Gamify

How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things

Biran Burke

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351861779
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Business General

Organizations are facing an engagement crisis. Regardless if they are customers, employees, patients, students, citizens, stakeholders, organizations struggle to meaningfully engage their key constituent groups who have a precious and limited resource: their time. Not surprisingly, these stakeholders have developed deflector shields to protect themselves. Only a privileged few organizations are allowed to penetrate the shield, and even less will meaningfully engage. To penetrate the shield, and engage the audience, organizations need an edge. Gamification has emerged as a way to gain that edge and organizations are beginning to see it as a key tool in their digital engagement strategy. While gamification has tremendous potential to break through, most companies will get it wrong. Gartner predicts that by 2014, 80% of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives primarily due to poor design. As a trend, gamification is at the peak of the hype cycle; it has been oversold and it is broadly misunderstood. We are heading for the inevitable fall. Too many organizations have been led to believe that gamification is a magic elixir for indoctrinating the masses and manipulating them to do their bidding. These organizations are mistaking people for puppets, and these transparently cynical efforts are doomed to fail. This book goes beyond the hype and focuses on the 20% that are getting it right. We have spoken to hundreds of leaders in organizations around the world about their gamification strategies and we have seen some spectacular successes. The book examines some of these successes and identifies the common characteristics of these initiatives to define the solution space for success. It is a guide written for leaders of gamification initiatives to help them avoid the pitfalls and employ the best practices, to ensure they join the 20% that gets it right. Gamify shows gamification in action: as a powerful approach to engaging and motivating people to achieving their goals, while at the same time achieving organizational objectives. It can be used to motivate people to change behaviors, develop skills, and drive innovation. The sweet spot for gamification objectives is the space where the business objectives and player objectives are aligned. Like two sides of the same coin, player and business goals may outwardly appear different, but they are often the same thing, expressed different ways. The key to gamification success is to engage people on an emotional level and motivating them to achieve their goals.

PART I

THE VALUE OF GAMIFICATION: ENGAGING THE CROWD

1
Motivation: The Gamification Endgame

Every year the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, commonly known as SickKids, treats thousands of children who are battling cancer. As Canada’s leading research hospital for children, the facility needs to gauge the effectiveness of various treatments so that it can use the best therapies while minimizing the pain for kids with cancer. Such information would also benefit kids with cancer around the world.

But first, the hospital needs daily reports from the children about their current levels of pain. Yet the kids are suffering. The treatments are painful, and patients are not always up to the task of filling out their pain journals, particularly on bad days. With inconsistent reporting, it’s impossible for doctors to determine which treatments work best. What the hospital really needs is a way to inspire the kids to consistently provide critical information on their pain levels.

In previous studies, patients had often been inconsistent in filling out their journals, so researchers tried a different approach. They looked at the problem from the kids’ perspective and decided to design an experience that engages the kids on a different level. Working with Cundari, a Toronto-based communications agency, the team created “Pain Squad,” an iPhone app designed to collect daily information about children’s pain levels. The Pain Squad app enlists kids as members of a special police force on a mission to hunt down pain. The app reminds children to report their pain levels twice a day. But simply moving the reporting from paper to an iPhone app wasn’t enough. The app had to inspire the kids. The Pain Squad team needed to do more than just build an app; they needed to design an experience.

ENGAGING PLAYERS AT AN EMOTIONAL LEVEL

The challenge in getting children—or most people, for that matter—to do mundane or tedious tasks is to engage them at a deeper, more meaningful level. People find inspiration in many different ways. One way to motivate people is to present them with practical challenges, encourage them as they progress through levels, and get them emotionally engaged to achieve their very best. Gamification does just that. At its core, gamification is about engaging people on an emotional level and motivating them to achieve their goals.

Engagement gets a lot of airtime. Marketers focus on customer engagement, employers focus on employee engagement, educators focus on student engagement—and the list goes on. But the focus on engagement is often on the quantity of interactions rather than the quality—and these are two completely different things. Not all engagement is equal.

For example, dozens of research papers on employee engagement demonstrate the correlation between high levels of engagement and increased productivity, profits, retention, and quality, among other benefits.¹ But the majority of American workers are not engaged or, worse, they are actively disengaged.² Recent research indicates that engagement is not one-dimensional, and it is important to distinguish between emotional engagement and transactional engagement. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), transactional engagement is “shaped by employees’ concern to earn a living and to meet minimal expectations of the employer and their coworkers,” while emotional engagement is “driven by a desire on the part of employees to do more for the organization than is normally expected and in return they receive more in terms of a greater and more fulfilling psychological contract.”³

The distinction between emotional engagement and transactional engagement is visible far beyond employee/organizational relationships. Every interaction is a balance, with some weighing more on the emotional side and others being more transactional. If you are trying to lose a few pounds and are going to the gym to work out, think about how you engage in that activity. Some of the engagement may be transactional—you need to spend twenty minutes on the treadmill. But when you step on the scale and see that you’ve lost five pounds, there is an emotional engagement. You can see progress toward your goal, and you know you need to focus on the goal, not on the treadmill. Clearly, these engagement dimensions are not mutually exclusive but rather combinatorial. The problem is that organizations often rely primarily on transactional engagement strategies in their interactions. We need to shift our focus to emotional engagement if we want to truly motivate people.

NOT ALL REWARDS ARE EQUAL

When SickKids hospital developed its Pain Squad app, it had to address the types of rewards the app would give the children. While many parents and educators are familiar with rewarding kids for good work with stickers, cookies, or allowance money, they know well the limitations of simple rewards when it comes to real behavior change. According to Dr. Jennifer Stinson, who led the study at SickKids, “Previous similar diary-type studies typically incentivize the patients to complete their diaries by paying them. In this study, we wanted to get away from paying the kids, and in working with Cundari, we decided to use gamification to motivate the kids.”⁴

The Pain Squad mobile app creates an experience for the children in which they are playing the role of a police officer in a special force. The app includes a progression structure, so that when the children complete their pain report three days in a row, they progress from rookie to sergeant and through ranks until they finally become a chief. Like leveling up in a video game, movement up the ranks in the squad is visible to the kids. At Pain Squad Headquarters, the kids can see the badges they have earned and when they need to fill out their next report. To add even more inspiration, the team recruited some of the heroes from Canada’s leading police television shows. The casts from Flashpoint and Rookie Blue collaborated to create a series of videos to encourage the children to complete their reports, and these are sprinkled liberally throughout the Pain Squad mission.

According to Stuart Thom, interactive designer/developer at Cundari, “The actors appear to be actually speaking to you because they are addressing you by your rank.”⁵ The app gives the kids a sense of control when it comes to managing their pain. According to the mother of one of the kids, “It makes her feel that she’s a part of this.”⁶ Instead of paying kids to provide information that the researchers need, Pain Squad engages them in an inspiring mission. Most importantly, they are contributing to something bigger than themselves.

GAMIFICATION IS ALL ABOUT MOTIVATION

What the SickKids staff was learning is that extrinsic and intrinsic rewards provide starkly different outcomes. In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink examined the science of motivation and how extrinsic and intrinsic rewards affect behavior. In it, he cited numerous studies showing that extrinsic rewards are not sufficient to sustain engagement, and sometimes have the opposite effect. Extrinsic rewards “can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and worse, can reduce a person’s long-term motivation.”⁷ Pink concludes that intrinsic motivators have three essential elements: “(1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to make progress and get better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves.”

Gamification uses primarily intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards. As we will see a little later, the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards is one of the ways we can distinguish gamification from rewards programs. Intrinsic rewards sustain engagement because they engage people at an emotional level. Extrinsic rewards can certainly be used to motivate people, but the motivation occurs at a transactional level.

The series of MasterCard “Priceless” commercials captured the difference between emotional and transactional experiences succinctly with the slogan, “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s MasterCard.”⁸ Engagement can be bought, at least for the short term, with extrinsic rewards, but for emotional engagement you need to focus on intrinsic rewards.

Now let’s examine the three elements of motivation (autonomy, mastery, and purpose) through the lens of gamification.

Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives. In effective gamified solutions, players opt in to participate, and once they do, they make choices about how they will proceed through the challenges to achieve their goals. Players are given the opportunity to discover and learn using different paths through the solution. In some gamified solutions there are no paths at all. Players are given goals, tools, rules, and a space to “play” without being directed on the next steps to take.

Mastery—the urge to make progress and get better at something that matters. We all have a deep-seated need to improve in aspects of our lives, but often we lack the motivation to take the first step. Gamification provides the positive feedback and easy on-boarding that can motivate people to start performing better in a chosen area. But mastery is not an attainable goal, it is a journey. There are many signposts along the way that indicate progress, but there is never an end point. In virtually all of life’s pursuits—whether it is running, painting, or learning a language—there is always another level. Gamification is about getting better at something.

Purpose—the yearning to act in service of something larger than ourselves. By definition, gamified solutions are distinguished from traditional games by their purpose. Gamification is focused on one or more of three objectives: changing behaviors, developing skills, or driving innovation. Gamification must start and finish with a purpose that is centered on achieving meaningful player goals. As we saw with the Pain Squad app, the kids played a critical role in the effort to reduce pain for cancer patients. It’s a goal much larger than themselves.

Cundari realized how important it was to create an environment of intrinsic rewards to motivate the children to complete their pain journals. As Cory Eisentraut, group creative director at Cundari, put it:

This app actually became very empowering for the kids. We didn’t realize at the time we started developing this app how little control the kids have over their lives. Nothing in their lives is up to them. They are constantly being told when to go to appointments, what surgeries they’re going to have, and how long they will be in hospital. None of that gets decided by them. So much is taken away from them. They get pulled out of school. They have to say goodbye to their friends for long periods of time.

What this app actually became was their control—a tool that gave them some power over their disease. The value exchange was more than being about fun, it was about actually being a part of the cure, being a part of their treatment. In a very real way, the data that they were giving the doctors was not only going to help them, but it was going to help future patients. We weren’t sure if the kids were really going to get that, but they absolutely did.

DON’T MISTAKE BUSINESS GOALS FOR PLAYER GOALS

Often, we fail to achieve our goals not because the goal is uninspiring but because the path to achieving the goal is too hard, takes too long, or we don’t know where to start. The goal is not the problem; it is the path to achieving the goal that is the problem. Outlining that path is one way that gamification can help. By breaking a goal into a series of manageable steps and encouraging people along the way, gamified solutions can help them achieve their goals.

One of the key problems in many gamified solutions is that they are focused on getting players to achieve the organization’s goals rather than players’ goals. Gamified solutions must put players’ motivations and goals first and make them the primary design objective. This player-centric design approach is not intuitive, but every design decision must be focused on motivating players and enabling them to be successful in achieving their goals. First, though, designers need to understand players’ needs and ambitions. The solution must build a series of challenges that engages the players at an emotional level and motivates them to achieve a goal that is meaningful to them.

Pain Squad achieved this synergy and has been a tremendous success. According to Dr. Stinson:

In a previous study for kids with arthritis we had a 76 percent compliance rate over a two- to three-week period. And compliance definitely dropped off in the second and third week, I think because of the lack of motivation. That study used an electronic diary, but it didn’t have the motivation of Pain Squad. Using the Pain Squad app, we did a feasibility study with about twenty-two kids where we had them use it twice a day over a two-week period. We had almost 90 percent compliance, and it did not differ between week one and week two, nor between boys and girls. I think it was because of gamification. They really wanted to move up the ranks by the end of the two-week period.

Of course, the organizational objectives must also be met. It would be unrealistic to expect an organization to spend time, talent, and treasure without a return on investment. Player-centric design does not negate the organization’s goals, but supplants them with the player’s goals as the primary objective. The organization’s goals are a by-product. If the player’s goals are aligned with the organization’s goals, then the organizational goals will be achieved as a consequence of the player ach...