How do you decide if gamification is right for your organization, or the business problem, or other kind of challenge that you have to address? There are four questions to ask, to determine, if gamification is a good approach to take. And these are, first of all, motivation. Gamification is about motivation, so, you need to first say, would you derive value, from encouraging certain behavior? If motivation matters to the business problem, it's likely that gamification would be a good approach. Second, is meaningful choices. Are the tasks involved, potentially, sufficiently interesting? Meaningful choices is one definition of the very nature of games. And it's implicit in many aspects of the intrinsic motivation description, that I gave you under self-determination theory. The notion of confidence and autonomy. Is basically the same as saying, the user has to feel like there are choices, and those choices are meaningful. Third is structure. And this basically says. Can we effectively gamify the system, by using rules or algorithms? So, is this a problem, that will lend itself to a digital system, which is what gamification typically is, that encodes the basic rules for this problem set? If it's not, if it's something that's too vague, or too subjective, or where the rules and objectives aren't sufficiently clear, then gamification may not work. Even if this is a problem that. Would benefit from motivation, and that's sufficiently interesting. And finally, potential conflicts. What other motivation structures, are there in the organization? And will the gamified system potentially come into tension with them? So, let's look at all four of those questions in a little bit more detail. The first is motivation. So, what are the situations where motivation is important? typically, two broad categories, which as you see, are very different. The first is situations. That involve real deep creativity, or situations that involve unique skills, and connections, and teamwork. Situations where it's not just rote work. It's not necessarily something simple and familiar. It's something complex and deep, that requires people. To go the extra mile, and motivation is the secret ingredient that gets them to do that. So, these are the high value add kinds of tasks, the desire for innovation, the desire for more productivity, the desire for lasting consumer engagement. The things that require more than just a simple push of the button. The second broad category where motivation is valuable though, is exactly that kind of situation, the situation where the task at hand, seems very dull, boring, and repetitive. Because those are the kinds of tasks, where if you can find some motivation. If you can find some meaning, and some interest level in the task, and some challenge that motivates people, the impact is quite significant. Because without those things, there's no way except for the external, extrinsic kinds of approaches, to get people involved in the task. And a wonderful example comes from the book Reamde, a recent science fiction book. By Neal Stephenson. If you haven't read it, I'd encourage you to read the first 200 pages, they're great. The next 800 pages, not so good. But it's a delightful book, like many of his books, in terms of getting us to think about a potential future that in many ways is already here. And the example for gamification is that, one of the characters in the game, excuse me, in the book, is the CEO of a massively multiplayer online games company, vaguely like the company that makes World of Warcraft. Only the business model for this game, is using gamification. Specifically, the game applies itself, generates revenue, by going to organizations that have dull tasks. The first example that they give. Is airports dealing with security, and having people having to sit there, and ensure no one walks in the wrong way, through the door that goes to the baggage claim area because there has to be an opening going through there and so therefore you have to check that to make sure people aren't coming through the wrong way, because they don't go through security. And so, someone has to sit there, but it's the most boring thing in the world, to have to watch, person, after person, after person, go out the door. On the off chance that some idiot will wander in the other way by accident. Much more likely to be that idiot, than actual terrorist, but if that idiot gets through, because the person sitting at the door fell asleep, or wasn't paying attention in their mind numbingly boring task. Then we've had lots of examples where whole terminals have to get shut down, because someone is in the terminal. Without having to go on through security screening. So the idea in Reamde, is that this company comes up with a great idea. They will use 3D motion capture, to represent the people walking through the passageway in the terminal, as creatures in the game. So, now there's a castle in the game, and people are walking down a certain passageway in the castle. All in one direction. But the game says, in the game, that there's a goblin trying to sneak in. And if you catch the goblin trying to sneak in, you get a big reward. Lots of experience points for you in the game. And the result is, lots of players in the game, sit there, and try to catch the goblin. They try to find the goblin, even though it involves the same thing. That the security guard had to do in the airport. Sitting and watching person after person going through the right way, in the hope that you might find someone going through the wrong way. Putting it into the game, suddenly makes that fun, and enga, engaging for people. And in the book, this becomes a huge business opportunity for this company, because they're able to leverage the engagement of the game players. To do tasks that otherwise would be deathly boring. So, that's an example of one kind of task that might lend itself to gamified motivation, that's very different from the kinds of tasks that we might at first think of. Second question to decide whether gamification is right for you. Is whether it involves meaningful choices. And here we can think about a number of different kinds of situations that we talked about, that make choices meaningful. Are there options for the user? Do they connect up with things that are meaningful for the user? Does the gamified system. Do things in a way that seem interesting where the user has to make choices, that they care about the outcome. But there are many gamified systems out there today, that don't seem to focus on this as much. Here is one example here, which is Google News Badges, which I believe I've already mentioned. And Google News Badges gives you badges, just for, reading stories on a particular area. There's no choice involved. Except for what stories you're reading. But that's not really a meaningful choice. Here you see that this person started reading stories about Syria. And it says, keep reading about Syria and you'll earn a bronze badge. But the question is, what's meaningful about that? If you read a little bit about Syria, do you want to start reading much about about Syria, to become an expert on Syria? Or do you want to read some about Syria, and then go read something about the Olympics, or some other topic, because that's what a news site or a newspaper does. It's lets you find out about many different things, as opposed to one thing to the exclusion of all others. That's not really a meaningful choice, deciding to write, to read a few more articles about something. Just because you're going to get a badge. So, I don't want to cast aspersions at Google News Badges. I'm not sure what the design criteria were for it, and what it's trying to accomplish. But from a perspective of thinking about whether this is a situation where gamific, gamification is, a logical or natural solution, not so clear. Third one is structure, is about can we use rules, algorithms, hard edge decisions, to implement a gamified system? And so, here is the Samsung Nation site that I've referred to a number of times. And you can see the points in the leader boards, but the question is underlying that, what does it take to get the points? What things are worth more? So two of the tasks that Samsung Nation lets you address, are sharing things on Twitter, tweeting about something you've done on the site, or, registering your product that you've bought. Your Samsung product that you bought in a real store. Do you go on the site and register it? Samsung Nation gives you 500 points, for registering the product, and 100 points for tweeting about something that you did on the site, now, I don't know again from Samsung's business criteria, why they picked one or the other. But the point is, a system that let's you make those choices and tradeoffs, in a coherent way. Tends to be one that will lend itself well towards gamification. Because you can build in, these different kinds of motivators. And then, think about different ways to encourage people. To choose between them, and to make their own tradeoff ,as to what's more meaningful for them. Again, this ties back in to the notion of meaningful choices. The points are just guides, and people in playing, need to decide, how they personally value the activity, vis-a-vis what the point system is telling them. And finally, conflicts. What other motivational structures are there out there? So, this is particularly important, say, in a company. There is a motivational structure for employees. It's called their salary. It's called their desire not to get fired from their job. That's not necessarily in conflict with some system that says, go do this because it's fun. And because it's going to motivate you to be part of a community, to have some achievement or accomplishment. But there might be some tension, if those things pull in opposite directions, or if the user starts to wonder, well, should I be doing this for the salary, or should I be doing this for the fun? What's the tradeoff between the two? Another context for illustrative purposes where this comes up a lot, is school. So, we have all kinds of motivators in school, including very extrinsic ones, as well as increasingly intrinsic ones, trying to get students to authentically care about and enjoy learning. So, when gamification gets applied to learning. It's very important to try to understand the potential conflicts. So, this here is a gamified leaderboard, or gamified experience point system, that was developed by Lee Sheldon, who is a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He teaches game design, and he gamified his courses. And this was the system that he used. For giving students points. Instead of saying, you get an A plus for a perfect score, and then it goes down from there, A, B, C, D, F, and the idea being you start at 100%, and every mistake you get, you go down til you settle on your final grade, what Sheldon realized, was that games don't work that way. Games work by building up. You start at zero experience points, and grow, and grow, and grow, until you reach your final level. So he said why don't we do school like this? Why don't we say, you start here at zero? You start with an F, and based on what you do, based on every assignment that you turn in, every achievement you get within the course, you move up, and up, and up. Until you ultimately settle at your final level, and that's your grade. Very cool idea, very powerful if designed right, but it needs to be designed consciously, around the existing sets of incentives. So, if this system were done in parallel to traditional grading. That would cause some real tension, and some real dissonance for the students. In Sheldon's classes he uses this as the entire grading structure, but even so, it needs to be designed in an effective way, that doesn't create conflicts between different other kinds of motivations that students might have. So, that's an example to illustrate, the need to think about. Different tensions that might occur, among different motivators. If you think about, all four of these questions systematically, and come up with good answers for them, you can be fairly confident that gamification is a worthwhile approach to use, to tackle a particular, business or other challenge.
