Do you alieve?

There are numerous examples of successfully gamified systems and one doesn’t have to look for long to find proof of how gamification can change people’s behaviour. But what is it about this “game layer” that is so exciting and engaging?

A lot of research has been conducted in the subject of games, especially in the digital era with the upcoming of video- and computer games. Scientists have tried to explain the different feelings we experience while gaming. What is it that makes us never want to quit a really good game of tetris? Or what is it that makes us so keen to explore just one more cave in World of Warcraft? And why is it that we can get the same thrill from reaching the top of a high score list in a Donkey Kong arcade game as when we achieve something in real life? Several new concepts and terms have been defined to explain the psychological phenomenons of games. 

Because of their central role in game developing and gamification we aim to point out the most relevant of these terms starting here with alief.

In her article, Alief and Belief, Tamar Szabó Gendler describes a term that explains how non-reality situations, such as games, can have the same effect and trigger the same reactions as real-life situations. Imagine the feeling you get when you find that epic sword in World of Warcraft, grow more crops in Farm Ville or climb the ladder playing Xbox Live. The reward for these things is purely fictive and has very little connection to your situation in real life, and you know that. Still, they trigger the same emotions as if you would achieve something in your real life. Gendler uses horror movies as an example that most people can relate to. When you are watching a horror movie the logical part of your brain knows that you are completely safe sitting at home in your comfortable sofa. Then how come this small frame of moving pictures terrifies you, not just for the moment but shake you up for days? Another good example is the u-shaped glass walkway over the Grand Canyon. Even if the visitors know that it’s perfectly safe they are still hesitant and afraid of walking out on the transparent walkway. In these situations, the illogical and more primitive part of our brain takes over and overrides our common sense. The same thing happens while we’re playing games but in a positive way and that explains the question asked above. This is alief and Gendler gives the fallowing definition:

“A paradigmatic alief is a mental state with associatively linked content that is representational, affective and behavioral, and that is activated—consciously or nonconsciously—by features of the subject’s internal or ambient environment. Aliefs may be either occurrent or dispositional.” 

Creators of all types of media have known, and used, alief for a long time. But it’s only recently this mental state was named and defined. Emotions play a big role in human behaviour and alief has a great effect on human emotions. Thus are games, where alief plays a central role, a powerful tool when it comes to changing human behaviour. 

Case example: Kickstarter.com

There are many examples of how gamification can achieve better results than any ordinary form of the same activity. An interesting example of this is the website Kickstarter.com where would be entrepreneurs can submit their ideas for funding. It contains the same basic model as a venture capital firm - if the venture is promising enough they'll get the appropriate funding, but with a much better framework!

First of all, anyone can invest. And private investors doesn't invest in shares or future profits, they invest in promises of goods or services to come if the venture is successful. The entrepreneur submits their idea, which often is a tangible product, along with a target sum that needs to be raised for the project to start in a given time limit. If the project then manage to hit their target sum within the given time limit, the business is started and the investors gets the promised rewards (which often is the product the company is built upon). But if the the project doesn't hit its target for funding, everyone gets their money back and nothing is produced.

This is quite brilliant, through progress bars and social cooperation they make the entrepreneurs goal everyone's goal.  If the target is reached, then everyone wins. If it isn't, well then nothing is lost. There are many success stories that originates from Kickstarter.com. There is everything from the independent film Rise and Shine: The Jay DeMerit Story which managed to raise over $220 000 to the new model of an iPhone dock that managed to raise the quite staggering amount of $1 464 000 - just through crowdsourcing and the ingenious use of game-design mechanisms.

This is just one example of what is coming. The future is games.

In-game motivation

We have reached a point in our work where we've covered the general background and concepts of gamification. It's time to dig into the psychological aspects behind the obviously successful mechanisms of games. 

People are different and are experiencing things differently. What triggers certain emotions and behaviours for one person might have an entirely different effect on another. Thus, to successfully develop a game for a given audience you need to be aware of what type of gamers who are going to use it. Some people play games solely to compete, some to explore a new virtual world and others to meet and interact with other gamers. When games, as in this case, intend to change people’s behaviours to fit a clear purpose (increase awareness of the consulting model, increase motivation, etc.) it’s vital to get the right input from the future gamers themselves. Failing to design the game accordingly might be fatal. A highly competitive game, for example, might be demotivating for non-competitive employees and end up being contra-productive. 

One of the first researchers to analyse the ethnography of online game players was Richard Bartle. Bartle is one of the co-developers of the first MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), MUD1 in 1978. MUD1 is the first digitally created virtual world and one of the first games that could be played more freely. Thus, the game experience was depending on the gamer. Bartle tried to categorise players after how they experienced and acted in different parts of the game.  What he came up with was a chart where players could be ploted after in-game behaviour and four main categories were identified; killers, achievers, socialisers and explorers. These four main categories are still well-known and recognised. 

                                   ACTING

                  Killers            |                  Achievers

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                                     |

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          PLAYERS -------------------+------------------- WORLD

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                                     |

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                  Socialisers        |                  Explorers

                                INTERACTING

But attempts to understand human motivation has been made long before Bartle and the theories of motivation differ widely. Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, claimed that there is only one driver for human behaviour; sex. Even though many psychologists acknowledged sex as a big motivator they wanted to expand the list. Freud’s student Carl Jung, for example, thought that our biggest driver is a general will to live. Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence made their own model of human incentives to explain behaviour. Instead of motivators they discussed different learned and unlearned drivers such as the drive eat and how these drivers ad up differently for people forming different motivators. B.F Skinner (1904-1990) went against the stream and urged his fellow psychologists to see to the individual. He claimed that since there are no scientific ways to establish human motivators they couldn’t be generalised for everyone. He concluded that you have to ask each individual to extract his or her motivators. Another famous contribution was made by Abraham Maslow in 1943 when his presented the article “A Theory of Human Motivation”. Maslow identifies five major needs; self-actualisation, esteem, love/belonging, safety and psychological needs. He also claimed that even if these needs do co-exist, people prioritise between them in a certain order.

Steven Reiss, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the Ohio State University, USA, have a slightly different approach, compared to Bartle, in his book "Who Am I". Reiss doesn't attempt to group people. Instead he  tries to identify a set of motivators, or desires, and claims that you can learn a lot about an individual by having them grading each of these desires.  An important point is that he tries to do so by empirical studies, which is surprisingly rare. Most of the theories in the area lack sufficient scientific evidence. Reiss came up with 328 goals and had 401 participants rate each goal after importance. They had a computer try the many thousand different combinations possible for making the categories and did this for 10 to 20 categories. The goal was to optimise the number of categories to capture as many of the 328 goals as possible but at the same time have a complexity that was reasonable. The result was 16 categories. If less were used some important goals would be excluded and with more, the complexity would be too great. These 16 categories of root meaning, or motivators, forms the base of his book “Who Am I” and are used as Reiss tries to explain human behaviour.

These are the 16 motivators:

• Power - the desire to influence others
• Independence - the desire for self-reliance
• Curiosity - the desire for knowledge
• Acceptance - The desire for inclusion
• Order- the desire for organisation
• Saving - the desire for collect things
• Honour - The desire to be loyal to one's parents and heritage
• Idealism - the desire for social justice
• Social contact - the desire for social companionship
• Family - the desire to raise one's own children
• Status - the desire for social standing
• Vengeance - the desire to get even
• Romance - the desire for sex and beauty
• Eating - the desire to consume food
• Physical activity - the desire to exercise our muscles
• Tranquility - the desire for emotional calm

In this thesis we aim to produce a well-designed custom made gamification system for CyberCom. We will therefor continue our research about how we can analyse people's motivation and try to find ways to translate those motivators to proper game mechanisms.

Stay in the game!

Can we gamify the writing of our master thesis?

As we're looking deeper into gamification and getting used to the concept, we cannot fail to see all the brilliant ideas out there; it's the chorewars.com who makes role-playing out of cleaning, there's the fitocracy.com who gamifies training and the NaNoWriMo that gamifies the act of writing, among a lot of other excellent ventures.

(courtesy of xkcd.com)

But maybe more importantly, it gives us the insight that almost anything can be turned into a game. Some companies are now looking into making traveling into a game, to enhance the experience and to motivate travellers to explore even more. But why aren't anyone trying to make a game out of public transportation to motivate urban citizens to leave their car at home?

Or why not realize our "thought of the day" (we try to keep it down to one new thought each day, otherwise things get complicated) -  why aren't we gamifying the writing of our master thesis? We've always found it hard to begin writing an academic paper (and I'm fairly sure we're not alone in that particular problem). A big project like a thesis could certainly make use of some fun and friendly competition. The only problem with this is how to measure writing progress in a good way. How do we know who's winning? The other mechanisms of a game, like rewards and feedback we could handly fairly easily. 

If (when?) we figure out how to gamify our thesis we'll post it here. In the mean time, start using some of the excellent games out there. And remember, this is just the beginning. Soon there'll be games out of everything. And we'll probably not even notice when it happens.

People are bored!

In our current research we came across an interesting and motivating presentetation by Aaron Dignan, author of the book Game Frame: Using Games as a Strategy for Success. Aaron made a simple observation; people are bored. Especially at work. The cashier at your local food mart is a good example. The job was fun the first two weeks when everything was new and you learned something each day, developing new skills and met new people; how does the cashier machine work?, where does this go?, which people do I like to hang out with?  But when you start to get a hang of it and every part of the job is "explored" it gets dull. You need to learn and evolve to stay satisfied.

He identified a group of people who almost never are bored; people playing games. Games are extrodinary good at stimulating the "wanting"-behaviour that makes you want to keep going for a little longer just to gain one more level, to try to fire that angry bird just one more time or to watch just one more episode of your favourite tv-show. And that's a behaviour that you rarely see stimulated at work. Aaron argues that play is natures learning engine and the human being is therefor programmed to enjoy games and that's why games are so addictive, skill-building and why we feel stimulated while playing.

Then what can be turned into a game? According to Aaron a game can simply be described as an activity where you use some kind of skill and get a certain output. If the activity can be learned, measured and if feedback can be provided in a timely fashion that activity can be gamified. And that's it. That's the only criteria for turning something into a game; to make it fun, skill-building and exciting.


We recommend you to take a look at the whole presentation!

http://the99percent.com/videos/7091/Aaron-Dignan-How-to-Use-Games-to-Excel-at-Life-and-Work
 

The opposite of work isn't play. It's depression.

There's the popular saying that "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". That's just plain wrong. Studies has actually shown that people are at their happiest when doing hard work at the borders of their skill level. We need to be challenged and receive continuous feedback on our work, otherwise we'll be bored. Most of the relaxing activities that we like to do on our spare time, like watching TV, are actually mildly depressing. Persons are generally less happy, less motivated and less confident after a couple of hours in front of the TV.

So hard work makes us happy. But what's the right work? We all know that depressing feeling at work when you want nothing else than just get to the couch and leave work and stress behind. That's because companies often fail to continuously challenge their employees at the right level in a structured way, and without giving them frequent feedback. Think of the classic picture of the scientist that can't be bothered with anything else while he's immersed in developing a new product in the lab. He forgets everything else, including food, other people, and personal hygiene. That's a man who's challenged to his limits and is extremely motivated in his work. But you don't generally see that in ordinary working places, which is a pity.

A place when you do see that level of commitment and motivation however, is with gamers in front of the computer screen. Gamers are willing to put up with hard work to achieve the game goals, hours upon hours is often poured into a game.  That's because games are structured challenges, designed to make you use your skills while giving you frequent feedback on how you're doing. Gamers are highly motivated. Below is a picture of a gamer about to achieve an epic win, that means he achieve's something that he thought was almost impossible through hours of hard work. How often do you see that in a work place situation?

This is the heart of gamification. We need to use the knowledge that we have in designing games and apply them on everyday situations to make life and work more engaging. Otherwise we'll continue to feel under-motivated, under-utilized and frankly quite bored in many work-related situations.

Read more about this in Jane McGonigall's book "Reality is broken".

We're all gamers

They say that time is our new currency. And who would disagree that spare time is becoming more rare in our increasingly intensive lives? Then why are people willing to daily spend hours of this precious time killing green pigs with blue and red birds with no deep or fulfilling meaning? Or why do people spend more time building their avatar in world of Warcraft than being out in the world meeting new people, working and building their actual life? Such questions have started a new movement and what some people think will be the new big thing after the explosion of social networks: Gamification. Cybercom has recognised the potential of games and the effect they have on peoples behaviour and assigned us to do our master thesis on the subject.

To fulfill the purpose of this master thesis we are starting of by doing a thorough  research about gamification, trying to get an overview of the concept. As we dig deeper into the subject we are constantly finding new, interesting and inspiring angles and information that we are going to post on this blog along with updates on our own work.

We recommend this video to get an inspiring introduction to the subject. Even if she sometimes tends to get a bit carried away we believe that she got some good points!

Skeptical? Here are some facts worth thinking about:

- Since the beginning of 2005, has gamers all over the world spent 5.93 million years of total game-hours playing World of warcraft. That's on avarage 0.74 million hours a year. To put this figure in perspective we can compare it to how many hours the swedish population are working annually. Roughly calculated that is around 1,6 million years.

- There are over 250,000 articles in the world of warcraft wiki, making it the second biggest wiki in the world.

- If you grew up in the UK and are 21 years old you already spent, in average, 10,000 hours gaming.

- In the US 215,000,000 hours in average are spent gaming annually.

- The average age of the most common game buyers is 41.

Introductions

So, starting of a blog without sounding pretentious. Well, we can at least begin by introducing ourselves and what we do.

We are two students at the MSc in Industrial engineering and management at Lunds Tekniska Högskola (a part of Lund University) who are writing our master thesis for Cybercom.

The purpose of this blog is to share what we're doing with the stakeholders of the thesis, to have a backlog of our work and, in the best of worlds, receive feedback, links and ideas.

The first part of the 21th century was the time of connecting online through social media. Now it's time to add the game layer.