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.
