Actionable Gamification

by Yu-kai Chou

  During this time, I was quite shy and could not imagine myself ever speaking in public. (In fact, for a long time, just seeing someone else speak on stage made my palms sweat.) My reputation in my high school, (besides being one of the few Asians there) was that I was “nice.” Most people who study persuasive psychology will agree that having a reputation of “nice” was not very motivating in most scenarios. Descriptions such as “sincere,” “passionate,” or “radiant” would be personalities that are similar but much more engaging for people.

  Though I had yet to build up my confidence as an individual, by my 10th grade I was elected to be the Chess Club President. My speech to garner votes was literally, “My last name is the shortest to write down. Vote for me!” After unexpectedly winning the election (I guess people liked the humor), I suddenly felt a sense of responsibility – Epic Meaning & Calling! It was no longer just about me but about the greater good of the organization! At this point I committed to become a stronger chess player, so that I would be able to lead and coach our team to greater victory. For over two years, I absorbed myself in the openings, strategies, and variations of chess for four hours a day, trying to expand my understanding of positional play and establishing my style as a player.

  In chess, there are a substantial number of opening variations, with possible lines of play exponentially expanding into far more variations than the total number of atoms in the observable universe (just after 4 moves each, there are over 288 billion possible positions).

  In 1996, then World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov competed against IBM’s specialized chess supercomputer Deep Blue. Deep Blue at the time could calculate 100 million positions per second. Both Deep Blue and Kasparov had approximately three hours each to think, with Deep Blue also calculating during Kasparov’s moves. If you multiply 100 million positions a second for three hours, that’s a whole lot of chess positions.

  When the competition commenced, Kasparov lost the initial game, which seemed to surprise him. Subsequently, he comfortably won three games while tying two to win the match.80

  In 1997, a rematch was called. IBM had a full team whose only role was to improve Deep Blue’s chess playing skills. By then Deep Blue could examine 200 million positions a second, doubling the prior year’s capabilities. This match ended with Kasparov winning one game, drawing two, and losing two, resulting in his defeat.81

  The second match stunned the chess world - for the first time ever a powerful computer could defeat the leading human in a game of chess. To me, this was rather odd. Intuitively-speaking, of course a computer could beat a strong human player. Isn’t chess all about memorization and calculations? Computers could obviously “remember” and calculate substantially faster than humans with much better precision.

  This was like being shocked that a motorized vehicle was starting to travel faster than a human runner, or that a human lost to a calculator in a multiplication contest. I thought that, instead of being amazed that computers were finally beating humans at chess, people should be amazed that humans stood a chance at all! How could a computer that is processing billions of positions and outcomes not see the loss coming and prevent it?

  The reason why computers can’t simply dominate human players, even today, is because chess is more than just calculations and memorization. Chess requires creativity, intuition, and understanding. Chess is so complex that the most powerful computers still can’t completely figure out the game against human creativity and intuition.

  Chess computers can calculate, but they cannot understand. Even though chess computers can figure out what a position can look like exactly fifteen moves later, unless there are obvious hints such as a checkmate or a significant loss in pieces, the computer does not know whether that position is “good” or “bad.” A human, on the other hand, cannot tell exactly what the position will be like fifteen moves later but they have the intuitive understanding that, “My knight would be established on a very strong spot. What it will do, I’m not completely sure yet, but I know it will benefit me one way or another.” It is this type of understanding and analysis that allows human players to triumph over strong computers from time to time.

  Earlier when I mentioned that there are far more possible chess moves than atoms in the universe, the rightful skeptic may think that I’m just pulling numbers out of my spleen for exaggeration’s sake. However, if you actually look into the numbers, a game of chess that is 40 moves long would have 10120 possible variations, which ends up being 1040 times the number of atoms in the known Universe. 82

  The reason I bring up these facts is to elicit the point that: because there are so many possible variations in chess, there is an abundance of strategies and styles of play. This variability is essential for creating a great gamified campaign utilizing Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. Some chess players are fanatically aggressive, some are defensively positional; some like to slowly squeeze their opponents to death, while others strive for a winning endgame. You can almost tell who is playing the game based on the types of moves they make.

  At UCLA, I once wrote a paper on how the style of each World Chess Champion reflects the historical events of their time. José Capablanca, the third World Chess Champion, lived during a golden period of peace in Cuba, and as a result played chess in a harmonious and elegant way, collecting little advantages that would eventually lead to a win. The next World Champion Alexander Alekhine lived during times of revolution in Russia, often escaping persecution and facing death. As a result, his style is known to be vigorously aggressive, ramming down the enemy king’s protective forts with sacrifices. Mikhail Botvinnik, another world champion lived during the time of the Soviet Union’s “Iron and Engineering” prowess. As a result his style was aggressively positional, similar to assembling a tank and then trampling the enemy territory with irresistible force.

  The great thing is, to be at the top of the chess world, you don’t need to play in one, specific “best” way. You can create your own style of play through meaningful choices that reflect your personality and style. As long as you invest the rigorous work, maintain the commitment, and have passion for the game, you will have a chance of becoming a great chess player.

  This capacity to allow players to express their unbounded creativity, see immediate feedback, and offer them meaningful choices to demonstrate different styles of play is what makes Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback so appealing to gamers, users, customers, and employees alike. When you design a great gamified system, you want to make sure that there isn’t one standard way to win. Instead, provide users with enough meaningful choices that they can utilize drastically different ways to better express their creativity, while still achieving the Win-State.

  As for my chess club, by the time I finished 11th grade, the Blue Valley High School had became the Kansas State Champion of Kansas for our division and successfully defended the position for five straight years. Beyond this, the club also finished strong in national tournaments. This experience also taught me how to be a leader and built my confidence when I had very little. I can’t thank chess and the BVHS Chess Club enough for where I am today.

  The General’s Carrot in Education

  When you design for Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, it is important to create a setup where the user is given a goal, as well as a variety of tools and methodologies to strategize towards reaching that goal. Often your users are not motivated because they don’t understand the purpose of the activity, do not clearly identify the goal of the activity, and/or lack meaningful tools to create expressive strategies to reach the goal.

  In the past few decades, physical battle card games such as Pokemon or Magic: the Gathering have become a new phenomenon, gaining significant traction in many countries83. Similar to chess or Starcraft, there are many dedicated tournaments where players young and old, duke it out to become the champions at the games.

  What’s interesting about this phenomenon is that there is a
ctually a great deal of information to memorize in order to play the game well. There are hundreds of cards, each having its own unique stats and numbers (such as hp, attack, etc.). Children who are good at these card games not only remember all the cards and stats, they even remember which cards counter which, and which other cards counter those in return.

  If you run the numbers, that is actually more information to memorize than the contents on the periodic table. It’s as though the child not only memorized every single element on the periodic table, but also the exact weight and placement of each element, as well as exactly how every element interacts with every other element.

  That’s pretty mind-blowing.

  But if you ask the same brilliant child what’s the fifth element on the periodic table, you will likely get a response along with the lines of, “Umm…Oxygen?” Why is that? Clearly the child did not suddenly transform from a genius into an idiot. This gaping difference is not a transition in intelligence but simply a change in motivation.

  When the child is memorizing the periodic table, they do not see the purpose of doing so. It is only to pass a test, get a good grade, and please their parents. As a result, the child studies hard enough to pass the test, and forgets most of the subject matter thereafter. But in these card games, the child is learning the information in order to come up with awesome strategies, beat their friends, and feel accomplished. Also, since they personally own many of these cards, they are anxious to study them, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and research what other cards are out there (an effect within Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession).

  If the means to that end is to memorize thousands and thousands of terms and stats, it becomes worth it, even fun. As designers, it is important to recognize that they understand the goal (beating their friends), build ownership and familiarity with their tools, and use their unique strategies and experience towards that.

  Folding into the Crowd

  One of the best examples of Empowerment & Creativity & Feedback is seen in the new trend of Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the activity of throwing a challenge or activity into the public and having the masses collaborate or competitively solve the problem.

  Well known examples such as the XPRIZE allows individuals and teams to engineer new solutions in advanced technology such as aerodynamics and space travel to advance the human race; while Kaggle allows the brightest mathematical minds to solve predictive modeling and analytics problems84.

  A very popular example in the serious game space has been FoldIt introduced in Chapter 4. For many years, scientists have tried to decipher the crystal structure of an AIDS virus labelled as the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV), in order to advance their understanding of AIDS treatment and prevention. Unfortunately, after fifteen years of research, this problem remained unresolved85.

  Fortunately, in 2008, David Baker from the University of Washington launched the FoldIt project, where through an interactive game-play interface, players could modify various protein structures with objectives such as “maximizing the surface area of this protein.”

  Surprisingly, this problem, which had baffled researchers for over fifteen years, was solved in a mere ten days. By tapping the efforts of thousands of “players” around the world, a creative solution was revealed through their vigorous play.

  To this day, Foldit continues to help biochemical researchers find cures to major diseases that plague humans, including HIV/AIDS, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

  If you are able to utilize this sort of intrinsic motivation where people can leverage their creativity and receive quick feedback with either a product or within the workplace (especially if it is tied to Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling as in the case of FoldIt), you will likely unlock long-term user engagement and high productivity.

  The Elysian Stairs to Health

  You often hear that it is better to take the stairs instead of the escalator. However, in practice it is convenient to forget this bit of good advice and take the escalator anyway. To combat this, Volkswagen’s viral campaign “The Fun Theory” (a database of videos that is now the staple of many gamification workshops) piloted a campaign called the Piano Staircase in Sweden.

  For the Piano Staircase, engineers integrated movement-tracking hardware to detect activity on the staircase, which subsequently plays a piano note whenever a specific step is triggered. The staircase is also decorated as piano patterns to show which note is being played and to elicit the commuters’ curiosity (Discovery Phase design is very important).

  As people walked up and down the stairs, they started to hear notes playing. Soon, many commuters who heard others go up the stairs started taking the stairs too themselves to see if it would work for them. Eventually, some individuals attempted to play some simple tunes.

  When you empower people by allowing them to easily play an instrument, you make the simple activity of walking more fun and engaging. During the pilot, the piano staircase led to an increase in commuters taking the stairs by 66%.86

  From an Endgame design point of view, the staircase does have its limitations. The actual tunes people can play is fairly limited since jumping up and down staircases in producing a pleasing rhythm is rather challenging. Pedestrians could quickly lose interest after stepping through the same notes over and over. Once the initial surprise and novelty wears off, the repetitive tones may become boring. However, many people may still prefer this over a regular staircase, just to get some delightful feedback on each step.

  This is an example of a Core Drive 3 implementation that focused well on the feedback it gave users, but it didn’t provide them full control to express wider ranges of their creativity.

  Empowerment and Creativity in the Corporate Space

  Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback also applies to the workplace and employee motivation.

  Occasionally, my friends with corporate positions reach out to me about making the switch towards a career in entrepreneurship. More often than not, the reason they want to start their own companies is simply due to the frustration of not seeing feedback on their creative ideas in the corporate environment. Frequently, months will pass after they have proposed a plan or concept before there is any response or feedback through the corporation’s bureaucratic channels. More often than not, the employee never hears back on that creative idea.

  In a bureaucratic organization, though everyone likes to talk about innovation, innovation requires risk, and the corporate ladder trains people to be risk averse. If anything new is happening, it is only after authorization through many signatures - to the point where no one could claim full responsibility if things went wrong. Managers often push everyone to come up with innovative ideas, but when they actually hear something new, they immediately respond with, “Hmm, has any other company done that before?”

  This is incredibly frustrating for those who have creative ideas which may positively impact the status quo, especially when their ideas are immediately shot down or the approval process is dragged out indefinitely. It is a sad scenario - as companies grow larger and more bureaucratic, they become less agile, less adaptive to changing business conditions. As a result, younger and more nimble companies adapt to changing business models more swiftly than their cumbersome counterparts and quickly take advantage of new opportunities. All too often many great companies from the past century eventually fall into extinction.

  In the Motivational Psychology Bestseller Drive, Daniel Pink explains that allowing employees to have full autonomy over what they work on, how they work, who they work with, and when they work often becomes greater motivators than giving them a raise.87 Convincingly, researchers from Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which empowered employees to work through autonomy, while the other half had a top-down management structure. For the group of companies which gave their employees more control in using their own creative processes to perform their work, business growth was four times the rate of the other group, with only on
e third of the turnover rate.88

  An example of a company who attempted to embed Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback into their workplace was Google. They implemented a program called 20% Time – where one day in the week, employees can work on any project they would like, as long as the Intellectual Property belonged to Google.

  Many employees who wanted to become an entrepreneur mostly did so because they had great ideas and wanted to see it become reality. But most of them still don’t enjoy the risk and the hassle of starting a company. With 20% Time, employees no longer felt a need to start their own companies because they could simply build their ideas in the safe and comfortable haven of Google.

  As a result, some of the most successful product lines such as Gmail were spawned from an emphasis on this Core Drive of Creativity. Unfortunately, 20% Time was shut down as Google became larger and wanted to “put more wood behind fewer arrows.”89

  Draw a Gun for Bad Endgame Design

  While we talked about how Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback can often create Endgame Evergreen Content, if it is not thoughtfully designed for the Endgame, it may still fail in the long run.

  For example, Draw Something (essentially Pictionary, where one side draws something with a pen and the other side guesses) was an extremely popular and fun mobile game for a short while in 2012. They amassed 35 million downloads within seven weeks of launch, and later that year was sold to Zynga for close to $200M.90