Learning about Gamification
Researching the psychology behind what makes a meaningful and delightful gamified experience.
Key Takeaways:
- Users really enjoy getting unexpectedly rewarded for doing tasks that were not mandatory to do in the first place.
- Students will be more engaged if they understand the learning objectives of what you’re asking them to do.
- People want to be able to gain and share recognition of their achievements with others in the community.
- We should really try to figure out what “journey” is that we’re sending students on when they arrive at Expii. Is it self-defined? Do we define it?
- It’s helpful for teams to define the parts of the game in a document that they can reference later and change as new ideas come in.
- Don’t give achievements or a score for the sake of having it. There should be a very clear reason for having that in an experience beyond saying we want to “gamify this”. Users should know exactly why/how they’ve earned the achievement and what the motivation is to keep going.
- Reward people for both the simple and challenging tasks.
Questions:
- Rewards: Why would someone want to be rewarded in our experience? What do the rewards look like? What value do they provide?
- Achievements: How do we let people share their achievements to the public or others in the community and friends?
Gameful: Importance of Autonomy, Competency and Belongingness
“Self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) says that in order to feel intrinsically motivated, people need to be able to make meaningful choices over whatthey are doing (autonomy), be challenged by a task but feel like they can succeed (competency), and feel connected to those around them (belongingness).”
People like to feel like they have autonomy in the choices that they’re making. They should feel like the tasks are challenging them but not so difficult that they won’t be able to ever succeed. As we discussed in our meeting last week, it’s important that we give students some challenges early on. We should reward them in the beginning for getting started but after that, it shouldn’t seem like we’re doing so much hand holding.
Create a sense of community
It’s also important that we build up a sense of belongingness. We should try to explore how we can incorporate social/community features into our V2 launch. It might be beneficial to think about the pros and cons of having a leaderboard. Some people may be worried about their identity being known.
“Start with an perspective switch: we switch from a percentage system where students begin with 100% and lose as they complete assessments, to one where they start with zero points and earn up as they complete experiences and show content mastery.”
Work towards clear learning objectives
We recommend creating your learning objectives for the course before you create assignments…The research around intrinsic motivation emphasizes that it’s motivating for students to understand the value of the work they’re doing — what they’re supposed to get out of it, and why you think it’s an important task. Starting your course design with learning objectives is a fantastic way to help you share this information with students, as well as build assessments that ensure you’re able to track students’ overall progress towards accomplishing them.
Expii may want to consider visibly stating what the learning objectives are for each topic that a student might want to study in the interface. We currently show students which topics map to which in the design of V2 but I don’t think we state very clearly what the objectives are. This might tie into what Po was bringing up at the meeting last week: How does a student know when they should move on?
Student defined learning objectives
If we tell them what the objectives are upfront, or even let the students define it for themselves, then we could incorporate that information into the design of achievements. Maybe once they’ve reached 3/5 of the learning objectives, we can nudge them to try a new topic. They might come back tomorrow to complete the rest of the 2/5 learning objectives. I know we want to be careful here of how we introduce objectives because it might start to seem like we’re implying that once you’ve mastered these # of concepts, you’ve mastered this topic. We don’t want to give the sense that there’s some sort of ceiling.
Provide the freedom to fail
We discussed last week that we might want to introduce some Challenge level from time to time as a student dives deeper into a topic. At these moments, they would have the chance to either boost their ranking/score or come out of the “mini-game” having lost points. I think having some sort of mode like this would be really beneficial to students. It would be even better if the students had the autonomy to enter into this mode themselves. We should be trying to build up their confidence over time.
“A core principle in videogames is the freedom to fail: you can experiment, take risks and try things you have never done before, fail miserably…and do it again and again until, after much practice, you get it right.”
Provide multiple means of asssessment
I thought this was an interesting point made in the article that we might be able to incorporate into the app:
Structure multiple ‘pathways’ of assessments so that failure in one area does not limit a student’s course success. For instance, if a student does poorly on an essay, they can make up for it by writing multiple scholarly blog post
Expii currently assesses students based on how they perform on practice problems. Maybe another way to assess their knowledge is to see if they can create problems with correct answers. We would be flipping the script to say here’s a chance to prove that you know the material because you can quiz other people about it and do it well. This also might give students more of a reason to contribute explanations and practice problems. Lastly, it might be interesting to reward students for doing Lesson problems. It might give them more reason to read through the different explanations.
Features and aspects of gamification
Bonuses: Where are opportunities for students to gain unexpected points? Maybe we reward them for holding a practice problem streak (ex: “You got 20+ coins for getting 5 questions in a row correct!”).
Discovery: We can reward them for diving into a completely new topic/area of focus. Maybe when they’ve been doing particularly well on a topic, we prod them to go discover new material in some interactive way.
Infinite Play: Expii currently does this with having infinite practice problems. Maybe in an “Infinite Play” mode, they sometimes get thrown problems that are more advanced or from a topic that’s somehow related to what they’re learning about. If the question peaks their interest, we can help them discover new areas of Math/Science that they didn’t even know about.
Countdown: It probably wouldn’t be too difficult to implement a Countdown mode where students have to answer questions under 1 minute/5 minutes, etc. The issue there is that people vary in how long they take to answer math problems. We could allow the student to identify how much time they’d like to give themselves per problem. We also could do a mode where a student says, “I want to do infinite problems for 10 minutes straight.”
Appointments: Students could be nudged to do a “5 minute countdown” mode each day at a certain time (which they can set themselves). For those 5 minutes, maybe we give them problems taken from all sorts of areas that they’ve studied before on Expii. At the end of it, they’ll walk away with some daily rewards and a quick snapshot of how they’re doing (ex: # of questions answered, average speed, etc). They might realize that it’s been a while since they’ve studied Fractions and they should review it again.
Collaboration: It could be cool to enter Grandmaster with another user (either virtually or in person) and they can work together to solve problems. In a more competitive mode, it could be like HQ Trivia, where a problem is put out and students have 5 minutes to lock in an answer. At the end of the game, they can see a report on the different statistics measured. The report should hopefully encourage both of them to keep learning rather than bring one person down.
Students need to understand the value in doing tasks
McDonald’s was able to gamify their employee onboarding experience by building in fun, competitive challenges (ex: get three right in a row, complete a trial order before time runs out). These sorts of features made the experience a lot more fun, even when the interface wasn’t that easy to use. What’s important is that people felt like there was a clear objective and gained value from doing the task.
This gave users a sense of purpose and competition which resulted in crew members using the learning tool 145,000 times in the first year, despite it not being mandatory.”
Game elements create ways of giving users recognition for performing tasks, and it’s no secret that humans crave recognition and status symbols.
Nike has numerous badges that they reward users with for doing tasks that seem to feel especially like chores or something they could put off. They deliberately refer to their users as “winners” when it comes to getting achievements.
Create a strong sense of journey for students
“Great games have great stories; stories that show an understanding of who the “hero” is, what obstacles they need to overcome, and the rewards they can expect. Using these game mechanics you can give your users clear goals and objectives while showing them where they’re headed.”
How do we get people to “binge-watch” problems?
I think Nike’s approach is good in some cases that they reward people for almost everything they do but I also think the oversharing of badges isn’t always great and desensitizes people from feeling like they really gained something. The article points out that the real value of gamification is to provide a sense of purpose and journey that hooks people in from the start and makes them want to come back or keep going, just as you would with binge watching a TV show.
Gamification isn’t just about adding badges and leaderboards. It’s about creating a path for your user. Games are all about the story, an immersive journey that creates a great experience for the player.
“It shows the user the journey they will be going on, the expected time the user can expect to spend on the course, and what reward to expect upon completion of the course.”
Developing Core Game Elements
“Due to these differences in relation to UX design, game design utilizes different concepts. For example, games are traditionally composed of several elements: characters, rules, goals, mechanics, and narrative. Each element equally contributes to the in-game experience.
Characters: “Their major purpose is to provide a vehicle for the player experience — something players can hop into and drive.”
This quote ties back to an earlier point I made about how students really need to feel like they have autonomy in the learning experience. They need to feel like they’re driving the decisions. At the same time, it’s good to throw in opposing characters every now and then that throw them off and give them something else to interact with.
Rules: “Rules bind players to the game world and determine what they can or cannot do. Goals determine the focus of a game and what is required to win. Some games do not have goals, but all games do need rules.”
Rules don’t totally apply to our experience…but a general rule that should be made clear at the start is how the Genius Level score works. In what scenarios, will their score lower and when will it get higher? This will help them define goals for themselves and know what it takes to “win”.
“Two games with the same rules and mechanics can feel completely different with different approaches to a narrative, which affects visual and sound design.”
Narrative: The narrative is what will and already separates us from other experiences. We should keep pushing this forward and define it in a way that’s fun and engaging for students. The article points out the importance of visual and sound design in really winning over people if they’re choosing between similar experiences.
I really like how KhanAcademy congratulates users for doing well on a set of problems with sound and fun pop-up animations.
Key Idea: Document the game elements/narrative upfront
In games, documentation can be used as a guiding force. Game design documentation can be short (1 page) or long (past 30 pages), but it always helps creators define game elements up front. Translating this to digital product design, this can be a document that outlines personas, user goals, and other information such as key statistics to track. This can help people who need information about current and upcoming projects to get going as quickly as possible…Document as you start to build and make changes to the initial ideas.
We could probably benefit from writing this sort of document out together as a team. It’d be a helpful resource for us to have moving forward and also help us understand what it is we need to design/build and how to do it.
Key Idea: Simple isn’t always best
Complexity is important in games because it provides challenges for players to overcome. Game makers excel at ensuring the addition of complex features include usefulness and meaning. If every part of a game is complicated, players will quit. However, the right amount of roadblocks can make players feel accomplished when they are surpassed.
We should figure out where it is appropriate in the experience to put in roadblocks. Where can we add friction to the interface? Users will feel more like pros as they continue to get over challenging tasks.
Finding new features and shortcuts gives me a sense of accomplishment. Consider ways to do the same in your product, especially if user goals require it to support a complex set of actions.
So many people, myself included, think that Snapchat’s design is pretty terrible. Their colors are all over the place. The badges they reward you with don’t make sense. They use unfamiliar icons in their navigation. The list goes on and on. I did some reading later on that made me understand why they chose to go with such weird design decisions and interaction techniques.
They found that users kind of enjoyed the challenges that came with using their interface. When someone figured out how to “unlock” a feature n the design, like how to display their unique QR code, they would feel like “pro users” and share that knowledge with others.
“In addition to emotions, people love personality. They want to identify with those behind the products they use and the games they play. In games, this is usually expressed through hidden secrets called easter eggs. Game designers use them to connect with players while rewarding them with a sense of accomplishment.
Some easter eggs take a lot of effort to find, while others are easy. Many reference memes, celebrities, pop culture, and even other games. For a quick and fun example, Google “do a barrel roll” or “zerg rush”. These are both references to popular video games.”
Now that some time has passed and more competitors have appeared in their space, I don’t know that their design decisions are really working for them so that’s also something to think about…I wouldn’t totally model any decision over what they’ve done.
Lesson: Understand what sort of emotion you want to convey
Journey mapping is the process of mapping out how a user in a specific scenario feels during each step of a specific set of tasks. Journey mapping an existing set of features can help designers understand where improvements can be made, and journey mapping while creating user flows for new projects enables designers to avoid potential pitfalls.
It could be useful to do this as an activity along with creating a document for the game elements. This could help us see how our designs might cause stress, anxiety, feelings of being overwhelmed, etc. We should also be very mindful of the voice and personality we are conveying in our copy.
How do we make a better impression on someone from when they first visit Expii? How do we explain the concept of “hearing from multiple voices” in a much more compelling way? What kind of tone do we want to set?
MailChimp does a great job on communicating that they’re there to help and guide you through this complicated journey of creating newsletters.
Lesson: Give obvious feedback
Responsiveness is important in games. It gives players the sense that their actions are contributing to changes shown on screen. In games, this feedback is known as “game feel” or “juice”. It is often expressed as screen shaking and changes in scale and color of objects.
Feedback makes UI elements feel great to interact with. It tells people that their actions have been acknowledged by the system, and can also be used to provide an additional sense of playfulness in products. For example, pressing and holding down Facebook Messenger’s like button, lets you make a larger emoji. Sounds and shaking effects tell the user when the button has reached its maximum effect.
Lesson: Be very intentional with achievements
Game elements shine when they are intentionally included. Users can tell when an experience is game-like as a gimmick. If you are considering the addition of game elements into your experiences, carefully think about their purpose.
A bad way to utilize game dynamics is the act of including a score, points, and achievements in a website or app without consideration beyond looking at what the competition does. These features feel out of place because the context is often inappropriate. For example, Snapchat, a very popular messaging service, includes a score. However, no emphasis is put on the score and no explanation regarding its existence is provided.
I think right now, we’ve talked quite a bit about what sort of game elements we want to incorporate into the experience (ex: badges, levels) which is good but we should really make sure we all have a clear idea of what the journey is that we are offering to students and why they should care about it.
Importance of self-expression
Sometimes digital rewards can satisfy people’s need for self-expression. In particular digital goods that help users express their creativity are often highly sought after. Examples of mobile app gamification techniques that appeal to self-expression include allowing a user to change the color or theme on their profile page in your app.
We could explore how we’d incorporate personalization into this (ex: changing avatars, customizing the profile page, getting virtual goods).
Importance of sharing achievements
People like feeling supported and being encouraged. Some examples of achievement recognition are sending an email or a push notification when a user gets their first follower or first story recommendation.
By sending an email with the sentence “Fun fact: Shakespeare only got 2 recommends on his first Medium story,” Medium encourages you to continue using their publishing service and also shows they are cool and supportive.
