As we saw when examining Tic-Tac-Dough, or if you prefer, knots and crosses, there are many different game elements. And if you looked at all of the games that you can think of, you'd find a vast array of different things that you might consider as elements, as templates or design patterns that can be applied in other games or in gamification. But when we examining prominent examples of gamification, including the ones that we've covered in this class for the most part, certain elements recur again and again. And most of them are derived directly from social games online or from other kinds of online video games. So I've developed a framework for gamification elements. These are the common elements that are found in gamification and some structure around the different kinds of those elements. These are not every possible element, nor are these the best elements, nor are these elements that should be in every example of gamification. Again, the best example is not the one that uses the most elements, it's the one that uses the elements the most effectively. But this frame work should give you some sense of how the different kinds of elements or pieces from games can be applied in different ways. And it's a pyramid structure that has three levels. The three levels being the dynamics on top, the mechanics in the middle, and the components on the bottom, and I'll describe each of those in some detail. The one point to make though before I go on is that this is not the totality, again this is just the elements and around the elements is the overall experience of the game. It's the aspect of the game that's not captured fully by the elements. It's the whole that's greater than the sum of the parts. And a critical part of that experience is the aesthetics of the game: the visual experience of the game, the sound, the other aspects that tie the game together and make it feel somehow real to the players. All of that is above and beyond the elements. All that is certainly extremely important in games, and often important in gamification, but that's the part that you have to design creatively based on the circumstances. What we're going to focus on here are the generic patterns, the aspects that can be taken from games and applied to generate specific kinds of results. And one point to add before I go into more detail. You may recall Marc LeBlanc, the game designer who developed the notion of eight kinds of fun that I mentioned in an earlier segment. He also created an influential framework for understanding all games called the MDA framework, and MDA stands for mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics. So it sounds very much like the framework for gamification elements I just gave you. There are some similarities, although LeBlanc uses those terms in somewhat different ways. Much of what he calls aesthetics is what we talk about under the rubric of fun. But LeBlanc's framework has been, as I said, very influential in helping designers and theorists conceptualize different aspects of games and how to create them. So if you're interested in finding out more, here's a link to a paper that he coauthored that goes into detail on the MDA framework. So now, back to the pyramid of game elements. At the top of the pyramid are the game dynamics. These are the most high-level conceptual elements in a game or a gamified system. I like to think of them as the grammar, the hidden structure that makes the experience somehow cohere and have regular patterns. They're not the same thing as the rules. The rules are specific to any game. The rules in tic-tac-toe are you put your x and they put their o and there's a certain place that you can put them, and so on and so forth. The dynamics are the implicit structure, which the rules may be a surface manifestation of, but they also include more conceptual kinds of elements that provide the framing for the game. So, for example, constraints. Every game has some constraints, because games create meaningful choices and interesting problems by limiting people's freedom. So the notion of what constraints get put on users is an important dynamic that any game designer needs to think about. Emotions: games can produce almost any emotion you can think of, from joy to sadness to everything in between. The emotional palette of gamification is typically somewhat more limited because we're dealing with real world, non-game context, whether those are at work, or a marketing context, or something like exercise where getting someone really upset, or abject sadness are not things that are going to be valued in that kind of situation. But there still are a variety of emotional levers that can be pulled, that can make the experience more rich, and certainly the joy, the, the sense of accomplishment, the emotional reinforcement that pushes people to play more, is important in most examples of gamification. Narrative: the structure that pulls together the pieces of the game, or the gamified system into some coherent feeling whole. The narrative can be explicit, the storyline in a game, or it can be implicit. And gamification doesn't necessarily have the richness of the aesthetic experiential aspect of games to put the work in creating a narrative. It has to rely upon things like consistent graphical experiences, creating a sense of flow and alluding to certain kinds of practices or certain kinds of story ideas that may be in players' heads using those, again, to tie together the individual pieces. If there's no sense of narrative, then the risk is that the gameified system will just be a bunch of abstract stuff. You get these badges. You get these points, but they're totally divorced from any sense of coherence and relation to the player's life and that tends to limit the effectiveness of gamification. Progression. So here we are talking about the notion that you start at one place and you go up along the way until you get to some higher place. Very important aspect in really, most examples of gamification is giving the player a sense that they're going to have the opportunity to improve, or at least to move from where they started, as opposed to just doing the same thing over and over and over again. Progression doesn't necessarily require specific examples like levels and points, but those, as we'll see, are typical game components that get used to instantiate that dynamic. And finally, relationships, people interacting with each other, friends, teammates, opponents, those general level social dynamics that are very important to the experience of the game. So those are the dynamics, at the next level are the game mechanics. These I like to think of as the verbs of a game or gamification, the elements that move the action forward. Now with these and the next set, I won't go into detail on every one because there are more of them. That's the notion of the pyramid that we have a few dynamics, a larger number of mechanics and a big number of components, but let me just highlight a few of them. So things like challenges, the game sets some objective for you to reach. Chance, there's some luck involved whether it's a roll of the dice or some other mechanism that makes it so the result is random and not entirely based on your activity. Both cooperation and competition. They're opposites, but both are valuable game mechanics, getting people to work together, as well as getting people to compete against each other to have a notion of winning and losing. Feedback, I've already talked about many times, very important for users to be able to see how they are doing in real time because that powerfully tends to drive them along to go further. Resource acquisitions, so games give you things or give you the opportunity to get things in order to move the game forward. Empires and Allies, for example, let you acquire oil which then you need in order to build things like airplanes. Rewards, some benefit that you get for some achievement in the game. Transactions, buying and selling or exchanging something with other players or with what's called a non-player character, with some automated character in the game. Turns we saw with tic-tac-toe, and win states we also so with tic-tac-toe, the state which defines winning the game. So again, these are various tools that can be used to figure out how to move the action forward, to get the players in the game to go from one state to another. And then finally the lowest level, most surface level, kinds of game elements are the game components. Specific examples, specific ways to do the higher level things that dynamics and mechanics represent. So, for example, achievements. As opposed to just the general notion of a challenge, giving the player some reward attached to doing a specific set of things. That's an achievement. Avatar, showing the player some visual representation of their character. Badges, we're going to talk more about these in a second, but specific visual representations of those achievements as well as of the higher level dynamics and mechanics. Boss fights is familiar if you play games, it may not be if you don't. This is at the end of a level, the end of some part of the game, a really hard challenge, a high-level monster that you have to defeat, and it's typically really hard to do so, in order to get to the next level. Collections is pulling together a bunch of different things, assembling certain pieces or certain examples of something. You have to get a whole bunch of spells together or you have to get a whole bunch of badges together to fill up a cabinet that you get in the game. Combat is probably familiar. Content unlocking means you need to do something, maybe an achievement, maybe some leveling up, in order to get access to certain new content in the game. Gifting, altruism, giving things to other people can actually make people want to play the game more because it feels like fun. People feel good about giving to others. Leaderboards, I'll talk about more, but lists of players in order of their score. Levels and points should be fairly obvious, but again I'll talk about them more in a second. And quests are similar to achievements, this is more the kind of game-like notion that you have to do some things that somehow are specifically defined within the structure of the game. The social graph, we saw this in Empires and Allies as well as at the bottom in the Kias example. Seeing your friends, who are also in the game, and allowing you to interact with them, to play with and against them, making the game an extension of your social networking experience. Teams, I already talked about. Virtual goods, this we'll see more of later on in the course, but things within the game, something that you pick up, the powerful sword, or the new kind of house that you put on your property in Zynga's Cityville, things that are virtual. They're not real, but that users are willing to pay either the virtual currency of the game, or their time, or even real money to get. So, altogether 30 different game elements that I've given you. Again, not a universal, comprehensive list but it should show you some of the richness, some of the options that you have to play with in implementing some gamified system. And the structure of the pyramid shows, first of all, that it goes from narrow at the top to the broad at the bottom. So there are fewer dynamics than there are components, but it also shows how the lower-level examples. The points are examples of things higher up. They are examples of progression and they may also be examples of, say, narrative. The lower-level examples are ways to do some of the higher-level things. That's how the structure fits together.
