by Yu-kai Chou
Currently, there are some daycare centers that charge a $1 late fee for every minute the parent is late. This design actively gets parents to be on time more often. This is not only because the loss is more threatening, but also due to the parents feeling a combination of Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience, as well as a bit of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback since they feel a stronger sense of agency over end results.
Careful Transitioning between White Hat and Black Hat
So now that we’ve covered the nature and differences between White Hat and Black Hat gamification, how do we blend that knowledge together into our designed experiences?
In general (with some exceptions), it is better to first setup a White Hat environment to make users feel powerful and comfortable, then implement Black Hat designs at the moment when you need users to take that one Desired Action for conversion. At that point, users will likely take the Desired Action, but won’t feel very comfortable. This is when you transition quickly back to White Hat motivation to make them feel good about their experience.
An example of this is seen in the previously mentioned game Battle Camp. In Battle Camp, there are often scenarios where you are in a “Troop” with twenty-four other players and the whole group needs to battle a big boss. Typically, you would have eight hours to fight this boss, where everyone needs to come back every fifty minutes when their energy is recharged (remember this technique is called a Torture Break), and then use that energy to attack the boss.
At times, after seven and a half hours, the will boss still have 20% of his health, and you begin to realize that your troop will not be able to defeat him. At this point, you basically have two options. Option one: you lose to the boss, and twenty-five players all waste eight hours of their time, not to mention falling behind other troops that will be ranked much higher after they defeat their boss. Option two: spend $10 and purchase more energy in order to beat the boss.
Because it is such a devastating event when everyone loses eight hours of their precious time, there is a fairly high chance that you will feel compelled to take option two - buy the energy needed to defeat the boss, especially if you were also the leader of the troop.
Now, we see that you were motivated by Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance when making this purchase – again, very compelling, but you feel fairly terrible afterwards. After you defeat the boss, if that was all and nothing special happened afterwards, you would feel pretty demoralized and perhaps subconsciously wished you weren’t playing the game anymore.
However, this is when the game starts to shower you with White Hat Motivation by showing you how great of an achievement you accomplished (Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment), and the rewards or trophies you have obtained (Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession) because you have beaten the boss. On top of that, your teammate will often start cheering for you (Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness), “Wow! You spent real money just to save our troop. You are our hero!” Being sprinkled by all this emotional confetti, people often start to think, “Hmm, maybe that was $10 well spent after all!” And this eventually trains their brains to be more open to spending the next $10 to buy energy and defeating the boss when necessary.
No Buyer’s Remorse from TOMS
Similar to the Battle Camp example, businesses should consider creating an environment of White Hat motivations, use Black Hat techniques to convert users, and then revert back to a White Hat strategy to make users feel more comfortable again.
The initial White Hat environment is for people to take interest and have a good opinion of your system in the first place. A venture capitalist wouldn’t want to invest in a startup if he didn’t first consider it world-changing and a smart investment (Core Drives 1 and 2), even if there was convincing apprehension that he may lose the deal. (Oddly enough, some investors still plunge under the pressure of Scarcity and Loss, even though they have previously determined it to be a worthless idea with no future).
Once people feel comfortable in your system but aren’t necessarily taking the strong Desired Action, such as making a purchase, you can then use the Black Hat techniques within Core Drives 6 and 8 (and sometimes Core Drive 5), to close the deal. If the user ends up buying the product, you want to reassure them that, if true, this is indeed the smartest purchase possible (Core Drive 2), that legions of others also made the same decision (Core Drive 5), and that it positively improves the world (Core Drive 1). This will likely ensure that customers don’t feel buyer’s remorse.
When you buy a pair of TOMS Shoes and begin to feel a little regret for making an expensive purchase, they hit you with reaffirming information on how your purchase has made a tremendous difference to a poor child in Africa - one who couldn’t afford a pair of shoes and had to walk barefoot to fetch water for her family. When you see that, you instantly feel good again about your purchase. Subsequently, whenever you see your shoes, it will remind you that you are a decent human being that benefits the world.
It is the same thing with donations to children in developing countries. When you make a commitment, the non-profit will continuously send you pictures, thank-you letters, sometimes even something written by the “adopted” child to make you feel that you have truly made an impact in their lives. Of course, there is nothing wrong with sending donors these pictures and letters for such a noble cause (unless they are falsely manufactured) as these donors are truly making a big difference in the lives of the less fortunate. In fact, it would be a mistake for any charitable organization to not show visual and social information on the impact they are making in the world. We would all like to see some Feedback Mechanics after taking Desired Actions.
As you design your experiences, never forget that if you want good Endgame design, you must immerse your users in White Hat Gamification techniques.
What about Core Drives 4 and 5?
You may have noticed that I mentioned Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession and Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness a few times in this chapter (in a White Hat context), and may wonder where they fit into all of this. They are in the middle of the Octalysis model, so are they Black Hat or White Hat?
Generally speaking, Core Drive 4 and Core Drive 5 have the duality of being able to be either White Hat or Black Hat. Often with Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession, owning things make us feel like we are in control, that things are organized, and our general well-being is improving. We feel powerful and enriched.
However, sometimes the stuff we own start to own us instead. You can imagine a person who buys an extremely rare vintage car, and then becomes afraid of taking it anywhere because he is afraid to damage it or rack up miles. At the same time, he also doesn’t want to leave it at home because he’s afraid it might get stolen.
There are also people who are so obsessed about building more wealth that they neglect everything else that matters, such as family, health, and friendships. Then there are people who compulsively need to organize things to the point where they can’t really focus on more important things that would bring them happiness. At that point, Black Hat starts to take over and the individual no longer feels good about their behavior, but simply does it because they feel compelled to do it.
On the other hand, for Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, we obviously enjoy and have fun when hanging out with our friends, building strong friendships, and expressing appreciation for each other. Even if we are making friends to network and build our careers (which adds certain Left Brain Core Drives such as Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment as well as Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession), we feel pretty positive about the experience.
However, sometimes peer pressure can cause some of the worst moments in our lives. When we feel pressured by our environment to behave in certain ways or get into fights with our loved ones, it starts to drive us crazy in a way that few other things can.
In fact, from time to time, social pressure is so strong that people end up committing suicide simply becaus
e they cannot endure the judgment of others. For these people, choosing to end their own lives is easier than confronting the situation, even when it is something as trivial as being afraid to go home and tell parents about a failed test. You can clearly see the Black Hat influences that can arise from Core Drive 5.
At the end of the day, each of the Core Drives wields a tremendous amount of power, and a designer must think carefully about designing for ethical purposes - to make sure there is full transparency towards the Desired Behavior, matched with the users’ freedom to opt in and out. If this is not carefully done, gamification design will fail the promise of making life more enjoyable and productive, and it would simply become a source of misery and bitterness - and then likely dropped altogether. No one wants that.
The cliché phrase is that, “with great power comes great responsibility.” When you understand how to motivate and change behavior, you can improve the world by helping others achieve their life, career, fitness, and relationship goals. Conversely, you can wield this knowledge to get people more addicted to harmful substances, create bad habits, and perpetuate broken relationships265. Ultimately, when your experience design becomes extremely successful, you must look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Is this the impact I want to have in the world?”
To get the most out of the book, Choose only ONE of the below options to do right now:
Easy: Try to recite the three White Hat Core Drives and the three Black Hat Core Drives without looking at them. Are you able to explain their differences?
Medium: Think back on your own life and all the major decisions that you made: applying for schools, changing jobs, finding a significant other, moving to new locations. What Core Drives motivated you to make those decisions? Are they mostly for White Hat reasons, or Black Hat? Are you happier with the decisions that you made from White Hat Core Drives? Do you feel less comfortable with decisions that were driven by Black Hat Core Drives, but feel like you had little choice when the decision were made?
Hard: Think of a campaign that you can design for your own project. Try to come up with ways to use White Hat Gamification to create motivation and desire, then switch to Black Hat Gamification to trigger important Desired Actions. Finally, understand how to transition user motivation back to White Hat Core Drives so they enjoy the experience fully and feel emotionally rewarded after committing the Desired Actions.
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.
Share your Life reflections.
If you picked the Medium Challenge above, share your life paths and choices as part of a self introduction to the Octalysis Explorers Facebook Group. Identify the Core Drives that motivated you along the way, and reflect on how you felt during those life choices. That way the community will get to know you better as well as learn a bit more about the 8 Core Drives through your experiences.
As you know, a community makes an experience engaging and fun, and it will make all the time you have invested into this book more fulfilling. Chances are, there will be others in the group that will also have similar life experiences and choices as you and can help you understand your life motivations more through the 8 Core Drives.
Chapter 15: Understanding Other Gamification and Behavioral Frameworks with Octalysis
Up to this point we have covered almost everything there is to learn in Level I Octalysis design. My goal for the book is to go deep on one methodology and framework (namely my own), and then once competency of that one framework is achieved, use it to understand other frameworks.
In 2012, when I attended the annual GSummit266, the largest gamification conference in the world, I was thoroughly impressed by the ensemble of knowledgeable panelists and speakers. However, I imagined that the average attendee could be flustered by all of the various talks and frameworks presented at the conference - from Richard Bartles’ Four Player Types, Mihayi Chiksenmihayi’s Flow Theory, Nicole Lazzarro’s 4Keys2Fun, and a plethora of others!
At the end of the day, while the attendee feels pumped and inspired about the world-changing potential of gamification, they may still feel confused about what to do next. All these frameworks, when pieced together, seem to communicate an abstract knowledge about the brain. But the question of how we connect them together in a way that holistically reflects our minds is difficult to answer. It becomes even more challenging when one needs to determine which framework to use for various projects.
Because of this, I wanted to make sure that my readers have a deep understanding of my own model instead of a shallow knowledge of different concepts. However, I do not want my readers to be ignorant of other prominent gamification theories and key models in motivational psychology and behavioral economics, which are all great in their own rights. So in this chapter we will discuss these concepts and examine them using our “Octalysis Glasses.”
One of the things I enjoy about the Octalysis Framework is that it helps me understand other experts’ work better by putting their research and findings into perspective. As we all have the same brain, I believe that various studies on the brain and motivation can converge with each other to provide a richer understanding.
Hopefully your understanding of Octalysis will help you comprehend these other frameworks quickly. Of course, there are many excellent books that are highly recommended, if you’re keen on diving deeper into those other frameworks.
Scientific Research and Game Studies
Every once in a while, someone asks me whether my Octalysis Framework was created based on a deep study of all the texts and scientific studies I’ve mentioned in this book.
In truth, Octalysis was 100% derived from my experience and study of games. I wish there was a more impressive origin, but in reality everything I needed to create the Octalysis Framework was found in my many years of playing and analyzing games. This is why I consider it a Gamification Framework, and not just mere psychological and behavioral studies that are independent of games, as viewed by others.
Once the Framework was created, I began to research behavioral economics, motivational psychology, and neurobiology to confirm (or extend) the principles behind the Core Drives. I knew that these Core Drives motivated us, but I didn’t have scientific publications to back it up until much later. Luckily for me, most people who hear about my work on Octalysis can relate back to their own personal experiences and observations. This prompted them to give me the benefit of the doubt before I could scientifically prove why it works. A Core Drive 5 victory on relatedness.
On this point, let me explain why I believe studying games is legitimate enough to obtain a full grasp of motivational theories and behavioral predictions - feel free to disagree with me; I won’t be offended.
As repeated in previous chapters, an important aspect of games is that you never have to play them. Again, you have to go to work and you have to do your taxes. They can be awfully dreadful but you still just have to grind through them. I call this “tainted motivation.”
But with games, no one has to play them267. The moment a game is no longer fun, people leave it to do or play something else.
In a sense every game can be considered an experiment in motivation and behavior.
We receive most of our understanding of behavioral psychology from experiments where participants (often fifty to two hundred undergraduate students) are placed in controlled environments and tested for their reactions based on certain variables. The result of these peer-reviewed experiments become legitimate scientific research that gives us insight into the human mind.
On the other hand, every game can be thought of as a Petri dish where hundreds of thousands (if not hundreds of millions) of “test subjects” voluntarily modify their behaviors based on changes in the environment. These mass “experiments” naturally show us how certain experiences and mechanics are effective or ineffective at impacting human behavior.
One of the things I like to do is s
tudy “clones” of games in order to understand why some clones are flops while others become more successful than the original. When two games look almost identical, but one (sometimes the less attractive one) becomes a breakout success while the other becomes a failure, it creates a great opportunity to study the subtle elements within the design that make a big difference. Sometimes the differences are as small as how many seconds pass before a message pops up, the order of challenges are introduced, or how well scarcity is controlled in the economy.
From my own research, these subtle differences are not well covered in gamification or even game design literature. But I have found them to be among the most important for the success of an experience - beyond graphics, animation, or even theme. At the end of the day, it is not whether they have certain game elements (theme, group quests, badges, power-ups), but whether those certain game elements are designed in a way that bring out our Core Drives.
Now, the challenge is that between two “similar” games there is never just one variable of difference. Often there are hundreds or even thousands of differences between games. As such, it requires a substantial amount of time and pattern recognition effort/analysis to identify the behavioral impact of each element to the point that it can be predicted and replicated.
This requires studying scores of games and years of serious observation before patterns can be easily recognized and predictions can be made on how behavior changes when game elements shift. You also need to go beyond the superficial changes to find what truly drives user behavior. This means digging into the experience and ultimately immersing yourself in those games to feel the forces of motivation first hand - which I must admit, consumed many joyful and some agonizing hours of my life.