Actionable Gamification
Yu-Kai Chou
“Gamification is the craft of deriving fun and engaging elements found typically in games and thoughtfully applying them to real-world or productive activities.
What I like
The book indeed feels actionable. I love the examples the author includes and the taxonomy that Octalysis introduces
I like how a lot of psychological principles of influence have been reframed in the lense of game design, it was a nice refresher on things like “endowment” and “scarcity” effect, or the “Alfred” effect
Each chapter felt salient and powerful, with ideas that assimilated together into more powerful ideas by the end of the book. It was easy to understand how all of the ideas come together to form the author’s framework and how to use it
What’s missing
It’s about 500 pages long, but by no means boring. I think a condensed version or playbook would be helpful
Some of the content feels like recycled ideas, which is to say, that the book isn’t entirely novel. For example, “human-focused design” is just “human-centered design” with a new label
Sometimes a bit pushy with self-promo (e.g. go to my site, xyz) especially near the end of the book when the author discourage readers to practice Octalysis without obtaining a certificate from their website.
Key Topics
Gamification, product design, motivation, behavior change, bias
Review
Gamification has always been interesting to me because of the combination of game design and product design patterns. As someone with way too many hours playing DotA among other games, I’ve always been fascinated by game design. Frankly I was addicted to games for a long time in my life which took a while to break away from, and this book helped me understand some of the reasons why. As someone with a Psychology degree and who has read a lot of design and psychology books, I wouldn’t say that this book is novel. It’s more of a collection of existing ideas wrapped with a framework to help make experiences more enjoyable and game-like.
This book dives deep into the subject and aligns game design techniques with psychological principles that have guided user experience design for decades, primarily “behavioral design”, a field of design that was exploited by B.J. Fogg to understand what exactly motivates people to do things through the lens of digital products or services in order to drive more engagement with digital products. The author, Yu-Kai Chou has composed a book here with deep insights that dive deep into the meaning behind gamification by creating an faceted framework for applying gamification design techniques to improve the design of digital systems. This framework of his is called Octalysis and it is broken out between “right hemisphere”, “left hemisphere”, “black hat”, and “white hat” techniques. I won’t dive into what all four of these things mean, but the gist is that each of these 8 facets can mix and mingle to create a more engaging experience, and some are more ethical than others.
As the author states, people choose to play games, and switch games. You can’t say that about everything in life. The fact is, people enjoy them- games are designed to be fun. But what is “fun”? I like Gabe Newell’s definition which is that fun is the degree to which the game recognizes and responds to the player’s actions (source). So how do you make something boring like doing taxes fun? If you know me, I’m a huge fan of Turbo Tax because it is a great example of taking something extremely boring and complex and making it simple for most people to do, and less expensive, than a personal CPA. It’s, in my opinion, one of the best user experiences in digital product design. You can apply the author’s framework to Turbo Tax and see that it scores pretty well.
Here’s a rough, napkin-sketch, Octalysis for TurboTax:
Meaning: Not sure if there’s anything to “Epic” about doing taxes (unless you’re so patriotic that you just love paying the government) so this score must be pretty low.
Empowerment: Every action taken within TurboTax is the user’s choice, and they do a great job of preserving autonomy throughout the process. This score is pretty high.
Social Influence: Turbo Tax surfaces information about how much others have saved. It will also connect you with a real CPA for free to help you along the way should you need their help. This score is in the medium zone I presume.
Unpredictablilty: Turbo Tax keeps people guessing what their return will be, and surfaces hints throughout the experience. This score is pretty high.
Avoidance: TurboTax suggests ways to help improve your return. Nobody wants to lose money that they could otherwise get back from the government. This score is pretty high.
Scarcity: Not sure if there’s anything scarce about TurboTax, but they do offer some discounts. This score must be pretty low.
Ownership: TurboTax constantly reminds users that it’s their return. It also saves your previous returns so that when you come back next year, all of your information is there. There isn’t too much customization or anything that lets people express themselves however, so this must be a medium score.
Accomplishment: This one is the big one for Turbo Tax. The goal of getting to the return at the end has a huge pay-off when the return is finally revealed. The app congratulates and encourages you each step of the way, so this score must be pretty high.
Those are the facets of Octalysis above, and you can apply them to practically any experience. Chou’s book provides a more comprehensive method for scoring these facets and communicating the results. So please check it out if you’re interested.
If you are interested in Gamification I highly recommend this book, I don’t think there’s anything else out there that is this comprehensive. It’s a long book at approximately 500 pages, but each chapter feels salient enough to come back to as a useful resource.
Learnings
Gamification is the process of applying game design principals to the design of products. A bad game designer will typically borrow successful elements from other games to create an experience, while a good game designer will focus on a feeling they want to elicit from a player and then design the game around that.
There are 8 core drives of gamification and hence motivation, without any one of these drivers, users will not be motivated to engage in a behavior.
Gamification is either done explicitly or implicitly, explicit gamification involves creating a real game to suit a product, lifestyle behavior, workplace, or marketing. Implicit involves applying principles of game design to a product, lifestyle, market or workplace.
Epic calling and meaning is the first driver in the Octalysis framework for gamification. It is a design technique where you are aligning your product with a users desire to be part of something more or to stand against the status quo.
Progress helps users fee like they are making a path towards goals, and that their actions progress them towards something. Helping users feel a sense of accomplishment or progress can be done by providing feedback from the system when they take a meaningful action.
Products can be further gamified in a way that is ethical, provides intrinsic motivation, and also highly difficult, by empowering users to express themselves meaningfully and creatively.
The balance that designers need to strike with meaningful choices and creative empowerment, is to make users feel like they are making a choice that is meaningful, even if it truly doesn’t effect the outcomes.
As designers we can place small commitments up front of an experience, such as signing a petition which has no cost, and then ask for something else sometimes weeks later. This is called “priming”. We can add to this feeling of connection to something by building ownership with things we assign ourselves to as well. For example, if the thing we are priming for asks us to place something in our home.
There are a couple of effects related to ownership and customization of things. The first is the monitoring effect which means that the more time we spend monitoring something, the more we become attached to it. The second is the Alfred Effect which means that the more a product becomes personalized to us, the more attached we become to it.
Games and products can engage users through social connectedness, allowing them to engage with other users and align their decision making with what others are doing successfully.
Scarcity is another principle of gamification whereby people place irrational value on something because it is rare or difficult to obtain. People will also value things that are higher price as more scarce.
Unpredictability and curiosity is another tenet of gamification whereby we are drawn in by the allure of an unpredictable reward. This is sometimes referred to as variable reward and the research of B.F. Skinner, and is part of what makes things like slot machines and loot boxes so alluring. The small chance of an incredible reward can make the idea of a small time commitment more palatable.
Loss avoidance is another quality of gamification which leads to motivation as driven by fear of loss. This is true even for when people have a very small odds of actually gaining something (which is the same as losing something if no chance is taken at all).
Companies can leverage both white hat gamification design and black hat gamification to create different experiences for customers. White hat game design ultimately makes people feel better about making decisions.
The difference between a game and the real world is that people choose to play a game, and can choose to stop playing and play another. That’s why games with good balance tend to outperform those that don’t, even if they are practically the same game.