How can gamification be applied in a way that makes people happy, fulfilled, flourishing individuals? To answer that question, we need to look to the discipline of positive psychology. Positive psychology was developed most notably by Marty Seligman, who's at the University of Pennsylvania and also by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and I put his name up there on the slide because that's the only way that you're going to be able to spell it. And the idea of positive psychology is that psychology generally is about pathology, is about what happens when something goes wrong, someone has some abnormal mental situation that doesn't allow them to think straight, or they are depressed, or they are psychotic in some way, and the question that Seligman started asking was, well, why don't we look at the opposite? Why don't we look at what makes people happy and fulfilled? Why don't we look at what things it takes to make people feel better about themselves, and to feel like they have authentically happy, flourishing lives, as opposed to just, what happens when something goes wrong? And so that's what the discipline of positive psychology looks at, and it's the basis of large volumes of research into many different areas. It turns out that much of this is very relevant to understanding the implication of games, and thus by extension certain kinds of gamification. Jane McGonigal in her book, Reality is Broken, points to Seligman's work, and in some of her later presentations points to how games directly can address all of the elements of his framework for human flourishing, which she calls, PERMA, which stands for positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. And I won't go through each of them in detail, but it should be obvious how each of these elements, which Seligman says are the five core aspects of being a fulfilled, flourishing individual, not just happy in a kind of light, short term sense, but truly successful as an individual. It turns out that all five of these elements clearly tie into things that we've discussed as core elements of games, most of which gamification, if it's done right and thoughtfully, has some opportunity to tap into. So that's the high level way that gamification and games can actually promote human flourishing, but I want to specifically talk about the concept of flow, which is one of Csikszentmihalyi's major contributions, because that ties in even more directly to some of the game design concepts that I've discussed around gamification. The idea of flow is that there is a state that we sometimes get into, where we are so engaged in what we're doing that time seems to lose its meaning. We lose ourself in the activity. We are fully and completely engaged to the fullest our, of our abilities. It's a state that is wonderful, and it's a state, interestingly enough, that occurs at least as often in work activities as it does in entertainment or play activities. And Csikszentmihalyi started, many years ago, to investigate this kind of flow staye in all sorts of situations. In musicians, and rock climbers, and financial analysts, lots of people who had this same characteristic kind of experience, and he developed a set of theories around what it takes to get into the flow state. Now, it's not something that you can do automatically and directly. You can't say, alright, I'm going to go into flow now. It's something that happens organically when an activity has certain characteristics that are at a sufficient level for that individual. But we can think about what the characteristics are of allowing flow to occur in a way that's useful for games and gamification. So, Csikszentmihalyi presents a chart that looks at, over time, what is the difficulty level of a certain activity. How challenging is it? And the idea here is that if the activity is too difficult, up here, it creates anxiety. It's too tough. We can't succeed at it. It scares us off. We get anxious about the activity. On the other hand, if it's too easy, we get bored. Something that is way below our activities is a sure recipe for boredom. In the middle is what Csikszentmihalyi talks about as the flow channel. So if we stay between these two boundaries, and have an activity that over time is constantly not too easy, not too hard, that's where we have the opportunity for flow, especially if our movement through this channel is variable. If it's an interesting activity that maintains its challenge, it's not something that we just get on auto pilot and do. The challenge ramps up as we move along, but the system is designed to keep adapting, so we never go either too hard or too easy. So that's a key to achieving this notion of flow, and therefore, in game design, game designers think a lot about tuning the system so that four players, it's neither too hard nor too easy, and yet it keeps int it remains interesting and variable throughout the process. To get to a few more aspects of flow that Csikszentmihalyi talks about that are relevant for games and gamification, he says flow occurs when there are clear goals, and we've talked about this in terms of the fundamental definition of games, and we've talked about it in terms of the first design criteria for designing a gamified system. He second, he says there needs to be a balance between perceived challenges and skills. That's the essence of the chart I just gave you, but the important thing here is to remember that these are perceived challenges and perceived skills. The game feels like it's just hard enough. Whether it is in some objective way, there's really no way to tell. The question is, how do you feel about the experience? And is it tuned in a way you feel like it remains sufficiently interesting? And third, I've talked about this a lot, feedback. Clear and immediate feedback. And this is not feedback in the pure behaviorist sense, of you're just learning from the experience and moving along and creating an association, creating some reinforcement. This is feedback allowing you to get to the point where you feel totally immersed in the experience, and have that wonderful experience of flow. So if you can design gamified systems to push more in this direction, to activate the five areas of flourishing that Seligman talks about, and to maintain the requirements for flow that Csikszentmihalyi talks about, you will create a system that is deeper and more rewarding than any kind of extrinsic external motivator can ever be.
