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.
4.4 Limitations of Elements
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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
Okay, so you've learned about all of these different game elements and in
particular, the points, badges and leaderboards.
You're done right? Wrong.
Game elements are a starting point for gamification, they are raw materials and
tools that you can use and deploy. But, just having them only gives you part
of what you need to know. Frankly, a big problem with gamification
today is that many companies think that just throwing elements onto a business
process magically makes something game like.
Magically makes it fun and engaging. Without doing any of the really hard work
and we'll look more at this objection and what's accurate about it later on in the
course when I talk about the pointsification argument about
gamification but for now whats important is to understand that game elements are a
starting point But not the entirety of what you need to do.
And if they were then we would take something like a frequent flyer program
and say ha, we've got the points. We've got the rewards that you get in
terms of free travel. You level up this person is Premier
Silver in this program. And you get badges here for frequent
flyer miles, it's the credit card representing your different level, the
progress bars, remember going to, in progress bar, aha, people will love that.
Oh and status, we haven't really talked about this yet but often, a claim that's
made about the identification, is that it's very powerful because people love to
show off their points and their badges and so forth.
So here we get premier status, that sounds great.
Well, that's all there was to it. First of all, most people would spend all
of their time just in love with their frequent flyer mile programs and
constantly trying to play the frequent flyer mile game when in fact, that's not
really how people look at this experience at all.
People like getting frequent flyer miles, but they don't think about it necessarily
as a really engaging game. Except for a fairly small subset of
hardcore flyers who do everything they can to optimize, against the Frequent
Flyer program. The larger point is that the elements are
not the game. You'll recall earlier I said, the
experience in the game are different. Well, the elements in the game are
different as well. The game, as I showed in that diagram Is
the thing in between the elements and the experience.
So if you just look at the elements. You say, oh this site's got badges,
great. It's got achievements, great.
It's got quests, great. That alone doesn't tell you whether it's
successful. What makes the elements successful is the
way that they are all tied together. And often, that involves recourse to some
of the higher level concepts like the dynamics, you'll notice that points,
badges and leader boards all east at the base of the pyramid.
They are service level components. So elements themselves don't tell you
that the experience is fun and engaging. Second point.
If you focus too heavily on the elements, especially on the PBLs, there's a real
tendency to overemphasize rewards. And, I'm going to talk about about this,
in more detail, in the psychology section.
How it is that rewards can, actually, demotivate.
So, saying, if you do this, you will get either a badge, or maybe even a cash
prize, can actually make people less likely to engage in the activity, and
less likely to really try their best. But for now, it's sufficient to say
rewards are not the same thing as fun. I describe different theories of what fun
is. And most of them included things other
than getting some reward. Fun can be about interacting with
friends, it can be about blowing off steam, it can be about solving problems.
It can be about exploration. Many different things can be fun.
The fact that you received a reward does not necessarily mean that that experience
is fun. And the fact that the experience is fun
doesn't necessarily mean that there's some reward in it somewhere.
And while rewards are not a requirement for the PBL kind of approach to
gamification, they tend to be at the center of those kinds of implementations
and that's a flaw. Again the rewards themselves are not
necessarily wrong. But if they are the only thing that the
designer focuses on is the objective, then there is a great danger that the
system will not actually generate the true results which come from real
engagement. And finally, if you have points, badges,
and leaderboards in your site and that's the heart of it, it's likely to look
somewhat like every other site that has points, badges, and leaderboards.
And that causes two problems, one is. Users don't necessarily differentiate and
the second is users get burned out. They say, wow, I just went through
collecting all these badges on this other site, why do I have to start from
scratch? I collect these badges here on this site,
it's not fun, even though the first time I experienced it I thought it was cool
and it attracted me to play more. So a couple of common problems with.
In particular too much focus on PBLs in Gamification.
There are a variety of other reasons to not stop with game elements, and let me
give you one example here and this comes from Google, which is an extraordinarily
good and successful company in many ways. But here's something that they
implemented which to me has not been that great of success and it's called Google
news batches. So, Google in the summer of 2011,
announced that they would add a gamification feature to Google News.
Hey, everyone's doing it. And so what they said was, as you surf
around and read news articles in Google News, depending on the subject area of
what you read. You would get these badges.
This is a basketball badge because I read a bunch of articles about basketball.
And these just pop up. There's not a Google News badges site you
go to. You just find them suddenly.
You read a bunch of basketball articles. And Google has a whole bunch of reasons
why this is good for you. It's a way of keeping track of what
you're reading. It's a way of showing people what your'e
reading. It's a way of showing things to your
friends. It's a way of getting some data about how
many articles you've read in a certain area, compared to everyone else.
But none of these to me seem terribly compelling.
if I like reading articles about basketball, I don't necessarily need the
news badge to tell me I've read a bunch of articles about basketball.
And even if it does So what? the badges, also, are not really giving
me any kind of reward, or achievement. They're just there.
They're looking like the kind of PBL badges, that recognize some
accomplishment. But here, the, quote unquote,
accomplishment is just, I happen to read a bunch of articles on the same topic.
So, it's not clear to me how Google News badges truly motivates and engages Google
news readers to do anything that they wouldn't already do.
And indeed, Google recently announced that it had gotten rid of the News Badges
feature entirely. So what went wrong?
It seems like they saw the appeal of gamification and just thought they would
try it out in this way. And that's dangerous, because it leads
you to put things into sites, that don't have a direct connection to driving real
business value. And when I get to the section I'll talk
about how to think about those kinds of questions first, rather than putting in
the elements and going from there. A few more points to drive home this
concept that the elements, well, they may be useful and they are good starting
point for gamification are not the game itself because, if you just focus on
these elements, what about those meaningful choices which make something
game-like? Just deciding to click one time versus a
hundred times, or deciding to watch a video over here versus doing something
over here on the site isn't really a choice but feels weighty, feels like it's
something that the person has to think about and make a good choice or a bad
choice. It's not something that really
necessarily engages the user. Similarly, challenges are not necessarily
puzzles. So, saying that you have to do something
and something that may take more effort, so for example clicking a thousand times
takes a lot more effort than clicking one time.
But clicking a thousand times isn't challenging and it's certainly not what
we would think of as a puzzle, something that requires problem solving and thought
and creativity to overcome. Now, not every gamified site has those,
and they are not well suited to every single example, but if you can create
something that feels like a puzzle, our brains love those things.
And I don't mean just a jigsaw puzzle or logic puzzle, but something that feels
like there's some challenge. There's some creativity that you're
called upon to deploy is something that's going to be much more powerful than
something that just requires mere effort. Third what about mastery?
The fact that you can get a bunch of badges and get a bunch of points, is
there really a pathway To true competence, to being an expert at
something or not. If it's just a staircase for the sake of
having a staircase it may have some value, it may attract people, but it's
not going to be as rich and engaging as something that has an opportunity to
truly master some kind of skill, whatever that skill is.
Community, as I talked about a few times, social interactions are tremendously
powerful in games. And often these PBL type sites have no
notion of interaction with other people, you're just going and collecting things
just for its own sake. And finally, people are different.
So if there's just one kind of structure that gives people a set of tasks to
overcome. Is it really going to pull in people with
different sorts of motivations. People with different sorts of
conceptions of fun. So these are some of the limitations of a
purely element-focused approach. I put this whole unit in on game elements
because they are important. And you need to understand what they are,
to start down the path of gamification, but you can't stop there.
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