The Future Unlocked: Gamification Part I

Posted by: Mike Pallante on March 28, 2011 at 10:20AM
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Our "Mind Blowing" Future

There are many ways to motivate people. An employer motivates an employee to work by dangling the reward of a paycheck. A mugger motivates that same employee to relinquish his paycheck by threatening him with a gun. Or, if you agree with the recent trends in marketing, health care and education, there's Gamification. Dr. Scott Rigby of Immersyve Inc. defines Gamification as, “...using video game mechanics – like points, scores, and levels – to build greater motivation for customers to stay engaged with a business.” Research into both the motivational power of games and applying that same paradigm to non-entertainment industries goes back to the turn of the 21st century. But, "Gamification" became an Internet buzz-word with Jesse Schell's keynote speech at the DICE Summit in February 2010.



Jesse Schell, former Imagineer with Disney, game designer and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, energized a crowd of designers and professionals at the DICE (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain) Summit . Described as “mind blowing” by Internet users, the final eight minutes of Shell's talk captured the imaginations of gamers, Internet communities and certainly marketing firms. Anticipating the proliferation of so called “disposable technology” in the near future Schell paints the picture of a world in which almost every daily activity is networked and game-like systems provide instant feedback on your level of achievement. Brushing your teeth with a BlueTooth enabled toothbrush earns you points with your local dentist, drinking enough Dr. Pepper ranks you towards a coupon at the grocery, practicing piano daily changes your ranking in a national arts scholarship contest.

All the while this feedback is linked to the social-network-of-the-day allowing you to compare your high score in life against your friends and family. In the final moments of his keynote speech Shell comments, “Is it possible, maybe, that since all this stuff is being watched and measured and judged... then maybe I should change my behavior a little bit and be a little better? … It could be that all these innovations are just crass commercializations but it is possible that they'll inspire us to be better people.” He's quick to qualify, “If the game systems are designed right.”

Gamification, Self-Determination Theory and Rewards

So how do you design a game system right? Will simply applying game mechanics to real world scenarios improve our lives? Will adding “Health Achievements” to our health care plan's website or “Safety Badges!” to our car insurance really make us better people? Scott Rigby, clinical psychologist, game designer and President and founder of Immersyve, Inc., an interactive marketing agency, provides context:

“There are lots of ways I can get you to behave or do things. Rewards. Threats. But, what leads to meaningful behavior change? You see this with how businesses try to motivate customers, teachers students and doctors patients...If you're using a lot of what we call extrinsic motivators, dangling badges, dangling gold stars... you may get people to behave in the short term but interestingly that undermines what we call their intrinsic motivation to behave in those ways.”

When Jesse Schell said, “If the games are designed right.” he knew exactly where to look for a model: Self Determination Theory. Self Determination Theory, or SDT, is a motivational theory in opposition to Behaviorism, or reward motivation. Over 30 years of research and clinical trials by numerous psychologists have shown that applying SDT can improve engagement and motivation. SDT motivates by addressing our fundamental psychological needs. Why reward, or bribe, Dr. Logan's Zombie with human brains when we could address his fundamental psychological needs and make not-eating-brains fulfilling in and of itself? But what are a zombie, or human's for that matter, psychological needs?

According to Self Determination Theory we are motivated the need for competence, autonomy and relatedness. Competence: The need to express mastery of a task. Autonomy: A sense of volition in the tasks, or that we are in charge of our destiny or the task. Relatedness: The need to relate to others and receive authentic and supportive interaction.

The psychological research behind SDT is fascinating, but what does it have to do with gamification? Well, Gamification is essentially a means to an end. Scott Rigby contributes, “What is Gamification really? All these businesses and areas of life are trying to make life more engaging and fun. Games are really good at this. Lets take this out into the world. In principal that sounds like a good idea to me. But we don't want to take games out into the world- we want to take the things games do well and bring those things into the world. Games when they are done right they are very good at satisfying... basic psychological needs.”

Gamification focuses on the incorporation of game-like elements in non-entertainment areas not because points and scores intrinsically engage users in and of themselves, but because a well designed games have always used points, scores and other methods to satisfy our fundamental psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Rigby continues, “It just happens to turn out that games are really really good at satisfying those needs when they are done. … Gamification is trying to take what games do well and bring them out into other domains.”

In part II of The Future Unlocked: Gamification we discuss exactly what "other domains" Rigby is talking about and explore some of he criticism gamification is receiving.