Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. This course will teach you the mechanisms of gamification, why it has such tremendous potential, and how to use it effectively. For additional information on the concepts described in the course, you can purchase Professor Werbach's book For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business in print or ebook format in several languages.
7.5 Fun and Tools
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Gamification
ratings
From the lesson
Design
Gamification done well is a form of design. This module describes the design process, and provides a six-step framework to apply to any gamification project. The second lesson identifies important considerations and options for developing creative, human-centered, thoughtful gamification solutions.
Meet the Instructors
Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
The final elements of my gamification design frame work
are don't forge the fun and deploy the appropriate tools.
Now, you might think that it should be obvious that
gamified systems are fun, but it turns out that when
people start to go down the path of building a
game of fight system, they often lose sight of that objective.
Especially if it's a system that is of
the PBL variety, where you're focused more on the
kind of behaviorist loops of motivating certain action
and certain responses to stimuli feedback that people get.
It's easy to forget that the point here or at least one
of the key points here, is that this is something game like.
This is something that people get pulled into because it feels somehow enjoyable.
And what I found in teaching students about gamification and asking them to come
up with gamification examples, is that very often they lose sight of that.
Very often I have to say, well why would someone want to do this?
Is this really fun?
Can you think about ways to make this
concept that you've come up with more engaging?
More involving puzzles and problems and surprise and delight
and all of those things that we associate with fun.
So this is something that I would encourage all of you to focus
on as well, when you do your gamification design project for this course.
Keep in mind that fun is important.
Now what's fun?
Well we've talked about this a lot, and it's certainly not the case that PBLs are
not necessarily fun, that there's nothing fun in
badges or there is nothing fun in rewards.
The challenge is making sure that those things are deployed
if you're going to use them, in a way that
actually unleashes some of those different characteristics or versions of
fun that I talked about earlier on in the course.
So, for example, here is the Samsung Nation
site which I have used a few times before.
And this introductory paragraph is where they describe to you why this is something
exciting, and it's exciting I guess because
they say it's an exciting social loyalty program.
You earn badges, move up in the ranks
and have fun discovering everything Samsung.com has to offer.
Now, the question is whether that's really something fun and I'm not saying
this to make fun, if you will, [LAUGH] of Samsung or anyone else.
But to pose the question whether this gamified site really focused
in on what aspects of the process are engaging for the user.
Maybe they designed a system that was effective in terms
of designing rewards using some of the techniques that I've described.
And coming up with a platform for people who happen to feel
motivated from the opportunity to earn badges and points and so forth.
But if the activity underlying it isn't something fun and engaging,
then there is an ultimate challenge in making the site effective.
And making it effective for a broad group of people, as opposed to that relatively
self-selected group, who respond more eagerly to these
kinds of addictive elements of PBL type systems.
And again, I'm not privy to what the designers of
Samsung Nation were thinking, or what kind of response they've gotten
to this service, but I think it's important to go beyond
just assuming that the activity is fun in and of itself.
If Samsung.com's website were interesting enough by itself,
they might need some of these game mechanics.
And the point here though, is that fun can be anywhere.
So think about whether Samsung Nation's site has that element
of fun in it somewhere, and think about some other sites.
So for example fitocracy.
I mentioned earlier.
Is about using the same kinds of PBL mechanics to get people to exercise.
And this is a site that really seems
to have a strong commitment to making things fun.
If you just look at the site, woohoo, and you look at all of the messages here.
Here's how fitness can be fun.
You look at the graphics which are kind of fun.
You look at the different kinds of
messages, the, the way that they've designed things.
The little images, the graphics, the discussion among people.
It all seems to be built around this notion reinforced time
and time again, that working out is great, it's exciting, it's awesome.
And you are awesome for going down this path of using a site like Fitocracy and
finding groups of people to work with, and leveling up and so forth.
So, this is a site that at least seems
committed to the notion that what they're doing is fun.
And again, there's no abstract reason why exercise has to be fun or not.
But it's important to at least go down that path
of thinking about where the fun is in the activity.
Remember this, the LinkedIn progress bar?
Where's the fun in that?
Well, there is some fun in getting feedback, knowing how far
you are and knowing that you're most of the way there.
There is some fun in knowing incrementally that you only
have a little bit more to get to the next level.
Is is, this is not a kind of deep meaningful life changing fun.
It's just a light weight bit of amusement and engagement on
top of a fairly mechanical process of filling out your profile.
For that activity, that may be enough fun and in fact
Linkedln saw real and substantial results with that level of fun.
So, fun is always important to think about.
But the kind of fun, and the magnitude of the fun,
always has to be considered in light of what the application is.
Here's one more.
Lest you think that fun has to be about something lightweight and
goofy, this is Folded, which I'll discuss more later on in the course.
Folded is an application developed by some scientist at the
University of Washington, and they are researchers on protein folding.
The three-dimensional structure that protein molecules fold into, determines
the effect that those proteins have in the body.
So, we can know the chemical composition, but if we don't know
the 3D folding structure, we don't know whether a protein will have
desired effects for example in a a vaccine or other drug, and
it turns out that 3D protein folding is a monstrously difficult problem.
Even our most powerful super computers take huge amounts of time to calculate
all the different potential 3D shapes of all the molecules in a protein.
But guess what?
3D shapes of protein folding look like a pattern that if it's designed
in a good way with a good interface, people like to play around with.
And so these researchers figured out a way to create a game, or a game
like system where people get scores for finding
the best possible folding pattern for certain proteins.
And this system has been spectacularly successful getting people voluntarily
just for fun to go and play around with these proteins, and they have come up
with a number of significant break through figuring out the 3D protein folding shape
of molecules that are relevant in things like finding vaccines for HIV/AIDS.
So real advances in a very serious
cause medicine, based around making this process fun.
It's not that you have to read a
whole lot about organic chemistry and microbiology and proteins.
What you get is a game-like puzzle and that ties in to the larger process.
Recall that relatedness is an important aspect
of intrinsic motivation under self determination theory.
Helping find a cure for AIDS is about as meaningful a thing as one could imagine.
So this is a good example of leveraging
fun in different ways for a very serious challenge.
The final step in the design process is to deploy.
And the key in deploying is to use the right tools.
I've given you a pretty extensive tool kit, a range of different
game elements there were 30 of them that I listed in that
unit in the course and we've also talked about different kinds of
fun, different kinds of game design
techniques, different kinds of design rules.
The point there is to illustrate the richness of
the palate that a gamification designer has to work with.
And all the examples that I've been giving
are trying to illustrate that while the PBL
style gamification examples are real and can be
successful and can have volatility if they're designed right.
There' s also a lot more possible beyond that.
So, the final step in gamifaction design.
Once you've gone through the other steps, and it's expressly last because
you can't do the design until you've asked all the right right questions.
But once you've asked all those questions and come up with at least
provisional answers, you need to sit down and think about all the different
options and the different techniques and tools that can be used and pick
the ones that seem best and most appropriate for the challenge at hand.
And then iterate and play test and iterate again, and keep
improving the system to get something that works for real people.
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