Actionable Gamification

by Yu-kai Chou

  The First Virtual Pet Game

  When I was in fifth grade, it was my third year back in Taiwan after living in South Africa for six years. Those years were very difficult for me, both academically and socially. My level of Chinese was significantly behind all my peers, and my grades were very poor.

  Back then, there would be Chinese quizzes where each time you wrote a character incorrectly, you needed to write a full column of the same character as punishment and practice. Most of my classmates only had to write two or three columns of “punishment practice” after each quiz, but I often had to write three to four pages of them. I remember when I was in third grade, I would be writing these penalty characters until 3AM in the morning with my mother next to me, with constant tears on my face. To my knowledge, this was not typical for most third graders.

  To add to the difficulty, I was always the odd one out because I came from a different culture. I didn’t really fit in, and other children would make fun of me. It was during this period that I started to pay close attention to what different types of people in different environments thought and felt. I also spent a great deal of time trying to understand how I could get people to accept me as their peer or perhaps, even respect me one day. Though painful, it may have helped me become more resilient and initiated my intellectual curiosity towards human motivation - which later manifested itself into the 8 Core Drives.

  While I was working so hard to be “cool” among my classmates, I realized that almost all of them had become crazed with this new thing called Tamagotchi, where kids would carry this tiny egg-like device with a little digital display. Inside the display, you started off with an egg. Once you have set the time and selected a name, the egg quickly turns into a small baby ball that you have to nurture and raise. There are a few simple options to feed the baby, play with it, discipline it, clean up its boo-boos, and give it medicine when it is ill.

  Under weeks of tender care, the little baby grows into a larger “animal” that responds to all your loving activities. In some versions, the pet lays an egg before it passes away, so you can start to play the game all over again without feeling that you failed. Back then as I was trying to fit in and be accepted, I really wanted one of these. Luckily, a classmate and I discovered a little abandoned pet in the boy’s restroom. We had great sympathy over the poor little thing, so we decided to raise it as our own.

  For a few months, we took turns taking care of the little thing, deciding what to feed the animal on a regular basis when it cried out, and took it for walks in its electronic world. Though the activity itself was rather tedious and not necessarily “challenging” nor “unpredictable,” we fought over who should take care of the little pet because we felt like it was our own. In that sense, it was enjoyable for us to do these chores, even “fun.”

  Eventually, the animal grew into a brachiosaurus. It was actually an eDinosaur! Interestingly, for this particular device, what type of dinosaur it became was determined by what food you chose to feed it. If you fed it more vegetables, it would become a brachiosaurus; if you fed it more meat, it would become a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I was sad to discovered this too late, as I would have really wanted a T-Rex. (Can you identify what Core Drive this game mechanic appeals to?)

  Many years later, I learned that Tamagotchi was a huge craze that swept Japan and the western world. Launching in 1996 in Japan, it was an early effort to create a toy/game that targeted girls who didn’t care about the fighting games of the time. The appeal of Tamagotchi obviously went well beyond its target audience.

  It swept the world and was even banned in many schools because kids had to take their Tamagotchi to school to feed, as a lapse of 12 hours not caring for your pet would result in its death - appealing to the Scarcity and Avoidance Core Drives. Australia banned it as well due to some slot machine mini-games designed within. The government decided that it incorrectly taught children to become gamblers (this is the Unpredictability Core Drive). The Black Hat Game Design did its work.

  Over the years, there were 76 million Tamagotchi’s sold worldwide. It became one of the earliest precursors of popular social games where the key objective is to care for an animal, a property, or a business.

  It looks like this ingrained sense of Ownership & Possession, along with some added benefits of novelty (Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity), made products like Pet Rocks, Tamagotchi, and later on Facebook games like Farmville or Pet Society104 such big successes worldwide.

  The Endowment Effect

  There is quite a bit of scientific research on how our psychology changes when we believe we own something. Much of it is summed up in what Academics call the Endowment Effect.

  In his book Thinking: Fast and Slow, Economics Nobel Prize Laureate Daniel Kahneman describes how a certain well-respected academic and wine lover becomes very reluctant to sell a bottle of wine from his collection for $100, but would also not pay more than $35 for a wine of similar quality.

  This made little economic sense because the same or similar wine should hold the same value in a person’s mind. The purchasing price and selling price should be roughly the same, deducting transaction costs. This illustrates that when a person starts to own something, they immediately place more value on that item relative to others who don’t own it.

  Researchers Dan Ariely and Ziv Carmon took this concept further by testing it on Duke University students who were avid basketball fans and would go through a demanding process to obtain tickets for Duke basketball games.105 After a semester of camping in small tents and checking in regularly whenever an air horn sounded, students who camped in front of the line were only given a lottery number towards obtaining the actual tickets. After the lottery results were announced, some students became ticket holders, while others did not.

  The Researchers called up the students who were winners in the lottery and asked them what would be an acceptable price that they would sell their tickets for. Concurrently, the non-winners were contacted and asked how much they would be willing to pay in order to get a ticket. It turned out, the non-winning students (who gave the exact same amount of sweat and labor towards it) were willing to pay $170 for a ticket on average. On the other hand, can you guess what the average ticket owner was willing to sell it for?

  The average ticket owner, whose only merit was that they were lucky enough to win the lottery, demanded $2,400 on average for their tickets. That is fourteen times more than the average buyer price. Clearly, the value of these tickets in the students’ minds went through drastic changes the moment they became owners.

  In a more lab-like example, Researcher Jack Knetsch asked two classes to fill out some questionnaires while promising a reward - prominently displayed in front of the students for the entire duration of the session. One group was promised an expensive pen, while the other group was promised a bar of swiss chocolate. After both sides had earned their rewards, they were allowed to trade their rewards with the other group. Only 10% of the participants wanted to trade, showing that most of them valued their own rewards simply because they already had ownership.106

  James Heyman, Yesim Orhun, and Dan Ariely further showed that the Endowment Effect is also realized when we simply imagine ourselves owning something. They found within auction sites, the longer people remained the top bidder (having imagined themselves as the official owner for longer), the more aggressively they would bid when someone offered a counter bid107. The envisioned ownership actually motivates people to fight for their divine rights to that item they don’t yet own.

  This is why advertisers often try to get consumers to imagine themselves owning the promoted products by asking consumers to think about what they would do with those products. Also, trial promotions and “money-back guarantees” work the same way by letting consumers own the product first without any friction. Since we now know that the value of something becomes much greater after it is in our possession, consumers often feel reluctant to return that product and get their money back afterwards
.

  For Sale Not For Use

  One caveat to the Endowment Effect is, if the person owns something as a token “for exchange,” they will not feel attached to the item in a biased manner. If a merchant owns hundreds of shoes in the hopes of exchanging them for money, he obviously does not feel that sense of attachment when someone buys the product. Similarly, when consumers part ways with their money to buy these shoes, they also are not pulled back by the Endowment Effect (unless they are already in financial difficulty)108.

  Interestingly, when Economist John List studied trading behaviors at Baseball Card Conventions, he noticed that novice traders were heavily influenced by the Endowment Effect, inappropriately valuing their own cards much higher than what the market would bear. However, as they became more experienced traders, they started to see the baseball cards as tradable goods, resulting in the Endowment Effect gradually diminishing109. This is why we often make more rational, and hence consistent, decisions when we are simply reminded to “think like a trader.”110

  Identity, Consistency, and Commitments

  Another interesting effect of Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession is that it also drives us to value our own identities and become more consistent towards our past. After all, there are rarely things we hold more closely than our values, characters, and past commitments111.

  In fact, science has shown that the longer we live, the more attached we become to our existing beliefs, preferences, methodologies, and even our own names.112

  A surprising study conducted by social psychologist Brett Pelham revealed that people are much more likely to choose careers that sound similar to their own names113. To test this idea, Pelham looked up names that sounded like the word “dentist,” such as Dennis. According to the census data, the name Dennis was the 40th most common male first name in the U.S., while Jerry and Walter were the 39th and 41st, respectively.

  Pelham then searched the national directory of the American Dental Association for dentists that have these three first names. It turns out, 257 dentists were named Walter, while 270 dentists were named Jerry - fairly consistent with the statistical base rate. However, there were 482 dentists named Dennis, which is close to eighty percent higher than the normal base rate of other names. This indicates that, if you happen to be named Dennis, you have an eighty percent higher chance of becoming a dentist compared to if you were named something different.

  Similarly, Pelham found that names starting with “Geo” such as “George” or “Geoffrey” are disproportionately more likely to become researchers in the geosciences. Hardware store owners are eighty percent more likely to have names that start with the letter “H” than the letter “R,” while roofers are seventy percent more likely to have names with the letter “R” than the letter H.”114

  Moreover, people tend to move to places that are similar to their own names too. People who move to Florida are disproportionately more likely to be named Florence, while people who move to Louisiana are skewed towards being named Louise. Mr. Washington is also much more likely to live on Washington Street than Mr. Jefferson. On that note, I’m glad that I have never considered a career in the medical profession, or else I might have ended up becoming a Urologist!

  Though no one would recognize or admit that their names play any role in determining these important life choices, our attachment to our own identities become so strong that anything connected to that identity becomes desirable to us. Studies have even shown that we prefer brands and even spouses that remind us of our own names115116. It has to be good because, well, it reminds me of me!

  Consistency: Valuing Who We Were

  Stemming from the attachment to our own identities is the need to behave consistently with our past actions. Dan Ariely describes this as self-herding, where we believe something is good (or bad) on the basis of our previous behavior.117. Often we buy certain items and brands just because we bought them in the past and we would like to stay consistent with our own choices, even though the particular product or brand may no longer be the best for our current needs.

  In fact, studies have shown that people instantly become much more confident in certain racehorses the moment they place a bet on the horse.118 This is like a person estimating that a horse has a 30% chance of winning (which is pretty good given how many horses there are on a track) prior to making a bet, and then suddenly believing that the horse has a 60% chance of winning after placing the bet. This is because the horse suddenly transformed from “a good bet” to “my bet,” and we learned from the Endowment Effect that once something becomes our own, we immediate place a much higher value on it.

  Our need to be consistent with our past can also cause us to do unreasonable things for others. In 1966, psychologists Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser did an experiment where they went door-to-door to ask California residents whether they would agree to have a big public-service billboard erected on their front lawns.

  The researchers showed a picture of a beautiful house almost completely obscured by a six-by-three feet, and poorly lettered billboard that read “DRIVE CAREFULLY,” and asked if residents would agree to have it installed. Understandably, only 17 percent of the residents complied.

  However, there was one particular group of residents that reacted to the offer positively, with 76 percent of them agreeing to the installation119. Why did this particular group respond so favorably? It turns out that two weeks prior to this intrusive offer, another “volunteer worker” went to those residents and asked if they would display a harmless three-inch-square sign that read “BE A SAFE DRIVER” in their windows. Since the request was fairly trivial, nearly everyone agreed to it.

  What the residents didn’t expect, was that this small act of public service would cause them to start believing they were publicly conscious people who cared about drivers in the neighborhood. As a result, when the imposing request came two weeks later, in order to be consistent with their publicly conscious self-images, they were inclined to accept such offers with less hesitation. Of course, there were elements of Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling involved too, but as you can see in the control group experiments, the Epic Meaning & Calling alone was not enough to motivate people to give up their beautiful home views.

  What’s astonishing is that even with a third group of residents, whom two weeks prior were only asked to sign a petition that favored “keeping California beautiful,” compliance rate of the “DRIVE CAREFULLY” billboard still increased to 50% - despite the petition had nothing to do with safe driving. This suggests that the compliance has less to do with the effects of repetition priming120, but more to do with that sense of ownership towards being a publicly responsible person.

  A reader of Robert Cialdini’s book Influence once wrote that when his insurance sales staff started to ask, “I was wondering if you would tell me exactly why you’ve chosen to purchase your insurance with [our company.]” as opposed to simply setting up a physical appointment to sign the paperwork, sales immediately rose from 9% to 19%121. This worked because as people recited their reasoning for taking an appointment, they were convincing themselves of certain values that they should stay consistent with and follow through on.

  Commitments: The Power of Writing Something Down

  Our need for consistency becomes even stronger when we create a commitment, especially when we write it down. Social Psychologists Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard once did an experiment where they asked groups of students to estimate the length of lines that were shown.

  One group of students only had to think of an estimate in their heads, while another group had to write it down on a Magic Writing Pad but would erase it before anyone could see it. A third group would not only write down their estimates, but would publicly announce their figures.

  Afterwards, the researchers gave new misleading information that suggested the students’ initial estimates were incorrect, and gave them a chance to change their answers. Interestingly, the students who just made mental notes of their
initial judgement were the least loyal to the judgements and changed their answers quickly, based on the new information.

  The students who wrote their estimates down without anyone seeing were far more reluctant to change their answers when the new contradictory information was presented. Of course, with a little help from Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, which we will cover in the next chapter, the group that publicly shared their estimates were the most stubborn in changing their answers; insisting that they were correct all along122.

  This level of consistency to commitments is why car salespeople often try to pin you down by saying, “I can’t promise anything until a dreadful plea with my manager, but if I could get you this price, you will buy the car today, correct?123” Once you commit to this and he sure enough returns with the quoted price, you will feel a great need to stay consistent with your earlier commitment, despite having full right to say “no.”

  In a similar manner, a restaurant owner once shared that after he switched from using “Please call if you have to cancel” to “Will you please call if you have to cancel?” during reservation calls, the no-show rate dropped from 30 percent to 10 percent. This is because when people answer “yes” to the question (and most people would feel like a jackal if they said “no” to such a reasonable request), they emotionally feel more committed in taking more responsibility for their reservations.124

  Often, asking users to fill out their own forms increases commitment towards a behavior. When door-to-door salespeople started to ask their new customers to fill out the sales form instead of doing it for them, fewer people took advantage of the “cooling-off” laws where they could regret and return the product after being persuaded by Black Hat motivation techniques. Based on this, hospitals would likely also decrease cancelation rates if they asked their patients to fill out the next-appointment sheets instead of doing it for them125.