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.
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Gamification
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From the lesson
Design
Gamification done well is a form of design. This module describes the design process, and provides a six-step framework to apply to any gamification project. The second lesson identifies important considerations and options for developing creative, human-centered, thoughtful gamification solutions.
Meet the Instructors
Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
Who are these people who are playing your
game, or engaging in your game of fightsight.
And, I don't just mean what do they look like in the game.
They seem to be a bunch of orcs and
elves and other strange monsters riding on war bears.
What I mean is, what do you know about the players?
That starts with the standard kinds of measures, like demographics,
age groups, and where they live and so forth, income level.
All those kinds of metrics that you might want
to get in any standard kind of marketing survey.
And psychographics.
What do you know about their behavior?
What kinds of things do they like to buy?
What kinds of things do they like to do?
All of those are useful in understanding the players for gamification, just
as they're useful in any other kind of marketing, or other activity, where.
You're trying to do something involving certain populations of
people, and you need to typically segment, and not
try to be all things to all people, because
different sub communities will have different sorts of needs.
That's all the starting point, and that will be more or less
feasible or normal to do based on the nature of the application.
If it's a standard marketing type external gamification situation,
then that kind of data may already be there.
If it's one of the other categories, then maybe it's not as useful.
But in any situation you can figure out what types of people are they here.
Knowing that the players in this particular
system are a group of your employees,
as opposed to a group of your customers, for example, makes a big difference.
So starting point is general things that you know about your players.
But the real important aspect to learn
in describing your players, is what motivates them.
What can you say, as a starting point, about
the different kinds of motivations that your players have.
Because again, as I've said many times,
gamification, very directly, and, and frequently involves motivation.
So here we see a chat room log from World of Warcraft.
Just the illustrate some of the different kinds of things
that will motivate players, even in one massively multi-player online
game, and we can see it just by the different
things people are asking for here in the chat room.
So this person here the lingo may not mean anything to you if you're not
a wow player, but this person here
is looking for a couple other specific skills.
A fighter that does damage, and a healer for, and what's called an instance run.
They're trying to defeat the bosses or monsters,
in this specific dungeon in World of Warcraft.
So that's a group that's coming together to try
to beat a dungeon, and they need some help.
This person here is looking for what's called an enchanter.
Somebody who has specific craft skills,
because the person posting wants to improve
the quality of their gear, their armor or their weapons, and they need help.
They need someone who can cast spells on them.
So they're using the chat room to go and find an enchanters.
That's something about improving the quality of what you
have on your character, which may then be useful
for dungeons, or it may be useful because they
want to show off to other people or something else.
And this also shows that some people are involved in the Crafting system.
Those enchanters have spent time and money in the game, to build up skills
in casting those specific kind of spells,
a different kind of activity within the game.
This person here is trying to sell something for 450 gold.
The game has an auction house where you can buy and
sell, but this person is going and trying to do it directly.
Trying to make money, engaged in economic activity in the world.
Again, a different type of activity than the previous ones.
And all of these different activities relate to different
examples of things that people may want to accomplish.
This one here is a group that's trying to get an achievement.
So, they're going to go through a dungeon, but the
point is not really to defeat the monsters in the dungeon.
The point is to get this achievement that the game has set up.
If you conquer a certain dungeon in a certain way, you get a reward.
You get a recognition that you get that achievement.
And so that's the objective of that group that's going on there.
Lots of different things happening, all within the same game, a key to why World
of Warcraft is so successful, and a lesson that we can take to apply to gamification.
Alright.
So, how do you define different kinds of players in a gamified system?
The most common model of player types that is discussed
today in gamification, is the Bartle model of player types.
Richard Bartle, who I mentioned earlier as the
games researcher and designer from The University of Essex.
Came up with this framework several decades ago,
when he was studying the early multi-user dungeon's.
The early massively multiplayer online games.
And what he found was certain recurrent patterns, and
four broad types that he could bucket players into.
Now, Bartle was expressly, not trying to make
a statement about player types in every game.
And he certainly wasn't trying to make a statement about motivational
types in the world in general, that would extend past games.
But his framework has proven to be very durable.
It's a great starting place, because you can
find these four categories in pretty much any
kind of situation that gameification would apply to,
but take it with a grain of salt.
Exactly what the borders are between
these categories, and exactly what the percentages
are of people that fit in to them, is subject to great debate.
And Gamification applied in a particular area may involve a different set of
categories of player types, for example if it's an internal gamification system.
For helping people get to know each other at work.
Or for improving the productivity of researchers
trying to piece together pieces of information.
Maybe these four categories I'm going to give you don't work.
But as a starting point, it's a great
way of thinking about different kinds of player types.
So Bartle talked about four categories.
A two by two matrix of player types.
On this axis, on the one side are players, and
on the other side are the world, or is the world.
On this axis at the top is acting, on those
things, and at the bottom is interacting with those things.
So, players who want to act upon the world, he called achievers.
[SOUND] These are people who want to reach
some achievement to overcome some obstacle.
Probably to get some recognition of their achievement.
And so they want to do some action in the
world that the game creates, and get recognition for that achievement.
Those who want to interact with the world he called explorers.
These are the people who want to see what's
possible within the game, go scope out all the territory.
Go try and see if they can jump off of that mountain, and not fall to their doom.
Push on the limits of the game, just because it's there
to quote Edmund Hillary's statement about why he climbed Mountain Everest.
The explorers want to try out every piece of the world that they can
find to find new vistas to figure out new things to do with the game.
Down here, people who care about players as opposed to the
world, but want to interact with those players, Bartle called socializer's.
So, these are players who
care particularly about interacting with others.
Being on teams.
Talking and chatting with other players of the game, being part of a community.
The social experience is more important than the
achievements that come out of that social experience.
And finally the most controversial category Bartle had
for acting upon other players, he called these killers.
And usually killers are described as people who don't just want to go out and
win the game, because that's an achiever, but want to stomp on other people.
To fight against other players, and totally vanquish, and destroy them.
In Bartle's framing, killers is actually broader than that.
It's anyone who wants to impose themselves on other people.
So that could also be, for example, by healing
other people, by feeling like you're in control of the
situation, and that you're the one who's keeping the
whole group alive, that would also fit in this category.
But basically Bartle talked about killers as
a small, but important part of the system.
Most people are not killers most of the time.
Some estimates are that it's 1% of the population.
But they are often the most intense and aggressive participants.
They are the ones who really care about
the game, because they will go to any length
to vanquish their opponents to be the top
dogs in charge of whatever they're trying to do.
So four different categories that Bartle defined.
You can think about how those are applied to any situation that might be gamified.
Important caveat.
This does not mean that we are all born in one
of these quadrants, that people are always explorers, or always socializers.
Pretty much all of us are in every one of these
quadrants at some time or another, for some situation or another.
And we typically will go back and forth between different kinds of activities.
So thinking about player types doesn't mean
segmenting your players once and for all, it
means, first of all, understanding what are the
different niches that your players can go into.
And then understanding how your players at a specific time in the
game might respond to one or more of these kinds of structures.
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