Actionable Gamification

by Yu-kai Chou

The game was fun because it allowed people to utilize their creativity in determining how to best draw a picture of the challenge word, so that the other person can understand and guess the correct answer. The game even monetized by having people unlock certain colors and drawing tools, so that they would have a richer variety of ways to express their creativity in helping the other person guess better (this is what I call a booster, which we will cover later in this chapter).

  Furthermore, Draw Something brought in an addictive Social Influence & Relatedness element (Core Drive #5) that made people curious to see if their friends could guess the meaning of their drawings (which adds Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity). All these elements contributed to the huge success of Draw Something during its time.

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  The Downfall of Draw Something

  Despite tapping into these Core Drives, once Zynga purchased the exciting game, the numbers started to decline. Many users started to drop out as the game failed to provide fresh content and challenges that would give people a sense of continued improvement and novel conditions for further mastery.

  Perhaps the Draw Something makers OMGPOP were too busy integrating with Zynga’s team to add more words to the pool, for the same word challenges started to repeat again and again. The element of creativity became null as people drew the same picture over and over.

  Here we see something that is not considered Evergreen Content – even though there are many ways to draw something. If the company does not add more word challenges for its players, the creativity aspect diminishes and the game becomes dull.

  Another issue is, when you are juggling too many ongoing games at once (as the design makes it natural for you to play a new game after each match, as well as invite more friends to play new games), it may start to feel like a big burden to answer all of them instead of feeling excited about the actual gameplay. As we know, play should be voluntary, and once you feel like you are not in control of your gameplay, you fall into Black Hat motivation, leading to a long-term fallout of a player’s engagement.

  Finally, the game also lost its appeal because many users simply bypassed the creative elements and began to “game” the system by drawing the actual letters of the answer instead of a picture. As a result, many of the people who had really high scores were the ones who were cheating. People will exert their creativity in a multitude of ways, including coming up with ways to cheat a system.

  In my client workshops, I often explore how having a system that is “gameable” is not necessarily bad and may even help their company if it is designed properly. However, if done incorrectly, it could seriously devalue the gameplay and clearly demoralize the experiences of those seeking to legitimately participate.

  If you block users from expressing their creativity in ways that are beneficial for the ecosystem, they will ultimately use their creativity to find loopholes and gain the upper hand by playing “behind your back.”

  Game Techniques within Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback

  You have learned more about the motivational and psychological nature of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. To make it more actionable, I’ve included some Game Techniques below that heavily utilize this Core Drive to engage users.

  Boosters (Game Technique #31)

  Have you ever played the game Super Mario and felt blissfully excited when you picked up a mushroom or flower that made you stronger? These are considered Boosters in a game, where a player obtains something to help them achieve the win-state effectively.

  Different from simply leveling up or acquiring new skills, Boosters are usually limited to certain conditions. You can enjoy the brick-breaking and fire-throwing as long as you stay out of harms way. Once you get hit by an enemy, you return back to your “natural state” prior to the boosters.

  Boosters such as obtaining a “jumping star” in Super Mario are limited by time, and temporarily give users the power of invincibility. For the next dozen seconds (I actually went on Youtube and counted the seconds just to write this), a player would rush as quickly as he can (sometimes falling into pits) as he enjoys the adrenaline rush of using his evanescent power (with a touch of Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience).

  That feeling of being empowered with new, but limited power-ups is exhilarating and is an extremely strong motivator towards the desired action. Very few people are willing to stop the game while the Star Invincibility effect is still active.

  In games like Candy Crush, Boosters are also very powerful mechanics, especially for its monetization. A player can earn (or buy) a limited number of boosters that will help overcome some of the most difficult challenges at a specific stage; such as getting a Bubblegum Troll to defeat the menacing chocolates, or a Disco Ball-like Color Bomb to remove all candies of a certain color. Without different boosters and power-ups, the game would not be nearly as engaging as it is today.

  Example of Boosters within Superbook.tv

  One of my clients, Superbook.tv, runs an incredibly high-quality Computer Graphics (CG) animation series with millions of fans, both online and via international TV. Superbook.tv is part of the non-profit Christian Broadcast Network, and its goal is to teach children about stories in the Bible through vibrant graphics, modern relatedness (Core Drive 5), and quirky humor. It even has a funny red robot named Gizmo that says goofy things while performing mind-blowing tricks - such as having a robot pet parrot fly out of its chest when it was pretending to be a robot pirate.

  On top of the high-quality movies, SuperBook.tv also has a website that aims to engage children to learn more about the back stories presented within the episodes. When I work with clients, I always first ask them to define five items within the Octalysis Strategy Dashboard that we will cover in Chapter 17: Business Metrics, Users, Desired Actions, Feedback Mechanics, and Incentives. While most of my clients define revenue growth or active users as their number one Business Metric, Superbook’s Director of Creative Media Gregory Flick stated that, “Our number one Business Metric is to get kids more engaged with the Bible.”

  To attract children’s attention, Superbook’s strategy is to implement a variety of fun games on their website that kids can enjoy playing. These games provide opportunities to accumulate “SuperPoints” that can later be redeemed for merchandise, gift cards, and other rewards.

  While the children are enjoying their games, some of them will start to explore other content on the site, including the “Episode Guides.” These guides explain much of the back stories of each episode, such as the historical setting of the time, characters, and other interesting trivia.

  The ultimate goal is to use the Episode Guide to direct children towards the Bible App, where they can interact with the Bible more. This is a very clear funneling strategy: Play Games –> Explore Episode Guide –> Interact with Bible App.

  Turning the Funnel Around

  The disadvantage of funneling strategies, is that the bottom of the funnel is often only a tiny fraction of the top. Many Kids will play the games, and maybe some of them will notice the Episodes Guides, but only a few of those kids will try out the Bible App. It would be nice if part of the game is to go into the Episode Guides and the Bible App, as opposed to simply being a curious discover.

  A potential solution to this issue is to embed Boosters within both the Episode Guides and Bible App. Let’s say, by completing Bible-related challenges within the Episodes Guides (which requires utilizing the Bible App to do well on), a child can increase their “Knowledge Score” that will serve as a multiplier towards SuperPoints when they are playing the fun games on the site.

  After they win a game with the boosters on, it would show them a “Knowledge Score Multiplier” next to their points, allowing them to earn SuperPoints much faster than other kids. Of course, for Scarcity & Impatience sake, it should also display “Knowledge Score Multiplier: 0%” if the child does not have these boosters yet, just to make them yearn for it.

  What’s interesting here is that inste
ad of playing games and maybe going to the episode guides and possibly going into the Bible App; it is now strategic for the child to first go to the Episode Guide, maximize their Knowledge Scores, and then go back to play the games. Now the child’s own creative strategy process motivates them to engage with the Bible App before playing games, and the “funnel model” before has been turned upside down in favor of their top Business Metrics.

  Milestone Unlock (Game Technique #19)

  One of the most successful design techniques within games is something I call the Milestone Unlock. When people play games, they often set an internal stop time in the form of a milestone – “Let me beat this boss and then I’m done.” “I’m close to leveling up. Once I level up I’ll go to bed.”

  What the Milestone Unlock does is open up an exciting possibility that wasn’t there before that milestone was reached.

  In some RPGs (Role Playing Games), whenever you level up, you learn a new set of skills. These skills are awesome and generally help you vanquish monsters faster and with more style. Consequently, they would have made your earlier gameplay a lot easier.

  Once players level up (their “stop-time milestone”), they naturally want to see what these new skills are like. They will want to test them out a bit, then test them out on stronger enemies, enjoy how powerful they are, and then realize they are so close to the next milestone that they might as well get there before stopping.

  This is when people plan to stop playing at 11PM but end up playing till 4AM in the morning.

  Milestone Unlocks in Plants vs Zombies

  Plants vs. Zombies is a dynamic “tower-defense” game geared towards forming a creative strategy to utilize resources and “plants” to solve puzzles of zombie attacks. In the spirit of Core Drive 3, the game embodies an aspect of allowing people to incorporate their creativity to come up with various solutions towards solving the same problem. Interestingly, this is the only “fighting” game and the only “zombies” game that both my mother and my wife got very into.

  In terms of Game Techniques, Plants vs Zombies utilizes Milestone Unlocks to the extreme. When you complete each level, you will usually unlock a new Plant to help you defend against Zombies. Not by coincidence, that new plant is often the exact plant that directly counters the toughest zombie in the stage you just defeated, and would have made your life a lot easier if you had it earlier!

  Of course, this is usually not the time to stop playing. If you didn’t start the next stage and try out these new found powers, you would be laying in bed, thinking about it all night long!

  Poison Picker/Choice Perception (Game Technique #89)

  Many studies92 have shown that people like something more when they are given a choice, compared to simply having one option. This holds true even if the multiple options are not as appealing compared to the single choice. Any parent with a two year old will recognize the influence of choice perception.

  “Do you want to eat your vegetables before or after your chicken?”

  When children turn two years old, they quickly discover that they possess a special power called “Free Will.” And once they discover this power, they start to exercise it with great fluency.

  *“Which one do you want?”

  “…”

  “Do you want A?”

  “NO!”

  “Okay. Do you want B then?”

  “NO!”

  “Well, you have to make a choice. A or B?”

  “NO!”

  “So you don’t want anything. I’ll take them away okay?”

  “NO!”*

  Negotiating with children is serious parenting work. You have to make the child think that whatever happens, it’s a result of their own decision and not someone else’s suggestion. (Interestingly, this aspect of us does not change as we grow older.) When the child does not know what they want, it’s the toughest because they can’t make a choice on their own. But they still hate it if they went along with someone else’s suggestion.

  When I was little, my mother would have me learn to play the piano. It was very frustrating for me, and many times I would cry out in anger. After two years of piano, my mother saw how much misery it caused me, and told me, “Okay, if you hate it so much, you don’t have to play the piano anymore. But you have to play an instrument. What would you like to play?” At the time I saw a popular singer in Taiwan named Lee-Hom Wang play the violin on-stage at a large concert, and it made an impression on me. I therefore told my mother that I wanted to play the violin.

  After I switched from playing the piano to the violin, things didn’t necessarily become easier. But because I made a choice to play the violin, I sucked it up and played with a much better attitude. After all, if I also hated playing the violin, it would mean my previous choice was “wrong.” And people hate being wrong! When I would start to whine and complain, my mother would ask me, “So you hate playing the violin then?” I would immediately shoot back with, “No! Who said I hate playing the violin? I LOVE playing the violin! I just need…more practice.”

  What a win for the parent!

  The key to the Choice Perception is that the choice itself is not necessarily meaningful, but merely makes a person feel like they are empowered to choose between different paths and options. In my case, I was still forced to play an instrument – I did not have the choice to stop learning – but because I felt that I could choose which instrument to play, I felt empowered.

  When I say the choice is not meaningful, it could mean that either the user is presented with a good option and a bad option, inviting the user to naturally choose the better one (again, often the user will feel happier with this situation, rather than being forced to take the better option); or it could mean that all the options are too limiting and therefore undifferentiated from one another.

  Jesse Schell, in his book The Art of Game Design - A Book of Lenses, introduces two Lenses: The Lens of Freedom and the Lens of Indirect Control93. Schell describes that, “we don’t always have to give the player true freedom - we only have to give the player the feeling of freedom. […] if a clever designer can make a player feel free, when really the player has very few choices, or even no choice at all, then suddenly we have the best of both worlds - the player has the wonderful feeling of freedom, and the designer has managed to economically create an experience with an ideal interest curve and an ideal set of events.”

  According to Schell, this can be accomplished by 1) Adding constraints to player choices, 2) Incentivizing players to take certain choices that actually meets the player goals, 3) Create an Interface that guides the user towards the Desired Actions, 4) Adding visual designs to attract the player’s sight, 5) Provide social guidance (often through computer generated characters in the game), and 6) Music control that affects player behaviors.

  Choice Perception influences our decisions in many other significant ways, such as wasting time and energy keeping meaningless doors or options open, even though they were formerly written off as bad options, simply to maintain a perception of having a choice.94

  Obviously, since Choice Perception suggests a lack of meaningful choices, it often is not ideal in an implementation as it does not truly bring out the creativity of the user. You could also offend users if too many options are blatantly meaningless. However, for many businesses, it is easier on the designer to implement choice perceptions into its systems than to actually create Meaningful Choices.

  Plant Picker/Meaningful Choices (Game Technique #11)

  Beyond choices that allow people to feel like they are empowered, there are choices that are truly meaningful and demonstrates preferences that are not obviously superior over others. I refer to these techniques as “Plant Pickers” because, just like deciding what to plant in a garden, it is often a preference on style and strategy, something that fuels Core Drive 3.

  If you create a gamified environment with a hundred players, and all hundred of these players reach the Win-State in the exact same way (such as “do acti
on A, get points, do action B, get badges, do action C, win!”), there are no meaningful choices present. (Often times this could be seen if the gamified system has a no-brainer dominant strategy95, which falls under Choice Perception.) If thirty players play the game one way, thirty play it another way, and the last forty play it yet another way, then you have some level of Meaningful Choices. If all hundred players play the game differently, then you have a great amount of meaningful choices.

  If you tell a hundred kids to sit there and play with a set of Lego, it is statistically impossible for any two children to build the same thing in the exact same order (outside of copying each other, of course). That level of meaningful choices and play is the ultimate state of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback.

  Plants vs Zombies Strategy

  I mentioned above how the Milestone Unlock is such a huge component in Plants vs Zombies good game design. Another aspect of its success is the Plant Picker. When you start a stage in Plants vs Zombies, you are faced with a challenge – a wave of zombies, each with different strengths and capabilities. You, as the player, have a limited number of plants you can “pre-pick” before a game to defend against those zombies. There are sun-resources that allow you to sow a plant, and there are a limited number of squares that you can place them in.

  To defeat a level in Plants vs Zombies, there are a variety of ways and strategies that each work extraordinarily well, among many ways that don’t work at all. A player can choose to power up their economy first with many sun-gathering plants and fewer defense plants; lay out the field with basic pea-shooters; save up to use more powerful plants that do massive damage; completely focus on explosives and traps; or use stinky onions to herd all the zombies into one lane before wiping them all out with penetrating attacks.