There are some real dangers to the behaviorist approach to gamification. I've already mentioned the limitations that, that approach doesn't get you focus as much on what's actually going on, what's really deep down motivating people but they're also some areas where it can be problematic. The first is what I started to get to in the previous segment. Manipulation, the idea that these are systems that are designed to make people do things and maybe, that's something the people want to do but maybe, it's something that they don't necessarily want to do and if game application is about leveraging these aspects of our psychology, the way the brain responds to rewards and to feedback and so forth, leveraging them to achieve someone else's desired results, that has the potential to be problematic. And this ties back in with the slot machine that I showed you earlier. This is an addiction machine and if you're a casino operator, then it looks like a great thing but there are lots and lots of negative consequences that come about, because people are addicted to gambling and to other things and if we can design systems that are optimized to addict people, if you will, on these virtual rewards that doesn't mean that we should and it doesn't mean that we should as an ethical matter. It also doesn't mean that companies should purely as a tactical or strategic matter because there's a real danger if users feel like they're being pushed into something they don't really want to do. A danger in terms of the response from the customers. A danger in terms of responses from government agencies and a danger in terms of the company itself not focusing on what it should be focused on, which is really delighting it's customers. So there is a danger in going down this path of a behaviorist approach that it tends to make us see everything like a casino owner and maybe that's not necessarily, the right way to approach all business situations. Second challenge or problem with the behaviorist approach is what's called the hedonic treadmill. So this word hedonic here, from the word hedonism, this just means pleasure based on fun. It doesn't have the same connotation that hedonism does in the colloquial sense. If you don't know what I mean, go look it up, but the idea here is that the hedonic treadmill means, once you start focusing on giving people rewards in order to give them pleasure that feedback loop effect, based on the way the dopamine system works in the brain. Once you start doing that, you better keep doing it because if people learn to respond to the reward, then they're only going to respond when the reward is there. Think about the speed camera lottery example, when I talked about the traffic monitoring signs that showed people how fast they were going. If that's only going to make people slow down when they see the sign, it's not really going to change behavior in a systematic way. So if you want to get people to slow down, you better put a whole lot of those monitoring signs up because otherwise, there's not going to be any effect and so in gamification, this means to the extent that there are rewards that are designed in this way, the designer needs to keep putting in more rewards to keep people interested and as certain rewards get familiar or boring, you have to come up with new rewards. More interesting rewards. More challenging objectives to achieve the rewards and so forth. So this could put a significant burden on the gamification designer to keep up and in some ways, in fact, it's worse than that and we understand this now because of studies that look into what's actually happening in the brain when this dopamine system activates and these are studies, for example, involving monkeys. And the way these studies work, here again is this graph showing over time what someone does and what their response is the monkeys would get a squirt of grape juice at a random time interval. Monkeys, I guess, it turns out like grape juice more so than bananas but the monkeys love the grape juice and they hooked up electrodes to the monkey's brains in this studies and they found that sure enough, when the monkey got the squirt of grape juice, the dopamine neurons fired and there was the expected result. The system was activated. The monkey had that chemical high, if you will, based on the reward but then the experimenters did something interesting. They reconfigured the system, so that exactly two seconds prior to the grape juice spray, a tone would go off. Just a tone. Not something the monkey, particularly, liked or didn't like. Just a tone but it was always, exactly, the same distance before the reward. The reward was a variable reward, the timing of the grape juice spray was random but every time the tone went off, the grape juice would come two seconds later. So what happened then? Very interesting. Turns out that no longer did the dopamine response come about in response to or at the same time as the grape juice spray. Instead, the monkeys didn't have that dopamine activation, even when they got the grape juice. They still liked the grape juice, they still drank it but it didn't create that pleasure response in the brain. Instead, where did they get the pleasure response? You can guess. When the tone went off. So what's going on here? The monkeys brains figured out the pattern. They figured out that the tone was what signaled the reward. The tone was the thing that was unexpected, that was variable. That was the thing that was interesting. So that's what then set off the dopamine system, even though the tone was just a tone, there was no benefit or pleasurable thing about it to the monkey, that's what the brains responded too. Again, brains are pattern recognition engines and they try to figure out problems and so, human brains do this in spades and what this means is, the dopamine system is really not about rewards. It doesn't give pleasure for rewards, it gives pleasure for the anticipation of rewards. When we know the reward is coming, that's when we get the dopamine hit and what that means is, if you're designing a gamified system and you're designing it in this behaviorist form, where it's all about the rewards, you have to keep people anticipating the rewards because if they don't, then it no longer has that feedback loop. It no longer has that pleasure affect that generates the results and people's brains are always trying to figure out the system, always trying to find the pattern at which point the game's no longer interesting. They no longer have the same result for the reward. Even if you're still giving them rewards. Even if there's more badges and more quests and more achievements and so forth, it's no longer fun and so, there's a danger in using too much of a behaviorist approach that you kill the very rewards that you're relying on by making them become expected. Third concern about behaviorist gamification and this one is really more specific to gamification. When gamification focuses too much on behavior, it tends to focus heavily, as I've talked about, on rewards and those tend to be typically non-tangible rewards. They're just things like badges and being at the top of a leaderboard and those more often than not, are based around status. Status is a very powerful motivator. It's not something tangible but we do lots of things to get status. We do lots of things because we want people to think that we're cool. That's the reality in the terms of how people act and so, gamification leverages that fact that we love status and it learns from things like frequent flyer or loyalty programs. Here you see the United Mileage Plus Program and they tend to focus a lot on the great status you get if you're in the higher tiers. You get better seats, you get to board first, you get access to the lounge. You get in some cases to walk on a red carpet going on the plane. You get a special card that no one else gets. You're cool. You have high status because you're at the top of the program and the notion is people chase that status and yeah, people do but if you just focus on that, you tend to think that everyone chases status all the time. That's just not the way people work. So when I say everyone here isn't Tom Stuker, Tom Stuker is the number one leader in the United Frequent Flyer program. He's flown over 10 million miles on United Airlines. He's had whole planes named after him because he's so far at the top of their leaderboard and you can say, well, that's great. Look how the Mileage Plus Program motivated Tom Stuker but most of us look at that and say, I'm not flying 10 million miles. There's no way I'm getting to that point. There's no way I'm going to put so much energy into flying and flying and flying, even if I think there's some status value, that's just not important enough to me and status does motivate people but it certainly doesn't motivate everyone all the time. We're not all constantly looking for that social approval and looking for people to think that we're cool in every walk of life. We do things for lots of other reasons. We do things for tangible reasons. We do things for altruistic reasons. We do things for social reasons with our friends. There are lots of reasons we do things that status doesn't explain and the behaviorist approach has a tendency in gameification to reduce down to a heavy status focus, which tends to lead to missing of some of the other kinds of benefits that can be delivered from a gamified system.
