Gamification - a player centered design process
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Gamification has become a buzzword in recent years and a big percentage of the top companies in the world are already employing it as a technique in their business operations. Additionally we have seen and experienced gamification on a number of occasions in our daily life – from loyalty programs to catchy marketing tricks for product promotion and what not. The design community has witnessed some practices that work really well and others that simply don’t. This talk will present gamification and its benefits, but also cover examples of good and bad practices. And since gamification is what seems to be the convergence of game design and user-centered design, extensive guidance will be provided about its incorporation in existing processes and products, as well as employing it in designs that are built from the ground up. We also will talk about what makes games fun, what types of players exist and what motivates them. We will discuss the concept of obstacles, the types of work that need to be done to overcome them and the rewards that are provided in return. And all this will be spiced up with numerous examples from the present and the past.
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Gamification - a player centered design process
- 1. Gamification A Player-Centered Design Process
- 2. UX Architect Local leader …but I also like running, skiing and snowboarding, and cold cocktails on the warm sand Stefan Ivanov
- 5. Senet
- 6. Myth Busters
- 7. • Games are for teenagers.
- 9. • Games are for teenagers. • Games are for men.
- 11. • Games are for teenagers. • Games are for men. • Games are not work.
- 13. z z What makes a game fun?
- 14. Goals, rules, feedback, voluntary participation
- 17. Boring stuff becomes fun
- 18. The icing on top
- 19. • High-stakes work • Busywork • Mental work • Physical work • Exploration • Creative work Work in games
- 20. Future Present
- 22. Player vs. User
- 24. • Levels • Leaderboards • Quests • Showing progress • Badges • Discovering • Virality • Sharing experiences Game mechanics
- 25. Monitor, measure and manage Monitor Measure Manage
- 26. Player personas
- 27. Player lifecycle Rookie Regular Master onboarding habit-building mastery teaching challenge creation
- 31. fold.it
- 32. eventbrite
- 33. LinkedIn
- 34. zombies, run
- 35. Have a lovely conference sivanov@infragistics.com stefanivanovux
Editor's Notes
- Hello everybody and welcome to my talk. Today I want to speak about gamification and how it looks like on the inside as a process of player-centered design.
- My name is Stefan and I work for Infragistics Bulgaria, the company behind this wonderful event, as a UX Architect. I am also a local leader for the Interaction Design Foundation. But I like many other things as well such as running, skiing and snowboarding, and enjoying my summer vacations with a cold drink on the warm sand.
- Here is a short agenda for today, which will be our quest list in this immersive talk. We’ll talk about games first, gamification next, to dive deeper into player-centered design and wrap it all up with Bartle’s classification of players.
- Let’s look at games first, some facts about the people that play them and a few underlying principles that make games what they are.
- Do you know that games have existed 3500 years before Christ? This is one of the oldest board games known to mankind, found in the tomb of Tutankhamun called Senet. There is much more to this when we add chess, tic tac toe and coming to the digital age pong, Tetris and MMORPG and even mobile and social media games lately. We are all familiar with games and how they work as they are introduced to us from early childhood. And many of these have not only and entertainment purpose but also educational and even serve to develop some basic skills at a very early age. It is not an accident that they have found their way in business processes and productive work to enhance them and make them more fun. Let’s take a look at what defines a game to learn more about the drivers that immerse and motivate us because that is what improves a process enhanced through gamification.
- Let’s play a game! Have you heard of the Entertainment Software Association. Well all you need to know is that they make statistics about gaming and gamers and I will share some data from 2012 to bust a few myths.
- Games are for teenagers.
- The average age of a gamer is 30. 70% of gamers are older than 18.
- Games are for men.
- Actually women constitute just under half of all gamers. So it is almost a tie. Do you know which is the fastest growing segment in gaming is women over 18? Don’t forget social games such as Candy Crush and Farmville.
- Games are not work.
- Do you know that an average WoW player spends 22hrs a week in the game? And that same game has the second largest Wiki on the Internet. Is that not work? And later we will talk about FoldIt – a scientific project that used gamification to solve an “unsolvable” task
- What makes a game fun? What are the underlying principles that are valid for all games that actually make them fun?
- These are the four basic principles that combined deliver fun and can be found in all games. What is different from one game to another is how they are applied in practice, but altogether they result in fun in every single case. These are goals, rules, feedback and voluntary participation. So lets study them with a game as simple as pong, the first video game ever. So the goal here is as simple as to hit the ball that bounces off the bar that you control. The rule of the game is that if you let it pass by your bar you give your opponent a point and the one who reaches a certain amount of points wins. The feedback you get is both visible through the movement and bounces of the ball when you hit it and audial as such a hit is accompanied with a beep sound. And in the end it is a game that you voluntary participate in, being challenged by a friend and having the freedom to leave the game at any given moment in time. These four are crucial when designing a gamifying experience so keep them in mind but before going to that let me share one other thing.
- Obstacles. They make a boring and repetitive task fun. Imagine you work in a warehouse and have to pick parcels and move them around. Well that is actually the core of the original Super Mario game. Real life often has simple repetitive tasks, but what games offer to increase the challenge is an increasing level of difficulty in the unnecessary obstacles presented. Imagine the Nokia Snake game – you have to collect apples to gain points but this also makes the snake longer and the game more difficult to play. Or Тetris, where clearing rows of blocks gives you points but also increases the speed with which they fall. Actual life is not like that as we strive to remove the obstacles to reduce risk or effort but that also removes the challenge and sense of competition from the big picture.
- Now let’s talk about gamification as a design approach and a process.
- There is one single purpose for gamification to exist and it is to make repetitive tasks fun. We basically do the same thing over and over again but do that restlessly thanks to the gamification elements embedded in the whole experience. The elements that we just mentioned goals, rules, feedback, voluntary participation and obstacles. And fun is the most critical KPI variable that we really have to measure. Of course since that is hart to quantify, there are indicators that are objective and measurable and relate directly to fun such as engagement but more about those in a few minutes.
- Before anything else there is one crucial think to mention. Gamification is not about fixing bad processes but about improving good ones. A bad process can and must be fixed and that can be done with a variety of UX activities. You are here today to hear about a few and some of you coming to the workshops tomorrow will benefit from experiencing further ones. But once the process is working well we can enhance it further by adding a gamification layer to improve learning curve, user performance and product retention to name just a few. It is the mouth-watering icing on top of an delicious muffin.
- What are the types of work that exist in games? First comes the high-stakes work which is most prominent in FPS video games. You are usually saving the world and you are alone against a whole bunch of zombies, Nazis or any kind of enemy. It is your character putting his life at stake to save humanity from the evil. Then comes the busywork with games such as Candy Crush – you do the same thing over and over again to clear groups of similar objects that give you points. We usually play these games to waste some time as it is better than doing nothing. Mental work are games that require us to think such as Sudoku and Scrabble, where our knowledge is challenged. Few games require from us to do physical work because usually that requires an additional control such as the mat and joysticks of the Nintendo Wii or the Kinect for Xbox from Microsoft. Exploration is the type of work that basically requires us to stroll the map to uncover it, I have spent countless hours doing this in Heroes of Might and Magic and Diablo II as a kid and WoW is a more contemporary game that uses the same concept. And finally comes creative work, where we basically make certain decisions without an idea of what the outcome will be but hoping for the most positive outcome. This is exemplified in games such as Championship Manager, where we manage our very own soccer team. No matter what the type of work a game presents to us, we do it because of the fun involved.
- And the digital natives are entering the workforce as of now. These are the people born after the inception of the Internet. They were raised with digital technology around and have on average about 10 000 hours of their life spent on online and video games. Gamification is taking advantage of their familiarity with games to make them more involved into work.
- Ok so what is player-centered design and what are the efforts and deliverables of the process.
- When it comes to gamification our users are actually our players. But how is that different? We already agreed that gamification is not about making stuff to work but actually a layer on top that engages the target user. Thus one can also say that unlike usability that often strives to improve user efficiency and effectiveness, here our goal is improving the engagement of the player with the process/system. However, the two process are very similar when it comes to the activities involved, it is just the goal that is different. There are many iterations along the way, we do a lot of brainstorming, test different hypotheses, measure and adjust the product until we find the golden ration that engages our players best.
- Player-centered design is the best approach for gamifying a system or process. This means that we put the player at the heart of all the design decisions that need to be made. Otherwise, it is not very likely that the gamification will be successful. We usually start by asking ourselves who our player is. And next we need to think about the mission of our gamification exercise that is usually dictated by business goals. Knowing the current state and desired outcome we have understand what would be the best way to motivate the players to embrace those missions. And then it is time for the final stage of the player-centered design process.
- Putting the game mechanics in place. There are numerous types of game mechanics of course such as levels (progressing level after level in the game like in Plants vs. Zombies), leaderboards (like the weekly one for check-ins in Foursquare), quests (such as the ones in Diablo that our character received), showing progress (like the completion indicator for our LinkedIn profile), badges (for the Farmville wiki contributors), discovering (finding a secret level in Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 was the best part of the game), virality (a game as simple as 2048 went viral because your friends simply wanted to beat the score you shared in social media), sharing experiences (like forming a guild on WoW). There is no right or wrong approach here, the solution is always a mixture of a few game mechanics, where we iterate until the desired outcome is achieved and often even beyond it.
- Monitoring, measuring and managing the engagement of your users is crucial for every gamification. It is especially important to monitor for cheating as in some cases it destroys the experience of others. To estimate engagement we can measure time of a user session with the system, time needed to complete a given task, and a number of subjective measures collected through surveys. Of course, we always compare the same variable measured in different settings and here usually we put the gamified and non-gamified process side by side. And we do so from an iteration to the next one to discover if we are moving in the right direction or not. It is important that these measurements are against SMART goals. That is we need to set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound goals for our users and measure their engagement with the system.
- Just as we create user personas during the first iterations in the user-centered design process, it is equally important to create player personas for the player-centered design process. They make us look into the demographics of our target users and serve to guide the decisions made during the design process. Of course here we pay more attention to character features that define a player rather than user and the persona goals are not related to productivity as much as they are to engagement and feeling more involved in an interaction series with the system. And down here are the Bartle’s player types that will be discussed in a few minutes.
- Here are the phases that a player goes through and they are under critical consideration when creating the player persona. We have to identify whether this is a rookie that needs to be onboarded with a tutorial and be left with a feeling that the game is challenging yet easy to learn. Then this rookie becomes a regular player once the basic skill set is taught and then our goal is to build a habit that keeps the player engaged and makes him happy inside the game. Once that user feels he is in full control of the game and anticipates the upcoming challenges yet they deliver unpredicted results, he can be considered a master. He knows all the tricks and give tips to newbies, he can teach them, furthermore he knows what is challenging and can create challenges for the newcomers, map designer in Heroes of Might and Magic.
- OK so let’s wrap it all up with a the Bartle’s player types that I already mentioned and discuss a few gamification examples.
- If you know what your players are motivated by you can easily cater to their needs. This simple measure, designed by Richard Bartle, breaks up the way people play games into four simple categories. They are the Achiever (Achievers are all about points and status. They want to be able to show their friends how they are progressing. They like to collect badges and display them), the Explorer (Explorers want to see new things and discover new secrets. They're not as bothered by points or prizes for them the prize is discovery. Explorers are OK with repetitive tasks as long as they eventually "unlock" a new area of the game or they deliver some kind of "Easter Egg"), the Socializer (The vast majority of players are Socializers. That's nearly 80% of all people who play games. The fun in their games comes from interacting with other players. Socializers are happy to collaborate in order to achieve bigger and better things than they could on their own) and the Killer (The Killer is similar to the Achiever in that they get a thrill from gaining points and winning status too. What sets them apart from the Achiever is that the Killer wants to see other people lose. They're highly competitive and winning is what motivates them. They want to be the best at the game and the only way for that to be true is if everyone else is beaten).
- It's worth noting that these categories aren't rigid. Most people display some traits from more than one category, however, most people have a dominant category which determines their overall preference. If you know where the majority of your players fall using this tool, you can use it to inform the majority of features you will use, and then just add a small number of features that appeal to each of the other categories.
- It all started in the University of Washington with an algorithm for predicting the protein folding. However, it turned out that there were so many variants and approaches that it would take forever for the algorithm to predict certain scenarios. And it turned out that an online puzzle game where the player performed the protein folding manually with each interactions issued the same results much faster, simply because the virality of the game supported many people playing it at the same time which exceeded by far the computational power that the institute had. You see game mechanics like a progress bar in the top right and quests given in the top left.
- The timeout on Eventbrite for those of you who purchased their tickets for our conference there. This timeout create a sense of urgency which is employed as a game mechanic in other scenarios as well like time challenge for completing a lap in racing games.
- Most LinkedIn members didn’t even know they were being gamified after completing their profile with the progress bar in place. And this game mechanic vastly increased the profile completeness of the average LinkedIn member, issuing the desired results.
- And another example is the interactive training experience called “zombies, run”. It is nothing more than a running up with the necessary game mechanics in place to make your run more emotional as you are hearing the mumbling of the zombies chasing you. Adding emotional aspects to a repetitive task such as running definitely makes me want to run longer and more often. How about you?
- That was actually my last example and with this I would like to open the Q&A section and wish you a lovely remainder of the conference.