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.
