Chapter 7: The Third Core Drive - Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” - Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations

The third Core Drive of Octalysis Gamification is Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, which really emphasizes on what most people refer to as “Play.” Some of my fondest memories growing up are of when I got to play with Legos and engage in assembling, dismantling, and rebuilding basic structures in a practically infinite number of combinations. It gave me and millions of others around the world great joy and fulfillment simply because it allowed one to be creative and see immediate results. I could admire the outcome of my ideas, while ensuring that I could recalibrate my efforts over and over again in bringing my imagination to life. I believe that humans are by nature creative beings, and we yearn to learn, imagine, invent, and partake in creative processes where the journey in and of itself brings happiness.

The beauty of this Core Drive lies in its perennial ability to continually engage us at all moments in our lives. Recalling the structure of Octalysis, with the top-down Core Drives being White/Black Hat, and left-right Core Drives being Extrinsic/Intrinsic, you will notice that Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback resides in the upper right “golden corner.” This implies that it is White Hat – meaning it has long-term positive emotions, as well as Right Brain – emphasizing Intrinsic Motivation. Unfortunately, this Core Drive is also possibly the hardest to implement correctly.

The Computer Game that Became a National Sport

In a large stadium, over 100,000 audience members sit earnestly in front of a stage. These players all paid a fine fee to be there and are excitedly waiting for their long time idols to compete with other pros in the league.

Two professional commentators are setting the scene, introducing the background and importance of this match in the overall context of the season, and what it would mean for each opposing player and their careers. They’re speculating on the odds for each player based on their strengths, weaknesses, style of play, and possible innovations that will be revealed during this pivotal match, all while popping in a few jokes here and there.

Simultaneously, over a million people are watching the stage on TV and all over the Internet, with the logos of some of the biggest sponsors in the world prominently displayed.

This is a typical setting for any professional athletic sport. The only difference is, on the stage, below a few enormous screens, there are only two computer “workstations,” each surrounded by soundproof glass. Seated in front of the workstations, two “star competitors,” both around twenty years old, exercise their pre-match rituals before the crucial game.

This is a championship match within the “eSports” industry, a newly emerging field where people around the world watch full-time professional gamers compete against each other.⁷¹

This is an industry that was pioneered by Blizzard Entertainment’s big-hit game: Starcraft. Starcraft is a real-time strategy (RTS) game launched in 1998⁷². Upon beginning an RTS game, players usually start off with a few workers that can mine resources. The resources can then be used to create more workers, erect buildings that have different functions, recruit combat units, research science and technology, and/or unlock certain powers, all for the purpose of defending against and defeating other players who are also building their dominions.

Users are constantly making quick decisions based on a scarcity of time and resources. Should they recruit more combat units and march into enemy territory, or invest in slow developing but dominant technologies at the risk of being run down by enemies who alternatively chose to train combat units in the meantime?

Each match in Starcraft (and for most RTS games) lasts around ten minutes to an hour, with each player starting from scratch with every round. This means nothing is accumulated from previous game efforts except for the players’ skills.

Moreover, the “real-time” part of RTS games means that the faster you can make sound decisions and execute on them, the stronger player you can become. Good Starcraft players have the concept of APM – Actions Per Minute. This indicates the number of actions a player can execute every minute. Actions could be anything from ordering a soldier to guard a certain post, or selecting a building to initiate new scientific research.

For new Starcraft players, it is common to only have 10-20 APM, as it normally takes a few seconds to determine what is possible and decide on what to do. For more experienced hobbyists, this rate could rise to 50-60 APM, which is about one action every second. The mind-blowing thing about Starcraft (or most eSport games) is that the top professional players often have shocking APM numbers between 300-400! This means that every second, they are literally executing five to six actions throughout the game.

This is very important in an RTS game, for if every action you execute your opponent can execute two, you are bound to be outmaneuvered and “pwned,” given that both players have similar judgments and strategies. In the documentary “The Hax Life,” when asked how he trains to become better, a top Starcraft player answered that he would put heavy sandbags on his wrists when he practices so that in a real game, his uninhibited hands and fingers would move much faster⁷³.

In fact, Starcraft has become so popular in South Korea that for over a decade now, there have been dedicated TV Channels that broadcast Starcraft matches between professional players. The very best Starcraft players can make over $300,000 a year, especially with all the sponsorships from major brands. I know to all my rich readers this isn’t much, but for a country like South Korea this is considered quite an achievement, especially for someone under 25 years old. Not only are the professional Starcraft players becoming famous, the top professional Starcraft commentators are also becoming quite well known.

Starcraft has also been wildly popular in the US. The University of California, Berkeley pioneered one of the first courses on Starcraft and its strategy, while many students at other academic institutions have incorporated the economic dynamics and decision strategies within Starcraft as key themes in their research papers and theses⁷⁴.

In 2009, 10 years after Starcraft was first released, students from Princeton University established the Collegiate Starleague, a seasonal intercollegiate league for competition between the member institutions. Over 100 North American universities and colleges participate, including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, MIT, and many more⁷⁵.

When Starcraft II was launched in 2010, the frenzy on Starcraft I had not diminished, with many players insisting that Starcraft I was still better. Of course, over a few years, most professional players transferred from Starcraft I to Starcraft II.

This actually is a great demonstration of how great Endgame design and the use of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback can remove so-called “gamification fatigue.”

Gamification Fatigue?

Every once in a while, attendees at my speaking engagements or workshops would ask, “Yu-kai, I want to add gamification to my company, but aren’t most games short-lived? Wouldn’t we be shooting ourselves in the foot if we implemented gamification?”

It’s true, many fun games are played for two to eight months, but afterwards players move on to new games. However, it doesn’t mean that gamifying your system would automatically result in the same situation due to two important reasons.

First, remember I mentioned earlier that there is generally no real purpose for playing a game; that is, most people never have to play a game. The instant a game is not fun, people will leave and play other games or go on Youtube/Facebook/email. As a result, after two to eight months, the game will often fail to engage people so they drop out. Hopefully the system that you are designing actually has a purpose to it, and so even if it becomes boring (which is probably the current state anyway), your users still have a reason to stay on.

The second reason is because most of these games have not been designed for continued motivation in the “Endgame”, the fourth and final phase of a player’s journey. If the experience is no longer engaging in the endgame, you simply move on to other games.

Many well-designed games, like Starcraft, have managed to engage the interest of players for more than a decade. Other games like Poker, Golf, Chess, Mahjong, have all stood the test of time and are still popular after centuries of use. Now there are many ways to design an engaging Endgame, but the reason why so many of these games stand the test of time is largely due to their utilization of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback.

In a study published by Queen Mary University of London and University College London in 2013, researched compared the effects of different games on the brain. After six to eight weeks, the study revealed that students who played Starcraft roughly an hour a day improved their memory, visual search and informational filtering abilities, as well as other cognitive skills (Trivia: I happen to be quoted in the Wall Street Journal article on this study).⁷⁶

When a user can continuously tap into their creativity and derive an almost limitless number of possibilities, the game designer no longer needs to constantly create new content to make things engaging. The user’s mind becomes the evergreen content that continuously absorbs their attention into the experience. That’s the power of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback in retaining users for the long haul.

Tic-Tac-Draw

Almost every culture has the game Tic-Tac-Toe, with some calling it by another name, such as Xs and Os⁷⁷. Many of us enjoyed the game when we were younger because it was easy to initiate with just a pen and a piece of paper (or a stick with sand), and can be finished within half a minute.

However, as we grew older, the game became less interesting⁷⁸. Why? Because at some point it became too easy. Most games end up in draws, and the only thrill is trying to see if you can trick a new opponent into making a careless move due to reckless/hasty actions (which is Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity). With just a little bit of learned strategy, it became boring⁷⁹.

Because there is a limit on the Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback, Tic-Tac-Toe became a lot less engaging for users.

On the other hand, chess is a game that has been studied and played rigorously for centuries. Today there are still thrilling matches between some of the strongest players in the world that are exciting to watch.

When I was a freshman in high school, having recently moved to the United States, I realized my English skills were quite poor. (In fact, in the 11th grade I met a friend who hadn’t seen me for 2 years that openly exclaimed, “Wow, you speak English now! That’s crazy!”). Making up for my lack of communication skills, I often played chess with my American peers, as it was quite similar to the Chinese Chess I played in Taiwan. With a few friends and the sponsoring teacher, Mr. Richard Gill, we formed the Blue Valley High School Chess Club.

During this time, I was quite shy and could not imagine myself ever speaking in public. (In fact, for a long time, just seeing someone else speak on stage made my palms sweat.) My reputation in my high school, (besides being one of the few Asians there) was that I was “nice.” Most people who study persuasive psychology will agree that having a reputation of “nice” was not very motivating in most scenarios. Descriptions such as “sincere,” “passionate,” or “radiant” would be personalities that are similar but much more engaging for people.

Though I had yet to build up my confidence as an individual, by my 10th grade I was elected to be the Chess Club President. My speech to garner votes was literally, “My last name is the shortest to write down. Vote for me!” After unexpectedly winning the election (I guess people liked the humor), I suddenly felt a sense of responsibility – Epic Meaning & Calling! It was no longer just about me but about the greater good of the organization! At this point I committed to become a stronger chess player, so that I would be able to lead and coach our team to greater victory. For over two years, I absorbed myself in the openings, strategies, and variations of chess for four hours a day, trying to expand my understanding of positional play and establishing my style as a player.

In chess, there are a substantial number of opening variations, with possible lines of play exponentially expanding into far more variations than the total number of atoms in the observable universe (just after 4 moves each, there are over 288 billion possible positions).

In 1996, then World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov competed against IBM’s specialized chess supercomputer Deep Blue. Deep Blue at the time could calculate 100 million positions per second. Both Deep Blue and Kasparov had approximately three hours each to think, with Deep Blue also calculating during Kasparov’s moves. If you multiply 100 million positions a second for three hours, that’s a whole lot of chess positions.

When the competition commenced, Kasparov lost the initial game, which seemed to surprise him. Subsequently, he comfortably won three games while tying two to win the match.⁸⁰

In 1997, a rematch was called. IBM had a full team whose only role was to improve Deep Blue’s chess playing skills. By then Deep Blue could examine 200 million positions a second, doubling the prior year’s capabilities. This match ended with Kasparov winning one game, drawing two, and losing two, resulting in his defeat.⁸¹

The second match stunned the chess world - for the first time ever a powerful computer could defeat the leading human in a game of chess. To me, this was rather odd. Intuitively-speaking, of course a computer could beat a strong human player. Isn’t chess all about memorization and calculations? Computers could obviously “remember” and calculate substantially faster than humans with much better precision.

This was like being shocked that a motorized vehicle was starting to travel faster than a human runner, or that a human lost to a calculator in a multiplication contest. I thought that, instead of being amazed that computers were finally beating humans at chess, people should be amazed that humans stood a chance at all! How could a computer that is processing billions of positions and outcomes not see the loss coming and prevent it?

The reason why computers can’t simply dominate human players, even today, is because chess is more than just calculations and memorization. Chess requires creativity, intuition, and understanding. Chess is so complex that the most powerful computers still can’t completely figure out the game against human creativity and intuition.

Chess computers can calculate, but they cannot understand. Even though chess computers can figure out what a position can look like exactly fifteen moves later, unless there are obvious hints such as a checkmate or a significant loss in pieces, the computer does not know whether that position is “good” or “bad.” A human, on the other hand, cannot tell exactly what the position will be like fifteen moves later but they have the intuitive understanding that, “My knight would be established on a very strong spot. What it will do, I’m not completely sure yet, but I know it will benefit me one way or another.” It is this type of understanding and analysis that allows human players to triumph over strong computers from time to time.

Earlier when I mentioned that there are far more possible chess moves than atoms in the universe, the rightful skeptic may think that I’m just pulling numbers out of my spleen for exaggeration’s sake. However, if you actually look into the numbers, a game of chess that is 40 moves long would have 10¹²⁰ possible variations, which ends up being 10⁴⁰ times the number of atoms in the known Universe. ⁸²

The reason I bring up these facts is to elicit the point that: because there are so many possible variations in chess, there is an abundance of strategies and styles of play. This variability is essential for creating a great gamified campaign utilizing Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. Some chess players are fanatically aggressive, some are defensively positional; some like to slowly squeeze their opponents to death, while others strive for a winning endgame. You can almost tell who is playing the game based on the types of moves they make.

At UCLA, I once wrote a paper on how the style of each World Chess Champion reflects the historical events of their time. José Capablanca, the third World Chess Champion, lived during a golden period of peace in Cuba, and as a result played chess in a harmonious and elegant way, collecting little advantages that would eventually lead to a win. The next World Champion Alexander Alekhine lived during times of revolution in Russia, often escaping persecution and facing death. As a result, his style is known to be vigorously aggressive, ramming down the enemy king’s protective forts with sacrifices. Mikhail Botvinnik, another world champion lived during the time of the Soviet Union’s “Iron and Engineering” prowess. As a result his style was aggressively positional, similar to assembling a tank and then trampling the enemy territory with irresistible force.

The great thing is, to be at the top of the chess world, you don’t need to play in one, specific “best” way. You can create your own style of play through meaningful choices that reflect your personality and style. As long as you invest the rigorous work, maintain the commitment, and have passion for the game, you will have a chance of becoming a great chess player.

This capacity to allow players to express their unbounded creativity, see immediate feedback, and offer them meaningful choices to demonstrate different styles of play is what makes Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback so appealing to gamers, users, customers, and employees alike. When you design a great gamified system, you want to make sure that there isn’t one standard way to win. Instead, provide users with enough meaningful choices that they can utilize drastically different ways to better express their creativity, while still achieving the Win-State.

As for my chess club, by the time I finished 11th grade, the Blue Valley High School had became the Kansas State Champion of Kansas for our division and successfully defended the position for five straight years. Beyond this, the club also finished strong in national tournaments. This experience also taught me how to be a leader and built my confidence when I had very little. I can’t thank chess and the BVHS Chess Club enough for where I am today.

The General’s Carrot in Education

When you design for Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, it is important to create a setup where the user is given a goal, as well as a variety of tools and methodologies to strategize towards reaching that goal. Often your users are not motivated because they don’t understand the purpose of the activity, do not clearly identify the goal of the activity, and/or lack meaningful tools to create expressive strategies to reach the goal.

In the past few decades, physical battle card games such as Pokemon or Magic: the Gathering have become a new phenomenon, gaining significant traction in many countries⁸³. Similar to chess or Starcraft, there are many dedicated tournaments where players young and old, duke it out to become the champions at the games.

What’s interesting about this phenomenon is that there is actually a great deal of information to memorize in order to play the game well. There are hundreds of cards, each having its own unique stats and numbers (such as hp, attack, etc.). Children who are good at these card games not only remember all the cards and stats, they even remember which cards counter which, and which other cards counter those in return.

If you run the numbers, that is actually more information to memorize than the contents on the periodic table. It’s as though the child not only memorized every single element on the periodic table, but also the exact weight and placement of each element, as well as exactly how every element interacts with every other element.

That’s pretty mind-blowing.

But if you ask the same brilliant child what’s the fifth element on the periodic table, you will likely get a response along with the lines of, “Umm…Oxygen?” Why is that? Clearly the child did not suddenly transform from a genius into an idiot. This gaping difference is not a transition in intelligence but simply a change in motivation.

When the child is memorizing the periodic table, they do not see the purpose of doing so. It is only to pass a test, get a good grade, and please their parents. As a result, the child studies hard enough to pass the test, and forgets most of the subject matter thereafter. But in these card games, the child is learning the information in order to come up with awesome strategies, beat their friends, and feel accomplished. Also, since they personally own many of these cards, they are anxious to study them, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and research what other cards are out there (an effect within Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession).

If the means to that end is to memorize thousands and thousands of terms and stats, it becomes worth it, even fun. As designers, it is important to recognize that they understand the goal (beating their friends), build ownership and familiarity with their tools, and use their unique strategies and experience towards that.

Folding into the Crowd

One of the best examples of Empowerment & Creativity & Feedback is seen in the new trend of Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the activity of throwing a challenge or activity into the public and having the masses collaborate or competitively solve the problem.

Well known examples such as the XPRIZE allows individuals and teams to engineer new solutions in advanced technology such as aerodynamics and space travel to advance the human race; while Kaggle allows the brightest mathematical minds to solve predictive modeling and analytics problems⁸⁴.

A very popular example in the serious game space has been FoldIt introduced in Chapter 4. For many years, scientists have tried to decipher the crystal structure of an AIDS virus labelled as the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV), in order to advance their understanding of AIDS treatment and prevention. Unfortunately, after fifteen years of research, this problem remained unresolved⁸⁵.

Fortunately, in 2008, David Baker from the University of Washington launched the FoldIt project, where through an interactive game-play interface, players could modify various protein structures with objectives such as “maximizing the surface area of this protein.”

Surprisingly, this problem, which had baffled researchers for over fifteen years, was solved in a mere ten days. By tapping the efforts of thousands of “players” around the world, a creative solution was revealed through their vigorous play.

To this day, Foldit continues to help biochemical researchers find cures to major diseases that plague humans, including HIV/AIDS, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

If you are able to utilize this sort of intrinsic motivation where people can leverage their creativity and receive quick feedback with either a product or within the workplace (especially if it is tied to Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling as in the case of FoldIt), you will likely unlock long-term user engagement and high productivity.

The Elysian Stairs to Health

You often hear that it is better to take the stairs instead of the escalator. However, in practice it is convenient to forget this bit of good advice and take the escalator anyway. To combat this, Volkswagen’s viral campaign “The Fun Theory” (a database of videos that is now the staple of many gamification workshops) piloted a campaign called the Piano Staircase in Sweden.

For the Piano Staircase, engineers integrated movement-tracking hardware to detect activity on the staircase, which subsequently plays a piano note whenever a specific step is triggered. The staircase is also decorated as piano patterns to show which note is being played and to elicit the commuters’ curiosity (Discovery Phase design is very important).

As people walked up and down the stairs, they started to hear notes playing. Soon, many commuters who heard others go up the stairs started taking the stairs too themselves to see if it would work for them. Eventually, some individuals attempted to play some simple tunes.

When you empower people by allowing them to easily play an instrument, you make the simple activity of walking more fun and engaging. During the pilot, the piano staircase led to an increase in commuters taking the stairs by 66%.⁸⁶

From an Endgame design point of view, the staircase does have its limitations. The actual tunes people can play is fairly limited since jumping up and down staircases in producing a pleasing rhythm is rather challenging. Pedestrians could quickly lose interest after stepping through the same notes over and over. Once the initial surprise and novelty wears off, the repetitive tones may become boring. However, many people may still prefer this over a regular staircase, just to get some delightful feedback on each step.

This is an example of a Core Drive 3 implementation that focused well on the feedback it gave users, but it didn’t provide them full control to express wider ranges of their creativity.

Empowerment and Creativity in the Corporate Space

Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback also applies to the workplace and employee motivation.

Occasionally, my friends with corporate positions reach out to me about making the switch towards a career in entrepreneurship. More often than not, the reason they want to start their own companies is simply due to the frustration of not seeing feedback on their creative ideas in the corporate environment. Frequently, months will pass after they have proposed a plan or concept before there is any response or feedback through the corporation’s bureaucratic channels. More often than not, the employee never hears back on that creative idea.

In a bureaucratic organization, though everyone likes to talk about innovation, innovation requires risk, and the corporate ladder trains people to be risk averse. If anything new is happening, it is only after authorization through many signatures - to the point where no one could claim full responsibility if things went wrong. Managers often push everyone to come up with innovative ideas, but when they actually hear something new, they immediately respond with, “Hmm, has any other company done that before?”

This is incredibly frustrating for those who have creative ideas which may positively impact the status quo, especially when their ideas are immediately shot down or the approval process is dragged out indefinitely. It is a sad scenario - as companies grow larger and more bureaucratic, they become less agile, less adaptive to changing business conditions. As a result, younger and more nimble companies adapt to changing business models more swiftly than their cumbersome counterparts and quickly take advantage of new opportunities. All too often many great companies from the past century eventually fall into extinction.

In the Motivational Psychology Bestseller Drive, Daniel Pink explains that allowing employees to have full autonomy over what they work on, how they work, who they work with, and when they work often becomes greater motivators than giving them a raise.⁸⁷ Convincingly, researchers from Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which empowered employees to work through autonomy, while the other half had a top-down management structure. For the group of companies which gave their employees more control in using their own creative processes to perform their work, business growth was four times the rate of the other group, with only one third of the turnover rate.⁸⁸

An example of a company who attempted to embed Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback into their workplace was Google. They implemented a program called 20% Time – where one day in the week, employees can work on any project they would like, as long as the Intellectual Property belonged to Google.

Many employees who wanted to become an entrepreneur mostly did so because they had great ideas and wanted to see it become reality. But most of them still don’t enjoy the risk and the hassle of starting a company. With 20% Time, employees no longer felt a need to start their own companies because they could simply build their ideas in the safe and comfortable haven of Google.

As a result, some of the most successful product lines such as Gmail were spawned from an emphasis on this Core Drive of Creativity. Unfortunately, 20% Time was shut down as Google became larger and wanted to “put more wood behind fewer arrows.”⁸⁹

Draw a Gun for Bad Endgame Design

While we talked about how Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback can often create Endgame Evergreen Content, if it is not thoughtfully designed for the Endgame, it may still fail in the long run.

For example, Draw Something (essentially Pictionary, where one side draws something with a pen and the other side guesses) was an extremely popular and fun mobile game for a short while in 2012. They amassed 35 million downloads within seven weeks of launch, and later that year was sold to Zynga for close to $200M.⁹⁰

The game was fun because it allowed people to utilize their creativity in determining how to best draw a picture of the challenge word, so that the other person can understand and guess the correct answer. The game even monetized by having people unlock certain colors and drawing tools, so that they would have a richer variety of ways to express their creativity in helping the other person guess better (this is what I call a booster, which we will cover later in this chapter).

Furthermore, Draw Something brought in an addictive Social Influence & Relatedness element (Core Drive #5) that made people curious to see if their friends could guess the meaning of their drawings (which adds Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity). All these elements contributed to the huge success of Draw Something during its time.

⁹¹

The Downfall of Draw Something

Despite tapping into these Core Drives, once Zynga purchased the exciting game, the numbers started to decline. Many users started to drop out as the game failed to provide fresh content and challenges that would give people a sense of continued improvement and novel conditions for further mastery.

Perhaps the Draw Something makers OMGPOP were too busy integrating with Zynga’s team to add more words to the pool, for the same word challenges started to repeat again and again. The element of creativity became null as people drew the same picture over and over.

Here we see something that is not considered Evergreen Content – even though there are many ways to draw something. If the company does not add more word challenges for its players, the creativity aspect diminishes and the game becomes dull.

Another issue is, when you are juggling too many ongoing games at once (as the design makes it natural for you to play a new game after each match, as well as invite more friends to play new games), it may start to feel like a big burden to answer all of them instead of feeling excited about the actual gameplay. As we know, play should be voluntary, and once you feel like you are not in control of your gameplay, you fall into Black Hat motivation, leading to a long-term fallout of a player’s engagement.

Finally, the game also lost its appeal because many users simply bypassed the creative elements and began to “game” the system by drawing the actual letters of the answer instead of a picture. As a result, many of the people who had really high scores were the ones who were cheating. People will exert their creativity in a multitude of ways, including coming up with ways to cheat a system.

In my client workshops, I often explore how having a system that is “gameable” is not necessarily bad and may even help their company if it is designed properly. However, if done incorrectly, it could seriously devalue the gameplay and clearly demoralize the experiences of those seeking to legitimately participate.

If you block users from expressing their creativity in ways that are beneficial for the ecosystem, they will ultimately use their creativity to find loopholes and gain the upper hand by playing “behind your back.”

Game Techniques within Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback

You have learned more about the motivational and psychological nature of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. To make it more actionable, I’ve included some Game Techniques below that heavily utilize this Core Drive to engage users.

Boosters (Game Technique #31)

Have you ever played the game Super Mario and felt blissfully excited when you picked up a mushroom or flower that made you stronger? These are considered Boosters in a game, where a player obtains something to help them achieve the win-state effectively.

Different from simply leveling up or acquiring new skills, Boosters are usually limited to certain conditions. You can enjoy the brick-breaking and fire-throwing as long as you stay out of harms way. Once you get hit by an enemy, you return back to your “natural state” prior to the boosters.

Boosters such as obtaining a “jumping star” in Super Mario are limited by time, and temporarily give users the power of invincibility. For the next dozen seconds (I actually went on Youtube and counted the seconds just to write this), a player would rush as quickly as he can (sometimes falling into pits) as he enjoys the adrenaline rush of using his evanescent power (with a touch of Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience).

That feeling of being empowered with new, but limited power-ups is exhilarating and is an extremely strong motivator towards the desired action. Very few people are willing to stop the game while the Star Invincibility effect is still active.

In games like Candy Crush, Boosters are also very powerful mechanics, especially for its monetization. A player can earn (or buy) a limited number of boosters that will help overcome some of the most difficult challenges at a specific stage; such as getting a Bubblegum Troll to defeat the menacing chocolates, or a Disco Ball-like Color Bomb to remove all candies of a certain color. Without different boosters and power-ups, the game would not be nearly as engaging as it is today.

Example of Boosters within Superbook.tv

One of my clients, Superbook.tv, runs an incredibly high-quality Computer Graphics (CG) animation series with millions of fans, both online and via international TV. Superbook.tv is part of the non-profit Christian Broadcast Network, and its goal is to teach children about stories in the Bible through vibrant graphics, modern relatedness (Core Drive 5), and quirky humor. It even has a funny red robot named Gizmo that says goofy things while performing mind-blowing tricks - such as having a robot pet parrot fly out of its chest when it was pretending to be a robot pirate.

On top of the high-quality movies, SuperBook.tv also has a website that aims to engage children to learn more about the back stories presented within the episodes. When I work with clients, I always first ask them to define five items within the Octalysis Strategy Dashboard that we will cover in Chapter 17: Business Metrics, Users, Desired Actions, Feedback Mechanics, and Incentives. While most of my clients define revenue growth or active users as their number one Business Metric, Superbook’s Director of Creative Media Gregory Flick stated that, “Our number one Business Metric is to get kids more engaged with the Bible.”

To attract children’s attention, Superbook’s strategy is to implement a variety of fun games on their website that kids can enjoy playing. These games provide opportunities to accumulate “SuperPoints” that can later be redeemed for merchandise, gift cards, and other rewards.

While the children are enjoying their games, some of them will start to explore other content on the site, including the “Episode Guides.” These guides explain much of the back stories of each episode, such as the historical setting of the time, characters, and other interesting trivia.

The ultimate goal is to use the Episode Guide to direct children towards the Bible App, where they can interact with the Bible more. This is a very clear funneling strategy: Play Games –> Explore Episode Guide –> Interact with Bible App.

Turning the Funnel Around

The disadvantage of funneling strategies, is that the bottom of the funnel is often only a tiny fraction of the top. Many Kids will play the games, and maybe some of them will notice the Episodes Guides, but only a few of those kids will try out the Bible App. It would be nice if part of the game is to go into the Episode Guides and the Bible App, as opposed to simply being a curious discover.

A potential solution to this issue is to embed Boosters within both the Episode Guides and Bible App. Let’s say, by completing Bible-related challenges within the Episodes Guides (which requires utilizing the Bible App to do well on), a child can increase their “Knowledge Score” that will serve as a multiplier towards SuperPoints when they are playing the fun games on the site.

After they win a game with the boosters on, it would show them a “Knowledge Score Multiplier” next to their points, allowing them to earn SuperPoints much faster than other kids. Of course, for Scarcity & Impatience sake, it should also display “Knowledge Score Multiplier: 0%” if the child does not have these boosters yet, just to make them yearn for it.

What’s interesting here is that instead of playing games and maybe going to the episode guides and possibly going into the Bible App; it is now strategic for the child to first go to the Episode Guide, maximize their Knowledge Scores, and then go back to play the games. Now the child’s own creative strategy process motivates them to engage with the Bible App before playing games, and the “funnel model” before has been turned upside down in favor of their top Business Metrics.

Milestone Unlock (Game Technique #19)

One of the most successful design techniques within games is something I call the Milestone Unlock. When people play games, they often set an internal stop time in the form of a milestone – “Let me beat this boss and then I’m done.” “I’m close to leveling up. Once I level up I’ll go to bed.”

What the Milestone Unlock does is open up an exciting possibility that wasn’t there before that milestone was reached.

In some RPGs (Role Playing Games), whenever you level up, you learn a new set of skills. These skills are awesome and generally help you vanquish monsters faster and with more style. Consequently, they would have made your earlier gameplay a lot easier.

Once players level up (their “stop-time milestone”), they naturally want to see what these new skills are like. They will want to test them out a bit, then test them out on stronger enemies, enjoy how powerful they are, and then realize they are so close to the next milestone that they might as well get there before stopping.

This is when people plan to stop playing at 11PM but end up playing till 4AM in the morning.

Milestone Unlocks in Plants vs Zombies

Plants vs. Zombies is a dynamic “tower-defense” game geared towards forming a creative strategy to utilize resources and “plants” to solve puzzles of zombie attacks. In the spirit of Core Drive 3, the game embodies an aspect of allowing people to incorporate their creativity to come up with various solutions towards solving the same problem. Interestingly, this is the only “fighting” game and the only “zombies” game that both my mother and my wife got very into.

In terms of Game Techniques, Plants vs Zombies utilizes Milestone Unlocks to the extreme. When you complete each level, you will usually unlock a new Plant to help you defend against Zombies. Not by coincidence, that new plant is often the exact plant that directly counters the toughest zombie in the stage you just defeated, and would have made your life a lot easier if you had it earlier!

Of course, this is usually not the time to stop playing. If you didn’t start the next stage and try out these new found powers, you would be laying in bed, thinking about it all night long!

Poison Picker/Choice Perception (Game Technique #89)

Many studies⁹² have shown that people like something more when they are given a choice, compared to simply having one option. This holds true even if the multiple options are not as appealing compared to the single choice. Any parent with a two year old will recognize the influence of choice perception.

“Do you want to eat your vegetables before or after your chicken?”

When children turn two years old, they quickly discover that they possess a special power called “Free Will.” And once they discover this power, they start to exercise it with great fluency.

*“Which one do you want?”

“…”

“Do you want A?”

“NO!”

“Okay. Do you want B then?”

“NO!”

“Well, you have to make a choice. A or B?”

“NO!”

“So you don’t want anything. I’ll take them away okay?”

“NO!”*

Negotiating with children is serious parenting work. You have to make the child think that whatever happens, it’s a result of their own decision and not someone else’s suggestion. (Interestingly, this aspect of us does not change as we grow older.) When the child does not know what they want, it’s the toughest because they can’t make a choice on their own. But they still hate it if they went along with someone else’s suggestion.

When I was little, my mother would have me learn to play the piano. It was very frustrating for me, and many times I would cry out in anger. After two years of piano, my mother saw how much misery it caused me, and told me, “Okay, if you hate it so much, you don’t have to play the piano anymore. But you have to play an instrument. What would you like to play?” At the time I saw a popular singer in Taiwan named Lee-Hom Wang play the violin on-stage at a large concert, and it made an impression on me. I therefore told my mother that I wanted to play the violin.

After I switched from playing the piano to the violin, things didn’t necessarily become easier. But because I made a choice to play the violin, I sucked it up and played with a much better attitude. After all, if I also hated playing the violin, it would mean my previous choice was “wrong.” And people hate being wrong! When I would start to whine and complain, my mother would ask me, “So you hate playing the violin then?” I would immediately shoot back with, “No! Who said I hate playing the violin? I LOVE playing the violin! I just need…more practice.”

What a win for the parent!

The key to the Choice Perception is that the choice itself is not necessarily meaningful, but merely makes a person feel like they are empowered to choose between different paths and options. In my case, I was still forced to play an instrument – I did not have the choice to stop learning – but because I felt that I could choose which instrument to play, I felt empowered.

When I say the choice is not meaningful, it could mean that either the user is presented with a good option and a bad option, inviting the user to naturally choose the better one (again, often the user will feel happier with this situation, rather than being forced to take the better option); or it could mean that all the options are too limiting and therefore undifferentiated from one another.

Jesse Schell, in his book The Art of Game Design - A Book of Lenses, introduces two Lenses: The Lens of Freedom and the Lens of Indirect Control⁹³. Schell describes that, “we don’t always have to give the player true freedom - we only have to give the player the feeling of freedom. […] if a clever designer can make a player feel free, when really the player has very few choices, or even no choice at all, then suddenly we have the best of both worlds - the player has the wonderful feeling of freedom, and the designer has managed to economically create an experience with an ideal interest curve and an ideal set of events.”

According to Schell, this can be accomplished by 1) Adding constraints to player choices, 2) Incentivizing players to take certain choices that actually meets the player goals, 3) Create an Interface that guides the user towards the Desired Actions, 4) Adding visual designs to attract the player’s sight, 5) Provide social guidance (often through computer generated characters in the game), and 6) Music control that affects player behaviors.

Choice Perception influences our decisions in many other significant ways, such as wasting time and energy keeping meaningless doors or options open, even though they were formerly written off as bad options, simply to maintain a perception of having a choice.⁹⁴

Obviously, since Choice Perception suggests a lack of meaningful choices, it often is not ideal in an implementation as it does not truly bring out the creativity of the user. You could also offend users if too many options are blatantly meaningless. However, for many businesses, it is easier on the designer to implement choice perceptions into its systems than to actually create Meaningful Choices.

Plant Picker/Meaningful Choices (Game Technique #11)

Beyond choices that allow people to feel like they are empowered, there are choices that are truly meaningful and demonstrates preferences that are not obviously superior over others. I refer to these techniques as “Plant Pickers” because, just like deciding what to plant in a garden, it is often a preference on style and strategy, something that fuels Core Drive 3.

If you create a gamified environment with a hundred players, and all hundred of these players reach the Win-State in the exact same way (such as “do action A, get points, do action B, get badges, do action C, win!”), there are no meaningful choices present. (Often times this could be seen if the gamified system has a no-brainer dominant strategy⁹⁵, which falls under Choice Perception.) If thirty players play the game one way, thirty play it another way, and the last forty play it yet another way, then you have some level of Meaningful Choices. If all hundred players play the game differently, then you have a great amount of meaningful choices.

If you tell a hundred kids to sit there and play with a set of Lego, it is statistically impossible for any two children to build the same thing in the exact same order (outside of copying each other, of course). That level of meaningful choices and play is the ultimate state of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback.

Plants vs Zombies Strategy

I mentioned above how the Milestone Unlock is such a huge component in Plants vs Zombies good game design. Another aspect of its success is the Plant Picker. When you start a stage in Plants vs Zombies, you are faced with a challenge – a wave of zombies, each with different strengths and capabilities. You, as the player, have a limited number of plants you can “pre-pick” before a game to defend against those zombies. There are sun-resources that allow you to sow a plant, and there are a limited number of squares that you can place them in.

To defeat a level in Plants vs Zombies, there are a variety of ways and strategies that each work extraordinarily well, among many ways that don’t work at all. A player can choose to power up their economy first with many sun-gathering plants and fewer defense plants; lay out the field with basic pea-shooters; save up to use more powerful plants that do massive damage; completely focus on explosives and traps; or use stinky onions to herd all the zombies into one lane before wiping them all out with penetrating attacks.

Often, one would defeat a level with one strategy, just to replay it again to test out another new strategic idea that the player conceived. The process of being able to select many options, each with its unique strengths and weaknesses, and resulting in a variety of style and creativity-based strategies, is the core essence of the Plant Picker technique.

Unfortunately, when Plants vs Zombies 2 was first launched, it completely forgot about its original design roots and turned Plant Pickers into Poison Pickers, with some plants being overpowered, while having others being completely useless in the early phases.

Farmville Art

I believe that Farmville is actually not a “fun” game to play, because it does not use many intrinsic motivators, though it still creates a compelling and mind-numbing machine that brilliantly utilizes all the black hat game mechanics to bring out our Core Drives.

Generally, during the Endgame Phase, carrying out your daily grind is not fun. However, some players have created their own endgame in Farmville that I think is positive and fun for the right reasons – it allows everyone to creatively express themselves through their Farms.

After Farmville players have participated in the game long enough, having unlocked all sorts of plants and colors, some of them even become Farmville Artists to express their creativity . Many create amazingly beautiful pieces of art through the digital pixels of Farmville. Of course, using an actual drawing technology like Microsoft Paint might still be more efficient, but hey, the canvas is your farm!

Because there are so many things you can do with your crops, this element of Farmville can be considered an Evergreen Mechanic. Users can continuously stay engaged without adding any additional content, just like paint and a paintbrush can be Evergreen material. The tricky thing here is that players must quickly plant the art and then take a screenshot, for within a few hours the plants will all wither and die.

Here are some pretty noteworthy pieces of art:

⁹⁶

⁹⁷

⁹⁸

Basic Components; Infinite Combos

Meaningful Choices make games like Lego, Chess, or even Minecraft⁹⁹ fun. Your choices create a tangible difference in your gameplay, and it shapes how the experience evolves over time. Often, there are only a few building blocks to select from, but based on the context, challenges, and constraints, these building blocks come into play in varying ways for different scenarios.

In the book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, game designer Raph Koster introduces a hypothetical game with a single hammer that can only do one thing, which likely results in a dull experience. Koster compares it to the game of Tic-Tac-Toe, which also does not require a meaningful range of abilities and strategy. In comparison, checkers players can start to learn the importance of forcing other players into disadvantageous jumps. “Most games unfold abilities over time, until at a high level you have many possible stratagems to choose from.”¹⁰⁰

Game designer Jesse Schell points out that one of the most exciting and interesting ways to add Meaningful Choices is to allow players to choose between playing it safe, and go for a small reward, or take a big risk, and try for a big reward. This type of dynamic, which he coins triangularity, is seen in many successful and engaging games.

Ultimately, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to implementing Meaningful Choices in your experience. If there were, it would be a paradox. You have to decide and carefully design which challenges the user must resolve, what plants the users can pick, and how different plants options will reshape the user experience into new inspiring lush forests.

Core Drive 3: The Bigger Picture

Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is a great Core Drive on many different levels. It taps into our innate desire to create, by providing us the tools and power to direct our own gameplay and giving us the ability to affect the environment around us through our own imaginations.

Unfortunately, Core Drive 3 is often the most difficult to implement into a product design, primarily because it requires so much attention from an already attention-deficit society. In an age of information overload, people have shorter attention spans in order to filter out all the worthless content they are bombarded with on a daily basis. So unless you design your experience with finesse, people will likely shy away from committing the time and energy needed to invest their creativity into something. That is why Core Drive 3 is more commonly seen effective in the Scaffolding and Endgame Phases, as opposed to the Discovery and Onboarding Phases.

Once you are able to unlock the power of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, it often creates a rush of other Core Drives, such as Development & Accomplishment, Social Influence & Relatedness through collaborative play, as well as Unpredictability & Curiosity. When effectively implemented, this Core Drive becomes a key evergreen engine that can be the difference between a short-lived flower and a timeless Redwood.

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 3: Empowerment of Creativity motivated you or others to take certain actions. Did it keep people engaged for longer?

Medium: Think of the last time you were engaged in an activity that really drew you in. Did it involve a lot of creativity, strategy, or meaningful choices? If yes, describe the process in which these elements were brought out. If not, think of ways to add these components into the experience. Would that make the activity even more engaging?

Medium: For your own project, think of ways you can implement Milestone Unlocks into the experience, while rewarding the users with Boosters once they hit the milestone. Are the Boosters something that users will see in a favorable light because it allows them to do what they desire to do, but more efficiently? Or is it something that users will perceive as a controlling tool to make what you want more efficient without caring about their own interests?

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

Get Your Feet Wet

Now that you are diving into the fascinating world of Octalysis Gamification and motivation, try out the Octalysis Tool on my website. Play with the Core Drive sliders, add short notes on each Core Drive to help understand each better, and read the automatically generated Octalysis Insights to better understand the strength and weaknesses of the design. Use this as a creative process and see the insights as feedback for your analysis. The Octalysis Tool can be accessed for free at YukaiChou.com/octalysis-tool.