Case example: Curing Malaria

Identifying malaria infected cells is time consuming and are done by a highlt educated doctor with the use of a microscope. In other words; a perfect task to gamify! That's exactly was UCLA has done in their new test project where they let gamers (with no relevant education) tries to solve the problem. The answers are combined in an advanced algorithm which make the end result more accurate.

To read more and try for yourself follow the link below!

http://biogames.ee.ucla.edu/

Changing behaviour

In our two previous posts, we have been focusing on our thoughts regarding the design and choice of game mechanics for Cybercom; what to avoid and what to focus on. In this post however, we are going to rewind a bit and discuss another angle of why game mechanics are so effective in changing behaviour. Micheal Wu has presented a series of great articles on his blog where he explains gamification by connecting BJ Fogg's Behavioural Model with game mechanics. We're going to give a brief summery of his conclusions.

BJ Fogg's behavioural model (FBM)

Dr. BJ Fogg (Stanford University) has developed a behavioural model which describes three elements that are necessary for behavioural change to occur. These are Motivation, Ability and Trigger. The model is intended to serve as a guide for designers to identify what stops people from performing the behaviour that the designer intends. It is also an attempt to bring clarity and structure to the subject of behaviour which is fuzzy and overflowed with a fuzzy mass of theories. First we're going to give a very brief description of the three elements.

Motivation

There are tons of theories on what drives and motivates people. For the sake of understanding the model however, there is no need to dig deeper into where motivation comes from (even if it, of course, is important when designing a game). Motivation can basically be translated to someone’s willingness to perform an action.

Ability

In short, ability measures how much effort, or how much resistance one has to overcome, to perform a given action. It might mean that you need a certain skill but might also refer to the resources that are needed, such as time, money, etc. Fogg sometimes uses the term simplicity to describe this element. 

Trigger

Even if one has sufficient motivation and ability for a new behaviour to take place, it doesn't. Often a trigger is needed; something that says: now it's a great time to do this! A good trigger however, is not only a reminder but contains elements that increases ability or motivation and thus increases the chances of a behaviour to happen. For example, a trigger can be a message saying that you get something extra by doing the behaviour right now or include something that makes it easier to do (facebook's friend-finder function, which makes it easy to connect with friends with only one click, is a good example).

The three elements together

A central conclusion in the theory is that when the three elements occur at the same time the target person's behaviour will change, i.e. when motivation and ability is high enough and the behaviour is triggered. The line in the model (shown above) illustrates the activation threshold which marks the crossing which the person has to be above to be willing to change his or her behaviour. It clearly shows that if the motivation is low, ability must be high and vice versa.

Connecting the model with gamifcation

PhD Michael Wu at Lithium Technologies uses Fogg’s model to describe how game mechanics effectively can change a person’s behaviour. He compares games with social media which has proven very effective when it comes to creating new routines in people’s lives (how often do you log in to facebook?). They do so by playing on people’s motivation to connect with others, making it really easy to do so and by using triggers (facebook uses notifications, emails, etc.). In his comparison, Wu concludes that games are far superior to social media when it comes to changing someone’s behaviour since games offer various ways to increase all three elements, which can’t be done by social media alone.

“Well designed games are able to solve complementary (and relatively much harder) problems than social networks do. If used properly, gamification is able to drive long term engagement and persistent actions reliably.” (Micheal Wu)

The use of game mechanics is simply a great way to push a person over the activation threshold and is there for very effective. The gamification system that has been designed in this thesis serves as an example on how all three elements can be used; the game mechanics aim to increase motivation by doing the consultancy model more fun, to increase ability by illustrating the consultancy model in a clear way and by providing effective and timely triggers. 

We believe that these theories are important to keep in mind when designing game mechanics. One needs to balance motivation with ability, come up with smart triggers and have good timing with all the elements in order to create a greate gamified system!

To read more about Wu and Fogg's theories please see the following links:

http://www.behaviormodel.org/

http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Building-Community-the-Platform/Gamification-from-a-Company-of-Pro-Gamers/ba-p/19258

Keep gaming! 

 

What activities should be gamified?

There are many theories on which components that makes a game and even if they may differ widely they usually point out one thing; the need of a good feedback system. A short feedback loop is often one of the biggest differences between games and reality and one of the main reasons that games are so engaging.

But on which activities or achievements should we give feedback and how should that feedback be presented? When talking about gamifying a consultancy model, which have clear steps and sub-goals to reach the next level, it might at first be obvious to simply give feedback when you achieve on of those goals; e.g. get a badge or points and see how you are getting closer to the next consultancy level with a progress bar. However, career progress can't be generically generated. In the end such decisions are always made after a manual assessment and a dialog with the affected indiviudals (manager and employee). There is no way to remove the human factor. This means that in a system where the feedback is based purely on professional performance, one will only receive feedback when the manager is giving it. In the best of worlds, such evaluations can be given frequently, but in reality it's not. The feedback loop will simply be too long for a successful game.

We simply needed something else to base our feedback on and to "keep the score" in our game. When realising that the bottom line of assessing the performance is dialog we started to think of ways to facilitate better commincation and focus the game on helping both parties to be more prepared for the assessment meetings. Personal developing meetings are held one, or in some cases two, times a year and the main input is the consultants personal log. After some research however, we found that the log is often ignored in between the meetings and that common practice is to, in the last minute, try to remember what you have done the past year. So we decided to make updating the log the central activity. A big advantage is that we can easily design game mechanics that generically provide direct feedback based on this activity.

Direct feedback from the system itself is not the only advantage. As we have already concluded; tayloring the game layer to fit our specific audience is vital. In our previous post we showed how status isn't something that is important to the employees at Cybercom. Comparision of performance between consultants might therefor not be motivating. On the contrary, there is a risk that it's only demotivating for the the people who, for different reasons, aren't performing well at the moment. However, we do believe that social interaction within the game is a great way to increase communication in the company and an additional way for the player to receive feedback from his or her co-workers. Again we think that the individual log should have a central role by setting up a system where one can comment on each other's posts in some way. That's not only good for the log writer who gets recognition, it's also a way to raise awareness of in-house competencies and a way to enhance the spreading of knowledge within the organisation. As we are struggling with the issue of what level of transparency that is fitting we also see the number of log updates as a delicate way for the consultants to compete by implementing a leader board.

Designing an experience

As we covered earlier, there are almost an infinite number of game mechanisms that a game designer could include in a gamified product. However, they must be tailor-made for the specific players (or users) of the system.

We are now at the point where we need to figure out what to include and what to avoid in our proposed system, with guidance from a survey about motivators and interviews. One interesting fact that we've discovered is that people at this workplace are not motivated by gaining status, actually quite the contrary. Instead, there are many other goals that people want to achieve than the feeling of being professionally superior to their collegues.

This has some implications for our design. Can we really use some kind of leaderboard if people are not seeking status? We have been discussing this quite intensively, both during interviews and with others in the company, and decided that we probably can. But in a different way than we thought initially.

Statistics has the great feature that one can show almost anything depending on what you measure. A good example was provided by Gabe Zichermann in his book Gamification by design (which by the way is a great read) about how to use a leaderboard in a gym. If the gym wants to implement a leaderboard-system to engage people to work out more, they can't really measure people's weight change or how much they could lift - that would probably demotivate new entrants to the gym. But they could design a leaderboard on how often they visit the gym, it still serves the same purpose but without measuring anything personal or sensitive.

By the same reasoning, why couldn't we use a leaderboard to picture how often players use the system or log an activity? And the leaderboard could also have dimensions, it may not be optimal for it to just show the top-20 users in the country. It could be cut to show a local leaderboard, a project-based leaderboard, a friend-based leaderboard or similar. In this way we hope that we can remove the" all-too-serious-and-not-so-fun-and-motivating"-feeling from a leaderboard mechanism, and make it a fun and engaging addition to the system.

What do you think?

Game Dynamics

If you're interested in games and gamifcation and have a few minutes to spare, take a look at this inspirational presentation by Seth Priebatsch.

http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html

We came across this list of SCVNGR's game mechanics that can be combined to create new and exciting games. Seth mentions four of them in his presentation but here you get to take a look at all of them! Anyone who attempts to engage people through gamification should check it out to be inspired!

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/scvngr-game-mechanics/

Keep gaming.

How to Gamify Cybercom?

Ok, now we have covered the inspirational part of gamification; why it works, some psychology behind it and shown some examples of how effectivly it can affect people's behaviour. And even if we are going to continue posting interesting theory and thoughts on the subject of the gamification we now want to share how we plan to achieve a successful gamification of the consultancy model at Cybercom.

(We are sorry for the Word 2000-feel of the model)

This is a modelling of the method we are using. The red boxes represents important deliverables, the green boxes represents our imperical studies and the blue boxes represents analysis of our results. 

The development of the gamification system is divided into three major steps illustrated by the arrows to the right; Empirics, analysis and verification/validation. The first part of the project, before the actual development started, was the research and theory phase. The downward arrow to the left shows how the results of theory study influences every part of the gamification system development.

In short, the method includes the following steps: Finding out what motivates the consultants at Cybercom, turning these motivators into things people find engaging and fun and combine that result with clearly identified barriers that we intend to overcome with the gamification system. Finally, a selection of suiting game mechanics will then be derived from that combination.

The Survey

The survey is based on Steven Reiss' theory about the 16 motivators and we have used the survey he presented to establish a general motivation profile for the employees at Cybercom. 

Focus Groups and Interviews

This part of the imperical study are meant to identify what exactly the barriers are that the gamification system intends to overcome. The purpose is to increase the awareness and use of the consultant model, what hinders usage of it today?

Workshop

The workshops intend to serve as a way to verify and vaildate the game dynamics and mechanisms that we have come up with. Is it feasable?, is it reasonable?, are they engaging? These are some of the questions that need answers. This phase will be iterated until we have a accomplished gamification system.

We our currently analysing the results from the survey which has provided interesting input on people's motivations at Cybercom. The next step is preparing for interviews and brainstorming different suitable game mechanics.

Keep Gaming!

Case: Chorewars

A good example of how games can make something as dull as chores fun is chorewars.com. Here you get to create an avatar starting at level 0 with a set of skills. As you complete chore adventures (you specify the adventures yourself as well as the monster you can encounter and the loot to find) you will gain exp and improve different skills. Your avatar can be compared to the others in your household to see who is the choreking!