What is fun? Here’s a formula offered by former Disney theme-park designer and video-game mechanics guru, Jesse Schell (Figure 14-1) ⁱ :

Figure 14-1. Fear - death = fun.

fear - death = fun

Well, that’s certainly one way to put it. Expanding, he means that a thrill ride (like a roller coaster or a zip line or even a first-person shooter video game) is an experience where actual threats to our physiology have been minimized, even though we still feel threatened. It’s a little like distorting Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism to say “that which does not kill me only makes me more amused.”

In much the same way, hard-core human needs like air, water, food, and our full ten pints of blood are seldom at risk when we use digital memes, nor are they provided by them. Thus, meeting the most basic physiological and security needs that Maslow defined may not set your meme apart from others (most memes don’t live or die depending on whether they help us actually live or die). As well, meeting our belongingness and esteem needs may not elevate your meme, especially games, since almost all of them tell us how we are scoring, and a great many let us play with others. You are sunk if you fail to meet any of these needs, but meeting them alone may not be enough to win our attention.

Since most memes and games sit on top of Maslow’s hierarchy, used by us only when all of our other needs are met, it will still be fun that determines which species thrive and which become endangered. So, what is fun? What kinds of different things do people find rewarding?

Paradoxically, during the heyday of behaviorismfrom the 1940s to the 1970s, when psychologists were obsessed with rewards and had their best chance of mapping this landscape, they actually refused to define what is rewarding, focusing instead on the right timing of rewards. They were just trying to be rigorous: they didn’t want to speculate on the nature of things that they couldn’t see (emotions), preferring instead to work with what they could (behavior). So they gave us a uselessly tautological definition of a reward: anything that increases behavior to acquire it.

That’s not very fun.

Later, psychologists realized the limitations of this view. One example of a reward that was pretty hard to explain without diving into the black box of emotions involved the cats of behaviorist Edward Thorndike. ⁱⁱ (Each behaviorist had his favorite animal. Ivan Pavlov liked dogs. John Watson liked rats. B.F. Skinner liked pigeons. But Thorndike liked cats. If he lived today, he would probably laugh really hard at a lot of grumpy cat memes.) Like his contemporaries in 1911, Thorndike had been using food to reward his cats as he studied how they learn. But bedeviling his efforts was the fact that the cats kept jumping out of his puzzle boxes. One day Thorndike set up a lever that the cats could use to free themselves (Figure 14-2). Thereafter, the cats enthusiastically “increased their behaviors” to get this new reward, that is, they learned really difficult maneuvers simply to be freed from the box.

Figure 14-2. Cat escaping from a puzzle box. From Guthrie & Horton, 1946. ^iv

The rewards here were not food, water, sex, or more pleasant temperatures, that is, the lowest physiological needs in Maslow’s hierarchy. Instead they seemed to find freedom rewarding, or the problem-solving needed to achieve it. This was one rung up on the needs ladder, and perhaps the first time behaviorists had to face a motivation that looked at least a bit more like….fun. Soon they were finding they could reward dogs with toys and chimpanzees with fake money, ⁱⁱⁱ and the internal world of cognition and emotion got increasingly hard to ignore.

But nonetheless, the next few decades still failed to produce a taxonomy of fun. When behaviorism fell out of vogue and psychologists finally embraced the unseen, inner forces on our behavior, they grew new disciplines like cognitive, personality, developmental, and motivational psychology. Although most of what their behaviorist predecessors discovered has never been disproven to this day, and are eminently applicable to digital experiences (we’ll get into their best lessons starting in the next chapter), they were wrong about one thing: scientists can indeed see psychological forces beneath the skin, skull, and overt behavior. It just took more clever scientific methods and better neural imaging to “operationalize” them for observation and study.

But even with these advances in cognitive science, did we get a theory of fun? Unfortunately not. The cognitive revolutionaries who shelved behaviorism were held back by a different problem: they were too serious. Even Maslow’s topmost self-actualizationneed as he outlined it did little to explain our widespread search for fun or the importance it has on our economic decisions. In fact, Maslow often argued that only a few truly enlightened people like Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi experienced this peak form of experience. ^v Not much room for fun there. We’re not sure visionaries like these had a lot of fun, and we’re definitely sure they wouldn’t have whiled away much time playing Flappy Birds.

So with so few helpful psychologists to guide meme-makers, perhaps it is time we introduced some meme-makers to psychologists.

Take for example young Pierre-Alexandre Garneau, who in 2001 had just graduated with a computer science degree from the Université Laval in Quebec. While looking for a job as a game designer, he wrote an article for Gamasutra.com titled “Fourteen Forms of Fun.” ^vi This was no ordinary internet list, primarily because it was one of the first typologies of fun that many people had ever seen. Sure, others had developed typologies of games and game mechanics, also uncovering lessons of interest to psychologists. But Garneau turned it around because he was in the business of inventing entirely new games. He wanted to first understand all the things folks like us found to be fun and then make games to fulfill us, rather than take the games that had already been made and put them into buckets.

His approach found an open niche and spread wildly. By 2004, Garneau’s forms of fun was being taught in the workshops of the San Jose-based Game Developers Conference, and game-design experts Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek made it part of their Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. ^vii That same year, the Michigan State University Communications department added two more forms of fun and published a typology of both casual and educational games. ^viii In keynote speeches at other conferences during that time, Jesse Schell of Disney extolled Garneau’s insights and the productive directions that it opened up in game design. ^ix The discipline of funologywas born, complete with a 2003 textbook by the same name. ^x

Here are the forms of fun in our own words, put in a way you can tell your boss and apply to your memes. Garneau gave us the first 14; Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek contribute 15 and 16; the Michigan State researchers 18 and 19, Jesse Schell 19 and 20, game theorists Gunn et al. 21 and 22, and the last two come from traditional psychology .

We find it fun to…

1. Please our senses with images or sound (beauty)

2. Escape into unusual environments (immersion)

3. Think through solutions to problems or overcome obstacles (intellectual problem solving)

4. Achieve superiority over others or our former selves (competition)

5. Be part of a successful group (social interaction)

6. Laugh (comedy)

7. Feel at risk of annihilation (thrill of danger)

8. Engage in intense physical movement (physical activity)

9. Feel strong affection toward someone or something (love)

10. Make something out of nothing (creation)

11. Feel great strength or power (power)

12. Find new things or new places (discovery)

13. Progress forward and arrive at a destination (advancement and completion)

14. Use abilities we have recently acquired (application of a skill)

15. Witness the unfolding of a story (narrative)

16. Act out something or play a role (self-expression)

17. Help or save others (altruism)

18. Increase our understanding (learning)

19. Put things in their place (tidying up)

20. Feel completely overwhelmed by a stronger power (submission)

21. Manage time and resources (management)

22. Retain something we’ve earned or created (loss aversion)

23. Re-encounter something familiar (mere exposure) ^xi

24. Attribute a chance outcome to something about ourselves (be lucky) ^xii

What should you do with this list? Make your meme more fun, whether it be in the engineered product or your product marketing. Treat it as a hypothesis and experiment with it. Gather a group of creative people together and start the conversation with a form of fun: “Okay, let’s design a meme, whether a game or an article of original content, that helps people experience the fun of [tidying up or a different form of fun].”

Read through this list and think about how you can infuse some fun into your existing meme, taking care to first assess whether it will align with task-positive users or task-negative users , whichever you are targeting. Use AB testing (or ABCD..X testing ) to find out which works better. Perform a cluster analysis to determine which collections of fun are engaging to the same people. And don’t be surprised if this ends up correlating with personality traits.

But let’s say you don’t think any sort of “gamification ” is right for your meme, and many don’t. You should still consider implementing some form of graphical reward for the actions you want us to take. We have shown ourselves to be surprisingly responsive to design elements that for you are incredibly inexpensive to make. A great example is the graphic that appears on our LinkedIn profiles with an animated line that rises to a certain height like a thermometer, representing how much content we’ve uploaded into our professional profiles (Figure 14-3). A graphic like this motivates us to increase our “profile strength,” which is a win for both us and for LinkedIn.

Figure 14-3. A graphic on LinkedIn encouraging us to complete our profiles.

If there is one thing the early behaviorists got right, it was to observe that we “increase our behaviors” to attain symbolic rewards that are very far removed from primary reinforcerslike food and sex. Indeed, we strive to acquire any symbolic secondary reinforcersthat we associate with real, physiological rewards by virtue of being present at the same time. The classic example is monetary: a holiday feast is a primary reinforcer, and we work, strive and compete for one. But we work just as hard for currency, which is a secondary reinforcer we associate with the feast. And we work just as hard to increase a balance displayed on our online banking account, which we associate with both currency and the feast. For many of us, our eyes dilate and our heart rates spike on payday when we log in to our bank accounts and see a new direct-deposit entry in our ledger, just as it would if you put before us a holiday turkey.

Thus as a meme-maker, there is almost no cost to you, and a lot of potential benefit, if you implement a digital secondary reinforcer in your innovation. Examples abound, from Likes we receive on Facebook, to the “cha-ching” sound of a cash register that we hear on our smartphones whenever someone contacts us about an item we are selling on the OfferUp app.

Secondary reinforcers can symbolize a wide variety of primary reinforcers that span several of Maslow’s needs. Some we associate with physiological needs (pictures of food), some with security (the padlock icon showing that a “https” web site uses secure socket encryption), some with belongingness (Likes), some with status (star-ratings), and some with pure fun (GIFs). If you make games, you can also design secondary punishers, which we will strive to avoid just as hard as we do to avoid primary punishers. And secondary punishers can also span Maslow’s needs, symbolizing threats to physiology (weapons, teeth), to security (traps), to belongingness (getting kicked off or kicked out of a group), to low status (badges indicate we are “nubes”), to the absence of fun (frowny-face emoticons).

Perhaps the most successful secondary reinforcer appeared on Foursquare, where a graphic element dubbed us the “Mayor” of a venue if we had checked into it more than anyone else in the last 60 days, symbolizing a kind of status (Figure 14-4).

Figure 14-4. Badges encouraging us to check into venues on Foursquare more than anyone else in the last 60 days, dubbing us the “mayor”.

When we are asked why we strive so hard to attain these secondary reinforcers, knowing that they benefit companies as much or more than ourselves, you can guess what we answer:

“I don’t know, it’s just kind of fun.”