Playful Design Blog

Last week I tweeted this question out to the world.  Here are some of the great responses I’ve received so far, and with more coming in every day it looks like I’m going to have to make it into a series!  If you’d like to contribute to the next installment, just follow and tweet me.

This week, scores of designers, developers, marketers, and venture capitalists are meeting up at the Gamification Summit in San Francisco. Since it appeared in the pop design lexicon a very few years ago, interest in “gamification” has exploded worldwide.

But even as its popularity is surging, a growing cultural skepticism of gamification has started to emerge. There’s a creeping suspicion that “gamified” applications are exploitative, cynical, ill-conceived, simplistic, and ultimately unsustainable. Thought leaders who have advocated for the social benefits of games and play are careful to draw a line between their own views and gamification. These are just a few
examples:

• Jane McGonigal declared in The New York Times that “I don’t do ‘gamification,’ and I’m not prepared to stand up and
  say I think it works. I don’t think anybody should make games to try to
  motivate somebody to do something they don’t want to do. If the game is
  not about a goal you’re intrinsically motivated by, it won’t work.”
• Ian Bogost made his views reasonably clear in his blog post “Gamification is Bullshit“, elaborating that “[The term] ‘exploitationware’ captures gamifiers’ real intentions: a grifter’s game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit trend comes along.”
• Eric Zimmerman was a tad more subtle but no less critical in his keynote at GLS 7 asserting that “Stakeholders of all kinds are falling for fads like badges and gamification. Maybe we’re barking up the wrong trees — or even wandering in the wrong forest altogether.”
• Jesse Schell (a speaker at this year’s Gamification Summit) expresses his concern that “A lot of times these efforts can have a kind of fake feeling to them, and it’s one of the real problems these efforts have” in an online video

It must be said that all of these critiques do not come without very strong justification. We suffer a glut of implementations toting the “gamification” banner that amount to little more than points and badges tacked onto an underlying system that remains otherwise unchanged. These
kinds of approaches will not survive because they do not value gameplay, so players will not value them.

It’s hard to think that gamification is anything but overhyped at the moment, and that its cresting popularity isn’t headed for a crash. Gartner’s hype cycle illustrates how this happens predictably with hot new thing after hot new thing.

I happen to believe that games can achieve great things in the real world. I’m sure that a lot of people at the Gamification Summit believe that too, but the overwhelming noise in the current market makes it difficult discern which projects have the real potential to effect meaningful change. The world needs to move toward a post-hype discussion of how games can make a difference in people’s lives. I’ll offer a few suggestions for things that I believe are important to that discussion.

1. Conceive of these projects as games, first and foremost.
   Rather than creating things that are game-like or game-inspired, create things that are true games. You can’t bolt game elements onto something that isn’t a game and expect them to have the effect that an actual game would have. Much better to start with something that really is a game, through and through.
2. Value the quality of the player experience. More than anything else, games need to be designed to be enjoyed. This is, after all, the reason why people play games in the first place. It’s not because they love your brand; they play because they value the experience. Designers should care about the design, and how it arouses feelings of engagement, fulfillment, pride, connectedness, and fun in players.
3. Put the interests of players before your own. Any successful game experience must work in service of the interests of the player before it works in service of the interests of its designers. There’s an inherent selfishness to gameplay, and players will reject experiences that prioritize someone else’s agenda. To the extent that any design trades off enjoyable gameplay in service of real-world objectives, it is ultimately shooting itself in the foot.
4. Focus on intrinsic rewards. Games must enjoyed in and of themselves, and not played only for the extrinsic rewards they offer. HopeLab’s ZamZee, for instance, pays kids real-world rewards for the number of steps they take in a day. This isn’t a game, because people would feel no motivation to play it if the bribes weren’t there. A true game stands on its own, and offers its own rewards.
5. Do good. Much of the cynicism around gamification comes from its frequent association with the marketing of commercial products like Honey Nut Cheerios and Chicken McNuggets. Of course games can serve good too, as the impressive titles showcased at conferences like Games for Health and Games for Change demonstrate year after year. People are much more likely to have welcoming attitudes toward these kinds of games.
6. Let’s stop talking about “using” games. I personally slip up on this a lot, but it’s important to realize that this particular turn of phrase is very off-putting. It has a sinister ring of manipulation, and alienates players who don’t want to feel like they’re being “used” for someone else’s ends.
7. Drop the “g” word. In addition to sounding graceless and faddish, “gamification” completely emphasizes the wrong thing. It implies an experience that is by its nature something other than a game, but dressed up to resemble one. It’s also so imprecisely defined that it has been broadly applied to anything from Farmville to LinkedIn’s profile completeness bar. This is not a useful term, because it can’t make meaningful distinctions between meaningfully dissimilar things.

Taking these suggestions would muddle contemporary thinking around gamification to the point that it’s not clear that it would continue to exist as a concept. Maybe that’s a good thing. We can’t get to the other side of the hype cycle, where the underlying idea finally finds productive mainstream adoption, without a major shift in the status quo. For games to realize their full potential to create meaningful change in the real world, maybe “gamification” has to die.

Earlier this year, a study published in the journal Pediatrics found that five games that are marketed with the promise of increasing players’ physical fitness produced no actual difference in activity.  78 kids between 9 and 12 were given Wii consoles, and then one group was given a couple of exergames while a control group was given “inactive” games like Madden and Mario Kart.  The kids wore devices to measure their physical activity, and they kept logs of when they played. 

• Active Life – Extreme Challenge
• EA Sports Active
• Dance Dance Revolution – Hottest Party 3
• Wii Fit Plus
• Wii Sports

This is an excerpt from an interview with me by Jenn Webb.  You can read the complete interview on O’Reilly Radar.

This is an excerpt from an interview with me by Jenn Webb.  You can read the complete interview on O’Reilly Radar.

Valve Software has designed top-selling games including Left 4 Dead, Half-Life, and Team Fortress.  I recently spoke with Mike Ambinder, PhD, the company’s
full-time experimental psychologist, to discuss the professional practices that
ensure high-quality game experiences.

Q: What’s your role at Valve?
A: My job is to apply knowledge and methodologies from psychology to game
design.  That means performing statistical analyses, developing
playtesting methodologies, conducting  design experiments, a little bit of interface
design, and investigating alternative hardware among other things.

Q: How can psychology guide game design?
A: Well for example, in the Left 4 Dead series there are several predetermined
locations in the game called “drop points” where health items or
weapons will spontaneously appear.  To decide what’s dropped, where, and
when we considered reward and reinforcement schedules, which are elements of
behavioral psychology.  You can put things on a fixed schedule so that
they’ll appear at regular intervals.  This makes the gameplay experience
more predictable, and there can be real value in that.  Or you can use a
variable schedule so that you don’t know what’s going to show up or when it’ll
pop in.  Variable schedules can create a higher rate of engagement in the
game and make the experience more enjoyable as uncertainty of occurrence can
increase arousal.  A large component of the gameplay in the Left 4 Dead series
is the use of these variable reinforcement schedules.

Q: How is testing integrated into the design process?
A: We’re constantly playtesting.  Our philosophy is to playtest as much as
possible, and to start it as soon as we have a playable prototype.  Of
course our designers are experienced and generally make good decisions about
gameplay, but we don’t want to just assume we’ve got it right.  Game
designs are hypotheses, and every instance of play is an experiment.

Q: What’s your standard testing method?
A: We use a variety of methods, but the most favored is direct observation of
real players working their way through the game.  I’m not a fan of the
think-aloud protocol, in part because the constant prompting detracts from the
gameplay experience and can introduce inadvertent bias, and in part because
people can be really bad at explaining why they do what they do.  Better
to just sit back, watch, say nothing, and try to understand the player’s
actions.  So quiet, direct observation is our preferred method, but we
combine that with player Q&As, surveys, quantitative metrics, eyetracking, and
design experiments, and we’re investigating methods of measuring the player’s
emotional experience during gameplay.

Q: How can eyetracking help to inform game design?
A: Generally, you want to eliminate frequent long eye movements because they
lead to fatigue.  For example, if the area map is in the bottom right
corner of the display and your progress through that map is shown in the upper
left, you’ll see the player’s eyes transiting the screen a lot.  The
proximity compatibility principle tells us that things which are mentally
proximal should also be physically proximal, and eyetracking can tell us which
things are mentally proximal.  By arranging related information together,
you can reduce fatigue and make the interface more efficient to use.

Q: And how can you measure the emotional experience of gameplay?
A: This is still early on, but we’re looking at biometric methods like EEGs
which measure brainwaves, and EMGs which measure the electrical activity of
muscles.  But there are questions of their cost and efficacy. 
They’re also both very intrusive methods, requiring either a cap that’s wired
into a machine or electrodes attached to the face.  In testing you want to
mimic the home experience as much as possible, and EEGs and EMGs both make it
feel more like a lab environment.  But new technologies are emerging that
could change that.  Remote detection of facial expression seems promising;
these systems produce data along the lines of an EMG but only use a camera to
measure muscle activity in the face.

Emotion can be viewed as a vector and measured along two scales: magnitude and
valence.  Magnitude describes the intensity of the emotion, while valence
describes its quality (either positive or negative).  You can measure the
magnitude pretty reliably using something like heart rate, but understanding
the valence is the tricky part.  How do you know if that intense emotional
response is good or bad?  Of course you could just ask, but again that’s not
a preferred method because people don’t describe their own experiences reliably
and you’re introducing bias into the response.  Context is a better
basis.  If someone is getting killed repeatedly, you can assume that
they’re experiencing a negative emotion. 
However, to validate we’d love to have a system which quantifies valence
in real time. 

Once we can measure these qualities reliably, we can start asking what the
ideal emotional experience should look like over the course of the player’s
interaction with the game.  Maybe that would be something like a pattern
of peaks and valleys that steadily rises over time, as opposed to a prolonged
burst of emotion that’s experienced all at once.  That seems like a
plausible theory, but we won’t know until we’ve measured it.

Q: What are some of the design elements that you’ve found make better player
experiences?
A: I can suggest a few things.  First, the player needs to be able to
understand the experience.  If you die, you need to understand why you
died.  If you reach a decision point, you need to understand what the
implications are of taking path A or path B.  The designer needs to
provide a sensible environment.

Variety is also really important.  Don’t give people the same monsters
again and again, or force them to traverse the same levels over and over. There
are obvious counterpoints to this, and the constructs of the game may dictate a
lack of variety, so it’s not a hard and fast rule (none of these are), but it
is something we try and emphasize.  The Left 4 Dead series is a great
example, because you’re always interacting with a new set of players with
different skill levels and different tactics, and that will completely change
the dynamic of the game.  It doesn’t play the same way twice.

Third, you want to provide people with a feeling of continuous
advancement.  People prize rewards if they increase in perceived
value.  They want to feel that the required level of skill builds
gradually as the game progresses.

Finally, have the player make interesting choices.  Which weapon should I
choose?  Which armor should I take?  If these decisions don’t involve
meaningful tradeoffs, then you’re probably not creating an enjoyable
experience.

Q: How do you foster collaboration in multiplayer games?
A: Left 4 Dead is really designed to force players to cooperate.  If you
go out on your own, for example, you’ll get incapacitated very quickly. 
The game doesn’t prevent you from doing that — it’s a choice you can exercise,
but it’s inevitably a losing strategy.  If you have other players near you
then you can collectively put up a stronger fight, and when you fall then they
can easily revive you.

Testing helped us improve collaboration in Left 4 Dead as well.  In the
original design, the thinking was that players would build awareness of each
others’ locations just through verbal cues, speaking to one another through a
headset.  But it turned out that in the midst of gameplay that doesn’t
work well.  When a teammate fell and needed to be revived, the other
players had a difficult time finding him or her.  They needed another cue,
so we introduced glowing outlines that appear around your teammates’ bodies, and
which are visible through walls.  We found that really increased the
players’ situational awareness, facilitated cooperation, and created a better
gameplay experience.

Q: What kinds of quantitative metrics do you use to inform design?
A: We work with tons of data.  We can track any variable available in
the game.  We’ll take information about where people die in each level,
then overlay it on an image of the level to show whether people are dying in
the right places, and in the right numbers.  We can examine the growth in
players’ skill levels over time by any of various measures, depending upon the
needs of the game’s design.  That may be a fairly coarse metric such as
the ratio of kills to deaths, who gets the most kills, who stays alive the
longest, and so on.  Or you can apply several measured in combination to
satisfy a very precise definition of the ideal skill level, such as players who
have a moderately high rate of kills but who win a lot and stay alive for a
very long time.

I really appreciate your time.  I’d wish you luck, but with these kinds
of practices it really doesn’t sound like you need it.

And it’s pretty positive!  (Breathing on fingernails; buffing fingernails on lapel.)

I’m massively excited to announce that my new book exploring how games can achieve great things in the real world is now on sale!

You can download and read the introduction for totally free.  It really sets the tone for the book and gives you a sense of what it’s all about.

Please reach out and let me know what you think by following @PlayfulDesign on the Twitters.

Happy day!