by Adam Alter
It’s also easy to tell yourself you’ll watch just an episode or two, and unless the show is really worth your time you’ll resist watching the remaining episodes. In a recent study, though, Netflix measured how long it took its viewers to become hooked to each show. For each show, Netflix calculated how many episodes it took for 70 percent of its viewers to continue on to the end of the first season or beyond. Most shows weren’t quite addictive after just the pilot episode, but some became addictive to a great majority of viewers by episodes two, three, or four (see here).
This leaves you with three options: avoid watching the show altogether, begin watching when you can afford to lose several hours to a binge session, or—best of all—use the cliffhanger-disarming technique to defang end-of-episode cliffhangers. If you design your environment wisely, you’ll stand a better chance of avoiding harmful behavioral addictions.
But not all addictive experiences are bad. In theory, the same hooks that drive addiction can also be harnessed to drive healthier eating, regular exercise, retirement saving, charitable giving, and committed studying. Sometimes, the problem isn’t that we’re addicted to the wrong kinds of behaviors, but rather that we abandon the right kinds. Behavioral architecture isn’t just a tool for doing less of the wrong things; it’s also a tool for doing more of the right things.
Enter gamification.
12.
Gamification
In late 2009, Swedish ad agency DDB Stockholm launched an online campaign for Volkswagen. Volkswagen was releasing a new eco-friendly car that was designed to make driving more fun, so DDB named the campaign The Fun Theory. “Fun can change people’s behavior for the better,” one executive explained, so perhaps a dose of fun would nudge drivers to try the new car. To generate buzz, DDB launched a series of clever experiments around Stockholm. Each one turned an otherwise mundane behavior into a game.
The first experiment took place at central Stockholm’s Odenplan metro station. Commuters had two options when exiting the station: to walk up a bank of twenty-four stairs, or to stand still on a narrow escalator. Surveillance footage showed that commuters were lazy by default, piling onto the crowded escalator rather than taking the empty staircase. The problem, DDB explained, is that stairs aren’t fun. So, late one evening, a team of workers converted the staircase into an electronic piano. Each stair became a piano key that played a loud tone in response to pressure. In the morning, commuters approached Odenplan’s exit as they usually did. At first, most took the escalator, but a few happened to take the stairs, unintentionally composing brief melodies as they left the station. Other commuters took note, and soon the stairs were more popular than the escalator. According to the video, “66 percent more people than normal chose the stairs over the escalator.” People flock when you turn a mundane experience into a game.
DDB released other experiments as the campaign gathered steam. At a popular park, an electronics expert created the “deepest bin in the world”—a trash can rigged to emit an echo implying that each piece of garbage plummeted before crashing far below. Other cans in the park attracted eighty pounds of trash each day; the deepest can attracted twice as much. Elsewhere, people were misusing recycling bins around the city, so DDB turned one bin into an arcade game. The game rewarded people who used the bin correctly with flashing lights and points that were recorded on a large, red display. An average of just two people used most nearby bins correctly each day; more than a hundred people used the arcade bin correctly each day.
The campaign was wildly successful. The videos attracted a combined total of more than thirty million YouTube hits, and plenty of online buzz. In 2010, DDB won the Cyber Grand Prix Lion at the world’s largest advertising festival—an enormous honor bestowed on the “world’s most celebrated viral campaigns.” Beyond industry plaudits, the campaign also changed how people behaved. For a brief time, the people of Stockholm were ever so slightly greener and healthier.
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There are two ways to approach behavioral addictions: eliminate them or harness them. Elimination was the subject of the first eleven chapters of Irresistible, but—just as DDB did in Stockholm—it’s possible to channel the forces that drive harmful behavioral addiction for the good. The human tendencies that enslave us to smartphones, tablets, and video games also prepare us to do good: to eat better, exercise more, work smarter, behave more generously, and save more money. To be sure, there’s a fine line between behavioral addictions and helpful habits, and it’s important to keep that line in mind. The same Fitbit that fuels exercise addiction and eating disorders in some people pushes others to leave the couch behind during an hour of exercise. Addictive levers work by boosting motivation, so if your motivation is already high there’s a good chance those levers will compromise your well-being. If you’re a couch potato who hates to exercise, a dose of motivation can only help.
A broad survey of human behavior reveals plenty of room for improvement. Sixty percent of the world’s developed population is overweight or obese, including 67 percent of Americans, 66 percent of New Zealanders, 65 percent of Norwegians, and 61 percent of Brits, Germans, and Australians. Graduation rates in the United States are declining at every education level, from elementary school to four-year colleges. In response, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education expects personal income to fall over the next fifteen years. Americans save just 3 percent of their household income; Danes, Spaniards, Finns, Japanese, and Italians save even less. A paper in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet predicted that half of all babies born in the world’s developed countries after 2000 will live past one hundred years, which will outstrip their retirement savings by decades. Between 2013 and 2015, U.S. residents were among the one or two most generous nations in the world—but even so, Americans donated less than 2 percent of their income to charitable causes.
Almost everyone wants to change at least one behavior. For some, it’s spending too much and saving too little; for others, it’s wasting nine tenths of the work day checking emails; for others, still, eating too much or exercising too little. The obvious path to change is with effort, but willpower is limited. People are more likely to do the right thing, DDB showed, if the right thing happens to be fun. A computer programmer named John Breen had the same intuition when his son was struggling to learn SAT vocabulary in 2007. Breen designed a computer program that presented his son with randomly chosen words, and asked him to choose the best definition for each word among four alternatives. Breen also ran a website that educated people on world poverty, so he decided to combine the two. If the site attracted enough traffic, he could sell banner ad space to the highest bidder, and use the ad revenue to buy rice for the needy. And so FreeRice.com was born.
For every correct answer, Breen promised to donate ten grains of rice to a food charity. The site launched on October 7, 2007, and on its first day raised 830 grains of rice. FreeRice grew so fast that two months later Breen raised three hundred million grains in a single day. In 2009, he offered the platform to the United Nations World Food Programme, and in 2014 the site raised its hundred billionth grain—enough to feed five million adults for a day.
When American students are forced to learn thousands of words for the SATs, that’s a chore; yet that’s exactly what thousands of FreeRice users choose to do with their free time every day. The site succeeds because Breen managed to turn the chore into a game. All the elements are there: each correct answer earns ten points (depicted as grains of rice), which function like a game score. You can track how many correct answers you’ve delivered in a row, and the game reports your longest winning streak. Meanwhile, the words become more obscure as you rise through the game’s sixty levels—and decline in obscurity when you make a mistake. That way the game is always pitched perfectly between too easy and too difficult. Breen wisely added graphics as well, so you can track your progress visually: a small wooden bowl fills with rice until you reach one hundred grains, and
then places the ball of one hundred grains beside the bowl as it begins filling again. Reach a thousand grains and an even bigger pile forms next to the bowl. Some users form groups that play together—the highest-scoring groups and individuals appear on a daily leaderboard—and you and your group members can stop and start whenever you like. FreeRice looks like a combination of learning and giving, but under the hood it’s driven by a gaming engine.
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What DDB did for Volkswagen and Breen did for FreeRice is known as gamification: taking a non-game experience and turning it into a game. A computer programmer named Nick Pelling coined the term in 2002. Pelling realized that game mechanics could make any experience more compelling, but he struggled to commercialize the concept, which lay dormant until Google and several prominent venture capitalists revived it in 2010. The central theme of gamification is that the experience itself should be its own reward. Even if you aren’t motivated to donate to a food charity, or to learn new words, you should want to spend your time playing FreeRice. Over time, despite yourself, you’ll find that you are learning and donating rice.
Gamification researchers Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter examined over one hundred examples of gamification, and identified three common elements: points, badges, and leaderboards. PBL, as the triad is known, first came together in airline frequent-flyer programs. United launched the first airline loyalty program in 1972, long before the advent of gamification, and other airlines soon introduced similar programs. With each flight or qualifying purchase, flyers earn points in the form of miles; when they earn enough points in a single year, they win badges in the form of status markers—silver, gold, platinum, and so on; and high-status members stand in different lines, board the plane first, and sometimes receive special treatment on the airplane—rewards that function as a conspicuous leaderboard.
Gamification is a powerful business tool, and harnessed appropriately it also drives happier, healthier, and wiser behavior. That philosophy drove Richard Talens and Brian Wang, who met in 2004 as freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania. Talens and Wang had two things in common: they both loved video games, and they were both fitness fanatics. “We kind of recognized each other because we saw each other eating broccoli and tuna in the cafeteria,” Talens recalled in an interview. “We had a very similar mentality to fitness because we both grew up very out of shape. We both grew up playing video games, and we both saw fitness as a game.” Talens and Wang became amateur body builders, and in 2011 they launched a gamified fitness website called Fitocracy. By 2013, Fitocracy had one million users; by 2015, two million.
Fitocracy rewards users with points after every workout—more points for harder workouts—and badges when those workouts reach certain milestones. Run a 10k, for example, and the site gives you the 5k badge, the 10k badge, and awards you 1313 points. When you go to the gym you’ll see two kinds of people: people who prefer to work out alone; and people who turn fitness into a social event. Fitocracy appeals to both kinds of people by giving you the opportunity to interact with other users. You can challenge them to duels and discuss your latest workout—or you can treat the site like a private activity log, challenging yourself to run farther and lift more without having to share your progress with anyone else. Variety is also a critical gamification ingredient, and Fitocracy injects variety by allowing you to adopt quests and challenges that draw on your favorite exercises. Wang and Talens have collected dozens of stories of people losing a hundred pounds with the site’s help—the majority having struggled to stick to an exercise regime for years.
Many adults fold in the face of temptation, so you can imagine how children struggle to do the right thing. Adults make wise decisions at least some of the time because they’re able to look into the distant future. Children, on the other hand, make decisions that suit them right now. There is no long view where children are concerned, so a chocolate cake is all temptation and no downside. But children love games as much as adults do, so gamification endows children with a dose of self-control. Take the case of dental hygiene. Kids have better things to do than brushing their teeth, particularly just before bedtime. Enter Philips Sonicare, which released a gamified toothbrush in August 2015. The toothbrush is designed to encourage kids to brush for a full two minutes. It has a small screen that displays a character called a Sparkly. Kids earn points for brushing each quadrant of teeth, and those points feed the Sparkly. The Sparkly proved so endearing that kids couldn’t get enough of the toothbrush. In an interview, a veteran at the company said, “Because kids love the game and they interacted so much with the app they didn’t go to bed right away.” The app had to be altered so the updated Sparkly falls over with exhaustion after brushing ends.
As NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz told me, designing games is tough. For every game that hooks the masses, thousands go largely unplayed. Philips had the opposite problem, deliberately tweaking the Sparkly app to make it less addictive. These tweaks are a common feature of gamified platforms, because it’s difficult to predict which elements will drive behavior. In 2009, Adam Bosworth, the former head of Google Health, launched a health app called Keas. At first, Keas was big on data and small on gamification. Bosworth designed the app to deliver mountains of feedback tailored to each user. Users completed quizzes and entered their workouts and meals, and Keas explained how their choices shaped important health outcomes. In Bosworth’s mind, users would exercise more and eat less if they were forced to confront the effects of laziness and gluttony. But idle data reports weren’t enough to change behavior, so Keas changed direction. Bosworth rolled out the app at a number of large corporations, where he encouraged employees to form rival teams. Good behavior earned players points, and the new version of Keas incorporated game levels and strategies. Bosworth wanted to make sure that the app had plenty of quizzes, so his team designed many more than he expected users to complete during the app’s standard twelve-day program. He undershot the mark: many users devoured the entire set in under a week.
Keas works in part because it’s simple. It relies heavily on a four-item quiz that users complete at the beginning and end of the twelve-day program. The questions are:
Are you a non-smoker?
Do you eat more than five servings of fruit and veggies a day?
Do you have a healthy bodyweight (Body Mass Index less than 25)?
Do you exercise regularly (more than 45 minutes, 5 times a week)?
For each “yes” answer, users earn a point—so scores of zero or one indicate an unhealthy lifestyle, while three or four indicate healthy behavior. Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical research firm, invested in the app several years ago. Before the program began, 35 percent of its workforce scored zero or one on the app—afterwards, that number fell to 17 percent. Meanwhile, healthy responses (scores of three or four) rose from 40 percent to 68 percent.
Keas operates for profit. Executives at companies like Pfizer pay a fee to use the program, and in turn their employees are healthier, more productive, less likely to call in sick and to draw from the company’s healthcare budget. Similar apps work just as well in not-for-profit contexts. An app called Health Lab improves the health of children in low-income communities, and the U.S. government has considered using games to fuel healthy childhood behavior across the country.
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In the fall of 2009, a new school opened its doors in New York City. Quest to Learn (Q2L) welcomed seventy-six sixth graders in its first year, and then added one new class at the beginning of each new year. Q2L was the brainchild of several organizations that came together to design a new model of education. The old model, they reasoned, was far from perfect. For centuries, schools had been wrestling with kids who were distracted, unmotivated, and often unhappy in the classroom. School seemed to be unpleasant by design: a combination of rote learning and brute-force instruction. Fun was an afterthought, if anyone considered it at all, so most kids saw school as a chore.<
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Q2L is different. Like DDB for its Volkswagen campaign, the school was founded on fun. If kids enjoyed school, surely they’d be happier and more engaged. The school’s founders decided that the best way to inject fun was to make the learning experience one big game. Learning, it turns out, is ripe for gamification. Each new module of information can be structured like a game that begins at zero knowledge and ends at perfect comprehension. Q2L uses the same gamified structure for each larger learning module, or mission: students complete a series of smaller quests during the mission period (say, ten weeks), and then finish with a boss level that pushes them to apply what they’ve learned to a new context. The boss level concept draws on classic gaming theory: that players hone their skills by defeating easier opponents before tackling a formidable “boss.” The boss serves as a capstone—a signal that the player has completed the mission and can move on to the next one.