Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. This course will teach you the mechanisms of gamification, why it has such tremendous potential, and how to use it effectively. For additional information on the concepts described in the course, you can purchase Professor Werbach's book For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business in print or ebook format in several languages.
4.1 Breaking Games Down
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Gamification
ratings
From the lesson
Deconstructing Games
What exactly does it mean to apply game design principles in non-game contexts? In this module, we'll discuss how game designers approach their craft, and how to see any situation through the lens of game design. Then we'll examine the raw materials of games and gamification, known as game elements. We'll earn how to break down a game into its constituent parts and apply them to create gamified systems.
Meet the Instructors
Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
In this unit, I'm going to talk about designing using game elements.
Now that you've oriented yourself to think like a game designer, how do
you practically take things out of games and apply them to business practices?
As I mentioned in the introductory unit,
game elements are your tool box for gamification.
So, think about it, if you're trying to build a house, you wouldn't go out to
the hardware store and ask to buy a
house gun that somehow shot out completely formed houses.
No, what you do is you buy things like hammers,
and nails and screwdrivers, and two by fours and sheet rock.
All the different components that you can put
together in different ways to make up a house.
To make up any kind of house or any kind of
building that you want, by recombining those elements in different ways.
So, that's what we mean when we talk about game elements.
They are regular patterns.
They are tools that we can extract from games that we find in the wild, and
then use in different ways to make business practices more game like.
So, you'll recall I gave the example earlier
on of Empires & Allies, the Zynga game
where I showed you the game, and then
show you some of the different kinds of elements.
Things like the points, and the quests, and the levels and so forth.
This is a template for what game elements might
look like, but let's step back and talk about what
game elements are initially, and then we'll build up a
list of common game elements that are used in gamification.
So, let me draw for you here something
that will probably be familiar to most of you.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Starting to look familiar?
How about this?
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Okay, by now, you probably are recognizing that what I've drawn is the game
Tic Tac Toe or, in the Commonwealth world, it's known as Knots and Crosses.
One of the most popular games of all time played for many centuries.
It's a game that many of us are familiar with.
But, what if you think about this game, Tic Tac Toe, not through
the lens of the game itself, not through the lens of the game play.
Here I am playing, aha, I forked.
And now this guy's going to win, but think about it through the lens of elements.
What are the elements of Tic Tac Toe?
What are the regular patterns, the pieces of this game that come together along
with the aesthetics and the overall experience to generate the gameplay?
Stop and see if you can think about some of the different
element that make up the game that we call Tic Tac Toe.
There's no one universal list, but you can probably come
up with some of them that are fairly easy to spot.
Here's a list of elements in Tic Tac Toe that I made.
There is, of course, the game board, that pattern of
lines that create nine spots that you can play in.
And there are the tokens, as I call them, the X and the O that you play with.
There are also, there is also the fact that
Tic Tac Toe is a game played with two players.
Now that's not anywhere there on the board, it's part of the
rules of the game and it's part of the structures of the game.
The rules are things like you play an X and then the next player plays an O.
You can only play in one square and so forth.
I'm talking about things that structure the game that go
to the essence of what makes it engaging or not.
So one of them is Tic Tac Toe is a game played
between two players, who are competitive, i.e, one person wins, one person loses.
It's not a bunch of people who are collaborating together to find a solution,
it's one winner and one loser in every game, or the game's a draw.
They take turns.
That's part of the structure of the game.
One player goes and then the other goes, and the
game defines certain situations, where we say one player wins.
So, if in fact, I'm able to make three X's in a row here, I have won the game.
That is called a win state.
Similarly, if we get to a point where all the boxes are
filled up, and no one has three in a row, that's a draw.
And if you saw the movie War Games,
the computer figured out somehow, in his vast intelligence,
that any two decently competent Tic Tac Toe
players can generate a draw in every single game.
No way to win the game.
Now, in that movie, that result almost led to nuclear war, we don't have to worry
about that but the point that I want to make here is that the structure of the
game, the elements of what it takes to win and what it takes to draw, the
game contribute to the gameplay, and contribute to
the way people feel in playing Tic Tac Toe.
How much fun it is, how much people
want to keep playing, how interesting it seems and
so forth, and all of this feeds into
gamification when we think about deploying these tools systematically.
There's no one set of elements that's always good or always
bad, they have to be understood in context of the overall game.
So a few others, there's no progression.
Now this is a limitation on Tic Tac Toe.
It doesn't necessarily get better or change, as you play it.
There's no level one Tic Tac Toe, and then once
you finish this board here, you go on to level two.
Nor is there any kind of scoring, unless you just keep track of who wins each game.
It's just, you play the game and you win or you lose.
These are also elements about why, when you think
about it, Tic Tac Toe's a pretty bad game.
Incredibly popular for centuries of human history, and
yet, a game that is so simplistic, and
so easy to draw, that it's not going to hold any adults interested for very long.
And again, you can see that from the elements that are there and some
of the elements that are missing, the ability to progress and advance in the
game and the ability to get feedback from scoring, certainly not necessary as I've
said, but things that tend to produce more engaging games, than games with out them.
So another way to think about this is, if
we talk about the game here in the middle, and
we can think about that through the various definitions
that I gave you, at the top is the experience.
The overall impact of the game, what you feel
like when you play the game, that's the experience.
First point here is that, this here, the game,
and this here the experience, are not the same thing.
The game is the set of rules, the aesthetics, all of the
game elements, the experience is what the player feels when they're playing it.
Those two are very much related but they're
different things, and when you're doing game design, what
you control is the game, and what you
try to produce is a certain kind of experience.
The other side to this is what's down here, which are the elements.
So if the experience is the kind of gestalt, the
overall impact or feeling of the game, the elements are the
piece parts, the bits and pieces, if you build up
the game from smaller units, then you're building up from elements.
If you think of the game in terms of its general impact,
how fun it feels,and why it feels fun, you're talking about the experience.
And really, both of these are ways to think about gamification.
We're going to focus mostly on going up from the elements, but gamification is
also about, again, thinking like a game designer, and trying to understand
how overall experiences that we can understand from games, can be put into
non-game contexts, using things like elements
but also using other kinds of techniques.
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