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.
5.3 Behaviorism in Gamification
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Gamification
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From the lesson
Motivation and Psychology
Gamification is a technique for motivation, so it ties very directly into psychology. This unit introduces the major psychological concepts relevant to gamification. The first lesson focuses on behavioral approaches and reward design; the second identifies the risks and alternatives to this approach.
Meet the Instructors
Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
How does behaviorism relate to gamification?
There are several valuable lessons that
can be gleamed from the behavioral psychology
research that inform much of the
gamification samples that are out there today.
The first lesson is look at what people actually do.
Remember, the basis of the behaviorist approach was not to focus on understanding
people's subjective mental states but to watch their external responses to stimuli.
And where that's useful, even today is recognizing that people
don't always behave in the way that you might think.
So behavioral economics, for example, thinks about and looks at
cognitive biases when people, for example, are averse to lawsuits.
Even though under basic economic theory, they should be indifferent
to the same probability of a gain or a loss.
When we study what people actually do, we do empirical studies.
We find that the results are quite different.
So a behaviorist approach is helpful in correcting
for the biases we have about how people
are going to act, and they can uncover
certain kinds of actions that may be valuable.
So, for example, at the beginning of the class, I gave you the example of the speed
camera lottery, which was built on these signs that track how fast you're going.
And you might think that telling people how fast they're going
won't cause them to slow down unless they get a ticket every
time they speed, but it turns out that even without the
lotteries, people will slow down when these signs are put in place.
They're now in use throughout the United States.
On average, study suggests people slow about 10%.
Just with the signs, this more gamified example that I gave you
with the lottery aspect to it caused a slow down of roughly
20% in Sweden when it was tried, but even without that there
are results based on what people do in reaction to those signs.
So we shouldn't ignore that just because it seems
like there's no direct punishment for speeding past the sign.
If in fact people slow down, then that's something useful, and we can employ that.
That's a behaviorist kind of insight.
The second and related insight is to focus on feedback.
The traffic sign about how fast you're going is a kind of feedback, and as I've
talked about a number of times feedback is
essential to the vast majority of video games.
When you do something, you get points.
You see an immediate reaction to your
activity, and that tells you what you're doing.
You don't have to wait all the way to the
end of the process to know how well you're doing.
And feedback we also see in gamification.
So this was, if you'll recall, the progress bar example from LinkedIn.
And part of what makes this effective in making people
fill out the profile more is that it gives you feedback.
It says guess what, you're 90% of the way there.
You may have known that you were some of the way there.
Maybe you had seen somewhere how far along you
were, but to actually see right in front of
you, you're 90% of the way there and then
to give you a small step up, to say alright.
You're now here on the ladder.
You're, you're right here at this point on the step ladder, but if you
want to get up a little bit further, we will tell you how to get to the next step.
That's another part of feedback, and that's what you see here
on this simple seeming 95% on the Linked In progress bar.
It says here's how to break down the
problem so there's just a little more to go.
So feedback about where you are and feedback about how
to get to the next step using small quantifiable goals.
Those are processes we see in lots of kinds of behavior change
programs for things like weight loss and alcohol cessation and so forth.
And they're effective in many cases because they draw upon these behavioral
insights that people respond to specific
quantitative, regular, immediate feedback about their behavior.
The next lesson to take from behaviorism is
that consequences can relate results because they condition people.
This was the loop that I talked about with operant conditioning.
And to the extent that it works, it works based on people learning to associate
certain results from what happens in a game or some other kind of system.
So here's an example from Farmville, the
spectacularly successful social Facebook game from Zynga.
Farmville has this concept of crops withering.
The game is about you creating your own farm.
You grow different kinds of crops and build things up and so forth, but you have
to water the crops periodically because if you
don't, the crops look like these ones here.
They wither, and each set of crops has a specific
time limit when the crops, mature and they can be harvested.
You want to harvest the crops because then you can use
them for other things, but, at a certain point in time,
if you don't harvest them and don't water them enough,
they turn into these brown withered things that you see here.
And what FarmVille was able to do based on
this structure was create what's called an appointment mechanic.
And the idea is that people know that they have to come back at a certain
time interval to water their crops or to
harvest them because if not, they're going to wither.
And that creates this draw because people start to realize, well, I'd better check
in every day or maybe every hour to make sure my crops aren't withering.
To make sure that I kept things up to date,
because if I don't, then I'm going to lose out.
And this draw of having to constantly check in and
tend to your virtual farm was part of what made
Farmville so powerful and successful because it got people learning
to just as a matter of habit regularly check back in.
That's a very behavioral kind of approach which worked well for Farmville.
And it also underlies many of the PBL type examples of gamification.
So, early on, I gave you the example of the MLB.com badges that you would collect
when you watched any video of the games based on certain things that happened.
And I gave you the quotes from that blog where people
were saying, gee, what is it that's so addictive about this?
Why are we obsessed with collecting these badges?
And the reason is a behavioral kind of
feedback loop that people see that when they take
the action, they get the badge, and that feels
rewarding to them for reasons that I'll talk about.
And they learn through that operant conditioning
process, that if they keep doing that, keep
watching the videos, they'll get more badges, and
there's a kind of addictive quality to it.
That gets people, at least some people, to want to come back more and more.
So that's a behavioral kind of structure in a gamification example.
Now, just to preview what's coming later, don't take away from this that
all gamification works this way or that all gamification should work this way.
There's some real problems and limitations to this notion that
gamification is like addiction, and it's about creating these behavioral loops.
But it's worth noting that this is something that does
work in some cases and understanding where it comes from.
Now, basically, the idea here is about rewards.
So behaviorism talks about conditioning, but specifically this
example with the badges is about rewarding people.
It's about giving them some benefit,
something that seems valuable even though it's
not tangible or not worth any money
and reinforcing by continually providing those rewards.
Much of the PBL type gamification, that's out
there is very focused on the notion of rewards.
And one reason that I gave you the
whole pyramid of elements before was to emphasise that
rewards are valuable, but they're just one of
the kinds of game mechanics that are out there.
Here they are here, and you see all these
other kinds of mechanics that are not specifically about rewards.
So rewards are real, but they should only be one piece in the toolbox.
That being said, when we go down a level to the components,
to the more surface level aspects of gamification, at least the ones that
are regular patterns in many of the examples today, you'll see that a
great many of them tie in at least in some way to rewards.
So achievements, badges, boss fights, collections, content unlocking,
leaderboards, levels, points, quest, and virtual goods
all can or necessarily link into the idea of earning some kinds of rewards.
So rewards are very powerful and very significant in gamification, but keep in
the back of your head that they should not be the only thing that you think about.
Now why are these rewards so powerful?
Why do people talk about things like obsession, like
a moth to a flame, addiction when they're referring
to these silly little badges or to something in
a game that has no real or tangible value?
The reason comes back again to psychology and specifically to brain chemistry.
And it relates to something called the dopamine system.
The structure in the brain that is associated
with pleasure and interestingly also associated with learning.
And our brains release and reabsorb the neurotransmitter
dopamine in response to certain activities, and rewards.
Things that we find rewarding or valuable, or sometimes just surprising tend
to cause that dopamine release, and that gives you literally a shot of a drug.
It's literally pleasurable, and that causes you to
make that association of the activity and the pleasure.
It causes that learning process and causes people to literally feel a, a
little bit like they have to go back and engage in the activity.
So you see here Samsung Nation, the PBL type
gamification site that I've showed you a few times before.
This is an example of one badge that you get, and the idea here
is, when you unlock this badge, it says, sweet, you just unlocked a badge.
And this one is just by hanging out.
So, you didn't do anything, right?
You're just hanging out on the site.
And it says poof, you get a badge.
All of a sudden there's something there.
There's something that manifests, that, that you didn't necessarily
expect in return for spending time on the site.
And to the extend that that works.
Again I caution you.
This doesn't always work.
It doesn't work for everyone, but the thing that
is working there when it does work is that
dopamine hit, that sense of ooh that comes about
in your brain associating the reward with the activity.
And so behavioral gamification tends to focus on creating
rewards that maximize that engagement based on dopamine
release, and based on that addictive quality that we
also see in lots of social games like Farmville and so forth
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