Chapter 6: The Second Core Drive - Development & Accomplishment

Development & Accomplishment is the Second Core Drive of the Gamification Framework Octalysis. This is the Core Drive where people are driven by a sense of growth and a need to accomplish a targeted goal. It is what focuses us on a career path, generates our enthusiasm and commitment to learning a new skill, and ultimately motivates us by showing us how far we’ve come and how much we’ve grown.

Many people have memories of their kindergarten teachers giving them gold stars to emphasize good behavior. Even though these stickers don’t become real prizes, children are often extremely intent on obtaining more stars and will focus on determining how best to gain them. That’s a very straightforward demonstration on the effects of Development & Accomplishment and how easy it is to add them into an experience.

This is also the most common implementation of gamification we see in the market, as most of the PBLs – points, badges, and leaderboards – appeal heavily to this drive.

Development & Accomplishment in Games

Almost all games show you some type of progress towards the Win-States. A Win-State is often a scenario where the user has overcome some sort of challenge - that’s the “win” in the Win-State. Games break down user challenges into stages to help the user feel like there is always progress.

Our brains have a natural desire to achieve goals and to experience growth in order to feel that real progress in life is being made. We need Win-States. Games can sustain long forty-hour or even four-thousand-hour player journeys because they use distinctive stages and boss-fights to recognize user accomplishment along the way.

To display that sense of accomplishment, some games show you points, others use levels, badges, stages, progress bars, better looking gear, victory animations… the list goes on. However, just because you see your progress through these elements does not necessarily mean you feel accomplished.

The key to Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment is to make sure users are proud of overcoming the challenges that are set out for them. Jane McGonigal, renowned game designer and Ph.D. in Performance Studies, defines games as “unnecessary obstacles that we volunteer to tackle.” ⁵³ (This is originally defined by the philosopher Bernard Suits).

McGonigal points out that challenges and limitations are what make a game fun. For example, if golf was just a game without any limitations, every player would just pick up the ball and put it into the hole to win. Everyone would score high, and every individual who has outgrown the “putting a round peg through a round hole” game will probably feel bored.

By adding unnecessary obstacles, such as requiring the use of a strange stick, certain distances, and landscape hazards, golf becomes fun because the player actually feels accomplished once such challenges are overcome. Gamification aims to integrate that feeling of Development & Accomplishment into everyday experiences within your product or service.

The First Gamification Site that I was Addicted to

One of the most popular blog posts on my website is a list of the “Top 10 eCommerce Gamification Examples that will Revolutionize Shopping.” At the top of this list is eBay (full disclosure – I worked with eBay on a couple projects in 2013)⁵⁴.

eBay.com is an online auction site that was founded in 1995, fairly early in the World Wide Web era. It became one of the largest Dot Com boom successes, and as of today it is one of the leading tech companies in Silicon Valley. It is also one of the earliest eCommerce companies that built gamification into its core DNA. If you plan to create a simple, generic eCommerce site, it’s not necessarily intuitive to include a competitive bidding system or a scored buyer-seller feedback interface. Nor is it obvious to provide a “path to level up” through achievement symbols such as Yellow, Purple, and Golden Stars, as well as creating a Power Seller status system.

eBay was the platform that triggered the founding of my first business. Without eBay, it is very likely that I would not have become an entrepreneur, and as a result you would not have this book to read.

When I was about to enter UCLA as a Freshman, there was a local barbecue event where second year students shared their experience and tips with us “newbs.” At that event, there was a drawing for two football tickets to the first game of the season. I was conveniently selected to be the student to draw a single name out of a box to win these two tickets. Call it Divine Will, fate, coincidence, or what have you; I drew my own name out of the box.

When I announced it was my own name, everyone was astonished, and the event organizer joked with a wink, “Congratulations! Just make sure you don’t sell it on eBay! We’ll check!”

At the time, I thought “What’s eBay? I’ve heard about it before.” I did some research about eBay, and shortly after I sold my two tickets through the platform (I hope the barbecue organizers don’t read my book).

That one transaction was surprisingly thrilling and fun for me. When I received my first bid from an anonymous stranger on the Internet, I almost jumped for joy (cultural joke: but I did not get stuck). Shortly after, I became obsessively glued to the screen after another bidder joined in on the “war.”

During the few days of the listing, it was the only thing on my mind. I continuously checked my listing, trying to see if people would outbid the last bidder. Of course, it was life-endingly depressing when no one had put in a new bid after my fourth three-minute check! By the way, this is what I now call a “Torture Break” (Game Technique #66), where a user must wait an interval of time regardless of their actions, a game technique to be explored under Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience.

When I finally sold the two tickets for a few hundred dollars, I was ecstatic. I felt that I had just accomplished something great (for a person just graduating high school). I made my first money as a seller! I started to find other things to sell on eBay. During this time, I noticed that the final price of an eBay auction is usually determined by what part of the day the listing ends. This is because most people like to wait for the last few minutes to put their bids in and steal the deal.

In that frenzy, people quickly outbid each other before the time runs out. This effect is a combination of a Countdown Timer (Game Technique #65) and a Last Mile Drive (Game Technique #53), where users feel that they are so close to the goal that they rush to complete it. For the record, these mostly employ Black Hat techniques.

Observing this effect, I began a small business buying and selling TI-83 Calculators, which was often a high school and college math class requirement. I would start to buy all the TI-83s I could find that ended their listings at 2AM, when no one was bidding against me, typically for $40. I would then resell them with auctions ending late in the afternoon when everyone was bidding against each other, typically for $60. As opposed to the boring mathematical theories from economics class and the social intermingling within college parties, this was the game that I needed to master.

True to the gamified spirit, when I sold my tenth item on eBay, I received an email from eBay itself! It was a certificate sent from this person named “Meg,” congratulating me as a valuable eBay seller and giving me a Yellow Star Certificate! I was so excited about this Achievement Symbol (Game Technique #2), that I printed it out and put it on my dorm room for many years. Even today, I think it is still sitting somewhere in a box at my parents’ home.

Even though this was not the original certificate I received, it looked something like the image below.

Eventually I would sell a plethora of other items, including new electronic products such as digital cameras, iPods, GPS devices, and even some string quartet songs I wrote! In my second year of college, at the height of my eBay career, I received a 100% satisfaction rating with over 1,100 positive feedbacks. As a result, I was awarded a Red Star ranking.

“I overpaid for my product. Take that, suckas!”

Based on the above, it’s easy to see how eBay uses Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment to make the experience more fun and addictive for the Seller. But what about the Buyer? What makes a buyer want to continuously buy on eBay?

From the buyer’s perspective, the genius thing about eBay is that when a purchase is made, you aren’t just buying something online like you do on other eCommerce platforms. No, instead of feeling that you are just acquiring some items in exchange for your money, you feel like you’ve actually Won!

Sure, after some adrenaline-filled bidding at the end, you may have ended up paying ten percent more than you otherwise would have, but you at least achieved victory over those eleven other bastards who were bidding against you!

“Take that suckas! It’s mine!”

Instead of just paying your way to success, which anyone could do easily, you worked hard and actually achieved a Win-State! You feel accomplished, and the value of that happiness far exceeds the extra money you end up paying for the item. On eBay, you are not paying to purchase; you are paying to play.

This is similar to games where people spend money in order to beat difficult levels that they can’t overcome. To be exact, people aren’t buying victories. If, immediately after people pay the game studio, a message pops up and says, “Congratulations! You have won!”, very few people would feel excited. Anyone could just pay money and get something. What gamers are paying for, is the feeling of being awesome. They pay to get powerful weapons or boosters that allow them to defeat a bunch of enemy monsters quickly, ultimately achieving dominating victory.

Another example that builds on the same principle is the General Mills brand Betty Crocker cake mixes. When it first launched many decades ago, it was designed to be the easiest cake mix for stay-at-home-moms to make, where they just have to add water to the powdered mix and then stick it into the oven for delicious cakes to come out. Unfortunately, sales were fairly stagnant and the company eventually hired business psychologists to help determine why.

One of the hypotheses was that the cake mixes were so easy to make, customers didn’t feel they were actually baking, and therefore did not have a sense of accomplishment or competence. Based on this concept, instead of making the process easier by removing steps, General Mills decided to add additional steps to the process. They decided to remove the conveniently powdered eggs from their Betty Crocker cake mixes and required the bakers to add in their own fresh eggs before putting them into the oven.

To many’s surprise, the product immediately became a breakout success. By adding that extra step of throwing in an egg yourself, people felt that they were actually baking a delicious dessert to compliment a meal. This made them feel great about themselves and their contributions to the family.⁵⁵. The philosophy of, “Games are unnecessary obstacles that we volunteer to tackle” can be seen clearly here, where adding a few extra steps increased Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment within the experience.

As a result of the gamified systems mentioned above, many claim that being on eBay is “addictive.” It eventually transformed from a personal hobby to a Fortune 200 company that is worth over $70 Billion.⁵⁶

What about Amazon?

After looking at eBay, you might ask, “What about Amazon? Aren’t they even more successful? I don’t see any gamification on their platform.” It’s true, founded in 1994, just a year before eBay, Amazon is now a Fortune 50 giant worth around $150 Billion, and they don’t do “gamification.”

Well, they don’t do gamification as in integrating points, badges, narratives, avatars or paths to leveling up. However, they have spent a great amount of resources nailing down many techniques within Human-Focused Design and many of the 8 Core Drives, which are the backbone drivers of successful games.

If you recall from previous chapters, good Implicit Gamification is often invisible like a doorknob – you don’t even notice it’s there, but you do use it to open and close a door without thinking. Through Amazon’s optimized design, we can see a few Core Drives being implemented with great effect.

First of all, the main Core Drive behind Amazon’s business is Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession. As mentioned in Chapter 3, the premise behind this Core Drive is that if you feel like you own something, you tend to want to improve it, protect it, and get more of it.

Amazon has worked hard to streamline this process of Ownership & Possession. It is an optimized engine that allows you to own and possess things quickly, accurately, and without hassle. It has established itself as the prime place to “get more stuff,” and you know you are likely getting the cheapest bargain on the market. With Amazon, you know you can own more, faster.

Also, Amazon is constantly learning about your preferences and personalizing what you see to who you are, something I call the Alfred Effect (Game Technique #83). As it does so, the sense of Ownership & Possession grows even more as people now identify it as a unique “My Amazon” experience that no other eCommerce site can provide.

Don’t fall behind your neighbors!

Accompanying the Alfred Effect is Amazon’s Recommendation Engine, now infamous in the personalization industry. Amazon’s recommendation engine, according to Amazon themselves, led to 30% of their sales⁵⁷. That’s a fairly significant factor for a company that is already making billions of dollars every month. In fact, JP Mangalindan, a writer for Fortune and CNN money, argues that a significant part of Amazon’s 29% sales growth from the second fiscal quarter of 2011 to the second fiscal quarter of 2012 was attributed to the recommendation engine.⁵⁸

And what does this recommendation engine look like?

“Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought.”

Amazon quickly realized that, by learning about what other people similar to you are buying, you have a much higher tendency to buy the same items too. Can you think about a Core Drive that pushes this behavior?

You may have guessed it (but I won’t judge you if you haven’t) - Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness. By knowing what other, similar people are buying, social proof and relatedness help consumers make decisions with greater confidence. This helps Amazon increase their sales and subsequent up-sells.

Of course, another “Social Influence & Relatedness” factor of Amazon that heavily contributed to its early success, was the millions of user reviews on books and other items.

“My friend Bob says the doctor is wrong – and he reads a lot about health.”

Studies on Trust and Reputation in Peer-to-Peer Networks by researchers like Yao Wang and Julita Vassileva of the University of Saskatchewan, as well as Minaxi Gupta, Paul Judge, and Mostafa Ammar of the Georgia Institute of Technology found that the average consumer prefers and trusts reviews by peers over those by professional critics⁵⁹⁶⁰. This is somewhat odd, because professional critics have made it their life mission to distinguish the good from the bad. For every published review, they would spend a significant amount of time collecting all the necessary information, going through the experience, just to write a well thought-out piece reflecting their depth of knowledge and commitment.

But when it comes down to it, consumers seem to prefer the thoughts and opinions of other consumers, who likely do not have the same level of sophistication and understanding with the product, let alone spent the same amount of time experiencing and reviewing the item in question. At the end of the day, we value the thoughts of people we can relate to, often more than the voice of authoritative experts.

In Amazon’s review interface, you see a statement such as, “4.6 out of 5 stars,” followed by a “leaderboard” of reviews that expresses the voting sentiments of the community. For the top review, “400 of 445 people found the following review helpful.” Coincidently, the review was given by “Book Shark,” who is labeled a “Top 500 Reviewer.”

Oh wait, there are also leaderboards, community voting, and status labeling on Amazon? If you thought Amazon does not use gamification, think again. While you are at it, try to remember what was the color of the last doorknob you held.

Never make Users Feel Dumb

I’d like to take a moment here to point out that though the focus of this chapter is on Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment, it is almost impossible to evaluate a good experience or product without considering the other seven Core Drives, as they intricately work together to create a unified and motivating experience. Even though the success on Amazon is seen through many other Core Drives, such as Scarcity & Impatience, as well as Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, let’s refocus back on the theme of Development and Accomplishment.

Beyond improving one’s ranks and obtaining badges, a very important type of emotional accomplishment is to “feel smart.” We all like to feel capable and competent, and feelings of being incompetent or powerless can create some of the most scarring moments of our lives.

A product that makes users feel stupid, no matter how great the technology, is often a failing product. From my experience, if a user spends four seconds on an interface and can’t figure out what to do, they feel stupid and will start to disengage emotionally.

The Google Search Engine makes sure this doesn’t happen. Before Google became “Google,“ Yahoo! was the quintessential “search engine.” giant. However, Yahoo! saw itself as an online portal where people could discover new content instead of being a pure search engine.

Interestingly, when the Google Founders wanted to sell their search engine to Yahoo for a measly $1 million, Yahoo turned it down, even though they recognized Google to be a more efficient search engine that took people to their destinations faster. This was because it went against Yahoo’s portal strategy of showing users many links to click on, leading to many more clickable links (a Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity Core Drive play). And along the way, offering advertising links to click on.⁶¹

Consequently, when you go to Yahoo’s homepage, you will see a great deal of content along with links. Even though it does drive many clicks and exploratory activities for many users, it can be a bit daunting or even paralyzing for users who can’t navigate and decide through so many choices. Google, on the other hand, focuses their strategy on the Development & Accomplishment Core Drive.

When you go on Google.com, you usually see only two things: Google’s logo, and a search box. There is almost no chance for you to feel confused about what to do next. You type your inquiry in the search box. Even if you are not exactly sure what to search (a moment of feeling partially incompetent), the auto-fill function jumps right in to give you suggestions.

Google understood this key point very early on. According to the book The Google Story by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, the company was so clearly focused on the strategy of having a clean homepage, that they turned down many great monetization opportunities which could be leveraged from their launch point; even till today.⁶² It is said that an organization’s strategy is not what they choose to do, but what they insist on not doing.

Unfortunately, the understanding and sophistication of making users feel smart from Google doesn’t always spill into their other product lines. Google+ is a common example of how a great technology can make users feel dumb and lose traction.

Even though Google likes to tout how Google Plus’ “active users” count makes it the second largest social network in the world, the average consumer understands that it is because they were somehow “tricked” into the Google+ interface while using YouTube or Gmail, something I call brute force distribution (no game technique here). Despite hundreds of millions of “active users,” according to ComScore and Nelson, average Google+ usage time per user every month is less than 7 minutes. Compared to the 400 minutes per month from Facebook, it clearly isn’t the place everyone is hanging out at.

Other web savvy users also continue to use Google+ because of alleged Search Engine Optimization advantages for marketing, which is credited to the brilliant work done by the search engine itself rather than the merits of the social platform.⁶³ After all, some people would even eat insects if it helps them increase their search rankings.

Despite being the “number two social network in the world,” if you look at Google’s own blog, with its user audience being the most biased towards Google products, you will often see way more tweets and Facebook Likes than Google +1’s on each post. An unnamed Google employee once told me, “At Google, there’s this joke, ‘If you are organizing a party and you don’t want anyone to know about it, share it on Google Plus.’”

Star of Bethlehem - Guiding Users Forward

If you have played the popular hit game Candy Crush, have you ever wondered why when you don’t make a move for a few seconds, the game shows you a “Glowing Choice” (Game Technique #28) of a possible solution that is often not the optimal way to match the gems? In almost all cases, if you just blindly follow the Glowing Choices, you will end up losing the game. Why would they show me a solution that does not make me win? Is this a trap?

The truth is, Candy Crush understands that, feeling a sense of progress and ultimately losing is much better than feeling stuck and confused. If you play the game through and lose, your natural reaction is to start a new game; but if you get stuck and can’t find three gems to match for a long period of time, you may just abandon the game altogether and start doing other things. Perhaps the expert consultant has already answered the email you just sent out - better check now!

Back to Amazon; Amazon makes people feel smart when they buy things. They do it in many different ways. First of all, Amazon tries to avoid the 4-Second Rule by making sure users always know what to do next.

On this screenshot of a product listing, most of the screen is white with black text, but graphically, the experience guides the user towards two Desired Actions. The first is the “Look Inside” button on the book, displayed in vibrant colors with a pointed arrow, similar to the interactive onboarding tutorials found within games. This is another example of a Glowing Choice, where a user is visually guided by obvious signs towards how to proceed.

The second Desired Action is the green zone on the right, with two time-tested orange action item buttons that serve as the real conversion metric for the business. Interestingly, the two orange buttons don’t even have the same color, with the “Buy Now with 1-Click” showing a cursor index finger pressing a button within the button.

It is important to note that this Desired Action is the only part of the page that is visually “colorful,” and the eyes automatically are guided to that direction. I call that a Desert Oasis (Game Technique #38), where visually nothing else is prominent besides the main Desired Action. The Desert Oasis looks green and juicy and it subconsciously suggests that there is a Win-State behind this option.

Finally, Amazon never forgets to show you a bogus List Price that is crossed out, a real selling price below it, and it tells you the amount and percentage of your savings if you didn’t pay the bogus List Price. This again makes people feel like they are making the smart choice for getting a great deal. A misunderstanding of this concept led J.C. Penney to fire their former CEO Ron Johnson, widely known for pioneering the Apple Store, after a “Fair and Square” campaign of removing “fake” discount numbers, resulting in one of the biggest failures in retail history.⁶⁴

The Premium Price of Smarty Pants

Bogus prices that make users feel smart are seen everywhere. In the Behavioral Economics Bestseller book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely describes a case where a group of MIT students are presented with a choice between paying $59.00 for a one-year subscription to the digital edition of the Economist magazine or to pay $125.00 for a one-year subscription to both the digital and print editions of the magazine. The majority of the students (68%) chose the digital version for $59.00.⁶⁵ Who wants to pay $66 more for physical copies of magazines when you can just read it digitally for half the price anyway?

However, when another $125.00 option to buy a one-year subscription for just the printed editions of the magazine was inserted in the middle of the above two options, it changed everything. Technically, this shouldn’t do anything right? Why would anyone get a $125 subscription for printed editions of the magazine when they could get printed and digital editions for the same price at $125? And we already determined above that very few people wanted both editions for $125 anyway. How could adding an even less desirable option change user behavior?

But surprisingly, when showing these three options to new groups of MIT students, zero people chose the new print version only option as we might have expected (they are smart MIT students after all), but a overwhelming majority of the students (84%) suddenly wanted to order the digital and print subscriptions for $125, and only 16% of the students wanted the digital-only copy for $59.

If you were the Economist magazine, this means adding the useless option that no one wants will suddenly increase your total revenues by 44.6%! How does that make any sense? The secret lies in the fact that people do not take actions that are necessarily the most economical, but actions that make them feel the smartest.

I have personally seen rich women who spend dozens of hours clipping coupons so they could reduce a $20 item to $0.60. Do they need the extra savings? No. Is it the most economical use of their time? Probably not. But they do it because it makes them feel smart. They get to buy a $20 item with a dollar bill, and they even get change back! Similarly, in the case of the magazine, when a person sees that it takes $125 to get the print versions alone, but also $125 to get the print version and the digital version, it now feels like the digital version was obtained for FREE! By putting out a bait reference price, people now feel smarter getting the one that seemed like a no-brainer good deal. Sometimes feeling smart comes at a luxurious cost.

Limitations of eBay’s Design

Because of the Glowing Choices, Personalized Recommendations, Peer Reviews, and Desert Oasis design elements mentioned above, Amazon users never feel confused about what to do next. You move quickly towards the Win-State, and especially if you made the “feel-smart” decision of purchasing Amazon Prime, your item will ship to your home within two days, with easy return and refund options.

eBay on the other hand, does not enjoy the same luxuries of making users feel smart. To start, eBay’s interface is a bit more like Google+, where the user doesn’t really know where to find what they want. With a variety of horizontal and vertical menus on the same screen, along with multiple dropdown menus, it’s easy for a user to spend over four seconds before figuring out where they want to go.

Also, because of eBay’s DNA of being a bidding marketplace, it does not have as much control over the experience of the users. When a user finally buys a product, eBay cannot guarantee the item will arrive within two days. In fact, eBay is at the mercy of the amateur sellers, who may not even ship the product out in a week. Even when the seller has shipped the item, they sometimes don’t record it as shipped, let alone include a tracking number. During this time of waiting, the buyer has no idea whether the product was shipped or not, and when it will arrive. This definitely does not induce feelings of competency.

Luckily, when that dream item finally arrives, joy is reinstalled, and that delayed gratification fuels the drive to buy again on eBay. Unfortunately, when the item doesn’t come in the form you dreamt it to be, therein lies the limitations of eBay. Especially as a used-item market, you may receive items that are in different conditions than described, damaged during shipment, or just plain out not what you paid for. And in the case of eBay, they can’t just give you a return-refund. The seller who shadily sold you the product in the first place has to.

Sure, you have the option to leave negative feedback on eBay’s reputation system, but for years there was a strange feedback standstill phenomenon which paralyzed further activity. When there has been a bad experience, both sides refuse to leave the first negative feedback in fear of negative feedback retaliation. Even though I had a bad experience buying at eBay, I didn’t want to give the seller a bad review because the seller could turn around and say I was a bad buyer, hurting my reputation. That stalemate is another bad feeling to go through, where the user feels unsettled and not feeling so smart about the purchasing decision (Note: this experience has been improved upon in recent years).

Sure, the user can take this bad experience up to eBay or even report fraud on Paypal (which is owned by eBay), but that process is grueling, with lots of waiting, frustration, and often poor communication. Letting users get stuck in bureaucracy (or be transferred back and forth on hold) is a sure way to make them feel helpless.

Imagine a game you play, where by working hard and reaching the Win-State, you have to wonder for a week when your reward will show up. When it does, it might actually show up as a penalty instead of a reward, and the only way to sort it out is to go through long steps of negotiation and bureaucracy. How often would you play this game? It becomes much easier to move on and never come back again. Perhaps this would make another great story in the users’ daily complaining rituals too.

Of course, though I firmly believe that both Amazon and eBay can drastically improve their metrics even more with better gamification and Human-Focused Design, both companies are incredibly and intimidatingly successful. With billions of dollars in revenue, each company powerfully wields different Core Drives that make them successful, engaging, and even addictive.

Wait, that’s not new!

Perhaps at this point, some people will say, “Making things easy for users and making them feel smart… that’s not profound at all! That’s what all Usability, User Interface, User Experience, and so-called User-Centered Design efforts already work on. How is Gamification or Human-Focused Design different?”

I believe the main difference between Human-Focused Design and the other fields mentioned is that they primarily focus on the “ease” of doing an activity instead of the motivation behind it. While usability focuses on making users complete their tasks more intuitively, assuming users already want to do that activity, Octalysis Gamification focuses on the motivation to do those tasks in the first place.

Even though most UX (User Experience) Experts also focus on the ease and flow of the experience, I have not seen many UX professionals try to improve motivation through a higher epic vision that users can believe in, nor withholding certain parts of the experience to create emotional scarcity. The focus is quite different.

In reality, Gamification is a combination of Game Design, Game Dynamics, Motivational Psychology, Behavioral Economics, UX/UI, Neurobiology, Technology Platforms, and Business Systems that drive an ROI. Interestingly, games have all of the above besides the last part: business systems that drive an ROI (or Return on Investment).

In order to make a great game, one needs to have great game dynamics, great UX/UI, have an understanding of Behavioral Economics through its virtual economy, motivational psychology and reward schedules, as well as the intricate relationships between hitting Win-States and dopamine firing. If any of these factors are off, the player simply abandons the game.

For this reason, when we study good gamification/game design, we will also inevitably bring up many concepts of creating behavior and great experiences in many other fields.

Game Techniques within Development & Accomplishment

You have learned more about the motivational and psychological nature of Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment. To make it more actionable, I’ve included some Game Techniques below that heavily utilize this Core Drive to engage users.

Progress Bars (Game Technique #4)

One of the simplest and best known examples of Development & Accomplishment is the LinkedIn Progress Bar. As the largest professional social network in the world, LinkedIn realized that its value is only as good as the information people choose to input into the system. But inputting one’s profile and job history on LinkedIn is tedious, and users quickly drop out early in the onboarding process.

LinkedIn realizes that simply making the interface easier for users to maneuver was not enough. They needed to make the interface more motivating. As a result LinkedIn introduced a little Progress Bar (Game Technique #4) on the side of user profiles to show people how complete theirs were. Our brains hate it when incomplete things are dangled in front of our faces. When we see a progress bar that is taunting us as only being 70% of a human being, it gives us that extra push to finish the Desired Actions and achieve the Win-State of completeness.

The amazing thing is, this progress bar didn’t take developers many hours to code, but improved LinkedIn’s profile completeness by 20%, an impressive change considering how they have spent millions of dollars on achieving this same goal⁶⁶.

Progress Bars are seen in many places nowadays, and are often used in the Onboarding experience. It is one of the simplest gamification design techniques out there. Of course, if designed incorrectly, it would also fail to create meaningful engagement. A parody example called Progress Wars by Jakob Skjerning shows a meaningless game where every time you click a button, a progress bar fills up, allowing users to level up⁶⁷. This is a great example of having game design techniques in a system without Core Drives powering them, leading to low engagement results.

The Rockstar Effect (Game Technique #92)

The Rockstar Effect is a gamification design technique where you make users feel like everyone is dying to interact with them. In essence, if you make people feel like they have earned their way in becoming a Rockstar, they will feel so much pride in it that they will continue to perform the Desired Actions of building up an even greater fanbase and sharing with others.

Twitter is a great example of utilizing the Rockstar Effect. Most people remember Twitter’s innovation being the limitation of only 140 characters within a message (which is an interesting balance between Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience combined with Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback), but few people remember that another one of Twitter’s key innovations was the one-way follow.

Back in the day, social connections were mutual – either both sides agree to be friends, or no relationship existed. When Twitter was launched in 2006, it came with this new one-way follow system, allowing users to follow the message updates of people who are interesting, without these people following the users back. Because of the one-way nature of the relationship, many people saw getting many followers as a true achievement – meaning that everyone wanted to listen to your valuable opinions, even though you didn’t give a rat’s pancreas about their opinions.

People tried as hard as they could to “earn” followers – tweeting out witty comments, sharing valuable links, and retweeting others to gain attention. Some even pressured their non-tech friends to follow them just so they could look better on Twitter. This became a game for many, where the goal was to reach the highest amount of followers and retweets.

Then, at one point, influential people started to compete with each other to see who had more followers. At the beginning, the implicit comparing came between influencers in the tech world, such as Guy Kawasaki or Robert Scoble. This is a typical condition that many new tech companies go through - where bloggers and people in Silicon Valley love the platforms, but the mainstream population isn’t yet aware of their existence.

However, because of the “Accomplishment” nature that is baked into Twitter’s DNA, Twitter finally caught massive mainstream attention when celebrities like Ashton Kutcher joined the mix of “follower competitions” against other celebrities, and most notably, the official CNN Breaking News Twitter Channel.

In 2009, Ashton Kutcher, publicly challenged CNN Breaking News to see who could first reach 1 million Followers.⁶⁸ Both sides, not wanting to lose the competition, started promoting Twitter and their own Twitter profiles on all their media outlets, hoping to be the first to hit that “golden million.” Ashton Kutcher’s fans, who loved his movies but had no idea what Twitter was, also started to write blog posts and make Youtube videos telling everyone else to follow him.

Towards the end, Ashton Kutcher did achieve his victory of reaching 1 million Followers on Twitter before CNN Breaking News. Again, because he considers this to be a true accomplishment, he brags with joy and pride with nine exclamation marks.

CNN Breaking News, on the other hand, behaves in a sportsmanlike manner, as a big company should. In the above screenshot, you can see that by the time Ashton Kutcher won, CNN Breaking News had 999,652 followers, mere hundreds away from winning. Instead of bitterly saying, “So close! We were only off by a few hundred,” they gracefully announced to the world “Ashton Kutcher is first to reach 1 million followers in Twitter contest with CNN” with a “Congrats” on the tweet below.

This contest has turned out very positive for the brand names of both CNN and Ashton Kutcher, but the biggest beneficiary is Twitter, whom received millions of dollars worth of free press with an audience that was unfamiliar with their platform.

Achievement Symbols (Game Technique #2)

As discussed in Chapter 2, points and badges can ruin good gamification design as often so-called “gamification experts” slap them onto everything they see. However, they are useful tools to drive Development & Accomplishment and have their place in a gamified system.

Badges are what I call “Achievement Symbols” and can come in many forms – badges, stars, belts, hats, uniforms, trophies, medals, etc.. The important thing about Achievement Symbols, is that they must symbolize “achievement.” If you go on a website and click a button, and then suddenly a popup springs out and says, “CONGRATULATIONS!!! You just earned your ‘Clicked On My First Button Badge’! Click here to see other cool badges you can earn!” Are you going to be excited?

Probably not.

You may even think, “Well this is pretty lame…what else is there? A ‘Scrolling Down Badge’? A ‘Click on the About Us Page Badge’?” You’re almost insulted.

But if through your creative skills you solved a unique problem that not everyone could solve, and as a result received a badge to symbolize that achievement, you feel proud and accomplished. Now the motivation is valid.

Achievement Symbols merely reflect achievement, but are not achievements by themselves. A similar example evolved from where badges came from – the military. If you join the military, and immediately get a badge on your chest, “Joined the Military Badge!” And on the next day, another badge gets pinned on your chest that says, “Survived My First Day Badge!” followed by “Made my First Friend Badge!” and “Made Five Friends Badge!” You probably won’t feel accomplished and wear all these badges to your social gatherings. You are more likely to feel nonplused or even insulted. But if you performed acts of valor – you risked your life to save a fellow soldier, and as a result received a Medal of Honor on your chest, you are likely to truly feel proud and accomplished.

Keep in mind some of those “insulting badges” do work great for children, because as small children, these are actual feats and accomplishments. More often than not, making your first friend is not something you have a parade about when you are a grown person.

Therefore, when I work with clients on gamification, I never ask them, “Do you have badges?” I ask, “Do you make your users feel accomplished?” Having badges (or any game element in itself) does not mean users are motivated towards the Win-State. That’s why we focus on the 8 Core Drives instead of game elements.

Status Points (Game Technique #1)

There are two types of points in a motivation system: Status Points, and Exchangeable Points. Status Points are for keeping score of progress. Internally, it allows the system to know how close players are towards the win-state. Externally, it gives players a feedback system for tracking their progress. As a great candidate for “Feedback Mechanics” in the Octalysis Strategy Dashboard (discussed in more detail in Chapter 17), showing people their score and how it changes based on small improvements often motivates them towards the right direction.

Within Status Points, there are also smaller divisions of types. For example, Absolute Status Points (which measures the total amount of points earned during a journey) versus Marginal Status Points (which are points that are specifically set for a given challenge or one time period, and can be reset once that challenge or time period is over). Another example is that of the One-Way Status Points (points that can only go up) verses Two-Way Status Points (it can also go down as the user fails to achieve the Win-State).

How you craft the gain and loss of points, as well as meaning behind the points can significantly change the users’ perception of your product. Done incorrectly, it can cause the user to devalue the entire experience and distrust your intentions as a systems designer.

A year prior to my advisory role as Behavioral Scientist to the Israel-based company Captain Up⁶⁹, I was looking for a good PBL platform to use for my own blog yukaichou.com.

I found Captain Up’s gamification platform to be the most customizable and easiest to use out of my options during the time.

When I was designing my Points and Badges system using the Captain Up platform, the first thing I did was to change almost everything in the default settings. The default settings at the time rewarded a few points for watching a video and commenting on my blog posts, and a lot more for tweeting and sharing the post on Facebook. This design is generally sound, especially since I indeed get more value when my readers are sharing my content to others. However, I felt the default points/rewards economy was not optimized.

The first thing I changed, was to make commenting on my blog worth 100 points, and watching a video worth 40 points. Facebook Liking and Tweeting were only worth 25 and 10 points. After I made the changes on the platform, the supportive team members from Captain Up reached out to me to make sure I felt comfortable with their platform. They also asked, “Isn’t 100 points way too much for just commenting?”

That’s a very good question.

During the Discovery and Onboarding Phases of a Player’s Journey (the initial two phases) the first thing you want to communicate to users is whether this is “a game worth playing?” With the rules you set, you are establishing an interaction with the user and communicating your values.

If you give people a bunch of points just to do marketing for you, or reward them with virtual items for every little stupid thing, users will feel like the game is shallow – this is not a game worth playing. Users have no interest in a game if they know the game designer is just trying to benefit themselves instead of caring about their community. For instance, if there are points, progress bars, and badges for “How much money you donated to the site owner,” people will feel insulted by your lame attempt to use them for solely personal gains.

People know that sharing on Twitter/Facebook mostly benefits me, and so I don’t want to tell them that my game is about sharing. When I state that commenting on my site is worth more than anything else, I’m expressing that I value interacting with you more than anything else. I want to communicate with you, and that is what I value. And if you don’t want to talk to me, at least watch my videos so you can learn something! And of course, if you are willing to share my content with your friends and family, I would be very grateful too, but I’m not going to use that as a big carrot in my site.

This tells users that the key of this game is “engagement.” I want you to be engaged, learn a lot, and participate in a community. This becomes a game worth playing.

When you design your Status Point systems, make sure it is based on something meaningful - something that the users themselves want to engage in. Or else, points just become meaningless counters meant to stress people out.

Leaderboards (Game Technique #3)

Leaderboards is a game element where you rank users based on a set of criteria that is influenced by the users’ behaviors towards the Desired Actions. Even though Leaderboards are meant to motivate people and bring in status, if designed incorrectly, it often does the exact opposite.

If you use a site for a few hours and received 25 points, and then see on the Top 20 list that number 20 already has 25,000,000 points, that would likely discourage you from trying further.

This was an issue that Foursquare, a geolocation mobile app that gamified the check-in process, had many years ago. Often, a new user would check into a new coffee shop, and then realize that the “Mayor” there has already achieved 250 check-ins and increasing their total every day. “Fighting for the Mayorship” is probably not something the user would be interested in, because he knows the odds of developing progress and feeling accomplished are very low.

What users need is Urgent Optimism, another term coined by Jane McGonigal⁷⁰, where the user feels optimistic that they can accomplish the task, but also the urgency to act immediately. When you set-up a leaderboard, there are a couple variations that have shown to perform more effectively.

First, you always want to position the user in the middle of the leaderboard display, so all they see is the player ranked right above them, and the player ranked just below. It’s not very motivating in seeing how high the Top 10 players are, but it’s incredibly motivating when one sees someone who used to be below them suddenly excelling.

Another variation that has proved successful is to set up Group Leaderboards where the ranking is based on the combined efforts of a team. In this case, even though not everyone is competitive and needs to be at the top, most people don’t want to be the laggard that drags the team down. As a result, everyone works harder because of Social Influence & Relatedness (Core Drive 5).

The next variation is to set up constantly refreshing leaderboards, where every week the data would refresh and the leaderboard will start tracking progress anew; hence no one falls too far behind and always has a renewed sense of hope, leading towards that Urgent Optimism. Finally, it’s a good idea to implement micro-leaderboards, where only the users’ friends or very similar people are compared. Instead of seeing yourself ranked 95,253 out of 1 million users, you see how you are top five among twenty-two friends.

The key way to effectively integrate a leaderboard is to ensure that the user can quickly recognize the action items that drives them to reach the win-state. If there’s no chance of achievement, there is no action.

Core Drive 2: The Bigger Picture

Since Development & Accomplishment is the easiest Core Drive to design for, many companies focus on this Core Drive- sometimes almost exclusively. Consequently, many of the Gamification Platforms out there are specialized in appealing to this Core Drive too. However, if you do plan to implement these game elements into your product, make sure you do this carefully and elegantly. Always focus on how you want your users to feel, not what game elements you want to use.

Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment is often a natural result after good implementation of other Core Drives, such as Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession, as well as Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience. Often, it also leads to Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, where the user wants to share with their friends that sense of achievement and accomplishment. We will be learning a lot more about these Core Drives in the next few chapters.

To get the most out of the book, Choose only ONE of the below options to do right now:

Easy: Think of an example where Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment motivated you or others to take certain actions. Did it keep people engaged for longer?

Medium: Think of the last time you saw a points or achievement symbol system. Were the points or achievement symbols representing something meaningful? Or were they pointless? What would you change to make them represent a sense of true progress and accomplishment?

Hard: For your own project, create a Status Points and Achievement Symbol economy via spreadsheets. Define what the Desired Actions are, assign point values to these actions based on how meaningful they are to the user, and assign Achievement Symbols based on more creative factors beyond just “Woot! You did the action a hundred times!”

Share what you come up with on Twitter or your preferred social network with the hashtag #OctalysisBook and see what ideas other people have.

Investigate the Experience

In this chapter, I talked about how I completely revamped the Captain Up system on my blog to create a “game worth playing.” Go to my blog at YukaiChou.com and experience the motivation design from the Captain Up widget on the right hand side. After playing with it, read up on the full blog about my design decisions at http://bit.ly/YukaiCup, or simply go on Google and search, “how yu-kai chou designed his blog.”

There are still many things I would like to change and add into the gamified experience if I only had more time. Please feel empowered to come up with ways it can be improved and share your findings with me.