| Mobile & Web

WHAT IS IT?

For the last few years, gamification has been buzzing on the lips of the tech and marketing industries. By layering on points and badges on every activity imaginable from geolocation check-ins, to ticking off a todo list, to building your dream farm, users can win these “rewards,” and in turn get addicted to the app or activity being pushed. Wunderbar!

Of course by now we all know that was a mirage. Players wise up to the cheap gamification tricks quickly, and have largely ignored the empty points that they were “winning.” The slapped on gamification features didn’t bring traffic, and with the exception of Zynga’s games (which isn’t really gamification given that they are games to begin with), no mass addiction ensued.

WHY IS IT RELEVANT?

The reason gamification fever failed is detailed in a very thoughtful article by Chelsea Howe (@manojalpa):

SuperBetter offers an alternative to gamification. Instead of taking the psychological hooks and operant conditioning from games, we use their deeply satisfying properties – things like agency, emotion, and immediate feedback – to help people do what they really want to do: feel better, reach their goals, connect with others, and live with meaning. We call this a gameful approach to design.

Ms. Howe carefully contrasted the difference in approaches between gamification vs. what she called gameful design, in the following areas:

Purpose

Motivating Users

Integration

Rewards

Achievements

Social Connections

Challenge and Skills

Virality

For example, in the rewards category, Ms. Howe deftly states that “Rewards only motivate people to get rewards,” and does not at all provide any intrinsic motivation for the task you want the user to do more of. The example Ms. Howe gave is that of a child who is rewarded with candy after each piano practice. This strategy not only entirely depends on the reward, such that when the candy is no longer offered the child will no longer play piano. This inherently devalues the actual goal of the strategy, which is to induce her to enjoy playing piano more —particular as she gets more proficient.

8ninths has been experimenting with gamification on a few projects, and we’ve aways found the exercise to be a bit, well, cynical. For our next project we are going to leverage Ms. Howe and her colleague’s advice in carefully designing intrinsic rewards that focus not on the what, but the why.