Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

by Yu-kai Chou

It is not about how gamification is the future and how inspiring life could be with it.

implementing good gamification design into your products, workplace, and lifestyle.

It is about how you can use gamification and scientifically proven methods to improve your company, your life, and the lives of those around you.

game design, game dynamics, behavioral economics, motivational psychology, UX/UI (User Experience and User Interface), neurobiology, technology platforms, as well as ROI-driving business

you might already have a firm grasp of the 8 Core Drives within the Octalysis Framework.

human-focused design in all types of industries.

our lives will become better as we spend time enjoying everything we do.

we can start to build a world that harnesses the power of play together.

When the Surreal Blends into our World

no demons to slay, no gears to perfect, no drops to loot and no Excel spreadsheets to strategize on.

“Sunk Cost Prison.”

I truly believe if anyone was to take what I have learned during this epiphany to heart, they would likely do even better in a shorter amount

without all the fumbling and stumbling I went through.

As part of my obsession, I would generate complex spreadsheets to help me determine the exact combos I would need for playing optimally.

Once I even broke into my college buddy, Jun Loayza’s apartment while he was still in class, entering through the window after removing the screen, just to practice a game he owned called “Super Smash Bros Melee.”

If I played for two hours every single day for two straight years, it would still just barely exceed fourteen hundred hours. Quite intense, I know.

my friends began to quit playing Diablo II and moved on to other new games. Eventually I decided to quit as well since I didn’t want to play alone. It was during this transition that a sudden sense of ennui (or weariness) caught me by surprise.

Was there really no meaning to all the hours I had spent playing in the past few years? What if I had spent all this time learning a new language, or playing the violin instead? I would be “high level” in real life, instead of in some digital world of escapism.

I would go out into the wilderness, defeat monsters, gain experience, learn new skills, accumulate resources, ally myself with those who have complementary skills, learn from those who were of a higher level than I, and seek to conquer exciting quests.

I had to design my own game, along with clear goals, meaningful quests, and creative feedback systems.

Throughout history, humans have tried to make existing tasks more intriguing, motivating, and even “fun.” When a small group of people casually decide to compete against each other in hunting and gathering, or simply start keeping score of their activities and comparing it to their past records, they are adopting principles that are prevalent in modern games to make tasks more engaging.

Clearly defined goals Better scorekeeping and scorecards More frequent feedback A higher degree of personal choice of methods Consistent coaching

displaying a duck flying around. These tactics have probably tricked many people, myself included, into clicking on them once or twice upon seeing them. Later on, eCommerce sites like eBay and Woot.com all adapted sound gamification principles to become hugely popular examples of how game mechanics and dynamics can really make a process fun and engaging

one that gives managers, marketers, and product designers tools for creating engagement and loyalty in their experiences.

Human-Focused Design optimizes for human motivation in a system as opposed to optimizing for pure functional efficiency within the system.

at its core, Human-Focused Design emphasizes that people aren’t rudimentary cogs in a system. We have feelings, ambitions, insecurities, and reasons for whether or not we want to do certain things. Human-Focused Design optimizes for these feelings, motivations, and engagement as the basic foundation for designing the overall system as well as its functions.

Since game designers have spent decades learning how to keep people consistently engaged with repetitive activity loops towards “purposeless” goals, games are a great source of insight and understanding

Games have the amazing ability to keep people engaged for long periods of time, build meaningful relationships between people, and develop their creative potential. Unfortunately, most games these days are simply focused on escapism

Now imagine if there is a truly addictive game, where the more time you spend on it, the more productive you become. You would be playing and enjoying it all day. Your career would improve as your income increased, you would experience better relationships with your family, create value for your community, and solve the world’s most challenging problems. That is the promise I believe Gamification can fulfill, and it is the vision I continuously strive for throughout my life.

The U.S. Armed Forces now spends more money on recruitment games than any other marketing platform.

Volkswagen generated 33 million web visits and 119,000 new ideas through its People’s Car Project to design the “perfect car”.

Nike used gamified feedback to drive over 5,000,000 users to beat their personal fitness g...

With Beat the GMAT, students increased the time they spent on the website improving their test scores by 37...

In 10 days, Foldit gamers solved an AIDS virus protein problem that had confounded ...

70% of major employers are already using gamification to enhance performance and tra...

“90 Gamification Case Studies with ROI Stats”

Life is too short to waste on playing bad games.

Most people know the principles of being a“popular” person – be outgoing, funny, confident, in some cases compassionate, etc.

If you have ever played RPGs (Role-Playing Games) before, you would know that the act of “leveling up” often requires defeating the same monsters over and over again in the same stage for hours on end. Even mobile games like Candy Crush or Angry Birds require the same repetitive action (bird-throwing and gem-matching) for weeks or months in order to level up and progress. In the gaming world, this is appropriately called “grinding,” and it is fun and addictive for children and adults alike.

In the real world, this is often defined as “grunt work.”

Grunt work takes on a new meaning when understood as an affect of powerful motivational factors. This is the promise and vision that good gamification design can create.

This is most often manifested in the form of what we call the PBLs: Points, Badges, and Leaderboards.

This has also generated a backlash from the game development community, as they claim that gamification is a bastardization of the true essence intrinsic to good gaming.

This is the difference between extrinsic motivation, where you are engaged because of a goal or reward, and intrinsic motivation, where the activity itself is fun and exciting, with or without a reward.

The truth is, simply incorporating game mechanics and game elements does not make a game fun.

There are many unpopular, poor-selling games with state-of-the-art 3D high- resolution graphics. There are also games with very basic graphics such as Minecraft, or even no graphics, such as the purely text-based multi-user dungeon games (MUDs), that have large communities of players addicted to them.

it’s not just what game elements you put in - it’s how, when, and most importantly, why these game elements appear.

It would be foolish for a modern army commander to say, “Hey! The Greeks sent a big wooden horse to the Trojans and won the war. Lets send our enemies a big wooden horse too!”

Learn from the design; don’t copy the shell.

Currently, no one describes a website’s design as being “so Web 2.0!” Gamification may just become the normal way we design, implement, and interact with the world around us.