decide on what to do. For more experienced hobbyists, this rate could rise to 50-60 APM, which is about one action every second. The mind-blowing thing about Starcraft (or most eSport games) is that the top professional players often have shocking APM numbers between 300-400! This means that every second, they are literally executing five to six actions throughout the game.
This is very important in an RTS game, for if every action you execute your opponent can execute two, you are bound to be outmaneuvered and “pwned,” given that both players have similar judgments and strategies. In the documentary “The Hax Life,” when asked how he trains to become better, a top Starcraft player answered that he would put heavy sandbags on his wrists when he practices so that in a real game, his uninhibited hands and fingers would move much faster73.
In fact, Starcraft has become so popular in South Korea that for over a decade now, there have been dedicated TV Channels that broadcast Starcraft matches between professional players. The very best Starcraft players can make over $300,000 a year, especially with all the sponsorships from major brands. I know to all my rich readers this isn’t much, but for a country like South Korea this is considered quite an achievement, especially for someone under 25 years old. Not only are the professional Starcraft players becoming famous, the top professional Starcraft commentators are also becoming quite well known.
Starcraft has also been wildly popular in the US. The University of California, Berkeley pioneered one of the first courses on Starcraft and its strategy, while many students at other academic institutions have incorporated the economic dynamics and decision strategies within Starcraft as key themes in their research papers and theses74.
In 2009, 10 years after Starcraft was first released, students from Princeton University established the Collegiate Starleague, a seasonal intercollegiate league for competition between the member institutions. Over 100 North American universities and colleges participate, including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, MIT, and many more75.
When Starcraft II was launched in 2010, the frenzy on Starcraft I had not diminished, with many players insisting that Starcraft I was still better. Of course, over a few years, most professional players transferred from Starcraft I to Starcraft II.
This actually is a great demonstration of how great Endgame design and the use of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback can remove so-called “gamification fatigue.”
Gamification Fatigue?
Every once in a while, attendees at my speaking engagements or workshops would ask, “Yu-kai, I want to add gamification to my company, but aren’t most games short-lived? Wouldn’t we be shooting ourselves in the foot if we implemented gamification?”
It’s true, many fun games are played for two to eight months, but afterwards players move on to new games. However, it doesn’t mean that gamifying your system would automatically result in the same situation due to two important reasons.
First, remember I mentioned earlier that there is generally no real purpose for playing a game; that is, most people never have to play a game. The instant a game is not fun, people will leave and play other games or go on Youtube/Facebook/email. As a result, after two to eight months, the game will often fail to engage people so they drop out. Hopefully the system that you are designing actually has a purpose to it, and so even if it becomes boring (which is probably the current state anyway), your users still have a reason to stay on.
The second reason is because most of these games have not been designed for continued motivation in the “Endgame”, the fourth and final phase of a player’s journey. If the experience is no longer engaging in the endgame, you simply move on to other games.
Many well-designed games, like Starcraft, have managed to engage the interest of players for more than a decade. Other games like Poker, Golf, Chess, Mahjong, have all stood the test of time and are still popular after centuries of use. Now there are many ways to design an engaging Endgame, but the reason why so many of these games stand the test of time is largely due to their utilization of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback.
In a study published by Queen Mary University of London and University College London in 2013, researched compared the effects of different games on the brain. After six to eight weeks, the study revealed that students who played Starcraft roughly an hour a day improved their memory, visual search and informational filtering abilities, as well as other cognitive skills (Trivia: I happen to be quoted in the Wall Street Journal article on this study).76
When a user can continuously tap into their creativity and derive an almost limitless number of possibilities, th
e game designer no longer needs to constantly create new content to make things engaging. The user’s mind becomes the evergreen content that continuously absorbs their attention into the experience. That’s the power of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback in retaining users for the long haul.
Tic-Tac-Draw
Almost every culture has the game Tic-Tac-Toe, with some calling it by another name, such as Xs and Os77. Many of us enjoyed the game when we were younger because it was easy to initiate with just a pen and a piece of paper (or a stick with sand), and can be finished within half a minute.
However, as we grew older, the game became less interesting78. Why? Because at some point it became too easy. Most games end up in draws, and the only thrill is trying to see if you can trick a new opponent into making a careless move due to reckless/hasty actions (which is Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity). With just a little bit of learned strategy, it became boring79.
Because there is a limit on the Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback, Tic-Tac-Toe became a lot less engaging for users.
On the other hand, chess is a game that has been studied and played rigorously for centuries. Today there are still thrilling matches between some of the strongest players in the world that are exciting to watch.
When I was a freshman in high school, having recently moved to the United States, I realized my English skills were quite poor. (In fact, in the 11th grade I met a friend who hadn’t seen me for 2 years that openly exclaimed, “Wow, you speak English now! That’s crazy!”). Making up for my lack of communication skills, I often played chess with my American peers, as it was quite similar to the Chinese Chess I played in Taiwan. With a few friends and the sponsoring teacher, Mr. Richard Gill, we formed the Blue Valley High School Chess Club.
