The power of constraints - a case study.

Editor's Notes

1. Hello everyone!  I want to thank all the Gamification Europe Organizers for having me again  I’m really happy I’m able to share with you some of the results of what we have achieved with BLUERABBIT  Today I want to present you how adding constraints to a challenge can affect player behavior
2. First of all, what is this story about? That guy you can see through the letters is Edgar Santamaria. He was in charge of Organizing an Scavenger Hunt while he was the commissioner for ANSI, an independent scout organization. His idea was so good that WFIS, the World Federation of Independent Scouts asked him to do the event for the entire region.
3. So what’s the game plan. Edgar had been using BLUERABBIT for a while now. He knew he could do something with it to make the scavenger hunt more engaging. His idea was to run the hunt in all cities of Latin America simultaneously. Using the app to ensure the challenges couldn’t be attempted outside of schedule and making sure everyone had a fair shot at everything. But…
4. Do you remember back in the good old days when you didn’t have to make a plan that involved a pandemic? When people could hug each other and face masks were NOT in? Well… That plan was made back then…
5. Edgar had to come up with a new game plan for 300 players who were just told they won’t leave the house for a little bit.
6. Our new setting was this: 300 players, 45 days, 81 activities. Split in 4 categories (6 groups) 2 weeks to prepare all of these. Budget: 0.
7. One badge. Nothing more.
8. Well, what was the journey like? The concept was simple. The players had to login daily to solve 3 challenges. Two tasks that required upload content and one was to solve a quiz. We will focus the data part of this presentation in the quizzes data. While you could login on the last day and solve everything at once, only those who completed every single challenge would get the badge. Making this a really HARD item to earn. Since this was made for scouts, it wasn’t a meaningless badge. It was proof of accomplishment and evidence of skill. The results?
9. Players from 8 countries joined the challenges Everything was completely voluntary. Many of them had to drop the challenge due to school responsibilities, issues around internet connectivity or the pandemic itself. 78 players earned their badge.
10. Now, what about the constraints and the behavior I talked about at the beginning? Well… Let’s analyze the data. Before we move to the numbers, let me explain some things:This data correspond to one of the four categories only. We do have the data for the entire event but it’s complex enough with just this one group. What I want you to see in this is how easy it was to improve player accuracy and behavior with one tool.
11. First of all, In BLUERABBIT, you can gamify a quiz by adding time limit, max amount of attempts and cost for every attempt from the players.
12. At the same time, you control how many questions appear every time the player attempts it. In this case, we set it up for unlimited attempts and show 1 question from the pool. No cost for any attempt. BLUERABBIT randomizes everything, questions and options, so you hardly ever see the same challenge.
13. The leaderboard calculates the position based first on the player level, then on the XPs and lastly on the coins they have, so every single coin spent meant losing position in the leaderboard. Every completed challenge awards XP and coins. Now, very important. The leaderboard had NOTHING to do with the earning of the badge, but these were very competitive players and they loved the challenge. You can see how these 10 players all have the same amount of XP and the difference between each is in the BP Coins. Now, let’s see the data.
14. Ok… who got a panic attack?
15. Let’s split the data so it’s easier to understand… First look at the INSANE number of attempts in Challenge number 7: 509 is the number. 22 correct, the rest failures. This is our pivoting point. Edgar contacted me to help with this as the behavior revealed some very interesting data: The parents of some kids were trying to game the game by clicking randomly at the options of the challenge instead of reading the question and actually solve it. What’s beautiful is what follows. Despite the jump on attempt 13, you can see how the attempts fall to the ground at challenge 8 and forward What did we do? Well… 50 coins per attempt after the first FREE try. What happened after? Now the kids were trying to solve the questions rather than letting their parents “game it” On challenge 13, there are 196 attempts. Only 14 are correct. But from those 196, 148 were made by 3 players. 77 by one of those, 52 by another. They didn’t get the coins cost memo on time it seems… This behavior repeats itself on every group. The second they have to use their hard earn resources to complete a challenge, they take it seriously. Check out the accuracy chart. There is a point where accuracy goes to 100%, 92%, 80%. And the difficulty of the questions just keeps going up.
16. Let’s split this one.
17. Conclusions and explanations. Questions and Answers. I believe the most important lesson to learn is that when a player realizes that their actions have consequences on their choices, they change their behavior to seek a more favorable outcome. We achieved this with virtual coins and zero budget. This is why we must use gamification in the education world to improve learning. This is it. The players suddenly connect with the material and take it seriously. I love that phrase that says that Reading can seriously injure your ignorance (please if someone has the author, share it).
18. Play exists to increase skill. Even if you aren’t measuring it, when you play something your skill on that something will rise. However, without boundaries, there is no game. Try and beat this mark, try to reach this height. Boundaries give the players context and purpose. I want to leave you with a teeny tiny bit of bragging by showing you my autographed copy of Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal.
19. She wrote: “Play with purpose” after I told her, her book changed my life. I believe we are all playing life with our own constraints. Giving us purpose on every step.
20. Thank you very much for your time. May the force be with you and NEVER STOP LEARNING.