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Unit 1: What is Gamification

Page history last edited by Timur Anikin 11 years, 5 months ago

Курс 

 

Первоисточник субтитров

 

Lecture 1.1 - Introduction

Hi there. I'll be your professor in this course.

Now, don't worry, I'm not actually going to teach the class from inside a video game. But I am going to show you how some of the techniques that designers use in games like this one can be applied to problems in business, education, health, and other fields.

That's a technique that we call gamification.

Hang on a second, I'll get out of here.

Much better. Hi there. I'm Kevin Werbach, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and I'm thrilled that so many of you have signed up for this online course about the emerging field of gamification.

In the next six weeks I'm going to teach you about what gamification means and how you can apply it to solve real world problems.

Some of you may not be familiar with the concept of gamification, so let me give a brief introduction here. I'll give you a much more concrete and detailed definition later on.

Gamification is about learning from games. So what can we learn from Angry Birds? Well, we can learn that there's something really popular there. Angry Birds in its various incarnations has been downloaded over one billion times. Can one billion people be wrong?

But there's more to it than that. Gamification is about learning from games not just in the sense of learning about the games themselves, but understanding what makes the game successful. Understanding what makes the games engaging. Understanding what games can do, why games have power. And then taking some of those techniques and thoughtfully applying them to other situations which are not themselves games.

So, for example, let me show you a service called Samsung Nation. Again, we'll talk about this in more detail later on. Samsung Nation is something that Samsung has on its corporate web site. And it's a system using what we call game elements or game mechanics to solve Samsung's business problem, which is they want more people to come to their site and they want people to do things on their site to interact with their products, to write product reviews, to watch videos to find out more, to register products that they've already bought. So what Samsung has done here is to build a site using simple elements that they've developed from games. Things like leaderboards, things like badges to reward achievements, things like point systems, and they've taken these and applied them to a situation that isn't a game. The situation is Samsung wants you to spend time and do stuff on their web site so that you'll eventually buy more products.

That's an example of gamification. It's not by any means the only kind of example of gamification. As we'll see, gamification is by no means limited to these kinds of contexts that you see here, but it's a good example, as a starting point, of what we're talking about.

So in the next series of lectures I'll start to unpack what exactly gamification means, which will then allow us to start to understand how to do it effectively and what some of the challenges in applying these techniques.

And if you're curious about what the things are on the bookcases behind me, well, you'll just have to watch the rest of the videos to find out.

 

Lecture 1.2 - Course Overview

So, what's this course about?

It's important, I think, to start with a set of learning goals. Especially because gamification is a novel concept. It's not something like introductory physics, where it's obvious what a course is going to teach you about.

So there are four things that I hope that you will get out of this course if you stick with it all the way through, watch the videos, do the homework, and so forth.

The first is to understand what gamification is.

The second is to understand how it might be valuable.

The third is to learn how to do it effectively.

And the fourth is to understand some specific concrete applications of gamification.

So let me say a little bit about each of those. 'What is gamification' is not obvious. Gamification as a new concept and in many ways it's misunderstood, so we'll talk a lot about understanding just what gamification is and what it isn't. As well as some of the history and some of the context for this emerging business practice.

Then we'll talk about how gamification can be used and why it might be effective. And notice I say here 'might be'. Gamification and is a powerful tool, and I'll give you lots of examples of companies and other organizations that are successfully applying game mechanics and applying other lessons from games to address their problems, but it's important to have some measure of skepticism. To realize that gamification isn't right for every problem. It's not, by any means, a panacea. And furthermore, doing gamification requires you to understand how to do it well.

And that's why we have this third learning goal - to talk about how to do gamification effectively. You can understand how gamification might be relevant to a problem, but you need understand the different techniques the different components that you can you use, and the pros and cons of different forms of gamification, in order to know how to do the right sort of thing when faced with a particular situation.

And finally, some applications, there will be examples running throughout the course. Some of them in for-profit business contexts, some of them in nonprofit social impact kinds of contexts, but we'll look towards the end of the course at some specific domains, like inside the enterprise and for social good where there are particular issues that come up with applying gamification.

It's important to note this is not a technical class. There are no technica prerequisites, there's not going to be any coding involved. It is also not a full-blown game design course. So there's no requirement that you be familiar with any of the technical or aesthetic aspects, artistic aspects of being a game designer. We're going to talk about some of those concepts in the course because in order to do gamification effectively even just as a business person you need to understand something about game design, but there are no detailed prerequisites involved. Anyone who has a basic kind of understanding about online services and about digital technology will be fine understanding this course.

The structure of the class is a series of prerecorded video lectures like this one. There's a total of 12 units of material that we'll cover during the six weeks and each unit is further subdivided into short segments. There are often embedded quizzes that will pop up. The video will stop and ask you a multiple choice question. Those aren't graded, they're just to test your comprehension of the material that's come before.

If you're taking the class for a certificate, your grade will be computed based on three factors. One is the multiple choice homework assignments that are available each week, in the first four weeks, on various topics that we cover in that week as well as some of the one's in previous weeks. The second component is a set of written project assignments, which are worth 5, 10, and 20%. These will be peer-graded. I'm going to give you a series of realistic scenarios for gamification, and ask you to come up with your own ideas for applying the techniques we described in the class to gamify those scenarios. I hope that you'll take the time to do this whether or not you're interested in getting a certificate in the class. And I really hope that you'll take the time then to review what others have written and be conscientious in grading them. I think you'll find that you'll learn a great deal not just from your own experience in working on the projects, but from seeing what other people have done as well. And then finally there's a final exam, again multiple choice, worth 30% of the grade. All of this, again, I certainly hope that you will take, because it will improve on your learning experience, whether or not you are focused on the certificate.

And in case you are thinking about this, or asking, the class is not itself gamified. A lot of what I'm going to teach you is that gamification is not necessarily simple or easy, and not always the right solution. I didn't feel like I could fully implement gamification in this course given the time and constraints of the online structure of it in a way that would truly improve the learning experience.

That being said there are lots of instructors in both K12 and higher education that are using gamification in lots of fascinating ways to actually improve the quality of their classrooms. I'll talk about some of them later on in the class.

But that being said, there just might be a little bit of gamification here and there in the lectures that you're going to see. I mention all of the stuff behind me on the bookcases. Keep an eye on it. You might notice some changes, some things that look different from video to video, and if you really notice what's going on you might notice something else from time to time appearing back there, and who knows, maybe a message.

Now, this course is novel in a few different ways which I wanted to highlight here at the outset. The first, obviously, is this new method of open online delivery. That's something has been used in certain experiments for the past few years but has really expanded greatly only recently. So this is a new way for me in teaching and probably for you a fairly new way in learning this kind of material. But this course in particular has some other aspects that distinguish it even from other courses that use this mechanism.

The first is that gamification is a brand new concept. As I'll talk about, it has roots that go back many years, and it's going to draw on some very old concepts in psychology, and management, and so forth, but gamification as a phrase to describe what I'm going to talk about, is really only a couple of years old. And as I said, just understanding what gamification is is not universal today. So we're going to have to start by learning what the concept is to begin with.

The third thing that's new and different here is that this course has never been taught before. I've taught about gamification in person to my students at the Wharton School. It was, as far as I know, the first business school course, and maybe the first university course on gamification last year, but this course is drawing on that one, but almost entirely new material. Trying to take what I've learned from the previous experience, as well as to structure things in the way that makes the most sense for this format of the short pre-recorded videos.

And, finally, this course is about practical knowledge, which may be somewhat different from some of the other courses that you'd take on an open online platform that focus on understanding concepts. This is not necessarily about theory. There's a lot of theory that we'll touch on that goes into concepts we discuss in the class, but this is a course, ultimately, that is designed to give you some practical knowledge. That's designed to help you understand how gamification is used today in the real world, and how you, potentially, can be someone who uses it yourself.

Now, as we go along I'll give lots of references to other resources that you might look to to get more detailed information. Just to point out at the outset, there's a web site that I and a colleague set up called gamifyforthewin.com that we started around a workshop, symposium, that we did last year on gamification, that has a blog and videos and other resources that you might take a look at, and secondly, later on this year, some time toward the end of the year, we will be coming out with a book called 'For the Win', from Wharton Digital Press. It's not yet available, and I didn't want to have any readings that are required that you would have to pay for for this course, but if you are interested in finding out more about what we discuss I encourage you to go check out the book when it comes out.

 

Lecture 1.3 - Definition of gamification

What is gamification? I thought you'd ever ask. This is all very new, so there is not one universally accepted definition. But let me offer you the following, which has the major components that we see, generally, when people talk about the concept.

Gamification is the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts. There are three parts to that definition. The first is game elements. I'll talk about this in much more detail, what exactly that means in a later session. The second is game design techniques. And the third is non-game context. So let me give you an example or two and then I'll explain about each of these in a little bit more detail. So, the first example is Nike Plus.

Nike of course, make shoes. They make running shoes and therefore, Nike wants people to run more. And so what they do with Nike Plus was they developed a device, uses a piece of equipment called an Accelerometer, that fits into the sole of your shoe. And it tracks every single step you take when you're running. And so therefore, the device knows how far and how fast you're running and it communicates wirelessly with a Smartphone or your PC, which can aggregate together all of that data. And then what Nike did was build a set of applications around it, that made the experience of running more game-like. So, the Nike Plus Application has some functions like for example, telling how far you've run, the fastest run you've ever had, the longest run you've ever had, various kinds of tracking data. You can also compare yourself to previous times and so forth to track what you're doing. But then interestingly, you can also establish goals and challenges. And if you are successful in achieving those goals, you get a trophy or a medal. Now that sure seems a lot like a game. And Nike has built all sorts of other features into this system including the ability to compete against friends, or the ability to get encouragement from friends. And overall what this does is takes the experience of running and makes it feel somehow more like the experience of engaging in some kind of game. Now you're still going out and running. This is not saying, go sit down in front of your computer and play a running game and see how fast the avatar, the character in the computer can run. No, you're actually going out and running but the game structures around it help to encourage you and to make that whole experience of running feel somehow richer and more rewarding.

Second example, also for the purpose of getting people to run but it looks very different. So this is something called Zombies Run. And the theme here is that you're being chased by an army of blood thirsty zombies. Pretty common kind of motif, hopefully not something that any of you have experienced, but a common setup for games. Only here the goal is not to get you to sit indoors on your smart phone and play the game. The goal is to get you to take that phone with you and go out and run. And as your are running, the Zombies Run game is telling you that actually the reason you're running is that you are running from the army of zombies that wants to kill you and eat your brains. And as you go you'll, you'll hear from the game the zombies are getting closer and you can see on a map where they are. You can get to power packs that will help you get special powers, or go faster. Your friends can get in the mix as well. The game that you are playing it's a very lightweight game, but it's taking the experience of running and now subtly making it feel like more fun. Subtlly adding another dimension to that experience of running. Different kind of added dimension to what we saw in Nike Plus this is a much more immersive. Kind of game-like experience as opposed to the challenges and rewards and so forth that Nike Plus had, but both are examples of using game elements and game design techniques to serve a purpose which itself is outside of the game. So, those are good examples of what we're talking about here.

So now let's go back to the definition and unpack in some more detail what these three aspects are, game elements, game design techniques, non-game context.

First of all, game elements. You can think of game elements as the toolbox if you will. The pieces that you have to work with. If you are trying to build some kind of service that uses the bits and pieces of games. Not the game themselves, but the regular design patterns that make up the games. So, let me give you the example.This is Empire and Allies. It's a casual social game on Facebook made by Zynga. And clearly this is a game. We can see the kind of graphical interface that we typically see in a game and the various kinds of, pieces that give a game-like experience. You don't need to know how to play the game, you can just can look at it and see that's a game. But, if we look below the surface, we can start to break down, what are some of the elements of that game. So for example, the game has,points. A way of keeping score as you are accumulating something in the game. That's a very common thing that's in games. We sorta take it for granted that lots of games, especially online or computer games have points. But that's the whole point,if you, well, it's a regular pattern that occurs in many of these games.

Similarly, you can level up you can collect resources here I believe these are barrels of oil that you've accumulated that you use to build other more complex things in the game. The game can send you on quests to find missions where the game says, go defeat this enemy, and you'll get certain kinds of rewards. Avatars, showing your character. The social graph showing you your friends, who you can play with or challenge and so forth. These are all, bits and pieces that go to make up this experience that is Empires and Allies. They're not the whole experience. There's a lot more to the game than this. But they are parts of the game that we can pull out and then think about reusing. And the point here with gamification is that we can do this with games.

We can look at what are the elements at different levels of the game, but we can also do the same thing for services that are not games. So here's an example, this is called KISS. It's a service that, helps people in companies, engage in activities to make them healthier. Whether that's exercise or eating well, and so forth. The company was started by a guy named Adam Bosworth who, was at Microsoft and BDA Systems and later ran Google Health. And, he has, the way it works is that you form groups within your company and you get a series of challenges and you report on your activities, things like exercising and so forth. And what we see here is exactly the same kinds of elements that we saw in Empires and Allies. So, we see again the points and we see again the levels. And if you look at this interface for points and levels in KISS, it looks very similar to the one that we saw in Empires and Allies. I mean,graphically it's almost the identical thing on the screen and that's not by accident. Here KISS is using a familiar structure that some of their players or participants may have seen and not only adopting those conceptual elements, but adopting some of the aesthetics of them as well.

Similarly here are the quests that you go on, here's the social graph, seeing what your friends do, here are the avatars. The, the visual graphical representation of each participant here we also see rewards. If you do certain things in the game, you get more points, or you get other benefits. And down here you can't really see it on the screen but you see the label for it, badges. These devices that demarcate or represent a certain achievement in the game. So, there are exactly the same game elements in the KISS service as in Empires and Allies but you can see there is a great deal over lap and a notion of elements. The notion that there are these regular design patterns is something that's common across games as well as gamified services. So, that's what I mean when we're talking about game elements.

The second thing here to talk about in gamification is game design techniques. And the reason we need to talk about that is that games are not just the elements. As I already said, there's partly the visual experience of the game. But more than that, games are not just a jumble of elements that have been stuck together in some haphazard way. Games are things that are designed systematically, thoughtfully, artistically for the purpose of being fun. And, so the things game designers do is not just a matter of pure engineering. There's a lot of engineering involved. There's a lot of algorithms, a lot of technology involved but there's also an artistic experiential side of game design that involves thinking about problems in a certain way. And that involves taking an approach that uses concepts that are common to all forms of design as well as some concepts that are novel and specific to designing these things called games. And here especially I'm talking about video games although some of them relate to all games. That kind of practice is something that like the game elements can be applied outside of games. And some examples of gamification are more focused on the elements and some of them are more focused on the game design modality. And some have elements of both, that's why both are part of the definition. The other thing to understand about, game design techniques, is that it involves a way of thinking. It's not just a set of practices, but it's a way to approach the challenges that you have. And so, later on the course, I will talk in much more detail, but just what that mean to think like game designer.

The third piece here is non-game context. And here we mean anything other than the game for its own sake. So, when you're playing a game, you're playing to have fun in the game. But if you are playing say, for reasons that relate to your business. You're playing because you are serving some objective of your company or you're playing because you're trying to learn something that's relevant to your work. Or you're playing to get a job. Then that's a non-game context. What you're doing may still be game like but the purpose, the rationale for the experience is something outside of the game. It's some purpose that has a validity and a intention independently of the experience of the game. And that doesn't just have to be business although, most of the examples we use will start with that context. It could be something like running. Now running is important to Nike for the purpose of selling shoes but running is important to people who are doing it for the purpose of being healthy and for the purpose of having all of the benefits that people feel like they get from running. So, non game context is anything, where your objective is outside of the game.

So, circumstances where something involves some combination of game elements and game design that is for a purpose other than playing the game, that's gamification.

Lecture 1.4 - Why study gamification?

So, why should be study gamification?

Maybe I should ask you that after all of you signed up for this course. But it's worth pausing for a minute and asking the question of why this is worth the kind of extended analysis that we're going to do in this class. Because it's just games, right? Well, there are four reasons that I think the systematic study of gamification, is fruitful. And we're going to see more and more gamification being a regular subject that's taught about, both in, training context and in, university educational context.

The first of these is that gamification is a signifigant emerging business practice. We're seeing lots and lots of examples come up from many different kinds of companies, as well as in non business context, where gamification is being applied. So, here's just a couple examples from, the recent press an article from Fotune Magazine, from October 2011 talking about gamefication as the hot new business concept. And while I certainly wouldn't say just follow something because it's a hype trend, the important thing is, many of the world's most admired companies are starting to get on board with this. It's not just something that's happening among cookie start ups, it's something that's being adopted by very large established companies. The second article here from the Wall Street Journal talking about how growing number of firms are incorporating elements of video games into the work place. So, video games, as I'll talk about in more detail, had become a huge and influential industry. But what we are staring to see is more and more examples of video games being the foundation, not just for selling games, but for the foundation of doing things at and around the workplace. So gamification is something that's happening and as I said, it's happening very widely. So, here is a list of a few of the companies that are applying gamification in substantial ways. And as you'll see, they range from small, very technology focu sed start-ups, to big, very consumer products focused, established bricks and mortar companies. And, some of these are companies that went out consciously and tried to implement gamification around one of their business practices. And some of them are companies that just develop something that in hindsight was game-like and they just thought that it was a good way to attack a particular problem they had. But in both cases, when we look at what's happening out there, there's a growing recognition that this set of techniques has value, and it has value in a very broad set of circumstances.

The second reason to think the game of occasion is worth, greatest could be, is that games are powerful things. We probably all had experience of saying, wow, I was really addicted to that game. Or, your time just seem to fly by. And maybe it's a video game, maybe you had the experience with a board or card game, maybe other experience playing sports. But the games have a real pull on us. There is something that is extremely powerful when we think about it, given that we think of them as experiences that are done just for enjoyment. So what is it that makes games engaging? What is it that allows games to support sophisticated kinds of thinking and learning as you see. What is it about games, that makes them so engaging? That's an important question to ask. It's a question that gets asked about, among the community of people who study games in their own right, but it's a question that becomes relevant when the games are being used or at least the game elements and design principles are being used in these non-game contexts. It's worth starting to dig down and say just what is it about games that's so significant?

The third reason to study gamification is because it teaches us things about other areas of knowledge as well. So as we'll see when we get into gamification, we're going to very quickly get into psychology. Games have been around throughout all of human history because they link to some very basic aspects of the way our minds work. And so to understand how to design things that are effectively gamified, we need to understand about, for example, motivation. What is it that makes someone want to do something? What are different kinds of motivation? And what are different techniques that can be used to help people achieve their goals? So we'll learn about psychology, we'll also learn about design. As I've already talked about, gamification is a design practice so understanding how to do it, necessarily gets us into thinking about the very, sophisticated, complex world of design. Strategy, I teach at a business school and understanding gamification in the organization, ties into lots of things that people here talk about in understanding how to do business. Understanding what it means to lead in the workplace. Understanding what it means to design an effective marketing campaign. These are all areas of knowledge that we're going to bring to bear in understanding what makes gamification work.

And finally technology. Games as I said have been around, forever. And, many games don't involve any sophisticated technology. But the ability of today's network information technology to create rich immersive personalized experiences, and to track interactions in real time, and aggregate and analyze them, and make use of them, is incredibly powerful when applied to gamification. So, most of the examples that we're going to see are going to be examples in the world of online activities, whether online services or technology startups. The gamification is applied in a digital internet based context. And so, understanding what it is about that environment about what makes gamification successful will provide a window into understanding aspects of technology as well.

And the final reason that we should study gamification is that it's not that easy, it's not that obvious. Once you understand what gamification is, you may think, great. So, I see that Nike Plus uses challenges and awards and trophies to get people to do stuff. Well I will just put some challenges and trophies in my business practice and people will flock to it. It turns out it's not that easy. Turns out that doing gamification well, doing gamification ethically, doing gamification in a way that fits in with your ultimate long-term business objectives is not trivial. It requires thought, it requires recourse through those various different areas of knowlede that I talked about. And so this is something that we can't just give you a cookbook. I can't just say here's the list of game elements, have at them. You need to understand them within a broader context and that's exactly what this course is intended to provide.

 

Lecture 1.5 - History of gamification

So, where does gamification come from?

As I've said it's pretty new as a business concept, but as it turns out, it's roots go way back. A 100 years ago, the Cracker Jack company started putting a toy surprise in every box. And since then, countless companies have use games and toys and other kinds of fun as a way of selling products. There are many other related examples like the S&H Green Stamps, frequent flyer program and so forth that have some of these components in them.

But there are gamification in the sense if we talk about today systematically thinking about how to make things more game like to rise business results. The first example that we can find of the term gamification was from 1980. It involves Richard Bartle, who is a noted game designer and researcher at University of Essex in England, and he was brought into a project called MUD1. Mud1 was the first multi-user domain or multi-user dungeon. Essentially, the first massively multi-player online game. Didn't look like much. As you see here, it was a text based system on a university computer network. But MUD1 was the first time people could experience a shared virtual world in this way, and thus was a precursor for things like Second Life and World of Warcraft today.

Bartle's role in this project was to take what was basically a collaboration platform and gamify it, make it feel more game-like. So, he actually jokes today that gamification then meant taking something that wasn't a game and making it a game. Where as now it involves breaking games down into these constituent elements. So, taking an actual game and turning it into something that's really not a game. The work that Bartle did was called gamification. But, it really wasn't the same kind of thing that we see today.

But there were other developments at the time that helped to lay the groundwork for today's gamification. One of them was research by education scholars looking at video games and learning. So, Tom Malone who is now at the Sloan School of Business at MIT, started around this time doing work on early video games. Remember, this was 1980. Very early, simplistic games on early PCs. But he was able to show kids could learn from playing these video games.

Since then, a number of researchers have done similar and more sophisticated work. One of them is James Paul G, who is at Arizona State University. He's written a number of books about how video games, even off-the-shelf, commercial, entertainment oriented games, like the Tomb Raider series. Encode powerful knowledge creation and learning mechanisms that relate to all of the deep research that we have on how people learn.

A second stream of work that contributed to today's gamification is the Serious Games movement. The Serious Games Initiative was founded in 2002 by Ben Sawyer and David Rejecsk, and it brought together the communities in the private sector, academia, and the military that were using games, full-fledged games, for training and simulation various kinds of non-game purposes. So, for example, the military was very interested in being able to simulate the battlefield and also in being able to use games as training mechanism for the thousands upon thousands of soldiers and others that it has to train every year. And many companies had similar interests. Now, serious games are different in a sense from what we're talking about in this course because they're full blown games. You have to actually have to build the simulation for a particular purpose. That's very powerful and there have been tremendous accomplishments using serious games. And, and the work on serious games informs much of what we're doing in gamification today but it's distinct for that reason. The Games for Change movement is a related initiative, or set of initiatives that focuses on using games for social impact. For example, Letting you play a side in the Arab Israeli Conflict in the game called, "Peace Maker", to understand some of the complexities of that incredibly naughty issue.

Games are great for teaching systems thinking, for showing you that your individual actions fit into a much more complex larger whole, which is valuable for pure education, and is also valuable in trying to promote understanding of major social issues. Now, the first time that gamification was used in something like the current sense was 2003. When Nick Pelling, a British developer and a designer, set up a consulting firm called Conundra, which was there to promote gamification of consumer products. He wanted to take a hardware product and make it more game-like. Didn't have a lot of success, the consultancy didn't last all that long but it was an indication of this notion that game mechanics and game concepts could be applied in this way to consumer products and other kinds of situation.

In 2005, a company called Bunch Ball was founded. In 2007, it launched it's product, which was really the first gamification platform. They didn't call it that at the time because again the word was not in common usage, but it was the first platform that incorporated mechanics like points and leaderboards and so forth to serve engagements purposes in companies.

Since then, Bunch Ball has been joined by a number of competitors like Badgeville and Bigdoor and Gigya, they are variety of company now that offered these gamification platform to companies and then they also are specialized service providers. Companies like Kiosk which I mentioned and practically green and ripple sales force which offer gamification services to companies in specific areas as well as many companies now that are building gamification services and systems on their own.

In 2010, gamification really took off. This was partly because the community reached critical mass and they agreed to use gamification as the common term, but also partly because of a set of presentations that really crystallized the idea of gamification for people. Probably the most prominent was a presentation by Jesse Schell, a well-known game developer who has his own firm called Schell Games and also teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. Jesse Schell spoke at the DICE Conference, a big games industry confab in 2010, and his presentation immediately went viral. Let's look at a clip of it and see why.

"and what would that world be like. Well, I think it'll be like this. You'll get up in the morning to brush your teeth. And the toothbrush can sense that you're brushing your teeth. And so, hey, good job for you. Ten points for brushing your teeth. And it can measure how long, and you're supposed to brush them for three minutes, and you did a good job. You brushed your teeth for three minutes. And so, you get a bonus for that. And hey, you brushed your teeth every day this week, another bonus. All right. And who cares? The toothpaste company, the toothbrush company, the more you brush the more toothpaste you use. They have invested financial interest. You go to breakfast, there's the cornflakes. On the back, there's a little web game that you can play. While you eat, instead of reading the back, you play a game while you eat your cornflakes. And you get that. And you get ten points just for eating the cornflakes. And then it turns out you can see your list of friends who also have cornflakes, and the scores that they got, because you're wifi, and then Facebook connected and everything, and so, you know, you get five bonus points because you just beat out one of your friends at the cornflakes game. So, then you go and get on the bus. The bus? Why am I taking the bus? You're taking the bus because the government has started giving out all kinds of bonus points to people who use public transportation. And you can use these points for, for tax incentives. And while you're sitting on the bus riding to work and you're playing your little Tetris and getting a few points here and there, you suddenly remember, I had this dream last night. I had a dream that my mother was dancing with this giant Pepsi can. And then you realize, oh yeah, the REMtertainment system. Right? Which is the thing you put in your ear and it can sense when you enter REM sl eep, and then it starts putting little advertisements out there to try and influence your dreams. And, then you can fill out a little form, it's a test to see if those things came through into your dreams. And if they did, then big points for you."

Okay. It's a great presentation. I encourage you to watch the rest of it if you can. The link to the YouTube video is there. Now, of course, Jesse was being a little bit sarcastic there but also pushing people to think about just where this could go. And again, it really lit a fire in terms of getting people to imagine the potential of gamification. Something else that had that effect the same year was Jane McGonigal's book, Reality is Broken, and a ted talk that she gave at that point. Jane is a game designer known for her work on what are called alternate reality games. Games that are embedded into the real world. And she talked about how games could actually solve major human problems, help us address things like climate change or inequality in the developing world. And otherwise, make people more healthy, more complete, more engaged and more successful. Jane, herself, doesn't like the term gamification. She doesn't use it in the book. And she's concerned that gamification trivializes the possibilities of using full-fledged deep immersive games to address these issue, but many of her ideas about how games work, how games motivate, are things that we're also going to talk about here in this course under the banner of gamification.

So, today gamification is starting to mature. It's still new. We're still developing the ideas. But there are conferences and many companies and different as, areas of the gamification space. There are market research reports giving big figures about the gamification industry. I would take all their specific numbers with a grain of salt, but clearly something is going on here. And clearly, the, the industry is reaching a point where its real and significant. So, we've come a long way, but we also have a long way to go.

 

Lecture 1.6 - Examples and categories

Congratulations. You've made it to the last segment of the first unit of the class. You've earned a badge.

Okay, I am being a bit sarcastic there. That's a pretty poor use of gamification without any real context or a sense of meaning or integration in a thoughtful way with the underlined process. But, hey, you deserve some pat on the back for getting this far.

Oh, one more thing. You may recall early on, I alluded to the fact that you should keep an eye on what's behind me on the bookcases. There's one more little game that will be embedded in the videos starting with the next unit. Periodically you'll see something else that shows up and there's a message that's encoded in that information. You have to figure out what it is and what it is that's signaling you the information in the message. But the first person who comes up with the correct answer, tells me what the message is, I will announce publicly and congratulate them on one of the videos before the end of the class. Please don't post it on the discussion board, send it to me privately by e-mail.

Okay. So, in this last segment of the first unit, I'm going to give you some examples of gamification in practice and a framework for different places where gamification can be used. There are three main categories, three main areas broadly speaking where gamification adds value. And these are External, Internal, and Behavior change contexts.

So, the first one is external. And here I mean external to the firm or the organization that you're in. So typically, these are applications of gamification for customers, or for potential customers. Things like marketing and sales context.

The second is internal gamification which as you might guess is about applications of gamification to people who are in your company already. Employees, typically. I also put here crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing we'll talk more about later, but it's a process of reaching out to lots and lots of people, and either breaking up a task into very small pieces, for example, trying to find a n ew star on very detailed, complex, massive star charts by giving each person a little teeny piece of it to look over. Or crowdsourcing involves situations where there's a challenge that's sent out to many people, and anyone who wants to can respond to the challenge. For example, trying to win a prize that's put out as a general challenge to whoever wants to respond. Crowdsourcing is not internal in the sense that it's people who work for one company, but it's internal in the sense of within a community. The organization that launches the challenge needs to get lots of people to actively participate. And crowdsourcing either may involve no monetary reward at all or it may involve people who aren't part of your company to begin with. And therefore, even if there is a reward, finding them and getting them to submit and participate requires some effort. Gamification can provide that motivation. As in the other cases, gamification can encourage people to participate when they otherwise might not.

The third category for gamification is behavior change. And here I'm talking about situations where someone typically wants to do something or at least appreciates the value of doing something but can't get over the hump. You know you should go to the gym more, but it's hard. Motivation through gamification can potentially change that behavior, make that practice into more of a habit. So behavior change gamification is often although as we'll see not entirely social impact kinds of context. Things where there's some either personal or community benefit in the activity. But the problem is getting people to engage in it, even though they know it's something they want to do.

Three broad categories of gamification. Let's look at an example in each category.

The first one is an external case and this is something called Club Psych. First question is, whether you can find the game elements in Club Psyche. Club Psyche was set up by USA Network, a US cable channel, for one of their popular shows called Psyche. They have a regular we bsite for the show, but a few years ago they set up a new gamified website to get people more engaged with the show. So, this website uses many of the game mechanics that we've already seen when we introduced the concept. See how many you can find in the screenshot here. As you can see Club Psych uses many of the game elements that we saw earlier when I showed you Empires and Allies on Kiosk. So, you can do various things that give you points and ultimately the points earn you rewards. Very common process, especially in these external marketing focus gamification examples. And you can even earn badges. And the badges here, this one looks something like a pineapple. If you watch the show Psych, that's a recurring motif in the show. One of the things that they've done with Club Psych is made sure to integrate what they do with the game mechanics, with other aspects of the show. It's not a generic gamification implementation. It's tied into motifs so that people feel like it's an extension of the show experience. Here down here we see the leaderboard. Here we see the player's avatar and here we see challenges or quests encouraging you to do things. All the same kinds of mechanics that we saw already. So, USA Network implemented this gamified website for Psych. What were the results? They were pretty successful. So, overall visits to the USA Network website went up 30%. Online merchandise sales, at a real direct bottom line impact in terms of revenues went up 50%, page views on the Club Psyche site or the, the Psyche website overall went up 130%, they more than doubled the number of use of the site around the show and they got people to share content on Facebook as part of the challenges in this gamified service. 300,000 times people shared content which met 40 million users who were able to see that content. The audience for Psyche is only about 4-1/2 million so this was a big marketing bump for them by virtue of this relatively simple, relatively generic although well implemented game mechanics.

A second example is an internal example and this comes from Microsoft. Microsoft has a big challenge. They put out software like Windows and Office to millions of people in hundreds of different countries and dozens and dozens of different languages. And it's a real challenge to make that software work well. They have a large group of people involved in testing and quality assurance. And the challenge that the test group has is there are so many people who use Microsoft software in so many places. Even a company as big and well endowed as Microsoft, can't necessarily get out there and get people to look at everything thoroughly. Think about it, Windows is in dozens of different languages. And there aren't necessarily localization testing firms in all of those countries that Microsoft could hire, even it they wanted too, to pour over the text, and the dialogue boxes and the interface elements of an application like Windows to ensure that there weren't some errors. So, what Microsoft's test group did on that case dealing with localization of Windows was ingenious. They gamified it. The test group led by a guy named Ross Smith in Microsoft developed a game, this is called the language quality game which you see here, that was used for Microsoft internally to test localization of Windows seven. So here's an example screen of language quality game and you see in the middle here on the side a dialogue box in some language. Probably some people viewing this know what language it is. I'm not familiar with the alphabet but it's certainly not English. They would put this out to Microsoft employees who work in that country. Not an outside firm they pay, volunteer Microsoft employees, they said look, this a chance to do your part for your company. And guess what? It's also a chance to compete against other Microsoft offices. Because as you see, there's a leaderboard here about how many bugs people found. You click okay if the dialog box looks okay, but if you see something that looks wrong, a term that seems out of place, you click that there's something wrong, and then that gets recorded. And what happened was Microsoft offices started to compete. They said, gee, we're going to make our language localization of Windows the best one in the company. And that game like aspect of this process, even though what it involved was very mind numbing, sitting and reading dialogue boxes. The fact that it was put into a game-like framework, a competitive framework led to very significant results. Turns out that over 4,000 Microsoft employees were willing to sit for free and look at these dialog boxes. They looked at over half a million dialog boxes, found close to 7,000 bugs. 7,000 times they found something out of place. And several hundred of those turned out to be actual bugs in localization that Microsoft was able to fix. So the gamification was the mechanism that encouraged people to take this action. Now, this again was internal. So it wasn't for money, it wasn't necessarily for individual recognition, it was part of their corporate citizenship around something outside of their normal job responsibilities. But again, the game structure made it fun, made it enjoyable and helped to get people to participate.

The third example is a behavior change example and maybe not one of the ones you might expect. This example has to do with speeding. So, how do the police get people not to speed? Well the traditional way they do it is by putting a guy like this with a radar gun and sitting there and watching, and if you're caught speeding, you get a ticket. And you have to pay a fine. Well that works okay. But it's incredibly imperfect. People only will slow down if they think there's going to be a cop there. And there's no way there's going to be a cop on every corner at every time. So what some police departments have done is put in monitors. Put in devices that show you how fast you're going as you're going by. And that has actually had some effect even when they aren't tied to the police department. They're just telling you your speed. That provides some f eedback. Seeing real-time feedback causes a behavior loop. It causes people to react. So, even though you know how fast you're going or you could know how fast you're going just by looking at the speedometer, seeing a sign up in front of you telling you you're speeding real time tends to have an effect and actually causes people often to slow down.

Now, potentially though, we could go further than this. Volkswagen had a contest called the Fun Theory. It was a marketing program where they encourage people to submit great ideas for using games and fun to solve real world problems. The winner was something called the Speed Camera Lottery. It was submitted by a guy who works for MTV in the United States, and his idea was this. Instead of just fining people who go too fast, what if we do the following? Set up one of those monitoring devices that tracks how people drive and shows them how fast they're going and have a camera on it as well that takes a picture of people and their license plate. So it knows who people, are going by and how fast they're going. But instead of having that be a way to catch people who are speeding, do something different with it. Have the normal cops there tracking people with radar guns and finding people when they're speeding. But also, anytime someone goes by the sign that tracks their speed and they're not speeding, enter them into a lottery. Give them effectively one ticket in a lottery. Where does the money come from? Well the money comes from the fines from the people who were caught speeding. Some of that money that would otherwise go to the government goes into a pool and at some point there's a lottery and a winner gets picked out of the people who aren't speeding. So, Volkswagen actually got the city of Stockholm in Sweden to try this. And the results were actually pretty dramatic. People slowed down. People slow down over twenty percent over a three day period when they trial this system even though all that was changed was that they could win some money by not speeding. The addition of the lottery, the addition of the game or competition element to this activity changed people's behavior. So that's an example of behavior change. As I said, many of the other ones we see will be behaviors that have some social benefit. I guess this one does in terms of people not speeding but it's a different approach taken by a government agency that as we see drives actual results.

So, what do we learn from these examples? Well. The first one is motivation. Gamification can motivate. It can get people to do things that either they really want to do or maybe they're not so sure they want to do, but it's a good idea for them to do it. The second thing is that there are many different areas where motivation is important and where gamification can help. I've given you three different major categories, external, internal and behavior change. And the third one is gamification is not unitary. These examples weren't all the same. They didn't all use the same elements. Not all of them had points, or levels or anything like that. There's a broad range of techniques that can be used in gamification all tied together by general principles of drawing on game elements and game design techniques to solve non-game problems.

 

 

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