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.
8.4 Designing for Happiness
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En provenance du cours de University of Pennsylvania
Gamification
notes
À partir de la leçon
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
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.
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