by Yu-kai Chou
Our brains are drawn to the element of surprise, and because these rewards are so unexpected the added feelings of excitement and good fortune make the experience extremely exciting. Sudden rewards incentivize customers to keep coming back in the hopes that they can inadvertently feel the same bliss again. In this case, ignorance of the rewards does lead to bliss.
Easter Eggs are effective in two ways: They get great word-of-mouth exposure because everybody loves to share something exciting and unexpected that happened to them. Upon telling their friends about the good fortune, their friends may also become excited about the experience too.
Easter Eggs also create speculation on what caused the trigger in the first place. If the Easter Egg seemed to be random, participants will wonder how they can replicate the experience in order to “game” the system. They will start to develop theories about how they won, and will commit to the assumed Desired Actions over and over again to either prove or disprove these theories.
A good example of an Easter Egg is the Chase Picks Up The Tab program198. Chase wanted their customers to swipe more with their debit cards since the company would have have better margins compared to their credit card counterparts. As a result, in the Chase Picks Up The Tab program, whenever a Chase customer swipes their Chase debit cards (the Desired Action), there is a very small chance the customer will get a text from Chase that says (paraphrased), “Chase just picked up the tab! Your $5 will be credited back to your account. Have a nice day.” Though the rewarded dollar amount is not great, it compels consumers to regularly swipe with their Chase cards in preference to other cards to see if they can repeat their success and “win” again. Often, users will also tell their friends about their win, which may compel the friends to sign-up for this “game” too to see if they can also win.
Another great example of an Easter Egg was implemented by the previous version of Foursquare (a pioneering app in the gamification space, which has recently pivoted)199. Foursquare (now Swarm) allows users to “check-in” at different locations they visit, share where they are with their friends, and earn badges based on impressive check-in patterns. Top check-in users of a location earn the status of “Mayor,” who besides bragging rights, may even gain a location-specific reward such as free drinks or snacks (some design flaws present but this is beyond the scope of this chapter).
Mario Herger, author of Enterprise Gamification, had an interesting experience with Foursquare’s Easter Eggs a few years back. In fall 2011, he was a moderate Foursquare user. On the day of Steve Jobs passing, many people flooded the Apple Store in Palo Alto to lay down flowers and leave commemorative messages on the walls. Mario was at the Apple store and decided to check-in on Foursquare. Unexpectedly, he unlocked a new badge that was titled “Jobs” with the subtext, “Here’s to the crazy ones. #ThankYouSteve“
As far as we know, this is a badge that can only be earned in a few places, in a very narrow window of time. As you may expect, this was a huge surprise for Mario (not detracting from the somber event of Steve Job’s passing) that motivated him to check-in on Foursquare at more places and further compelled him to often talk about this experience to the point where I am now sharing it in this book.
Lottery/Rolling Rewards (Game Techniques #74)
Another type of reward context that is fueled by Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity is the Rolling Reward, or sometimes called the “Lottery.” The key idea of rolling rewards is the rule that somebody has to win during each period. Therefore, as long as the user “stays in the game,” the chances of you winning increase linearly.
In smaller group settings, Rolling Reward designs are seen in forms such as “Employee of the Week” where employees work hard, hoping that one day they will be the one that earns that status and recognition. (Note: Mario Herger in his book, Enterprise Gamification, suggests that Employee-of-the-Week programs won’t work in countries and cultures that frown upon individual recognition200).
Another form of Rolling Rewards is when an employer or big client states, “After this project, one of you will receive a free two week vacation to Maui!” In fact, at most workplaces, the thought of being promoted one day is in itself a Rolling Reward – someone has to become the new Vice President: I hope it will be me.
On a larger scale where there are a great number of participants, Rolling Reward programs have low barriers to entry and the rewards are substantial (think state or national lotteries), but there’s a very slim chance to win, regardless of how long you spend playing the “game”. Yes, individuals can increase their odds of winning by performing more of the Desired Action, such as purchasing additional tickets, or collecting additional entries. But again, the larger the program, the more daunting the odds.
The reason why lotteries work so well is because our brains are incredibly bad at distinguishing small percentages. We can’t conceptually understand the difference between “one in ten million” and “one in a hundred million.” We just register both odds as “a very small chance” without really comprehending that you could be winning the “one in ten million” prize ten times before you can win the “one in a hundred million” prize once!
Robert Williams, a professor who studies lotteries at the University of Lethbridge states, “we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.201” As a result, as long as there is some chance, people are willing to invest small amounts of money to obtain a gigantic reward.
Rolling rewards work on a number of levels. For starters, because they have moderately low barriers to entry, they can easily attract a large number of participants. Furthermore, if a participant actually wins, they may easily become a fan for life. This is simply because they feel that they were chosen to win, which draws power from Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling.
Taiwan’s Government Gamifies Tax Collection
Taiwan is my home country and as I became more knowledgeable in gamification, I continue to be more impressed with the level of gamification that is implemented in its society and culture - without these innovations actually being called gamification. Beyond all the point-collecting and little reward structures from small businesses and public transportation everywhere, one of the things I have been most impressed with is how the Taiwanese government uses gamification (specifically Rolling Rewards) to ensure tax compliance from small businesses.
Tax evasion is very common in many countries, where businesses prefer to take cash over credit cards so they could report less on their earnings. Most countries use the penalizing Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance by cracking down and punishing companies that are caught for evading taxes. However, besides a chronic lack of complete enforcement, it is also extremely costly to investigate all the businesses that are suspected of tax evasion.
As early as 1951, the Taiwanese government sought to address this problem by doing two things. First, it unified all receipt and invoicing platforms into a central system, which meant that all businesses which gave out receipts would automatically send the unique receipt numbers and invoice amounts to the government for tax reporting. (In fact, in Taiwan most people don’t need to hire accountants to do their taxes - the government can directly tell you how much you owe them or how much they should return to you).
But the second step is where we see true innovation. The Taiwanese government turned each receipt and invoice number into a lottery ticket for citizens to play. For every odd-numbered month, citizens can see if their receipt numbers match the winning prize. The first place would win the equivalent of $62,000 - about five years of salary for an average new college graduate, while the second place would win $6,200, with subordinate prizes scaling all the way down to $7.
Because of this “Uniform Invoice Lottery” system, consumers are now demanding receipts and invoices from businesses, preventing the businesses from evading taxes by exchanging cash under the table (or purchasing with Bitcoins). In addition, consumers are
more likely to spend more since each time they make a purchase they can become a winner, boosting the economy in the process.
Even my grandmother has won many of the small $7 and $31 awards over the past two decades, just by doing what she already does – buying groceries and essentials.
As a result of the Uniform Invoice Lottery, the Finance Ministry collected 75% more in tax revenue in 1951 compared to 1950. Great ROI, especially for government efforts202. The program was so successful, they increased the top prize to over $330,000 in 2011, hoping to get more consumers to demand their receipts.
In 2006, the Taiwanese government also started to transition these unified invoices into e-invoices, reducing the involved processing costs by $250 million and saving 80,000 trees every year203.
We should see more of our governments implementing innovative solutions by motivating and engaging its constituency instead of just clamping down harder or making punishments for infractions more severe.
Core Drive 7: The Bigger Picture
Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity is a powerful Black Hat Core Drive that is intrinsically thrilling. For any engagement design, it is productive to ask yourself, “Is there any way to add a little bit of randomness and chance to the process?” By using techniques that are designed for curiosity and unpredictability, companies can drive their customers to engage with their product and retain these customers much longer into the Endgame Phase.
Working with White Hat Core Drives, Core Drive 7 is a great way to inspire Epic Meaning & Calling, stir up Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, and improve the value of Ownership & Possession. Working with other Black Hat Core Drives, Unpredictability & Curiosity matched with Scarcity & Impatience, creates obsessive and addictive behaviors, while substantially amplifying the negative emotions of fear and worry when matched with Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance.
To get the most out of the book, Choose only ONE of the below options to do right now:
Easy: Think about your favorite TV-series (if you have one) that you are constantly glued to. Once you watched it through once, would you go back and watch it again alone? What happens to your motivation when Unpredictability diminishes?
Medium: Unpredictability magnifies our emotions towards both gain (Core Drive 4) and Loss (Core Drive 8). Think about a scenario where unpredictability was attached to a gain and it made the entire experience more playful and exciting compared to a guaranteed chance of gain. Then, think about a scenario where it is tied to a loss and how it paralyzed activity more-so than if the loss had a sure chance of incurring. Can you see how unpredictability can make any event more emotional engaging through a Black Hat Intrinsic way?
Hard: In your own project, try to design a Group Quest Mystery Box combo, where if the entire group commits various Desired Actions, a surprise reward will be given to everyone. Evaluate the pros and cons of that compared to just giving a Group Fix-Action Reward, where everyone already knows exactly what the reward is if they did the Desired Actions (Earned Lunch).
Share what you come up with on Twitter or your preferred social network with the hashtag #OctalysisBook and check out what ideas other people have.
Explore Octalysis Content in Unpredictable Ways
One of the creations I have on the Internet is a video tutorial series called Beginner’s Guide to Gamification. It is basically a combination of the Octalysis and gamification knowledge that you are reading from this book, footage from all my travels across the globe (U.S., India, China, Denmark, Kingdom of Bahrain, U.K., Germany, Hawaii and more), and a bunch of goofy activities that I do just to prevent viewers from leaving these videos prematurely. Some of the things I do in these videos are so outrageous that I still feel embarrassed to show people. It may serve as an interesting way for you to review the contents learned from this book in an more entertaining way. The video series can be accessed on my website at http://www.yukaichou.com/video-guide204.
Chapter 12: The Eighth Core Drive - Loss & Avoidance
Loss and Avoidance is the eighth and final core drive in my Octalysis Framework. It motivates through the fear of losing something or having undesirable events transpire.
A concept within many popular games is to stay alive in order to advance to the next round. Depending on the game’s design, dying or injuring your character means that you’re now forced to start over or lose something significant - be it coins, money, the number of lives you have, or other setbacks that make it more difficult to reach the Win-State.
This aversion towards loss is obviously not limited to games. There are many situations in the real world where we act based on fear of losing something that represents our investment of time, effort, money, or other resources. To preserve our ego and sense of self, Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance sometimes manifests itself through our refusal to give up and admit that everything we have done up to this point has been rendered useless.
Even new opportunities that are perceived as fading away can exhibit a form of Loss & Avoidance. If people do not act immediately on this temporary opportunity, they feel like they are losing the chance to act forever.
A common example can be seen in the coupons that arrive regularly in the mail. Let’s say you receive a coupon that gives you a 10% discount to a popular chain store that you have no interest in visiting, and the coupon is labeled to expire on February 12th.
Your brain may be absolutely certain that, if you let the coupon expire, the very next month you will receive the exact same coupon that expires on March 12th. But you might get an annoying feeling that you are somehow losing something if you don’t use the coupon before the expiration date. Rationally it shouldn’t matter, but you are compelled to think about the offer a little more. As a result, you become a bit more likely to go to the store for a discount that you may not truly care about.
Cropping your Losses
Many social games effectively employ Core Drive 8: Loss and Avoidance to motivate players towards taking the Desired Actions. In the now familiar example of Farmville, if we look at the early part of their onboarding stage, we can see that avoidance design was already integrated into the system, inducing users to “log in” multiple times each day.
The first few minutes of Farmville seems very positive as the player spends time creating their avatar and starts working on their farm with an initial pool of free Farm Cash. However, Farmville soon demands that each player maintain their crops and livestock through routine farming chores - mostly in the form of coming back and clicking on the crops and livestock to harvest their products.
If you don’t return to reap your harvest within a given number of hours, as determined by the crops’ profiles (you can choose which crop to plant, which plays into Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback), you will lose your invested hard work and be shown demoralizing images of crops withering and dying. This mildly depressing incident upsets the user, compelling them to log back in frequently to keep their crops alive. The player becomes proactively involved in avoiding this negative outcome.
When players lose their crops, it not only costs them Farm Cash to replace but also their time, as they have to replant and maintain new crops again. Each time you see the discouraging images of dead crops, you are hit with the triple whammy of having lost your time, effort, and resources.
Many years ago I was astonished at how effective this design could be, as my technology abhorrent mother suddenly became obsessed with playing Farmville. Back then, my mother was the type of person who thinks that technology is a source of evil that is polluting society and crippling authentic relationships; she still barely checks her email.
But in 2009, due to her close friend’s enthusiastic recommendation - a nice example of Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, my mother signed up on Facebook and started to play Farmville. The beginning of the Onboarding phase was smooth and fun, as she used the game to relax her mind and connect with her friends.
However, after a few months of playing, my mother would
sometimes wake up at 5:00am in the morning simply to harvest her crops and prevent them from withering. It became so bad that when my mother needed to travel out of town, she would call up my cousin and ask if he could log into her Facebook account and help manage her farm. She needed to make sure her crops didn’t die. (Though she also used to ask me, being a son that was lacking in “孝” as discussed in Chapter 5, I eventually deferred the responsibility so I could focus on my “other” important work).
At the time, this blew my mind. I initially thought the reason for most people to play games was because they had too many responsibilities in the real world and needed to immerse themselves into a fantasy world to escape those responsibilities. However, here you have a brand new set of virtual responsibilities that add on even more stress and anxiety to daily life. It didn’t make any sense.
Of course, today I understand the nature and power of Black Hat Motivation. For a period of time, Farmville was able to successfully increase its Daily Active Users Metrics and lower short-term turnover with this type of Loss & Avoidance design. That is, until users hit a “Black Hat Rebound,” where they eventually burn out and find the courage to pursue freedom outside of Farmville.
Affection Held Hostage
In early 2014, I was invited to the global conglomerate Huawei in Shenzhen, China to do a few workshops on gamification. During this trip, I had an assigned tour guide that took me to the beautiful Tea Stream Valley for a full day trip. (You can see much of this trip, including my camel ride and a jaw-dropping lion dance performance, in my video series - The Beginner’s Guide to Gamification.) Between all that excitement, the educational part of my trip came towards the end.