What UX can (and cannot) learn from games
(Visited 16051 times) Game talk
Jun 032010
Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games is a great presentation by Sebastian Deterding examining the currently popular fallacy that adding points to a system is enough to make it into a game or enough to transform a website or service into something fun (something that has spawned some argument lately on Twitter, in fact).
I do think there is much for UX design to learn from games — and vice versa — but I also very much agree with the core thought here, which is that the two disciplines are different, and thinking that you can get by with a superficial understanding of one or the other is a mistake — they are not small disciplines!
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[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Raph Koster, Emil Ovemar. Emil Ovemar said: Om du gillar rolighetsteorin m.m: presentation om mötet mellan UX och speldesign. "Just add points?" http://bit.ly/ckOe4l (via @raphkoster) […]
I guess Volkswagen is compensating for that whole Blitzkrieg thing. Where’s IBM’s game initiative? We could call it “Funwashing”.
Too cynical?
I was at a small games & public policy think tank meeting last month in which at one point it was suggested that we could, for example, encourage men to get checked out for prostate cancer by giving them points for doing so. This caused me to rant for 5 minutes about how that wasn’t a game, that was just paying people but calling it “points” instead of “pennies”.
Rewards do not a game make. Gameplay, a game makes.
Richard
@Richard (and full disclosure, have not read the actual article yet (at work))
I can see the outside perspective, particularly in regards to early video games, that a “game” does appear to be an otherwise pointless activity incentivized by the literal addition of points and made compelling solely by that measure. Space Invaders, Pac Man, etc. as viewed by someone who is not a gamer and finds them thoroughly uncompelling.
I say this as I think this will end up (sadly) being a fairly common, if minority mindset: that you “turn something into a game” by adding points. Or that people may talk in softer language about making something “more game-like” when what’s being discussed is solely adding points (or less abstract status tracking, i.e. achievements), not the addition of any play elements (game or otherwise).
Tracking, measuring, rating… these are compelling things, and thus they get incorporated into a great many compelling games, making the confusion understandable (not that, ahem, I really need to tell anyone here that). I definitely share the frustration at dressing things up like a game that aren’t, and do see the danger in that potentially co-opting certain areas of intellectual ground. It’s an error with a certain logic to it, though, and knowing that might help in countering it (hopefully).
@Richard:
While I definitely agree with you, invoking the nebulous spectre of “gameplay” doesn’t yet offer a solution!
Given the not-proven assumption that there is something that games can offer to prostate cancer checks, what would be your approach? What moves the things that we know about games closer to helping us achieve mundane tasks?
http://www.movember.com/ is a sponsored “grow a moustache” event which raises money and awareness for prostate cancer, and its sense of collaborative fun and play (who in the office can grow the most ridiculous one? Who’s girlfriend won’t kiss them for a month?) definitely meets the objectives. While I’d argue this isn’t a game, but simply play, are there gaming constructs that we can begin applying?
My To-Do list is a game. I have a list of things. To defeat said list of things, I have to achieve the tasks. By achieving them, I get the reward of a to-do list with nothing on it, and a “Done” list that grows ever larger. This is little different to my WoW quest log, except the loot is worse 🙂
I am not necessarily sure there is a gaming carrot we can offer prostate cancer checks and other undesirable/mundane activities, but I’d love to hear any thoughts on it.
There’s certainly more to game mechanics than points. I run a regular UX workshop and we did a calendar/time management design exercise, and two different groups added “badges.”
After that, we did an entire workshop around game mechanics (Stephen P. Anderson did a similar exercise using email), and while I think you can easily explore interesting ideas and try new techniques using these basic mechanics, they’re not silver bullets, and I agree that game design is an entire discipline unto itself.
In my notes I call out the importance of that, because if you design points into your system (or worse, copy someone else’s points implementation), when it fails, you won’t understand why and you won’t be able to fix it. Once you get through the basics like this, you still need more practice with different styles and techniques to do a full-on “game.”
That said, I think it’s important for user experience designers to know and understand and keep up with game design principles, because they’re incredibly important when it comes to designing with serious user engagement (“fun”) in mind.
Of course, I’m also of the mind that game designers need to understand UX better: bad jumping-over-the-crocodile mechanics don’t make your game harder in a way that’s ever fun. A game UI (including the responsiveness to the controls and how the character and camera moves) needs to get out of the player’s way, just like any other interface.
Being by nature somewhat bloody-minded, the fastest way to turn me off of something is to promise me meaningless and worthless rewards for doing it. Xbox Achievements? I don’t think so. This is why Jesse Schell’s lecture about how in the future we’ll earn “points” for all kinds of things like eating right is bollocks. I suppose he’s right that someone will try it, but the day my refrigerator starts passing judgment on my eating habits is the day that sucker goes to the dump.
You want to give me a reward? Cash on the barrel-head, that works.
Peter S.>I think this will end up (sadly) being a fairly common, if minority mindset: that you “turn something into a game” by adding points.
What mystifies me is how points somehow got decoupled from play. What used to happen in the days before “serious games” were called “serious games” is that people would come up with some concept they wanted to teach or encourage, consider for ages exactly what they wanted people to do, then at the end tack on “and then we’ll make it into a game”. This would invariably involve scoring points for the task at hand “and the person who gets the most points is the winner!”. Nowadays, we seem to have lost even that “and the person who gets the most points is the winner!” step.
>I definitely share the frustration at dressing things up like a game that aren’t, and do see the danger in that potentially co-opting certain areas of intellectual ground.
What’s most frustrating for me is that we’re likely to lose in the short term. The way that “gaming will become part of our everyday lives” is by de-gaming the games, which is not fun.
Richard
Chris Lewis>Given the not-proven assumption that there is something that games can offer to prostate cancer checks, what would be your approach?
I wouldn’t use games, I’d use bribery. Pay guys $50 every year to have the check. Or, if you want a game-like element that isn’t a game, give them 5 tickets for the lottery, or have prostate cancer check vouchers be the prize for winning a (meaningful) competition.
If you want an actual game, the aim of which is to get people to go have the checks rather than educate them or scare them into it, go with an ARG. As part of the network of spies/monster-hunters/conspiracy theorists that the fiction puts you in, you have them do a whole bunch of things to work towards the solution. You have to photograph a maple tree, obtain a London Underground ticket, identify the mystery Japanese guy, get a prostate cancer check, ride one of the world’s 50-biggest rollercoasters, have your photograph taken holding a live spider, …
The moustache thing is fun, but it’s fun because (as you say) it’s play. There’s nothing wrong with that. Games are just a specific form of play (play you can lose). If you want to use them to encourage activity, make that activity be incidental to the game, not central to it. No-one is going to play a game about prostate cancer unless forced; however, they’ll play a game about rooting out aliens living among us because that sound fun. If, in the course of that, they learn about prostate cancer, we win.
Richard
Ernest Adams>This is why Jesse Schell’s lecture about how in the future we’ll earn “points” for all kinds of things like eating right is bollocks.
That’s how I felt about it, too. What can you do with these “points”? Either nothing (in which case why do you want them?) or you can exchange them for something (in which case they’re currency). If they’re currency, why not just use currency? If someone wants to pay me to clean my teeth, OK, I’m up for that. If they’re paying me 5 points that are worth $0.0001 each, though, well it’s not going to be long before I realise I’m being tricked.
>You want to give me a reward? Cash on the barrel-head, that works.
Exactly.
Richard
@Bartle, And yet, as Xbox Achievements have demonstrated, just having points *does* do something to a not insubstantial number of people. Throw in a ladder, where you can compare against other people and it becomes even more compelling. It’s not the whole story, of course, but it is a big part of it.
It’s not that this’d work for everyone, or that it works well in absence of other factors, but that people will do very silly things for very little reason if they see some sort of progress on a “track”, even if that track leads to absolutely nowhere. There are people that become addicted to it even, where they’ll grind through games that they absolutely despise because it’ll inflate their gamerscore. They’ve got a goal, and they get incremental reinforcement for it, and so they do it over and over and over again.
As to the earlier question, I suspect you can blame Xbox Live for the decoupling of points and game, as that was the start of the whole Achievements craze. Looked at from a certain distance, Xbox Achievments seem to live outside the gameplay, and in some respects they *do*. But there are other intrinsic factors to the platform that definitely do matter, so it’s not so simple as just being about points. And it’s not exactly a new idea, it’s just being quantified differently. You’re looking at a system that at it’s core is simplifying the boy scout badge model. Do a set of tasks, get a badge. What are they good for? Not much, except that you need more badges to “move up”. Or get certain harder to obtain badges. Points are predicated on the same concept.
It’s not a currency replacement. It’s more of a status replacement. It’s not about utility, but about standing and about creating tangible goals out of activities that can be sometimes hard to visualize as being related or are difficult to figure out how to sequence. It makes indiscrete things like “take care of your health” into a series of discrete steps you can check off. And then it rewards you for doing so by increasing your relative standing. I have 10 points. You have 100. I want 100, because 10 is less than 100. If I’m of a certain personality type, I want the maximum number of points. If I’m of another, I want more points than anyone else. Completionism kicks in, as does social competition.
So the ideal isn’t to give points for prostate exams, but to give points for a wealth of health realted activities, including prostate exams, and then have a chart where you’re put into varying rankings based on your point total. That *should* work, at least for a decent amount of folks. Not everyone of course; some people will reject it, some people will embrace it, some people will go crazy over it without really understanding why. Creating a progression taps into something very primal. And creating a progession that mixes social standing is even more primal and even more effective.
I think Xbox Achievements work specifically because they offer a separate idea of how to play the game. There’s something tantalizing about just using the Gravity Gun through HL2, or climbing the Agency Tower in Crackdown. It’s a new framework with which to explore and play. I agree that rankings and such do help for some people, but I think more get a kick out of the idea of trying something they otherwise wouldn’t have done.
Menial tasks don’t fit inside that framework. They are just there. Prostate exams don’t give you a new way to experience life (well… mostly…), nor does taking out the laundry. Maybe if there were points for taking out the laundry and doing it by only breathing 5 times… there would be something in it!
I dunno Chris, some of the achievements are pretty silly depending on the game. They’re not particularly interesting, but they do trigger a completionist attitude, no matter how menial the in game tasks are. Collection tasks in various games work pretty much the same way too, the drive to complete a collection in a game isn’t really inspired by having to do things differently – usually it’s more a matter of just scouring the landscape long enough – but by the fact that you haven’t done everything and the game is making it very clear that you haven’t, but perhaps more importantly, is constantly telling you you’re getting closer every time you find another item in the collection. It’s a form of reinforcement. In some people it’s a form of reinforcement so strong, it leads them to go out and buy games that they don’t like just so they can get more achievement points. There’s nothing tantializing about what’s being asked to those people, it’s a simple matter of needing to make the score go up even more. It’s like a gambling addiction, and that shows that there’s a definite neurological response that’s occuring beyond the pyschological one. The reward cycle is tapping into brain chemistry at a very low level.
As to applying it to menial tasks: again, if you look at the boy scouts merit badges, you’re often looking at a lot of menial tasks, and structurally it looks very similar to the Xbox Live achievement system. It works plenty well as a motivator, at least to people who buy into the idea. So I think that pretty clearly shows that even real world activies that don’t really involve play can be effectively channeled through something that works roughly like the achievement system on your console of choice.
Anything that allows us to turn something into a goal with discrete steps that are very clearly delineated and provide some sense of progress and feedback, will have some amount of currency, though more or less depending on the person of course. If the steps are interesting, it certainly helps, but it isn’t a requirement. People will do all sorts of things they dislike if it makes them feel like they’re improving. I suspect, though I don’t have the studies to back it up, that this is deeply wired into the human organism; we’re addicted to progressing, to getting better at things. It’s implicated by the dopamine releases when we learn something new, but I think it goes deeper than that.
Chris, you clean the laundry. You take out the trash. heh
Folks, does the term “piece rate” sound familiar? How about “it’s all a game”? There’s nothing new here, after all. But maybe we should realize that games have always been a part of our lives, even subconsciously. Setting goals is a game of sorts. It even includes the very gamey term “goals”.
And if the entire concept of points or rewards based performance is wrong, are these serious discussions misguided?
Len, if anything I think that video supports the idea of reliance on achievement like systems if you’re trying to incentive somewhat more complex tasks. Might not be as ideal for areas where real creativity is required, but it hits some points; there’s a definite sense of progressing toward mastery and you’re dealing with an intrinsically self-directed system if you implement it correctly. Certainly can’t hit the contribution box all the time though (though if you make it something where you also get points toward achievement advancement for helping other people keep to the system, you can maybe create something self-reinforcing), but two out of three isn’t bad.
I agree. It seems to support the notion that games and simple point based systems are not the same but also that each has it’s place. What is there to master about a prostrate exam except showing up? Yet it is a mechanical task and the research suggests that for mechanical tasks scaling rewards systems do improve performance. So points based systems can improve the user experience but do not a game make?
Ahem… prostate. The other is a different user experience.
Mastery doesn’t need to be so clearly defined though… If it’s just a prostate exam, yes, there’s no mastery to be gained. If it’s a series of tasks that lead toward a larger goal that includes a prostate exam, mastery suddenly becomes an issue, even if the individual tasks are relatively mechanical. Now we have a progression that we can track and see ourselves getting better at.
Oops, curse the lack of an edit button: or to put it another way, if you put giving points toward a progression track on top of a system that breaks tasks into mechanical substeps, you can hit it from both directions at once. You have motivating incentives for the substeps – they’re mechanical and thus respond to reward incentives – but an even stronger motivating goal for the progression track; it taps into mastery and autonomy, and if you do it right, contribution.
Which eerily sounds like the Project Plan template I’m creating here in Excel. I think it obvious that there is an emergence zone where reward driven tasks become games and games turn into serious work.
And then we get bored. Cue Raph’s Theory of Fun.
Eolirin>And yet, as Xbox Achievements have demonstrated, just having points *does* do something to a not insubstantial number of people.
Sure. So would giving them money. What’s your, er, point?
>Throw in a ladder, where you can compare against other people and it becomes even more compelling.
Yes, competitions can be compelling. That doesn’t mean they’re games, though.
>It’s not a currency replacement. It’s more of a status replacement.
So if I was too busy to play to get points myself, I could hire a group of expert players in China to play 24/7 on my account to get me points, and then everyone would think I was high status when really I was merely rich?
>It’s not about utility, but about standing and about creating tangible goals out of activities that can be sometimes hard to visualize as being related or are difficult to figure out how to sequence.
That’s not a game, though.
>It makes indiscrete things like “take care of your health” into a series of discrete steps you can check off.
It does, yes. It has no gameplay, though. You’re being bribed to do it.
>If I’m of a certain personality type, I want the maximum number of points.
And when you have them, what’s the end game? Or if you can’t get them, how long before you abandon the exercise in frustration?
If I’m of another, I want more points than anyone else. Completionism kicks in, as does social competition.
>So the ideal isn’t to give points for prostate exams, but to give points for a wealth of health realted activities, including prostate exams, and then have a chart where you’re put into varying rankings based on your point total.
Well go right ahead. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try it, I’m saying these activities are not games (or that they are games, but games diluted to homeopathic levels).
Richard
The problem of your analysis, Richard, is not recognizing at there are two ends of a single dimension of analysis (rewards systems) with games at one end and tasks at the other. In the middle there is overlap and while these may be strong tasks or weak games, there is a commonality of rewards.
Not surprising really. One might want to understand and publish measures of that dimension because otherwise misdirection or false labeling can be used to rob markets. It isn’t helpful to purchase tasks at game prices or accept weak game rewards for strong tasks.
Richard, I never asserted you were playing a game. I asserted that points work as a reward mechanism, and that achievement systems can work for UX even if they’re not games and even if there’s no intrinsic utility, if they’re constructed correctly. You can call it a bribe if you want, but bribes have somewhat different qualities. What you’re really doing is creating a structure that induces behavior by tapping into the reward systems of the brain at a very very low level. In some respects it makes it much more insidious, as it’s more operant conditioning than it is simple bribery. But it’s effective at low cost. You don’t need to provide rewards of any value; the utility isn’t as important as the dopamine reactions.
I thoroughly agree with not calling it a game though, because it’s not. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.
To clarify, I was responding to : “That’s how I felt about it, too. What can you do with these “points”? Either nothing (in which case why do you want them?)”
There are a lot of reasons why people would want them, even though they have zero rational utility. Actually converting to money or other commodities becomes counter productive unless you have a truly ridiculous amount of funds that you can divert to the task and all of the tasks you’re asking for are purely mechanical. You’d never be able to afford to provide a tangible reward that people would care about, which would readily become apparent as you said. It’s better then, if the reward isn’t tangible to begin with, because then no comparison can be drawn. The mere fact that there’s a number that goes up is sufficient to tap into underlying neurological mechanisms; you want to keep the comparison circuit out of the loop so it can’t interfere.
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len>The problem of your analysis, Richard, is not recognizing at there are two ends of a single dimension of analysis (rewards systems) with games at one end and tasks at the other.
I recognise that reward systems are components of games. However, I also recognise that games don’t have to have reward systems, and that reward systems don’t have to be games. If we’re talking about reward systems, OK, let’s talk about reward systems. My complaint is when we talk about them as if anything with a reward system is a game.
Richard
Eolirin>Richard, I never asserted you were playing a game.
Not you, no, sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that. I was restating my position as being aligned with that of Sebastian Deterding, whose talk this thread concerns. There is a view that adding points to an activity makes it into a game, and that’s what I was complaining about. I’m not saying that adding points to an activity might not be worthwhile (at least until people grok it), I’m saying you can’t call it a game just because it has points. If you want points, hey, go for it!
>What you’re really doing is creating a structure that induces behavior by tapping into the reward systems of the brain at a very very low level.
This works IF the rewards really are rewards. If they’re not rewards, then the higher parts of the brain override the lower parts.
I’ll give you one point every time you type the word “bean” into your reply. Is that going to make you fill your reply with cut-and-paste repetitions of the word “bean”? No, it’s not – even though you could have all those points, and other people wouldn’t even get those points, so you’re way ahead of them!
Also, there’s a difference between competitiveness between people. You’re talking as if everyone likes points. No, they don’t. Points imply competition, and lots of gamers out there prefer co-operation. If the stereotypes are right, for example, female players will like points mainly because of what they can exchange them for, not simply because they have more of them than their friends have.
>You don’t need to provide rewards of any value; the utility isn’t as important as the dopamine reactions.
Well go on, then, enjoy the dopamine you will get from the points acquired by typing “bean” into your reply multiple times.
This points approach only makes sense for as long as you can fool people with it. The moment they see that the achievement isn’t actually an achievement, and that the reward isn’t actually a reward, it won’t work. With the “beans” example, because it’s so brazen and open about its worthlessness, it’s not going to work. If, however, I told you that the first of your two posts to which I’m replying is worth 42 points and the second is worth 69 points, well then you might be curious and keep asking how many points your messages were worth until you figured it out. If I said Morgan Ramsay’s post was worth 18 points, then you could interpret this as a goal to try figure out the secret to scoring points before Morgan does, so you can then make high-scoring posts without revealing how you do it. Fun, perhaps, but the points are merely a score in a game that you don’t even know if Morgan is playing.
>I thoroughly agree with not calling it a game though, because it’s not. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.
That’s pretty well what I was saying. What I’ve just added is that even if it does involve points, it can give different responses, not just the mmm-shinies one.
>There are a lot of reasons why people would want them, even though they have zero rational utility.
Such as?
>The mere fact that there’s a number that goes up is sufficient to tap into underlying neurological mechanisms; you want to keep the comparison circuit out of the loop so it can’t interfere.
Rising numbers aren’t intrinsically good unless you have a context. I wasn’t pleased when I saw the rising numbers on my watch yesterday that meant I was increasingly likely to miss a connecting flight.
Richard
Actually, you can, Eolirin. For example, medical services do something similar. If you stop smoking, they reduce your rates. If you can’t assess each behavior individually, you could use a points system to aggregate desired behaviors and rate reductions. That would be a rational reward.
What is insidious about operant conditioning? That’s pretty much how you learn anyway. If the reward is points, money or fun, the outcome is still behavioral modification.
Somewhere in our education system for psychology, something political bumped against the science and created superstitious learning.
Fair enough, Richard. I agree. My point is that for the systems that use rewards, some are games, some are tasks and there is some overlap that should be measured to offset the effects of market burglary (selling a task system as a game or a game as a task system). The serious games market may be a good place to look for examples and exceptions. As I mentioned to Eolirin, it is possible to use points systems in tasks where the points are not the rewards but the points gained determine the reward values. Insurance rates are an example of that.
@len, insidious in the sense that it can be used for Evil just as easily as Good. ;p Proper implementation means that the context is mostly if not entirely irrelevant. As long as the dopamine releases are spaced properly, it works regardless of what you’re asking the person to do. There’s a fine line between learning and brainwashing with this stuff.
@Richard, it’s not quite as simple as that though. You’re thinking too psychologically about it; all that really matters is that there’s a chemical reaction in the brain of a certain type in a certain interval, and that it’s reinforced in a certain way. It doesn’t have to be remotely rational to work, most of the subsystems that make up our cognitive processes don’t talk to each other directly, so you just need to bypass the ones that would shut the process down.
Structure, and not context is what’s important. We’re dealing with neural firing patterns; as long as you’re activating the right set of circuits you get the right motivating factor in association with the task you’re looking for. You only need the one subsystem to make that happen, but context requires the interaction of multiple subsystems. The fewer subsystems you have in the loop, the more likely you are to get the behavior you want rather than something else. People not choosing to do what you’re pushing for is a result of interference more than anything else. Interference can be mitigated through numerous different methods though; distraction, “fun”, sensory stimulation, appearing benign and harmless, being something you were going to do anyway, all should work roughly as much actually giving you something tangible.
The process does need to be organic too though; you can’t stipulate a single outlandish task and expect an outcome. You need to create an ecosystem of actions that get channeled in a particular direction and let the “user” pick and choose their level of investment. Invariably, they’ll get more invested than they meant to. But you do it this way precisely because they won’t think about it too hard if you do it like that. You only need to get them in the door, and then the reward cycle takes over, even if the reward is utterly meaningless.
Now, I’m sure there’s also a point of diminishing returns, and there’s very likely the potential for a resistance to be built up over time, as the body adjusts to the level of releases it’s receiving, so it’s not like you can do it for everything… but context matters quite a bit less than it should.
Oh, and len, that works great, if you’re an insurer.
Kinda hard for anyone else to do it though.
I wonder. Isn’t that what coupons for restaurants, etc are? The task is to be there when they are valid which is a very weak task, I agree, but at the edge. Performance reviews at work are points rated and you have to make a bet that you can hit certain marks. The difference there is there is no real promise there will be a reward for those point (a nasty gotcha and one of the reasons I favor employee-owned companies where game peers affect performance). One might be able to think of others (eg, negative games like traffic citation points).
But as they say, if at first you don’t succeed, don’t skydive. 🙂
I mean, yeah. It is. But you can’t really provide reduced rates unless you happen to be in control of setting rates. So for medical related stuff, that’d be the insurers, since they’re effectively the group that does that.
Late response– just watched the presentation.
It’s compelling, well-researched, and touches a WHOLE LOT of things beyond “do points make a game”. It also has lots of great links to further reading/viewing.
Hi, like the Shrek movies, super film!
It seems to me that achievements and badges have value within the context of an identifiable group. The badge that is proof of an ability to make a fire is of some value to a scout wanting to establish their status, competence and identity in relation to their scouting peers. Does a non-scout care about the presence or absence of the badge? Probably not. Something similar applies to achievements.
I would think that badges and achievements work because they plug into deep social and emotional bits of our brains about belonging, identity and status. Within that context, they have real sociological and psychological utility. No sociological context, no value?
[…] game mechanics aren’t really” (apologies for changing the title) and the fascinating discussion on Raph’s blog about points/UX. It definitely has some controversy in it (including some saucy references to the […]