Chapter 2: The PBL Fallacy
A Story about Social Media
The landscape of gamification development must be viewed within a historical context to see why gamification mechanics themselves don’t ultimately lead to effective design. Let’s start by taking a look at social media6.
Due to the proliferation of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, the versatile term “social media” overtook “social networking” in 2007 and became a new buzzword. When enough interest and excitement in an industry hits critical mass, there will always be people and agencies proclaiming themselves as experts, to capitalize on the trending buzz. It really doesn’t matter what the new buzzword is – SEO, SaaS, Cloud, Big Data, you name it - the terms are so new that while no one can truly be an expert, everyone is in the running to be considered as one.
And so these “experts” saw the growth in “social media” platforms and services as heralding the dawn of a new era in technology, business, and culture. They made sure to demonstrate the importance of its influence through viral growth models and by collecting case studies that show companies obtaining huge successes due to their social media savviness. “Everyone is now a publisher” became the motto, and how companies leveraged the phenomenon became the focus. The pitch was very inspiring and logical.
Unfortunately, being an “expert” only went so far. When companies actually hired these social media services to run their marketing campaigns, they found that all these “experts” could do was create Twitter profiles and Facebook Fan Pages (I’ve even seen services that charge thousands of dollars just to create these accounts).
However, the real question wasn’t how to publish but what to publish. Content strategy was still a mystery in the early days of the social media revolution. For content, the “experts” would simply ask their companies to send them worthy updates for posting. Every once in a while they might even provide some customer support using the companies’ Twitter accounts or share pictures on their Facebook Fan Pages. But overall, the industry felt a little disillusioned by this new “fad,” as the miracle they were expecting in ROI (Return on Investments) just wasn’t being realized.
What most people didn’t recognize then was that social media is much deeper than simply possessing and posting on profile accounts. That’s just the outer shell of its influence and impact. Today, we know that great social media campaigns focus on how to create value for the audience by sharing information that is insightful and engaging, has a personal voice, engages and sincerely interacts with each potential customer, and much, much more. In essence, the beauty of social media was in how you designed and implemented a campaign, not in the bells and whistles you used. It was the informal and formal dialogue you had with your community that ultimately taps into the platform’s unique possibilities.
Having knowledge of good social media principles does not necessarily mean someone can execute them correctly. Take popularity for example. Most people know the principles of being a“popular” person – be outgoing, funny, confident, in some cases compassionate, etc. But when you look around your community or network, you find that there are still only a few people who are truly “popular,” while some may even appear to be sleazy as they try. Helping a brand become popular is exactly what true social media experts would be doing if both principles and execution were aligned.
Fortunately, social media does have the power to make a company radically successful and the trend stuck around. (There are still dozens of successful social media case studies appearing on a monthly basis.) Today, most companies now subscribe to the belief of, “If your company doesn’t have a social strategy, it will become irrelevant.”
What connection does this have with gamification? We will soon see that the early days of social media almost completely mirror the gamification industry today.
An Obsession with Grunt Work
As I mentioned in the last chapter, games have the amazing ability to keep people engaged for a long time, build relationships and communities among players, and cultivate their creative potential. Still people often ask, “Do games really have the power to motivate people?” Consider this: many feel that children today do not have strong work ethics. They complain that kids nowadays don’t have discipline, are easily distracted, and don’t show persistence when encountering challenges.
But when it comes to playing games, these same kids have what most people would consider amazing work ethics. Many of them wake up secretly behind their parents’ back at 3AM in the morning, just to play a game and level up their fictional characters.
What’s the motivation behind this? If you have ever played RPGs (Role-Playing Games) before, you would know that the act of “leveling up” often requires defeating the same monsters over and over again in the same stage for hours on end. Even mobile games like Candy Crush or Angry Birds require the same repetitive action (bird-throwing and gem-matching) for weeks or months in order to level up and progress. In the gaming world, this is appropriately called “grinding,” and it is fun and addictive for children and adults alike.
In the real world, this is often defined as “grunt work.” Generally, no one likes to do grunt work, and it requires strong work ethic and will power to complete it. But kids, who again are assumed to have no discipline or work ethic, are somehow sacrificing sleep and risking punishment to complete seemingly pointless grunt work for fun.
Why? Because they are excited about leveling their character up. They want to get that extra +5 strength and gain a new game skill to beat a challenging boss that they couldn’t defeat until they reached a high enough level. They do it because they see the big picture, the “why” they are doing it. They like that sense of accomplishment, as well as the use of their creativity in developing and optimizing certain strategies. They desire these feelings so much that anything that stands in the way, be it grunt work or otherwise, is worth doing and doing urgently.
Now, imagine a world where there is no longer a divide between what you need to do and what you want to do. Where everything is fun and engaging, and you actually want to wake up each morning to tackle the challenges ahead. Grunt work takes on a new meaning when understood as an affect of powerful motivational factors. This is the promise and vision that good gamification design can create.
Secondhand Sushi Making
Despite the many case studies on gamification that demonstrate the potential and promise of its great impact in the world, there are still many more examples of poor practices, failed attempts, and misconceptions. When I started my gamification career in 2003, it was a topic that no one really understood or believed in. People thought I was just creating more excuses to play video games
Fast-forward twelve years and gamification is now a leading design methodology for industries across the globe. Though it gives me great pleasure to see that my once lonely passion became mainstream, it troubled me that experts who were working in gamification didn’t seem to understand games very much. Yes, they might have played Candy Crush a little, or even Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. But if you ask them what games have they been completely immersed in and obsessed with for long periods of time, you get very short answers.
As with social media, once gamification became a buzzword, it attracted many who saw it as an opportunity to corner an emerging industry. I’m a firm believer that you should immerse yourself in an experience in order to best understand it. Yes, you can derive insight by closely observing those who are going through the experience. But that is like watching someone eat sushi and asking them to take a survey about it, rather than eating the sushi yourself. You’re not going to get the same findings, and if you try to replicate that experience simply based on the survey, you’re going to impart a “superficial sushi taste” to the product you’re designing.
As a result, many gamification professionals focus only on developing the superficial layer of games. I call this the shell of a game experience. This is most often manifested in the form of what we call the PBLs: Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. Many gamification professionals seem to believe that if you put points on something boring, add some badges, and provide a competitive leaderboard, that once boring product will automatically become exciting.
Of course that’s also what a lot of gamification platforms specialize in: adding PBLs into various products in a scalable manner. And as a result, many people who are less informed but curious about gamification start to believe that the sum total of gamification methodology and philosophy is merely the process of adding points, badges, and leaderboards to products. Justifiably, this leads them to believe that gamification is a shallow fad and not very impactful.
This has also generated a backlash from the game development community, as they claim that gamification is a bastardization of the true essence intrinsic to good gaming. And who can blame them? Foursquare seems to be nothing more than points, badges, and leaderboards based on going to places, while Nike+ seems to be the same thing based on running. Is this as deep as gamification goes?
Of course, points, badges, and leaderboards do have a place in game design. That’s why you see them in so many different games. They have the ability to motivate behavior and push people towards certain actions. But gamification is so much more than PBLs. Many gamification professionals are only familiar with how to implement PBL mechanics and even though these do create value, most of them completely miss the point of engaging the user. It is not unusual for users to feel insulted by shallow shell mechanics.
If you ask any gamer what makes a game fun, they will not tell you that it is because of the PBLs. They play it because there are elements of strategy and great ways to spend time with friends, or they want to challenge themselves to overcome difficult obstacles. The points and badges are often an added bonus that’s nice to have depending on the context. This is the difference between extrinsic motivation, where you are engaged because of a goal or reward, and intrinsic motivation, where the activity itself is fun and exciting, with or without a reward. We’ll dive deeper into these distinctions in Chapter 13 on Left Brain vs Right Brain Motivations.
A Trojan Horse without Greek Soldiers
Generic game mechanics and poorly constructed game elements such as levels, boss fights, or quests often fall into the same hole as PBLs. Simply put, applying traditional “game elements” ubiquitous in popular gameplay without diving deeper into user motivation contributes to shallow user experience: it’s all flash and no bang. An almost humorous example of this is when people I meet call something a “quest” instead of a “task” thinking that this automatically makes the same original actions fun and engaging. Sure, having a playful attitude can make a big difference, but it only goes so far, especially when your customers and employees may already distrust your motives.
The truth is, simply incorporating game mechanics and game elements does not make a game fun.
Games aren’t necessarily fun because of high quality graphics or flashy animations either. There are many unpopular, poor-selling games with state-of-the-art 3D high- resolution graphics. There are also games with very basic graphics such as Minecraft, or even no graphics, such as the purely text-based multi-user dungeon games (MUDs), that have large communities of players addicted to them. Clearly, there are more to games than “meets the eye.”
Unfortunately, a lot of people who work in gamification incorrectly think that applying game mechanics like points, badges, and leaderboards – elements that you can also find in boring and unsuccessful games - will automatically make the product or experience fun and engaging. Unfortunately, it’s not just what game elements you put in - it’s how, when, and most importantly, why these game elements appear.
It would be foolish for a modern army commander to say, “Hey! The Greeks sent a big wooden horse to the Trojans and won the war. Lets send our enemies a big wooden horse too!” In this case, he clearly doesn’t understand the true design behind the Trojan Horse, but he only copied the outer shell of it. Instead, it would be much more effective if he created a virus that pretended to be a normal file to corrupt enemy computers. Learn from the design; don’t copy the shell.
The Threat and Opportunities in Gamification
Even though gamification has become accepted in the mainstream, poorly designed applications threaten its long-term viability and impact development. I am genuinely afraid that in a few years, companies will look at gamification and say, “Hey, we tried the points stuff and it didn’t work out. I guess gamification was just a short-term fad.”
That would be a huge loss for the world.
Based on my years of research, observation, and design in gamification, I am a hundred percent certain that good gamification design can unlock tremendous potential and improve many lives in the process. There are hundreds of case studies that illustrate this also. And so it is my job (and hopefully yours one day) to continue protecting and innovating the core essence and the promise of gamification.
In the long run, the term “gamification” might actually fade and eventually disappear. Currently, no one describes a website’s design as being “so Web 2.0!” Gamification may just become the normal way we design, implement, and interact with the world around us. It’s my hope that the principles that optimize for human motivation becomes the standard for good design across the board.
Fortunately, there are enough good gamification examples that continue to show how thoughtful design can improve core business metrics and inspire new ways of thinking and execution. Besides the 90+ Gamification Case Studies listed on my site, as mentioned in the last chapter, it is interesting to note that some of the best historical examples of gamification, such as eBay or Woot.com, have not been categorized as gamification by most people in the industry. There are dozens, if not hundreds of companies that became extremely successful because, regardless of what it was called, they applied great game mechanics and gameplay dynamics to their processes. Some of these examples are illustrated in the following chapters.
Because of these success stories, I believe that gamification will continue to evolve and meet real needs if practitioners and the general gamification community also evolve in their understanding of its principles and practice.
So if “game mechanics” alone are not the true reason why games are so engaging and sometimes addictive, then what is?
The Story of the Good Designer vs. Bad Designer
To understand the core of good gamification design, let’s start with an example of how a bad game designer might design a game.
In designing a game, a bad designer might start off thinking, “Okay, what popular game mechanics and game elements should I use? Well, of course we need monsters in the game. We also need swords so where should I place those? How about crops that friends can fertilize? What about some birds that show a lot of attitude? I’m sure people will love it!”
As you can see from the exaggerated depiction above, a game might have all the “right game elements” but still be incredibly boring or stupid if they do not focus on their users’ motivations first. It is worth remembering that every single game in the market has what we call game mechanics and game elements. However, most are still boring and are financial losers. Only a few well-designed games become engaging and even addictive. Are you designing your experience to be the failing game or the successful game? How would you know?
So let us look at how a good game designer might tackle the problem. Instead of starting with what game elements and game mechanics to use, the good game designer may begin by thinking, “Okay, how do I want my users to feel? Do I want them to feel inspired? Do I want them to feel proud? Should they be scared? Anxious? What’s my goal for their intended experience?
Once the designer understands how she wants her users to feel, then she begins to think, “Okay, what kind of game elements and mechanics can help me accomplish my goals of ensuring players feel this way.” The solution may lie in swords, plants, or perhaps word puzzles, but the whole point here is that game elements are just a means to an end, instead of an end in itself. Game elements are simply there to push and pull on their users’ behavioral core drives.
As a result, in order to further explore, systemize, and scale methods of combining game mechanics with our motivational core drives, in 2012 I decided to share my original gamification design framework called Octalysis to the world. The Octalysis Framework embodies my life’s work, and the majority of this book will be about how to use Octalysis to design experiences that are fun, engaging, and rewarding.