The Behavioral Science of Gamification

Dodging the Crap - The Behavioral Science of Great Gamification

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

Robert Haisfield dives deep into the intersection of behavioral science and video game design, discussing how these fields can improve the effectiveness of gamification. He highlights common failures in gamification strategies, especially when they focus too much on points and badges rather than deeper motivational elements. Haisfield emphasizes the need to understand users' goals and motivations, incorporating concepts like expectancy value theory and feedback systems. By borrowing subtle game design elements and focusing on failure recovery, he advocates for a ground-up rebuild of gamification strategies to foster user engagement and goal achievement.

Highlights

Gamification often fails when it focuses solely on surface-level features like points and badges. 📉
Understanding users' goals and motivations is key to effective gamification. 🎯
Expectancy value theory helps in setting goals that users feel are achievable and valuable. ✔️
Learning from game design, elements like feedback loops and voluntary participation are crucial. 🔄
Failure can be a great teacher; design gamification to help users recover and learn. 🚀

Key Takeaways

Gamification should be more than just points and badges; it needs meaningful design! 🎮
Understand your users' goals to design better gamified experiences. 🎯
Behavioral science offers a powerful lens for creating engaging gamified products. 🧠
Failure recovery is crucial; it's okay to fail as long as users can bounce back stronger! 💪
Design for different abilities - not everyone's at the same level! 📈

Overview

Robert Haisfield, a behavior designer and gamification consultant, shares insights into combining behavioral science with game design to create engaging products. His fascination began with video games, later evolving into a study of behavioral economics and science.

He critiques the gamification industry's tendency to mimic existing gamified applications, leading to uninspiring results. Instead, he calls for using behavioral insights and game design principles to address user motivation more effectively.

Haisfield introduces concepts like expectancy value theory, emphasizing that effective gamification aligns with substantial user goals and provides clear feedback on their progress. He underscores the importance of designing for failure recovery, ensuring users remain motivated despite setbacks.

Chapters

00:00 - 01:30: Introduction and Personal Background In the chapter titled 'Introduction and Personal Background', Rob Hayes introduces himself as a behavior design and gamification consultant at his consultancy 'Influenced Insights'. He also works as a behavioral product strategist for Spark Leave, a start-up studio in New York, where products are built using behavioral science. He shares a bit of his personal background, mentioning his extensive experience in playing video games while growing up, which likely influenced his current career path in gamification and behavioral design.
01:30 - 03:30: Behavioral Science and Game Design In this chapter, the speaker reflects on their childhood experiences of playing games online with both friends and strangers. They mention how their parents often questioned the amount of time spent on games, possibly seeing it as a waste. However, the speaker was more focused on how much they enjoyed the games, indicating an early connection between behavior and engagement in gaming. The narrative implies an interest in understanding the motivations behind gaming rather than just the activity itself.
03:30 - 05:30: Understanding Gamification This chapter explores the personal journey of discovering the concept of gamification. The narrator details their initial curiosity and engagement with playing games better. Over the years, this curiosity evolves as they delve into the field of behavioral economics during their college education. Their academic pursuits broaden to encompass a wider spectrum of behavioral sciences, rooted in the foundational principles of behavioral economics. The chapter lays the groundwork for understanding gamification through the lens of behavioral sciences.
05:30 - 07:30: The Role of Goals in Gamification and Behavioral Science The chapter discusses the foundation of behavior in gamification and behavioral science, referencing Kurt Lewin, an early psychologist. Lewin proposed that behavior is a function of both the individual and their environment, suggesting that personal preferences and external stimuli play a critical role in determining behavior. This concept serves as a basis for understanding how goals can influence behavior within gamified systems.
07:30 - 09:30: Importance of Usability and Empowerment in Game Design The chapter examines the significant influence designers have over user behavior in the context of apps and games. It highlights that the environment created by the digital design serves as the user's environment, impacting their actions whether or not the designer is aware of it. The chapter specifically notes that game designers have long recognized and leveraged this control to shape user behavior.
09:30 - 12:30: Feedback Systems and Progress Monitoring This chapter explores the influence of feedback systems and progress monitoring on behavior, drawing parallels from game design. It highlights how the rules and incentives in a game can shape player behavior, such as taking more risks or playing it safe depending on the consequences or rewards set by the game.
12:30 - 17:30: Handling Failures and Encouraging Retry in Games The chapter discusses how games are thoughtfully designed to influence players' behaviors, ensuring they play in a way that is fun and engaging. The focus is on understanding the intended experiences that game designers want to create by examining games through a behavioral lens. The chapter emphasizes the potential lessons that can be extracted from this perspective, highlighting the richness of insights that games can provide.
17:30 - 23:00: Dynamic Difficulty and Matching User Skills The chapter titled 'Dynamic Difficulty and Matching User Skills' discusses the concept of dynamic difficulty adjustment in games, examining how this approach influences player behavior. The author reflects on using games as a lens for research, notably referencing the game Dark Souls. Despite engaging with gamified systems, there is a sense of disappointment with the prevailing implementations observed at the time. The chapter mentions a 2012 report by Gartner, predicting that by 2014, a significant adoption of gamification might occur.
23:00 - 29:30: Case Study: Guided Track This chapter focuses on the shortcomings of current gamified applications in meeting business objectives. The failures are primarily attributed to poor design choices where designers are more inspired by existing gamification rather than games themselves. This results in repetitive design elements reminiscent of those from 2009, such as the mechanics used by Foursquare.
29:30 - 33:00: Conclusion and Call to Action The chapter highlights a statement by Brian Burke from Gartner, emphasizing the misplaced focus on superficial game mechanics like points, badges, and leaderboards in gamification. Instead, Burke suggests that organizations should concentrate on critical game design elements, such as balancing competition and collaboration, and establishing a significant game economy. The current trend is criticized for merely counting points and awarding meaningless badges, leading to ineffective and shallow gamification.

Dodging the Crap - The Behavioral Science of Great Gamification Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 my name is Rob Hayes field I'm a behavior design and gamification consultant that's influenced insights that's my consultancy I also work as a behavioural product strategist for spark leave a start-up studio in New York where we build products from the ground up using behavioral science right and so I got into consulting a little while ago right and I'm just gonna give you a little bit of backstory I played a lot of video games growing up and I played
00:30 - 01:00 by myself I played with strangers online you know like I played with my friends one of those friends is here tonight and and my parents they they always thought that it was a waste of time they probably asked themselves a whole bunch of times what is it about these games that makes him place so much but that's not really what I was thinking to myself instead I was thinking about how much I
01:00 - 01:30 wanted to play and how and trying to figure out how I could play better so let's fast forward a few years studied behavioral economics in college I was an absolutely voracious reader just read everything I could get my hands on and my interests ended up expanding expanding from behavioral economics into behavioral sciences more broadly and one of the core teachings of behavioral
01:30 - 02:00 science is that it comes from an early psychologist named Kurt Lewin who said behavior is a function of the person and their environment right so that's pretty straightforward it's just saying that people's behavior is determined by the person who they are what they want what their preferences are and also the environment which is just like what's coming at us and when you think about it so this is when things started to fall
02:00 - 02:30 into place because when you think about it an app in an app the design that's the digital context that's their environment at the time so that means that the designer has a lot of influence over what the user is doing it doesn't matter whether the designers intentional about it or not they're still influencing the users behavior and games they've recognized this since the beginning they've been designing for behavior
02:30 - 03:00 change for longer than just about anybody right the game designer they know that the way the player interacts with their in-game world the rules of the game that's going to shape the way the player behaves you know they might they might act more aggressive and play more risky because of some set of incentives right or they might alternatively be really safe because they're entirely afraid of failing so
03:00 - 03:30 games that they thoughtfully designed the rules and interactions with the game so that way you are more likely to play the game in a way that's fun they're able to get people to have their intended experience by influencing the user's behavior so I got really excited about the idea of looking at games through a behavioral lens just to see what lessons that I could extract like there's just there's so much to learn
03:30 - 04:00 from games and how the influence behavior when you just look at them through this lens and it also meant that I could play Dark Souls and call it research so he's wasting time now and but then I started looking at existing implementations of gamification and I was largely unimpressed in 2012 in 2012 a report came out from Gartner where they said by 2014 eighty
04:00 - 04:30 percent of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives primarily due to poor design I don't think that things have changed all that much right like because what's essentially happening happening is that designers they aren't being inspired by games but rather by other gamification and so as a result we end up having the same copy/paste mechanics that Foursquare had in 2009
04:30 - 05:00 today now elaborating on this statement Brian Burke from Gartner the he said the focus is on the obvious game mechanics such as points badges and leaderboards rather than the more subtle and more important game design elements such as balancing competition and collaboration or defining a meaningful game economy as a result in many cases organizations are simply counting points slapping meaningless badges on activities and creating gamified
05:00 - 05:30 applications that are simply not engaging for their target audience so it is essentially saying here is that game a cake gamification fails because of poor execution one of the reasons he identifies is that gamification needs to broaden its tool belt you know we need a look at games and really try to understand what's going on on a subtler level I'll also add that a lot of poor execution comes from a misunderstanding
05:30 - 06:00 of the context surrounding each of these game mechanics when they're being used in games and a misunderstanding of the behavioral science that drives people's responses to those mechanics so as a gamer I mean this is tragic but as a behavior designer it's a huge opportunity so I've made an intentional choice since the beginning that I wanted
06:00 - 06:30 to build up my understanding of gamification from the ground up really I'm just trying to combine what I know about behavioral science and video game design and just see what comes out the other end so the definition that I end up using most closely resembles what you see right now gamification is the application of principles of game design and behavioral science to influence user
06:30 - 07:00 behavior I say principles because they means that we can take a little bit of a softer focus on what's going on in games mechanics elements that's super concrete that's what leads us into the cut into the copy paste horrible state of gamification we're in today and to influence user behavior that just focuses my energy on what's actually important right because games game design it's not directly impacting
07:00 - 07:30 engagement what game what game design is doing is that it's impacting user behavior which in turn influences their engagement so my definition of gamification is intentionally fuzzy some of what I'm talking about tonight is going to be different than what you traditionally associate with gamification that's okay I kind of just mix my influences and I'm more concerned
07:30 - 08:00 with making great products than I am with whether this design feature or element belongs to gamification behavior design game design it's all the same to me so when people ask me questions and I do get this question a lot is gamification effective I I kind of have the same response that you all might have if I were to ask is design effective right like it's not just one monolithic thing it's what happens when
08:00 - 08:30 you combine behavioral science and game design and human-computer interaction and just seeing what happens so now let's get into the meat of it what can we learn from game design and behavioral science I'm going to discuss a few areas where both of those fields are thinking about the same things and that will hopefully give you a better understanding of the core building blocks of gamification so you can just
08:30 - 09:00 think about it in a new way so what is a game that's a question that Jane McGonigal asked in reality is broken and she found that games tend to share four qualities all have goals which are just something to focus on this is it drives the user forward there's rules and the rules inform the user about how they can achieve their goals in what constraints
09:00 - 09:30 are there these rules can actually empower users by giving them a sense of control over the world there's feedback which shows the users how their current actions relate to their goals and this can help the user to just notice their own progression and learn the rules of the game but then this last component I think is the most important one it's voluntary participation people can choose to play a game or not you know they don't have to play any game so if
09:30 - 10:00 people don't if the users goals aren't aligned with the game then they're not going to play it and that's pretty much the same as what we've got with products right at any given point people could use something else or just not use anything at all it's their choice and not using anything at all that's their default state of being you're trying to
10:00 - 10:30 get them to do something different than their default state of being so this brings me into some behavioral science so goal-setting and pursuit how do game set goals that people voluntarily accept and that they're likely to achieve expectancy value theory I think is an incredibly useful mental model I use it all of the time and it's saying a few it's making a few big claims one is that it's making a few big claims about what
10:30 - 11:00 goals people choose to pursue and whether they'll be successful in pursuing those goals so it's saying the goals got to be valuable to the person that's straightforward enough if I don't care about the gold and I'm probably not going to do anything about it it's also saying that the person believes completing a certain step set of steps leads to goal achievement which again is straightforward if you
11:00 - 11:30 don't know what to do in order to accomplish your goal then you might feel discouraged you might feel confused and you're not going to be as likely to succeed at it and it's also saying that the person feels capable of completing the steps to the goal this is saying I mean like if you're good at something then you're more likely to do it then if you're bad at something I might be it I might start playing soccer if I was suddenly like I'm good at it and if somebody invited me to play a game of
11:30 - 12:00 pick-up basketball I feel like oh no maybe not so much and in this theis together with what we just learned right all of this goes towards voluntary participation but the rules in the feedback the rules in the feedback system they also are able to make the relationship between the goal and performance clear and make the user feel more capable which I'll discuss in more detail but translating expectancy
12:00 - 12:30 value Theory just into products what this is saying is do they asking three questions do the users believe they're capable of doing what the app wants them to do do the users believe that if they do the actions within the app their goals will be accomplished and do the users want to achieve the goal that the product can help them to achieve so let's break this down and go into more detail do the users believe they're
12:30 - 13:00 capable of doing what the app wants them to do this is this has two main components to it one is usability which UX designers this is their superpower right make it simple remove steps make it easy this can make the user feel very capable I can do this and then there's also empowerment which is making the
13:00 - 13:30 user feel powerful and making them feel capable of making a change so let's look at a few of the ways that games do this one way to do this would be to show the user successful similar others the common way to do this might be a leaderboard opus Magnum does something that I think's a little bit better at least for the context but it's in but what opus Magnum is doing is it is you've got a puzzle and then at the end of the puzzle you're graded on three
13:30 - 14:00 different three different qualities cost cycles and area you're able to see how you compare to the rest of the world on histograms that show the distribution of other users and here I'm able to see like OK on cost I'm doing much better than the rest of the world on cycles I'm not doing so well on area I'm doing much better than the rest of the world but here on cycles you see a bunch of users that are just above you right and that
14:00 - 14:30 makes the user feel like they're capable they if these other people could do it then maybe so can I the difference here between like a global leader board because this is showing you how you compare to all other users in the world a global leader board is maybe saying like your five thousandth place right maybe that's in the top 10% of all users but that's not so motivating rising up from 5,000 place like how are you even
14:30 - 15:00 supposed to do that this just makes it moving the bar a little bit to the left you can also do this in a little bit less gamey of a way Noom is a weight loss app and it during their onboarding they ask you a bunch of questions that personalize the experience to you so they so at the end of those questions they'll present you with a screen where they'll say based on your answers you'll be 172 pounds by December 19th I think
15:00 - 15:30 that this could actually be a little bit more effective this meaning is implied but I think that this could be more in fact more effective if they just explicitly said based on your answers and others like you you'll be blank again this just conveys the message oh there are these other people that are just like me they did it so that means I must be able to do it as well then you can also give them small wins Oh safe Pokemon in here that's supposed to say hollow knight the the so in
15:30 - 16:00 hollow knight this is within the first few minutes of the game and you are you run up against a wall you want to get past that wall you press a whole bunch of buttons and eventually you swing your sword and that breaks the wall that breaks the barrier congratulations you just overcame an obstacle and you made it a little bit closer to your goal so in order to use like small wins in your apps and in your gamification I just
16:00 - 16:30 think it's really important that this win needs to be a win that moves the user closer to the goal that they have in a way that they understand right like maybe if you've got a to-do list app you have the user make a project or maybe it's receiving a personalized weight loss plan after you answer a bunch of questions but putting your email in and signing up that's probably not gonna feel like a win for the user so maybe don't give them a batch for that
16:30 - 17:00 progress bars are another way that you can show the user that they're capable or on LinkedIn you you're making an account and people want to have an all-star profile they're able to see okay this is how much of my profile is filled this is where I want to go this is how much is left but what's important is even from the beginning they start you with a little bit of progress
17:00 - 17:30 already filled and then every time you add some more information into your profile then they fill up that bar more and more and that teaches you the rules it teaches you okay I fill up my profile that makes my profile better it's something else to point out here is just some of the behavioral science behind this the gold gradient effect that's basically saying that the closer you get to achieving a goal the more motivated
17:30 - 18:00 you're going to be you can think about that as though you're on a run and you're getting near the end of the run you can see your house so maybe you decide to sprint that last little bit right and being at zero is so much more so much less motivating than being just a little bit in already so then there's the second component which is do the users believe that if they do actions within the app their goals will be
18:00 - 18:30 accomplished this is about connecting their actions as clearly indistinctly as possible to the goals that they already have and it just makes it clear to the user exactly like what they should or could do in order to accomplish their goal using your app so this brings us to feedback systems in progress monitoring
18:30 - 19:00 which is more or less saying that people compare their goal state to their goal state where they want to be to reality where they are currently and they're getting feedback after they do any action that shows how their how their behavior relates to their goals so think about like a Fitbit right you've got 10,000 steps that you're trying to to make and every once in a while you can look down and see how many steps that
19:00 - 19:30 you've made already this gives you clear feedback after your after your actions that show you where you are and where your goal is so there's a few different there's a few different types of goals states that people can have there is a target goal state this is when I want to be somewhere distinct that's forward that's ahead of where I am currently so one way that you can do this is so in
19:30 - 20:00 Pokemon right you've got progress bars the trainer wants to become the best trainer that they can they in order to be that they need to level up their Pokemon the Blaziken bottom left corner it's currently level 51 and you can see at the bottom there's that little bar where most of its blue and a little bits a little bit of its gray and that shows the player exactly where they are in relationship to their goal and
20:00 - 20:30 then after they beat that grout on if they do decide to beat the grout on then then that'll move them closer it'll give them more experience points and they'll be able to see oh I beat a high level Pokemon that gives me a lot of experience versus earlier when I play beat a low level Pokemon that gave me not so much experience right so this is showing the user the rules of the game and bringing them closer to their goal duolingo takes the lessons of this and
20:30 - 21:00 carries it over very well in this instance I'm a user who wants to do two activities per day every day I have this goal I do one activity it gives me ten experience points and it moves the bar around that circle halfway and that just gets this clear signal to the user okay if I do one more activity then I complete my goal goal gradient effect and it also shows them like it just
21:00 - 21:30 conveys that rule to activities per day and I've achieved my goal in Borderlands in Borderlands they have a skill tree that's another way that you can express progress between a target and where you are right so in this skill tree each time you level up you gain a skill point at the bottom at the bottom of each of those skill trees are the most advanced skills that you can have the most advanced powers
21:30 - 22:00 that you can have and these are really desirable to the player they want to get these high-level powers but in order to get there they need to chart out their course a little bit the skills that are at the top of each of these trees those are the basics and they need to fill up the basics in order to get to end this just gives the user a very clear indication of early it helps the user to set a goal right they say this they look through it and they say this is what I want and it also helps the user
22:00 - 22:30 to see okay I've accomplished this many goals I'm getting pretty close there is also a type of goal State target that is a past performance so I want to do better than I did before so one way that you can do this is through a personal leaderboard right Lumosity is a brain training game app after each game that
22:30 - 23:00 you play you get to see your personal leaderboard of all of your past scores and they're just your scores so you're comparing to yourself and you're able to see okay I did better I did worse I've done this well before I know I can do it again and then I also really like how loop habit tracker does this with their with their streak counter most have it many habit tracker apps they have a streak counter where every day in a row
23:00 - 23:30 you add to your streak you know so if I have 88 days in a row then that means I have an 88 days streak this is this shows the user all of their past scores all of their past streaks so that way after they lose that streak they're able to see okay I think I might be able to outperform it this next time or I can at least outperform some of my previous attempts and then there's also a social comparison goal State this is I want to
23:30 - 24:00 do better than other people and this I'll just show you the Opus Magnum example again this just gives the user a clear indication of this is where everybody else in the world generally is it's such the value in the users head of like you know I think I can do better than this or I think I don't want to do better than this so I can look at the I can look at this scoreboard right this this set of histograms and well I'll
24:00 - 24:30 just tell a story one of the early levels of this game had me building water molecules building machines that would build water molecules at the end of it cycles that was the that was the thing that I really Garet about i was doing pretty poorly so after i had already beat that level i redid it like ten times i worked on it for two hours after I had already won so so these sorts of comparisons they can
24:30 - 25:00 be really powerful and then last component of expectancy value theory is just do the users want to achieve the goal that the products can help them achieve and I don't know what to say about gamification here but I just think this is good product design right and good user research learn about the goals that the user has what are they trying to accomplish with your app and just and try to figure out how committed they are
25:00 - 25:30 to those goals and just really build your whole thing around that because if you're doing that then you're already doing better than most one way of doing this is through user research you can talk to a bunch of users another way to do this is just to ask and be onboarding right so uplift is one of the house that I work with it helps people with depression to reduce their depression and we'd already done some of this user research figured out what some of the goals were and by asking this during the
25:30 - 26:00 onboarding we're able to figure out what each individual users goals are so that way we can measure the user's success right isn't that better than just looking at like how often do they use it right I care so much more about are they accomplishing their goals than anything and this also tells you the frequency of each of these goals maybe you find out that feeling happier maybe you find out
26:00 - 26:30 that feeling happier that's the main goal that uplift users have so then you just focus a lot more of your design efforts around that goal so I hear people say all the time that that they don't really care about the gamification in their apps they just ignore it but to me I just think that signals poor gamification right because gamification should be made so that
26:30 - 27:00 people want to pay attention because paying attention and following along will actually help them achieve their goals better so if you get nothing else from this talk I just want you to take this to heart people can choose to use your product or not so understanding user goals and enabling them as best as possible makes that choice favorable and it's just good design another area that I think is that's a common theme between game
27:00 - 27:30 design and behavioral science is failure recovery when people are going for goals they're probably going to mess up a lot right like the sorts of products that I work with you know I've got uplift we've got a 12-week program for people with depression and they've got low motivation I've got fabric you know which is trying to help people keep in touch with all of the contact all with 50 of their personal contacts and balance all of
27:30 - 28:00 that and I've also got a coding language called guided track where you know people are essentially learning it from scratch right people are going to fail along each of those accounts multiple times so how do we make it so when they fail instead of being demoralized in giving up they try again so hollow night is a game that I love a lot and I think that
28:00 - 28:30 it does this really well hollow night is the game designers they wanted to make a game where the user is challenged constantly because they want the player to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes with beating something that previously beat them right and as you're playing this game you're just exploring around some map you can go in any direction that you want you're killing monsters and you're
28:30 - 29:00 earning money when you die when you die you lose all of that money that you just earned all of the money that you haven't spent yet it's gone and you returned to the check the last check point that you sat on which is just some rent some location in the map where you previously were so that sounds pretty demoralizing right if that's all that was going on I would
29:00 - 29:30 maybe just give up or maybe go in an entirely different direction on the map and not try to overcome what previously beat me this is pretty similar to street counters I think so in a street counter again 88 days in a row you've got an 88 day streak and if you miss a day then you lose your entire streak up until that point and you start over from zero and this is based on some good
29:30 - 30:00 behavioral science right it's saying it's based on the endowment effect which says that we value what we own more than what we don't own right so a bird in the hand really is better than a bird in the bush and then loss aversion is saying that losing something is more painful than its equivalent gain but what happens is when you lose this so the streak is really motivating while you
30:00 - 30:30 maintain that streak you're getting this sense of ownership over it as its increasing its size but as soon as you lose it you just suddenly become discouraged I actually found a comment online rich said this was kind of funny yesterday I fell asleep before I finished the session or I left the app open or something and this morning the counter had sets back to one I was unreasonably upset about it I felt like the previous 380 something days had
30:30 - 31:00 been for nothing I was useless so so so I think that a street counter is good well good well you have it but it doesn't design for failure so what is hollow Knight do to solve this problem whenever you die you leave a spirit in the location where you died which you can see just in in the middle there the black spirit and if you are
31:00 - 31:30 able to make it back to the point where you died and beat that spirit then you get all of the money that you just lost back so so so hollow Knight game designers they wanted players to try again after failing in order to encourage that behavior they gave players something to lose from failing and also a chance to regain it all from trying again and getting to the point where they've lost everything
31:30 - 32:00 this is fully utilizing the endowment effect and loss aversion but the street counter is already trying to do and so what I think is just so important about this is that the game designers they recognize that failure is inevitable and they built a whole system around it so instead of ignoring failure in our apps and in our gamification how can we make failure work for the users so some causes of failure that I've noticed
32:00 - 32:30 these aren't all of them are just you could have a lack of knowledge you don't know how to do something you might have an obstacle get in the way you might forget to do something the goal that you have it might be too challenging or alternatively the app might be missing something that you expect to be there to solve your goal so how do so let's look at a few of the ways that games design
32:30 - 33:00 for failure Halle Knight already described this they punish failure but they give you a chance at redemption in Celeste let's see if I can play this video real quick yeah in Celeste you whenever you fail look at what happens when the player dies look how short that was they literally just respond immediately and they respond immediately right back at the beginning and they were able to solve that problem again there is no punishment whatsoever they
33:00 - 33:30 were just like here you see where you failed you can still see that but how'd that happen maybe try something different and then ziggurat is a roguelike game that rewards failures so what's a roguelike game basic premise of it is that you each life that you have you're trying to make it further and further into the game when you die you start
33:30 - 34:00 over from the beginning and you try to make it further the next time in cigarette what happens is as you play the game you the longer your streak gets the more powerful the the perks that you unlock the power-ups that you unlock are but you don't get those perks and you don't get to see what they are until your next life so they're giving you a boost at the beginning of your next life to look forward to it's under it is
34:00 - 34:30 another game that does something similar where they just say instead of hollow Knight where you lose all of your money when you die in sundered whenever you die that's your opportunity to spend your money and get power-ups so that way in your next life you're able to have all these other things that you can look forward to I can imagine I can imagine that sort of thing being in a street counter in an app like duolingo where you have a whole bunch of different power-ups so some possible responses to failure that you have available to you are making asking for
34:30 - 35:00 support easy and that support can come from from the support team but it can also come from just like other users if you're able to establish good community elements you can also give the users a fresh start with no consequence like Celeste does you can let them you can give them a chance to redeem what they've previously lost like hollow Knight does or you can give them a power out to start off their next try with a boost that they can look forward to like
35:00 - 35:30 cigarette and slander'd Thunder does and then another concept that I think is really important to discuss is difficulty matching games don't want to make a game that's too difficult for its players right they want their players to enjoy the game they want them to be sufficiently challenged and they don't want it to be too easy flow is a concept that's been around in positive psychology for a while it comes from Csikszentmihalyi and what it's basically
35:30 - 36:00 saying here is that when the task is when the task difficulty and the users ability are right around equal that's going to be when people are most likely to get into a flow state if things are too hard for the user then they're gonna get frustrated and anxious and if things get are too easy for the user then they will then then they'll get bored so in
36:00 - 36:30 what this is also saying here is is not that it needs to be an exact match of user ability and skill in challenge what is what it's actually saying is just it's got to be in that general vicinity right the users got to feel enough challenge that it's interesting and maybe even enough challenge that they're able to learn something new when you have this flow state like people are fully energized they're focused on what
36:30 - 37:00 they're doing they lose track of time and they just stick with something for a really long time games thrive on the flow State now this isn't always directly relevant to gamification because flows about doing something in losing track of time so duolingo for example they don't really care if a user is playing is using duolingo for hours and hours at a time the user sets a goal for themselves like 10 minutes per day and they just
37:00 - 37:30 want to make sure that the user is playing for 10 minutes per day so they're not really trying to get the user into a state of flow but at the same time I think that this graph is a lot more useful if you just look at it for the emotional value of what it is right so the the emotions that it describes are that if things are too hard people will get frustrated or anxious if things are too easy then they might get bored if things are or alternatively they might get relaxed and
37:30 - 38:00 if things are just about right in terms of difficulty then they'll probably feel pretty good so I used this concept all the time I think about it a lot when I'm onboarding when I'm on boarding users because like somebody might we might have one user who starts using the app and they just like learn how to use it incredibly quick they're picking up on it like crazy so at that point I might want to show them some more advanced use cases
38:00 - 38:30 or some more advanced functionality that they can play around with other users are gonna be a little bit slower so I'm just gonna give them more basic functionality to start out and slowly build them up over time I think something else that's important to note about this is that it should be rewarding to play in a challenging way doing things that are hard should feel good because I mean that's at least for me with the sorts of products that I
38:30 - 39:00 work with people are trying to accomplish goals that they probably struggle to accomplish on their own that's why they download this app you know so it's my responsibility to make it rewarding for them and to make it engaging for them to go through that goal and it's also not just about skill level and difficulty but also about motivation right so if somebody gives you a task in you're right around perfect level of difficulty but you hate
39:00 - 39:30 it then you're probably not gonna enter a flow state so before I move on I just want to say this is not to say make your gamification hard for users or make your design hard for users what I'm really trying to say is that there are natural differences between the skill levels of each user that you may have and also the skill level of each individual user is going to change over time so think about
39:30 - 40:00 how you can accommodate for that so games do this bunch of ways Resident Evil 4 uses dynamic difficulty if you're doing well then they make the game harder if you're living for a really long time they make it harder they throw more zombies at you those zombies are stronger they'll hurt more and if you're dying a lot then they'll throw less Sambas at you and make the game a little bit easier for
40:00 - 40:30 you this is to kind of just try to modulate the difficulty according to how the users performing duolingo does a version of this they do it right up at front they don't do it all throughout the experience but what they do is during the onboarding if you come to the app with already a basic amount of language like I'm pretty proficient with my Spanish I start using duolingo it's not going to start me from square one because I would get bored out of my mind
40:30 - 41:00 if it started me with square one gives me a placement test and if I do well on that placement test then it unlocks a whole lot of things you can also do a linear difficulty curve this is like Celeste's which is when every user follows the exact same path and that path is the same difficulty for every user if you're going to do this it's got to be well tested and it's got to be
41:00 - 41:30 well tested so you're not excluding the group that you're trying to target so in celeste it's an incredibly challenging game but they're not really targeting they're not really targeting soft gamers they're targeting hardcore gamers right fabulous is an app for habit formation and routine formation they try to make forming a habit as easy as possible so
41:30 - 42:00 what they do here is every user from the very beginning they say for the next three days drink what drink the glass of water in the morning as soon as you wake up do that if you do that then we'll give you another goal like eating a healthy breakfast and I believe that their reasons for doing it this way and having this single this single
42:00 - 42:30 difficulty curve is basically because they're trying to help people otherwise might struggle with forming a habit so for fabulous is probably good for them however they're also going to be alienating a lot of users or a lot of potential users because imagine you come to fabulous from some other habit tracking app or you or you've just tried to experiment into personal productivity a good amount already then you get to
42:30 - 43:00 fabulous and it's like you're not even going to be able to set your own goals to like two weeks in you know so so that goes back to the idea of flow if it's too easy than people might get bored you can also reward more challenging playstyles ensoniq you can get all the way to the end of each level and you can play it in a really easy basic way but you won't get a high score if you want to get a high score you've got to do it
43:00 - 43:30 in a reasonable amount of time you've got to do some tricks I collect a lot of rings be really fast and the thing about that is one the requirements to get a high score are very clear to the user so they know how to adjust their action and also if you do what it takes to get a high score then that makes the game more fun so more challenging play is rewarding so so again with Sonic they
43:30 - 44:00 don't say you have to play it in a hard way but if the user wants to play it in a hard way they're rewarded for doing so and then in steam world heist I mean this happens everywhere in games they just let the user select their own difficulty level right at the beginning of the game I can say oh I'm a casual player I want it really easy oh I'm elite I want it really hard this
44:00 - 44:30 person's experienced but something that I like a lot is that they let you change your difficulty level at any point in the future because during the onboarding people don't know what your app is they don't know what's challenging for them they don't know what's easy for them they have no frame of reference in door lingo does this well as well they ask you during the onboarding are you casual regular serious insane five minutes 10 minutes
44:30 - 45:00 15 minutes or 20 minutes per day and they say you can always change your goals later so I've been talking about a lot of a lot of abstract concepts tonight and I thought that it might be helpful if I made things a little bit more concrete so one of the companies that I work with guided track they've
45:00 - 45:30 agreed to let me do a preliminary case study of them we're trying to come up with an onboarding for this app is pre-launch right now I mean you can still go to guided track calm and you can use it but we haven't really started publicizing it yet and before we do so we want to make sure that we have a good onboarding system because this is just this incredibly flexible powerful thing users we don't want users to get
45:30 - 46:00 overwhelmed at the beginning one of the options that I'm considering is a skill tree system and what I'm about to show you is not fully baked but what I wanted to do is just show you this is kind of how I think through these problems while using the concepts that I discussed tonight so what's guided track a guided track is a very basic coding language that was originally built for behavioral
46:00 - 46:30 scientists but what it's trying to do is let you unless you build surveys you know you can build experiments you can build training modules if you're some coach or you can even make basic apps in a more advanced way than just like a drag-and-drop survey builder like Qualtrics or Survey Monkey could so this really helps this would really help an experimenter to go from coming up with some idea that
46:30 - 47:00 helps people behaviorally it's actually rolling it out in half form so people can use it in again this is just this incredibly flexible thing and this is this incredibly flexible thing with a lot of different capabilities and we're trying to make it effective so the first thing that I'm thinking about is expectancy value theory just as a quick refresher the goal is valuable to the person the relationship between the steps to the goal and the goal
47:00 - 47:30 achievement are clear and the person feels capable of achieving this of completing the steps to their goal so let's start with the valuable goal what's the user trying to accomplish all sorts of things like I said this is a basic coding language you can use it for a lot of different things and so we have a lot of different personas that come to us with different use cases but like there are some commonalities like for
47:30 - 48:00 example some user a lot of users want to create an onboarding flow that personalizes and changes the questions that asks as it goes based on the answers that you provide a lot of people want to create experiments that randomize between groups many people want to create an email signup form that sends the person in a confirmation email after they've done it right so what we can do is we can create individual skill
48:00 - 48:30 trees that we can create individual skill trees that each have titles that are just based around these different use cases right so see people you people usually come to guide the track with their goals already in mind so that means that we can ask them during an onboarding flow about their goals and then we can personalize it based on that
48:30 - 49:00 because we have all these different user personas with all these different goals then we probably shouldn't give the same thing the same onboarding experience to everyone because if we do then they're not able to see clear this is how the app relates to my goal I want to make that relationship as clear as possible as quick as possible for each individual user skill trees can allow the user to skull trees can allow the user to approach their goals and
49:00 - 49:30 chart out their path just by looking at and seeing what they want to have is what they want to have so we can just like make all these different trees could be named for the different use cases during the onboarding we can ask the user questions and give and show them the relevant skill trees based on that and we can also make it so each skill has very clear requirements on how
49:30 - 50:00 you earn it in so what this basically does is it just lets the user decide this is what Michael is let's see what the goal is in the skill tree oh okay I just do what I just do this this and this it's showing them also the progress they're able to see where they want to end up and they're able to see where they are and they're able to progress along those lines so we've got this clear relation we've got to have a clear relationship between the steps and the
50:00 - 50:30 goals so the skill trees are going to be named named and clearly navigable according to goals each individual skill is going to be named according to goals and the trees are going to be named according to a little bit broader goals and the requirements are also going to be very clear so why do I want to name eat why do I think it's so important to name each of these skills and skill trees according to goals well it's because it's for a few reasons
50:30 - 51:00 one is that people don't know what the features are when they're being on-boarded they don't know the language of the app so if they run into some problem then they don't know where to look if they've got like just an aunt like a help document right and also I want to name goals appropriately because I mean this is something that other gamification systems do very poorly so I mean like let's say that have a meditation app and I want to
51:00 - 51:30 build a meditation habit I'm not gonna call a badge for a meditation habit seven days in a row because that's more of a reflection of the company's goals than anything I'm also not going to call the badge ninja because what does that even mean to the user right the he need to like look specifically through each thing to figure out does this relate to what I'm trying to do or not if you can name each of these badges and skills just based on goals that the user
51:30 - 52:00 already has then they have no reason not to want to achieve them and then we've got to make the user believe that they're capable this is where difficulty matching comes into play so our users skill it varies over time the goals in the question the questions that the user is asking six days in they're gonna be different than the questions that they're asking six months in how can I accommodate for both scenarios imman also the skills from one
52:00 - 52:30 user to the next are going to be different like some people maybe come into guided track having already coated in some other coding language and some people are just experimenters who have been using Qualtrics their entire life and they've just been dragging and dropping things so they really need to learn something new and skill trees they enable users to chart out their own path by providing helpful information for
52:30 - 53:00 goal accomplishment and I want it to be the skill tree requirements truly signal goal achievement so what do I mean by this I just mean that the requirements should be written in such a way that a user could achieve those skills regardless of whether they read the description of it if they're just becoming a more and more advanced user than they should be achieving those skills because they have them right and
53:00 - 53:30 and that also allows us to be able to show those users effectively at any given point here's the next things that you can learn like because here's what's next in the skill tree you've already populated it on your own without really thinking about it so on this skill tree I mean you can see there are skills that build up into later skills and and you can just naturally accomplish these things
53:30 - 54:00 so now just like the little thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is how do you build power users right because in my mind my hypothesis is that the power user is someone who's found a good fit for their goals using your product but also they've been exposed to all of the other goals that they can accomplish using their product that they didn't know they had originally because
54:00 - 54:30 then if they lose if they stop having some goal then they're still able to use the app because they're using it to solve all sorts of things and this is where the gold gradient comes into play remember to go gravy in effect what it was basically saying was that as you progressed towards your goal as you get closer to your goal you become more and more motivated and I think I can use that in this skill tree to my advantage
54:30 - 55:00 I think that skills can exist in multiple locations right like just about any use case that I can imagine would require a user to be able to know how to write a good question or would require them to know how to use variables and make if-then statements later any track I can imagine would use that so why not have it when they accomplish a goal in one track in one skill tree it also accomplishes it in all of the other
55:00 - 55:30 skill trees that means that means when they look at it then they'll see oh I've already started on this I might try to explore a little bit I might try to learn some more things and this is just again to make it so people are exposed to new goals so thinking through a skill tree or even a badging system like this it gives you a lot of things it gives you a way of measuring whether the users are
55:30 - 56:00 accomplishing their goals it gives you a way of enabling the user to accomplish their goals and it also gives you a way of giving them recognition when they accomplish their goals right so I mean wouldn't it just be great if instead of looking at how frequently people were using it you're just looking at what goals are each user achieved what goals what goals each user achieving then you're able to concretely
56:00 - 56:30 measure the value that they've had and this system that I've described it may sound like a lot but from the users perspective if it's well designed what's going on is the users saying huh I wonder if I can do this or I wonder how I can do this let's see there's the skill tree that's named something like what I'm trying to do and there's their skill within it that's exactly what I'm trying to do let's do that cool I
56:30 - 57:00 learned it let's see what else I can do now that I've learned that that's what's going on here and if we've got that then I think we're pretty much golden but one thing that I haven't discussed yet is how do we get people to pay attention to this skill tree and how do we get them to care about it and here's where failure comes into play when do people have goals set right like they have
57:00 - 57:30 goals set when they fail when they run into some problem so one instance of this is I run a program and I get some error code something I was trying to do did not work how do I fix that that's the first thing that's coming to my mind so wouldn't it be great if in this moment with each of these error messages were able to show them the relevant skills that they could learn in order to
57:30 - 58:00 solve those errors and then maybe even the next time they run the program they just see like this little like check mark go by the previous error message so they're like hey I did this then there's also the sort of failure which is not knowing what to do I've got this blank page what do I put in here here we do something else to help the user out we give them this sidebar you can see where it says
58:00 - 58:30 like hey you've got the check mark it's on the left side it's on the left side yeah and when you click on those you're able to browse through a bunch of pre selectable options so I could click let's say I'm trying to send an email to a user that's what I want to do so I can look through all these buttons and I see okay here's here's the email I click on that button and it lets me just fill in
58:30 - 59:00 the blanks wouldn't it be cool if in this moment when they're on this screen it shows them all the skills they can gain by using this functionality or it shows them a whole bunch of different use cases that they could have with that functionality so we're what we're trying to do here is make it so when the user fails they have a goal they're clearly pointed towards how to accomplish their
59:00 - 59:30 goal so they accomplish it so again this just this wasn't totally explored but I just wanted to show you how considerations of expectancy value theory of difficulty matching and of failure can all come into the play call come into play in gamification so just summing it all up
59:30 - 60:00 people use your app voluntarily so expectancy value theory is a very good mental model try to understand the users goals make it incredibly clear how they can accomplish those goals using your app make them feel capable of using your app to accomplish those goals and give them some recognition when they do so failure think about when it happens for your user and try to design it so people don't get demoralized and
60:00 - 60:30 instead bounce back maybe you can give them a new goal when they fail and then difficulty you want users to feel good not frustrated or bored but you also want them want to help the user to accomplish the things that they were struggling to accomplish on their own that's why they downloaded your behavior change app so think about whether your product accommodates for the varying levels of skill ability and motivation that you've seen that you see between
60:30 - 61:00 users and also that you see within each individual user spread out over time so to me gamification is just the application of principles of game design and behavioral science to influence behavior it's not from understanding concrete game mechanics but rather from understanding game design and behavioral science that we end up with something
61:00 - 61:30 that's truly powerful I want to create a world where people are both able and willing to do hard but necessary things for themselves and for others and in doing so people will be able to accomplish goals that they've always said they wanted to accomplish but they were struggling to do on their own game design and behavioral science it just it provides an incredibly powerful set of lenses for this and as a concept it has
61:30 - 62:00 a lot of promise in order to live up to that promise I believe that we need to rethink gamification from the ground up using the basic principles what motivates people and what are a bunch of different ways that we can do it so we've covered a lot tonight with a
62:00 - 62:30 lot of detail a lot of so I believe you'll get the most out of this talk if you spend some time reflecting on what you've learned and if you reflect on what you've learned tonight and you believe that you have something to add or discuss about these ideas please reach out you know I mean I still very much consider myself at the beginning of my journey into gamification and really doing this right
62:30 - 63:00 so similarly if you know someone who's thinking about or researching similar things I'd really appreciate an introduction because again I just think that we can build something really powerful together additionally in my consulting I generally work with products that make users lives better by helping them achieve their goals that they previously struggled with if you have a product that improves people's
63:00 - 63:30 health and makes them happier wealthier wiser more productive I'm interested in talking with them and if you I'm interested in talking with you and if you know someone who else who might be interested I'm interested in talking with them as well together we can really make a difference in a lot of people's lives