HOW DOES THE APP GET BETTER THE MORE YOU USE IT??
** Highlight whats important and then
What is gamification?
Learning from games and what makes games so engaging and what games can do.
- The use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game context

Why Gamify?
- To close an engagement gap
- Choices/variety. If an app is very unitary then people don’t engage to it as much.
- Progression. E.g. If checking in the app the first time feels like checking in the 60th time, then users won’t have much motivation to come back.
- Social: I want to come back to engage with my friends
- Thus creating a Habit
Think like a Game Designer:
- Consumers -> Players
- Players are the centre of a game
- The game revolves around the player
- Plays feel a sense of control, choices/variety
- Choices that have impact and meaning
- Players play
- Free motion in constraint.
- Goal:
- Get players to play the game and keep them playing
Game Rules:
- Journey:
- Onboarding: getting the user in the game
- Scaffolding: providing training wheels, so that users don’t get stuck in the middle of the game
- Plants vs Zombies example
- Guides
- Highlighting
- Feedback
- Limited option when starting out
- Make sure that it’s IMPOSSIBLE to fail at this point
- Feel like achieving something (lead to pathway to mastery)
- Pathway to mastery: make sure that the user made some achievements and learn some real skill
- Balance
- Make sure that values/rules in the game are balanced so that it’s still fun to play
- E.g. monopoly, if one of the boardwalks cost 2x as much to buy, it’s going to make the game imbalanced
- Design levels to be not too hard/too easy
- Experience
- Make the experience fun, not just doing the task
Fun:
Making things fun:
- Winning
- v.s. Triumphing (you win, someone else lose)
- Problem solving
- Exploring, finding something new
- Chilling out, just enjoying the experience
- Teamwork
- Recognition
- Collecting
- Surprise
- Imagination: thinking of ideas
- Sharing: people feel good about charity
- Role Playing
- Customization: making something your own
- Goofing off: exploring the opportunity to just be silly.
- Anatomy of Fun:
- Easy fun: chilling out, not hectic
- Had fun: mastery/completion/overcoming obstacles/problem solving
- Social fun
- Serious fun: fun in doing things that are meaningful (e.g. personal development, saving the planet)
- E.g. Collecting badges
- Another framework: 8 types of fun: https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/434/game-design-8-kinds-of-fun
Game Elements: elements alone are not the game. You need to look at how to design
- Things that make up the game (e.g. avatars, levels, points…)
- Dynamics (the grammar): the big picture, implicit rules and conceptual elements
- Constraints
- Emotions
- Narrative
- Progression
- Relationships
- Mechanics (the verbs): actions that move the user forward from one state to next
- Challenges
- Chance/Luck
- Competition
- Cooperation
- Feedback
- Resource Acquisition: collecting coins etc
- Rewards
- Transaction
- Turns
- Win States
- Components (the nouns): elements we use to do higher level things like mechanics and dynamics.
- Achievements
- Avatars
- Boss fights
- Collections
- Combat
- Content Unlocking
- Gifting
- Levels
- Quests
- Social Graph
- Teams
- Virtual Goods
- Points: keeping score, 100 pts vs 5000 pts
- Keep score and determine win states
- Connect to rewards
- Provide feedback real time
- Display progress
- Fungible: points are a currency to create a system where one action can be equivalent to another action (e.g. leverage that to saying going on a quest is equivalent to watching an ad)
- Leaderboards
- Feedback on competition, relative to other players
- Might demotivate, try friend relative leaderboards
- Badges
- PBL: most popular triad
- Representation of achievement
- Flexible element, can represent anything and motivate any behavior
- Signalling what is mportance in the game
- Credentials: here is what I’ve done, so everyone can see (similar to diploma)
- Collection: show progress of filling up trophy case

Rewards are not always fun
Fun is not always rewarding
Cookie cutter experience: if I just earned badges from another app, I don’t want to do the same thing on this one, burnout.
Limitations of the Element-Only Approach
Elements don’t solely make up the game. What happens when you try to gamify an experience by only using elements?
Bad example: Google news let users earn badges depending on what you read (read sports news, get a sports badge). However, not compelling. Why would user get rewarded on just reading a basketball article? Then it’s not really an reward, and not really motivating me to do anything else. Doesn’t drive any real value.
- Meaningful choices: if the choice is not something that requires the user to make an active choice, then engaging to the user.
- Puzzles: not the same as challenges, need problem solving.
- Mastery: Getting a badges or points (which are more like staircases) doesn’t give full confidence in mastery in “skill”.
- Community
- Different kinds of users: People are different, so if the game only has one structure it’s not going to engage people with different motivations.
MOTIVATION:
- People make mistakes consistently
- Loss aversion: people are more concerned about losses than gains.
- Condition though consequences: Farmville needs checking or else crops will wither
- Power of defaults
- Confirmation bias: people tend to see what they’re looking for, they want to see patterns weather or not they are actually there.
- Intrinsic Motivation
- User is doing action because of the action itself, not for any consequences/reward
- Extrinsic Motivation
- About the reward, but not about the action it self
- Status (easiest to implement and also the most powerful)
- Access
- Power
- Stuff
Types of reward:
Sometimes rewards can de-motivate, makes user think they’re doing it for the reward and not the task itself (less intrinsic motivation than before)

Amotivation: none whatsoever
Extrinsic: doing the task for rewards
- External regulation: only reason to do task is because someone/something has to keep telling you to do it
- Introjection: I don’t want to do it but other people would like it if I do it, so I will do it. (I’m taking their view of status and appropriating myself to do it)
- Identification: Taking the external motivator and taking it as my own. I can see how it somehow aligns with my personal goals
- Integration: Complete alignment with personal goals but need some external push. (e.g. exercise)
Intrinsic: doing the task for myself
- Need 3 characters to make task intrinsic:
- Competence: user is achieving something in the activity
- Autonomy: user feels like they are in control, meaningful choices
- Relatedness: connected to something else (e.g. goals/meaning/social/personal growth)
HOW TO START:
- List and rank possible business objectives
- Target behaviours
- Specific: why are you gamifying this?
- Success metrics (what makes this gamification project a win?)
- Analytics: DAU/MAU
- Who are the players? What are their motivations?
- Bartle MMOG Player Type Model (a typical player will go back and forth from each of these quadrants)
- Achiever: want to have achievement and have recognition by acting with the things in the world (e.g. quests)
- Explorers: want to see what is possible with the world. Push to the limits of the game by interacting with elements of the world
- Socializers: Care about interacting with others, being in a part of the community
- Killers: Don’t want to just win the game, but to also destroy/heal players (or healers also fit in this category), often the most aggressive player

Activity Loops: what keeps players playing
- Engagement Loop: (often happens at an individual level) Motivation -> Action -> Feedback -> Motivation
- Progression Loop: To accomplish this goal, you must complete these small subtasks. (Level up to 30 and you become a mage)
- Motivated by the potential of the end goal and encouraged by the achievable subtask right before their eye.
Know your users
- Badges on foursquare: designed to look cool, so that users feel COOL after checking into a place
- Badges on stack overflow: designed for nerds, lots of numbers and information, no visual clutter just goes right into the info