If you've decided that gamification is a good approach to use for your business challenge, how do you ensure that you're doing it in a thoughtful, deep, substantive, meaningful way? The best way I can think of to illustrate this is to give you a detailed example of a service that uses all of the standard PBL-type game elements, but pulls them together in a coherent and consistent way to address some of the deeper aspects of game design and psychology and ultimately, meaning. The site is called Stack Overflow. It's part of a larger group of sites now called Stack Exchange. And I'm going to intersperse screenshots of the site with some quotes from Jeff Atwood, who's one of the founders of the site, from a blog post that he put out trying to explain how and why he and his co-founder made design decisions to implement gamification. Now an important point he makes is that when the site was set up, he had no idea what gamification was. And all these decisions were not made based on gamification being an interesting or cool design practice. They were ways that he and his co-founder tried to solve the challenges that they had in front of them, which just happened to be the kinds of things that we now think about as gamification. So Stack Overflow is a site for programmers. It's a question and answer site where you can go to ask questions about how to write software or problems that you're having with certain kinds of coding, and other people answer the questions. Well, that doesn't seem terribly interesting, does it? Asking and answering questions about coding. In particular, how do you get people to spend their own volunteer time answering other people's questions, answering questions from total strangers about how to code certain things? Well, it turns out that Stack Overflow has been tremendously successful at this very task. The site, or the collection of sites now that they've put together, have over two million registered users. They average over 5,000 new questions per day, and over 10,000 new answers per day on the site. So they've been able to motivate people to engage in this practice and the question is how they have been able to do that. Well, the first reason is by thinking about the problem in the right way. What is programming? Well you can look as programming as the example of something very dull and rote. You can look at answering questions about programming as something inherently boring and difficult. Or you can look at it as something cool and wonderful and magical and game-like, and that's the approach that the designers of the site took. So Atwood says, the field of programming is almost by definition one of constant learning. Learning, as we talked about, has a great affinity for games. And he said, programming is supposed to be fun. Says who? Well, says them and obviously says a lot of other programmers. And to the extent that you can take this approach and think of what you're doing as fun, then it naturally leads towards a gamified approach that's authentic, that's not just based on how do we make people do this thing which otherwise they wouldn't want to do? How do we come up with a whole bunch of rewards that we'll dangle in front of people, a bunch of big carrots or a bunch of big sticks that will get them to do the thing? This approach says well, how do we think about the problem in a way that makes the people feel like they want to do it themselves? If it is fun, if you can find the fun in any problem, as Mary Poppins says then snap, it becomes a game and people will want to do it voluntarily. So that's the first aspect of what they've done. Second aspect of what they've done is to implement a system that is reflective of their community. Know your players. Understand what the community is that's involved in the activity. And this is particularly important because meaning is socially constructed in communities. What's meaningful, what's important is not the same from every community to every other community. It depends on the norms of those groups and communities, and the kind of activity they're involved in. So take Foursquare's badges which we've seen before. Very colorful, very fun if you will, creative, graphical, lots of little inside jokes here and, things like a pumpkin and so forth, These are badges that are designed to be cool in their own right which is part of the whole FourSquare mantra when they implemented these gamified elements, to get people to think that checking in was somehow something fun that they'd want to do. The badges in Stack Overflow look quite different. So here's a profile page of a user. This happens to be a very high level user, in fact he's one of the moderators who have the extreme privilege of helping to run the whole site. He's got 88,000 reputation points, which is an awful lot. And here are his badges, just that, 52 gold badges, 224 silver badges, 434 bronze badges. So you notice a very different aesthetic here. This is a site for programmers, for geeks, so it's about lots of numbers, lots of information and not lots of visual clutter, but just get to the heart of the information right away. Gold, silver, bronze, what those badges are and what they mean so at a glance you can see what this person's reputation score looks like. So two different ways to do badges. Each one is appropriate for the situation at hand. So this is an example of a Stack Overflow set of question and answers. There was a question above and here's an answer from someone talking about how to do something. And here's the person who gave the answer, this user Babu and you can see this person has 204 points and nine bronze badges, a pretty low-level user. And then here someone else has come in, this other user, and that person has edited the answer. And you see this person is a much higher level user. They've gotten 9,000 points, and a bunch of gold badges and so forth, not quite at the level of Bill the Lizard, but they're a much higher level user, and they have voluntarily edited the other person's post. So not only did that person voluntarily come up with an answer, they voluntarily modified and improved upon someone else's answer. You see here there's a link to improve the answer. Well, that's really great. If the system not only gets people to come up with their own answers, but to improve the answers are there, it's a self-reinforcing, self improving system. And here you see another example of an answer that was done by this person, and then down below some dialogue back and forth by the person doing the answer and the person posting the question. Again more information. The question gets more precise, the answer gets more precise. More activity actually improves the system. So that's a really great process. If you can design a system that has those characteristics it will be very powerful. And the question is then, so how does gamification do that for Stack Overflow? Back to Atwood again. Stack Overflow, he says, is many ways my personal Counter-Strike. Now Counter-Strike is a game, it was a modification of a game called Half Life, which is an interesting story in its own right, but the cool thing about Counter-Strike was that it was structured around groups coming together and having to fight as a team. Counter-Strike is a game where you're a commando unit that's fighting against terrorists. It's all about shooting at things using various different weapons. But in Counter-Strike if you go off on your own you're almost certainly going to die. You need to group up with a bunch of other people and some of them will cover you as you move forward, and will take out snipers and so forth. You have to work together as a team. And that activity was what made Counter-Strike really interesting and challenging for a lot of gamers. Because it's harder to group up with people and all work together as a team then just to go off on your own. And Counter-Strike implemented this in a really interesting and compelling way, so it was an extremely successful game. And what Atwood says is that notion of working together as a team, that to win the game you have to be effective, not just yourself, but as a teammate, as a part of a larger whole was the lesson that he and his co-founder took to apply to question and answers for programming. So the idea is helping fellow programmers is the way that you win at the game. You don't win by being awesome by yourself, you win by helping other people. So the gamified system is structured in Stack Overflow, relentlessly to incentivize pro-social behavior, to incentivize things like as we saw, improving on other people's answers as opposed to just doing stuff purely yourself in a way that doesn't help the group. So let's look very quickly at some of the ways that Stack Overflow structures its game elements to produce that same Counter-Strike-like result where people are encouraged to work together in order to win in the game. The first is that the points in the system are actually called reputation. And the primary way you get points is when your fellow users vote up your questions and answers, so not for your actions, but for other people saying you did a good job. That's the core definition of reputation in the system. You have to do something other people think highly of in order to get points. Similarly, there's this structure in Stack Overflow called bounties, where you can give reputation to someone for coming up with an answer, or a good answer to a question. That creates this notion of exchange, and gifting, which is another very powerful pro-social norm that gets activated by this game mechanic. So all of these game mechanics around the point system are structured to reward, not individual achievement, but things that serve the collective good. And Atwood talks about this as encouraging groups to do what's best for the world rather than their own specific, selfish needs. Here he alludes to a wonderful article by Clay Shurkey, called A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, where Shurkey points out that there's this real problem online, that we have really easy group formation. You can form a group for anything online, but the group tends to fall apart because the group may have some set of goals, there may be some set of things that we can agree is in the group's interest. But all the people who participate in the group aren't the group, they're individuals and so they pull in their own direction. And the group, as it grows, tends to fall apart and disintegrate because it doesn't have hierarchy and structure. The lack of hierarchy and structure is what's great about online activities and online groups, but they cause attention. And Atwood's claim here is that game elements in Stack Overflow are what pull against that natural tendencies of groups to collapse into selfish interests. So, for example, the reputation gives you certain powers, but they are not just powers to go off on to different parts of the site, and lord over people. They are powers that give you abilities to be essentially a moderator of the site, to engage in more of this beneficial behavior on the site. And that's cool, that's something you get with reputation, but it's also something that helps others. Similarly Stack Overflow has a badge system. But again it's not the FourSquare type of badge system where the badges are about showing off your big cabinet with all of your cool badges in them. The badges are about doing things. Some of them are just things that are good for the site, visit every section of the FAQ. But some of them are about things that are good for others, edit 100 posts that have been inactive, actively, oh, that's not really one, but here, vote 300 times, leave ten comments, and so forth. All social behavior. And this is especially true of the gold badges, the really cool badges that people are going to want. There you have to do things like edit 500 posts. Remember, editing a post is the thing that's most beneficial in terms of improving the quality of the site collectively, but the thing that people are least likely to do on their own, so use a badge to encourage people to do it. similarly, great answers get you a gold badge, but so do great questions and so do questions that are famous, that are viewed by lots of people. So all of these are different ways of incentivizing the very things that are in the interest of the site, in the interest of the group as opposed to just incentivizing the things that may make people feel individually cool. And Atwood ultimately talks about this as the game elements being in service of a higher purpose. He said it ultimately helps him become more knowledgable and a better communicator while improving the very fabric of the web for everyone. Now, not every gamified site can credibly claim to improve the fabric of the web for everyone. If it's purely a marketing site that's trying to get more customers engaged, it's hard to see this as something that is fundamentally making the internet a better place. It's not necessarily in conflict with it, but as long as you can push in that direction, try to find things that are meaningful and fun for people, but also try to find ways to have the gamification elements push towards cooperation, collaboration and larger good, larger purpose, that notion of relatedness in self determination theory, the more likely it is that the gamified site will be deep and significant and enduring.
