What's the secret to sustainable behavioral change? This is particularly important for gamification for social good because so many of those contexts involve people wanting to change the way they act in their lives, and meeting some mechanism to motivate them to do it on a reliable basis. But it's relevant to other forms of gamification as well and of course relevant to much more beyond gamification. There are lots of situations where we want to change the way we act, somehow change our standard default behavior. But it's hard to do so. Really what we're talking about here is the formation of habits. So a habit is something that you do automatically. You don't stop and think about it consciously. It's just the default, it's the normal way you do something. And that makes it something that you will reliable do, in a way that even something you know objectively is good for you, you're not as likely to do because it requires you to activate that conscious, structured part of your brain as opposed to the automatic, unconscious part of your brain which can just run on autopilot. So ideally, what we want to do in a lot of these context, is help people move from the conscious mode of thinking to the automatic mode which is the domain of habits. B.J. Fogg who is the director of the persuasive technology lab at Stanford, has for many years studied behavior change and particularly looked at how technology devices and online services can promote behavior change. He's developed a framework for describing how behavior change works, which is particularly useful for us in the context of gamification. Fogg's model, which is here, has basically three elements. You see here the formula B is behavior, and he says it's equal to mat, M is your motivation, A is your ability and T is your trigger at the same moment. If all three of those things are present he says we are likely to see people take the action. So, let's look at each of these three elements. The first axis is motivation, and here we're talking about they're some things that you really want to do. And the more that you want to do them, the more motivated you are, the more likely you're going to do them. Ability says there are some things that are easy for you to do. And, the easier it is, again, the more likely you're going to do it. But, any action that we can think of, has to get plotted here on this graph. So, maybe I really want to run a marathon. I'm really desperately motivated to do it. But, I'm not much of a runner. I couldn't run a marathon if I tried. I'd collapse long before the finish line. So that would go up here. And some other task that maybe is pretty simple for me to do. Something like getting up in the morning and jogging for 10 to 15 minutes, which would be great everyday. I can do, it's pretty easy but I just don't because I'm not sufficiently motivated to do that. And so what Fogg says is that we can plot everything on those two axises. And then we can look at the third element, which is what he calls triggers. And triggers are the things that push us at a particular moment to engage in the activity. And what he says is basically, the more that you are out here, in this domain of the graph, the upper right, where both ability and motivation are high, the more likely it is that the trigger is going to work. So, the,the triggers are based on where you are. And, in designing these systems, it's important to think about, first of all, what the level of motivation is, second of all, what the level of perceived ability is. Important to specify, this is what the person thinks their ability is, it's not necessarily something that'd we find if we did an objective test, because again, this is about people's behavior and it's based on what they think they can do not what they can actually do that's the second dimension. And finally what could trigger given those conditions the desired activity. The trigger according to Fogg gets associated with the activity, echoing that behavior is notion of operant conditioning. But Frogg's framework is broader and brings in the notion of it as well. So, what are some of the things that we can learn from this framework? The first one here is that motivation and ability can trade off against each other to the extent that motivation is high, then you can do something really hard. But to the extent the motivation is low, it needs to be a pretty easy task for someone to be willing to do it. And so in looking at gamification techniques, which can push on both of these dimensions, it's worth thinking about which area is worth the most effort and what the nature is of the activity, and what's needed in order to move people to make that sustainable behavior change. Second lesson from this is that timing matters a lot when it comes to triggers. Because the trigger is the thing at that moment that gets you to take the action based on your level of motivation and ability, and so it's important to design the trigger at the right moment when someone is ready and able to take the action. A lot of the design challenge in applying these kinds of techniques, whether it's in software or in other situations, is building in the right kind of triggers to work at the right moment. Too many triggers will just overwhelm people. They'll become noise. And, finally Fogg says there are three kinds of triggers. The first one he calls sparks, and these are triggers that increase your motivation. They're things that make you more likely to want to do something. The second are facilitators triggers that increase your perceived ability. Things that make a task seem easier, even if they don't make you more motivated they make it seem simpler and therefore that triggers you to take the action. And finally triggers that are just signals. If you're motivation and ability are sufficiently high, so we're out here. All you need is just an alarm clock. You just need a reminder saying, okay, time to go do that now, and that habit will be activated. So, here's the punch line for gamification. In my gamification design framework, there were two kinds of activity loops. One I called the engagement loops, and the other I called progression loops. Each one ties into one of these elements of motivation in Fogg's model, and shows the way that gamification can activate these various kinds of conditions to encourage sustainable behavior change. The first one was the engagement loop. And this you may recall was the move from a motivation to an action to feedback, and back again to motivation. This was what sometimes gets called the addiction loop. It's the thing that creates that pull that you want to do something. Even if it's something that objectively you wouldn't think is something exciting, but you just feel that desire to do it. Or it's more, robustly, your reaction to feedback that's then giving you a sense that this is something that you should want to do something. That ties in directly with motivation. So engagement loops are great techniques for pushing up on that motivation axis, making people more motivated to do something. The second kind of loop is the progression loop, and, this was the, stair step up the mountain with the various stops and boss fights and so forth along the way. And this is basically about perceived ability because down here at the bottom, where we have on-boarding, this kind of progression structure in games makes people feel comfortable with the game. And then, as you move along to various spots, you go up a ramp of difficulty, and then achieve a level of mastery, and then level out. So, again, it navigates you through the process of getting better and better, and improving both your actual ability and your perception of your ability. Wow, now I'm up here and I was able to kill this really big boss, which when I was down here starting off, I thought was impossible. So that ties into the notion of perceived ability and pushing along that access of behavior change using gamification. And finally, triggers. If you look at well designed games, they're great at triggering. They're great at putting something in front of you at the right moment. And that's what in gamification analytics can do. Understanding behavior, understanding how people react to the system and what they're doing provides guidance for giving them the right trigger at the right moment to encourage them to participate further. If you're interested in more on this topic, Michael Wu, who is the principle scientist for analytics at a company called Lithium, has a terrific series of blog posts explaining some of the basic concepts around gamification. And, here's the one that talks specifically about the application of the Fogg behavior model.
