Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. This course will teach you the mechanisms of gamification, why it has such tremendous potential, and how to use it effectively. For additional information on the concepts described in the course, you can purchase Professor Werbach's book For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business in print or ebook format in several languages.
7.4 Activity Loops
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En provenance du cours de University of Pennsylvania
Gamification
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Design
Gamification done well is a form of design. This module describes the design process, and provides a six-step framework to apply to any gamification project. The second lesson identifies important considerations and options for developing creative, human-centered, thoughtful gamification solutions.
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Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
You can think about the core gameplay elements
in a gamified system in terms of loops.
And here I mean loops similarly to the way computer software programs often operate.
Think about a simple program that is running a constant loop.
Check for key press, check for key press, check for key
press, and then if someone presses the key on the keyboard
it fires off another process or subroutine which says put that
letter on the screen and then go back into the loop.
Check for another key press, check for
another key press, check for another key press
and when someone does something it breaks
the cycle and goes off in another direction.
So a game will also have those kinds of loops.
Structures that are repetitive, recursive, but
also branching off in different directions.
And in particular, we are going to look at two kinds of activity loops in
a game, or especially in a gamified system,
which I'll call engagement loops and progression loops.
Engagement loops operate at the micro level, individual user actions.
Progression loops operate at the macro level, broader structures of activity
.throughout the course of a game, So the first one is the Engagement Loop.
And this is the constant, process of first
motivators appearing, the game giving the user something to do, some reason to be
motivated to, take an action to, overcome a challenge.
To, go and do something in the game.
And the motivation if it's strong enough, effective enough, will lead to the action.
Maybe it won't, at which point the loop dies, but then another motivator comes up.
And then at that point the user takes the action.
They want to get the points to get to the reward.
So they go and spend time on that part of
the site, that's the action, and then the user gets feedback.
Once again, the importance of the user having
clear, direct, and immediate feedback on what they're doing.
Seeing the points they've received.
Seeing the level of their performance.
That in and of itself then becomes a motivator.
So that's why this is a loop.
The actions produces the feedback, the feedback becomes a
form of motivation, the motivation leads to more actions.
So designing a gameified site involves
structuring the way that, that loop happens.
And this will be more evident for some kinds of gamefication than others.
The more experiential game-like types of activities may not be quite as clear cut.
But if you think about, especially the PBL types of sites, think about foursquare.
Your action of checking in, then produces some feedback.
Some information that you see about how
many points, about badges that you've unlocked.
About, congratulations, you're the mayor, and so forth.
Which then, hopefully, will motivate you to engage in some other action.
Which might be checking in somewhere else.
It might be looking at your friends, and seeing what they're doing.
Or reading something about the location that you're at.
The point is, a well designed gamified system, will keep that process moving.
So that each piece reinforces each other piece.
That's the, micro level structure, that drives
forward the action in a gamified site.
The way that motivation, it comes together with
feedback and with the set of target behaviors.
We can also look more generally at how the gamified system moves forward.
Through what are called progression loops, and
basically now lets me step back from individual
actions and motivations, and look at the overall
structure, what happens to users in the site.
At one level, the way that this is typically done in game design is, there
are a series of fairly small challenges, which are part of a larger challenge.
So you don't want to just say to the players, go and start
here, and get all the way over to here, because that seems overwhelming.
You say, here's your overall objective.
But you're going to get there by means of some specific steps.
Here are the quests that we're going to give you along the
way and they are typically going to be part of some subchallenges.
So this red one and this red one are intermediate kinds of challenges.
And overall the goal of the game is to get from the start to the finish.
So that's one kind of progression loop.
Start to finish through a set of
intermediate steps, which are all balanced in
an effective way so that the user has a sense of, first of all,.
The ease of the individual steps.
The next step is right there in front of me.
As well as the sweep and the potential of the ultimate goal which also motivates.
Another way to think about this is as a representation of the player journey.
The player's evolution in the game from a newbie, a novice, to a master, and
typically the way this is done in games is through rising and falling action.
So the first step is onboarding, that process of getting someone up to speed as
quickly and efficiently as possible and as much as possible within the game itself.
Getting them to the point where they know how
to play the basics of the game on their own
and then you start moving up to a higher
level and then at some point you get a rest.
If it's constantly up the slope, that's too challenging, people get exhausted.
So we gave them a break, the difficulty ramps down.
And then it ramps up again, and then it ramps down, and then
it ramps up again, and at some point, we get to a boss fight.
You'll recall this was one of the game components that I described.
Where the game says, now you have a really hard challenge
to conquer, if you want to get to the next level.
So this is a, typically a demarcation point of
getting to the next overall major level or segment of
the game, and an opportunity for real achievement, real
accomplishment, demonstration of mastery over that part of the game.
The boss fight is something you have to overcome and then once you
do, you get a little more rest and then you start climbing again.
And ultimately you are all the way up here when you started all the way down here.
And when you look back you've made tremendous gains towards mastery that
if its done well motivates people through that sense of competence that
I talked about under self-determination theory, but it's done in a natural
way that people don't feel like they’re on a grueling force march.
This system allows them to progress through this integrated set of
challenges it also makes the process feel more interesting to people.
It's not unitary, every moment of the game is not the same kind of challenge.
You're not getting wave after wave after wave of monsters.
There's enough variety there that makes it interesting.
So a well designed game, and a well
designed gameification system, will typically have well structured
engagement loops that ensure that feedback pushes towards
motivation, which pushes towards action, and so forth.
And also well structured progression loops, which
get the user from that early stage.
Easy to learn, up to that very hard stage of mastery, tough to master,
through a natural set of processes that allow them to progress through the game.
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