In the next two units, I'm going to talk about psychology. Specifically, the psychology of motivation. Now, don't worry, this is not a psych course, it's a gamification course. But we need to focus in on psychology because it's central to what makes gamification effective. And if you think about gamification without digging into the mental processes that are going on in people who are involved in gamified services, you're going to miss a lot of the essential practices to do gamification effectively. So, particularly, we're going to talk about motivation. Motivation means you are moved to do something. It's what makes you do something versus something else or do something versus just sitting around doing nothing. Now, of course, we're talking psychology here so people don't entirely know what makes them do something. They might say, oh, well I did that because I felt like it. Or, I did that because someone told me to. But it turns out we have a lot of leeway, and the reasons that we do things can be fairly complicated, and not necessarily related to our experience. And they also may be counter intuitive. So, certainly people do things for rewards. You do things because someone says, if you go and compete you'll be the winner, you'll get a big trophy. Or, if you go and do a really great job at work in this job that you've got, at the end of the year you'll get a bonus, you'll get more money. Sure, those are things that motivate people and later on I'll get into more detail about what is the essence of those kinds of motivators versus some other kinds of motivators. But there are lost of things people do for very different reasons. First of all, lots of people work really hard at their jobs, care tremendous amount about there jobs even when those jobs don't pay very much. We've all talked to people who say, I love my job. I would do it for free. Well, what's that? And clearly we all do things for other reasons than rewards. Not everyone is participating in every competitive activity because they think they're going to win and get the trophy. We do things like sports, in part, because they're just kind of fun to engage in. So, there's a lot to motivation. And before I get into looking at it systematically, I'd like you to think about different ways that people could be motivated. So, I would ask you, pick some task that you might want someone to do and see if you can think of at least four different ways that you could try to motivate that person to do the task. They might not always work, but see if you can think about at least four different approaches you could take that would operate in distinct ways to motivate that person to take the action. Alright, hopefully you came up with some different ideas. Keep those in mind later on when I talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the different psychological theories that we're going to go through. And see which of them match up with the different motivators that you came up with. So, what is all this have to do with gamification? Let me give you one example to start you thinking about it. In 2011, Major League Baseball started a promotion called MLB.com badges, where if you watched games on their streaming video service, they could track if you had the, client open. They would pick certain players, seemingly randomly, that were playing in that game and if those players did something specified. This player hits a double say, and you were watching that game, you would get a badge. They would give you this little token representing that player and it would go in this bookcase on their website, you would log in and have your profile. And the more that you got, the more the badges would collect up here. That's it. That's the service. So, you might think well, why would anyone care at all about that? What do you get for these badges? How would that be motivating? So, here's some quotes from a website called Sons of Steve Garvey, which is a blog for a group of die hard Los Angeles Dodger's baseball fans, remarking on their experience with this badge system. The first one says, I was obsessed with this! Even though he calls it a diversion, a curious sidebar diversion, he knows it's kind of silly. He says, thinking back, I really cared. I really wanted to get these badges. The second one said that he got mad at a co-worker for shutting it off because he wanted to get the badges even when the computer was just open by itself. He wasn't actually watching the games. He started caring about the badges more than actually watching the game. The third one said, I feel like a moth to a flame. Think about when a moth just seems mesmerized and it flies into a flame or a light bulb. Even to the point where it dies, just because somehow it's so attracted to it, this person said, that seemed like what I felt thinking about collecting these badges. And the final one, gets into a little more detail about what might be going on here. He said, these are virtual items, okay, good. They have no observable purpose. What do you do with them? You stick them in the case here and that's it. And no ultimate reward or benefit. They're not worth money. You don't use them to get free tickets or anything else. They're just badges. They're just there. If you've seen the famous movie, Treasure of Sierra Madre, you've heard the line, we don't need no stinking badges. These guys it seems like needed some stinking badges. And why? Well, this starts to get at it. It seems like an appropriate pastime for a blog such as ours. Remember, this is a group of hardcore Dodger fans. They got excited about these badges, because it was part of this experience of engaging with baseball and their favorite team. Now, we don't have any hard data on how many people felt the way that these viewers did. But we do know that major league baseball didn't renew the service in 2012. So, clearly, these badges had some motivating effect. And, the glass is half filled version would say, well, gee, this kind of gamified badge based service actually got people interested, even though it didn't seem to have any real value to it. The glass is half empty version says, well just how broad was that? How many people really were engaged and was it enough to justify the service? So, those are the kinds of questions that you should think about in developing or considering a gamified service. What motivates and is it the right kind of motivation and is it enough? What makes this challenging is that motivation is complicated. People are complicated. We are all motivated by many different things and we're not all motivated by the same thing all the time. So, if the goal is, for example, a company wants its employees to be more innovative. To come up with great new ideas that might lead the company in new directions. What would motivate those employees? Well, lots of different things. before, I asked you to come up with at least four different ways to motivate someone to do something. The point is, there's no answer. There's no answer that says, the only way and the best way to motivate everyone to do this thing is the following. Give them a cash bonus, or donate the money to charity because they'll feel good, or something else. There are many different forms of motivation, and in gamification, we need to be aware of all of them, and think about the appropriate times to use different techniques. One more example to get you thinking about motivation and design and then we'll go on to the psychological theories in more detail. So, let's say you want to motivate people to buy computers. You can make really good computers. Okay. Check. You can price the computers affordably. Okay. Check. But, if you're going to create a retail experience, let's say, what would motivate those people to buy more computers in the retail store? You might think that the answer would be, make it really efficient, make it quick, make it easy, so that people can see all the products, they're all together in one place. They can compare them and decide what they want to buy and get out of there. That's how most computer stores worked until along came the Apple Store. And the Apple Store looked at this very differently. The Apple Store said, or I guess Apple said, in building the Apple Store, no, what we want is for people to come in and hang around and browse. This is an expensive purchase and it's a lifestyle purchase. We want people to get familiar with how to use our computers. People often don't buy computers because they don't really know how they work or what they would do with them. So, let's create a kind of lounge experience where people can hang around. It's comfortable, you can see all the products and they're beautifully displayed and there's lots of them you can play around with. And we'll stock it with a whole bunch of helpful people who aren't necessarily sales people, they're just there to help you and explain stuff and take you around. Or, if you have a computer and you've got problems, we'll create a genius bar there. We'll have classes and other sorts of things. We'll make this a place, not that you want to get out of quickly, but a place you want to linger. Because the more you linger, the more time you spend with the products, the deeper you get into what you could do with these products, and at the end of the day the more you'll buy. Apple store is the highest grossing retail chain in the entire United States. So, Apple was able to successfully motivate people to buy their products, by thinking differently about how to design stores. And, this is clearly not an example of gamification. But it's a useful thought experiment for gameified systems to think about how do we do the same kind of things that Apple did for the situation that we're involved in. It's not that making people linger in a lounge like environment is always the right answer. The point is, thinking about users, different ways to motivate them. And the nature of the task at hand gets us thinking creatively about how to deploy motivation in a systematic way, and that's what we're going to look at now in gamification.
