Here are some of the techniques that can be used particularly in context of gamification for social good. And I'll illustrate each of them with reference to a real world example. The first example is something called CAPRI, which stands for Congestion and Parking Relief Initiatives. It's a project at Sanford that's being developed by a professor named Belagi Provocar and his team, based on some work they've done in other places. And the issue here is parking spots fill up on campus at Stanford, the roads get congested because most people who are driving onto campus, show up at the same time, and leave around the same time. That's why it's called rush hour. This is of course not at all unique to Stanford, and so what the team did was come up with a system to incentivize people, motivate them, use game rewards and so forth, to spread out their arrival and departure and parking patterns. And at some level it works like the other kinds of gamified system that we've seen, so it uses the standard approaches of feedback and rewards. You see here this meter, which shows how many points you've earned. Here's how many points, level 30, the person has earned this week. Here's their level that they have gotten to, level silver and you see this graphically represented here. And that provides some feedback and that feedback then ties into rewards. And here you see $25, you get a monetary reward and a set of credits, points every time you park at some time outside of the rush hour period. So that's the first element of this which, again, looks like many of the other examples that we've seen. But here's some interesting areas that are a little bit different. The first one has to do with monitoring. So how does this information get recorded? It gets recorded automatically. Because users of the system use smartphones with GPS that are tied into a system that can track automatically what time you arrive and where you arrive. There's no need to go and type in and self-report what you did. This is a particular challenge for social impact gamification. It's a challenge for all kinds of gamification but if we're talking about commercial context, usually there's some existing transaction. It's you at work where you're monitored by the corporate systems that you're using. Or it's you visiting a website of a company, that's then able to track you that way. With many of these social impact type applications that involve behavior change, a big challenge is getting people to report. You've got to describe what you ate. You've got to describe what kind of energy usage you engaged in. And that's a hurdle. So more and more sensors are being used to track, automatically, what people are doing. Obviously, this raises privacy and other issues. It needs to be done in a way that is transparent that allows the users to at least opt-out and probably opt-in and so forth. But if it's done right, then that's very powerful to encourage participation in the system. Third one is the subtle use of communal pressure. So you see down here the use of friends. You can see not only what you're doing but some information about your friends and their parking behavior within the system. Earlier on I gave the example of Opower and showed how they give you reports that say this is how your power usage compares to your neighbors. And, what that does is it activates some very powerful social norms. It's not necessarily about competition per se, it's about social norms that, you don't wanna be, too far out of line, with your community, your neighbors or your friends. Creates a kind of subtle pressure which may be healthy to get people to conform and to get people to engage in that behavior. So, those are some techniques that this service uses which are particularly interesting in the social good context. The next technique is competition. So, as I said, purely showing you what your friends did creates a subtle pressure but it's not about beat your friends. Now certainly we can use, or these systems can use, a leaderboard. And some of them do for the express kind of competition against either others or friends. But there is also the potential to make the entire process a competition. What I'm showing you here is something called the Kukui Cup, which is a project at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Where some professors there have developed a system to create a competition among students in the residence halls, in different floors and sections of the residence halls, to see which one uses the least power, which one is the most efficient in their sustainable use of energy. And it's got all of the usual kinds of gamefication elements that we see as well as a big educational section. Here are the points and so forth. But the big issue here, the big thing that I want to highlight, is it's a competition. So the entire process is built around trying to win and do better than your peers. That's something that can be used in other contexts of course, but it has particular value in social impact. Because the danger of focusing too much on competition in the context of commercial gamification is that it pushes people to compete as opposed to focusing on doing well at their job. Or focusing on understanding the product that they are going to buy, and having a long-term engaging relationship with the company. Competition can result in this zero sum relentless focus on the competition, which is bad. Here there's no external existing kind of structure where this is your job. The competition is about trying to take pride in winning but to get you to something that again, you want to do. To get this group of students, for example, to use less energy. So the competition has less potential to be dangerous, and more potential to be an added motivator that just sweetens the pot if you will, and helps people get to the desired result. The next one is impact. If you are visiting a company's website you probably don't care that much if your engagement is producing more sales or some additional marketing benefits for the company. But if you are involved in some kind of social impact activity, you as the user, the player may care a lot to find out just what impact you're having, what good you're doing for the world. So, there's an opportunity to leverage that feedback effect of seeing the ultimate results of collective activity on the site and turning that around and using that to further motivate people. So for example, this is a screenshot from a company called Practically Green. Susan Hunt Stevens, who is the CEO of the company, is going to do an interview with me later. So I'll let her tell you about what the company does. But basically, they motivate sustainability types of actions by people. And you see here, one of the things that they show on this page is what the consequences are of your activity. How much energy you've saved, how much fuel you've saved, how much waste you've avoided, water, trees, emissions, and, if you're doing this within a company, you can see those metrics for the entire company. Look at all the good that we have done by using this service. That can be a powerful motivator above and beyond the direct motivational pull of the gamified system. Seeing what you're doing can make a big difference in getting people to do more of it, if the objective is something that they feel is a social good. Finally there's an interesting opportunity to use chance. This is back to the CAPRI system, the parking system at Stanford, and what this system does is, remember it gives you either dollars of rewards or credits. And the idea of the credits is that you can use the credits, not to redeem them for different kinds of tangible rewards, but to play a game. To play this basic kind of chutes and ladders game where you have a chance of a bigger reward, but it's random, it's not guaranteed. You give up your certain reward and you might get less depending on where you come out on this, you get different kinds of outcomes. But you might also get a lot more. You might have a big kind of payoff. This is a lottery type of system, and people love it. The system has embedded in it also some skill based or performance based elements, namely that depending on your status level. You'll recall there was member, silver and gold and so forth levels, based on how much people were parking at the desirable times. Depending on where you are on that scale, you get a better board. HIgher levels give you a bigger chance of winning bigger prizes. So there's some incentive. It's not purely by chance. But once you get to the end of that process, if you choose to use this system, your reward is potentially randomly determined. And it turns out that people actually love this, that they generally prefer this opportunity to get a much bigger reward potentially, but not guaranteed. And this ties in to lots of findings in behavioral economics and so forth and ties in to the example I gave way back in the beginning of the class of the speed camera lottery and how a game-like system of a lottery can actually promote behavior. This system CAPRI, as I said, is based on some prior work. The preliminary trial that was done in Bangalore, India found that they were able to double the number of cars in the test area that were parking earlier or later than the rush hour period. And I trial in Singapore found at least a 10% impact on overall traffic patterns. And 10% may not seem like much. But traffic is a non-linear thing. A small consistent increase in the number of cars on the road in a particular place, will lead to a big increase in congestion and traffic. And so 10% can actually make a huge difference in terms of avoiding some of those impacts.
