Gamification

Yeah but what is a game? What makes a game? Mn 8er kalam kteer l2en feh entire
philosophies etkatabet fel topic dh this is a very simple explanation.

Gamification should tie back to the challenges that you face in your business. Usually in:
●​ The Engagement gap
●​ The desire for habit formation
●​ Adding a social aspect whether normal one or a competitive one
●​ Adding Choices
●​ The desire to feel Progress.
Where gamification can be used:

Well it certainly can be used in almost any

environment as it’s not particularly about play but to
introduce and import the “game features” into a non
game scenario in an attempt to make the activity
more fun, engaging, create a consistent behavior and
introduce higher degrees of overall satisfaction.

“Think like a game designer”. Now, that doesn’t mean

that you should be a masters degree holder in game
design or become a game designer yourself BUT
think about it through the lens of game design instead
of the lens of a business owner lets say. It’s a state of
mind more than anything else. FUCK! This course is
good. Also, Think like a game designer and not like a
gamer. Meaning, think about the structures and things
that would or should be there not about your
experience if you were bla bla bla. The immersive
flow of the game is what a good game should do to a
gamer. YOU though are a game designer.

Exercise: Think of a game that you've enjoyed

playing. It can be a video game, board game, or something else. See if you can jot
down at least three structural elements that make the game successful. After this
lecture, I encourage you to discuss your notes with your classmates on the discussion
forum.

I liked tekken very much when i was young.

Three structural elements that made the game successful?
●​ Exaggerated visual and sound effects when landing the right blow. (gives a
sense of reward; if a punch in defense had the same effect it wouldn’t mean
anything)
●​ How much the health bar decreases is motivating to continue playing as it
demonstrates how much you did and how much you got left to finish the job.
●​ Leaving a higher and higher (reward) visual effect and sound effect) when
completing a higher task (think the ultimate in any fighting game i.e. boku no hero
game)
●​ In arcade mode you feel rewarded more by winning against another human
against you. The competitive edge of “I won” over another human is greatly
satisfactory.
 ●​ Having a character in the game that represents your journey and the existence of
your ability to customize the character. Makes people want to work to build the
character.

Players are:
●​ The center of the game. Everything you do revolves around the user, the player.
●​ Players feel a sense of autonomy/self control.
●​ Players play and that doesn’t necessarily mean game but that they experience
the free flow of actions within a set of constraints.

Player Journey: the player journey should NOT be a random walk where there is no
constraints and they can do anything at any time and there is no path or any specific
goal to get to
●​ Onboarding: where you onboard the player into the game and guide him on how
the game works and how they should navigate is dh f awl el le3ba lamma
by3alemok t3mel eh w tro7 fein …etc.
●​ Scaffolding: how does the game provide training wheels if you will, instances
where you make the game easier at instances where the user would otherwise
be stuck and that otherwise would help the player understand what they need to
do next
●​ Pathways to Mastery

How do they do it exactly?

The idea is they should guide you whether through
explicitly telling you or guiding you through highlighting
and feedback (imagine if someone had to explain
plants vs zombies for you to be able to play it “you
have a house and there is zombies w 3andk mazra3a
el zombies hy3ado 3al mzra3a w el plants will fight the
zombies'' it sounds unnecessarily garbage and
complicated but they make it easy and they guide you
through the beginning and this is the idea of
onboarding and scaffolding it need to be effortless for
the player to be introduced to the game and start to
understand how it works and play it)this process
should be iterated until the training wheels of the game
if you will are not needed anymore and the user can
go on to use the game on his own , they also should
give you limited options and limited monsters and they should make it very simple at the
beginning and if it stayed like that it would be very dull and boring after a while so they
have to introduce more and more options and monsters as time goes on.Another note is
that it is impossible to fail. It has to be UNBELIEVABLY EASY to make it al principio y
entonces deberian hacerlo mucho mas duro and challenging.

As a game designer you should think:

1.​ How do I get them to play?
2.​ How do I get them to keep playing and form that habit?

Exercise: Take a moment to jot a list of experiences and states of being that you
associate with fun. After the lecture, I encourage you to share your list with your
classmates on the discussion forum.
What experiences are associated with FUN?
●​ Competition. Beating people in a competition and even when you lose the
competitive aspect is always fun.
●​ Strategy, Tactics and planning for the future is fun.
●​ Progress is the ultimate fun for me.
●​ Sexual characteristics are fun. The lusciousness of sexuality is undeniably FUN.
●​ Teamwork is fun. Working in groups is fun.
●​ Sharing ideas with others is fun.
●​ Expressing oneself and one’s thoughts and emotions in front of people is fun.
(Think Taqaddam
workshop talks, think
giving presentations
and speeches).
●​ Getting to know new
people and form new
social connections is
fun. Socializing in
general is fun.
●​ Socializing in general
is fun.
●​ Laughter is fun.
●​ Critical thinking is fun.
Problem solving
sometimes.
●​ Recognition and
outside validation.
●​
FUN and how it works.

Now, How can you use these FUN to trigger emotions and feelings for the player?

Game Elements Analysis:

Exercise: let’s take an example tic tac to, what are
the elements of this game?
●​ Board
●​ Signs
●​ Two people playing it
●​ Confines within you can play and confines
with-out you can not play
●​ Competition
●​ Turns
●​ Win, draw and lose states
●​ No progression or scoring system (which is
kind of a limitation that tic tac toe has)

Let’s do another exercise. What are the elements that characterize tekken 5 for
example?
●​ Competition
●​ Reward System. Multiple of them actually and in different forms as well, for
example both auditory and visual.
●​ Win, draw and lose states
●​ Progression system (when you are in a fight the sight of the health bar of the
opponent decreasing with every strike both gives a sense of progression to your
goal which is to win mn na7ya w mn na7ya o5ra it’s also a reward system as you
are pleased with seeing that health bar decrease with each strike you hit
otherwise it would feel daunting if you don’t know how much damage you did to
your opponent at a certain moment in time)
●​ The field of the fight where you have the freedom to move within but the
constraint of not being able to move with-out.
●​ Health bar
 ●​ Variety of moves you can do with a variety of damage potentials
●​ No turns which we can argue adds a level of interactiveness that you don’t have
in games or apps that involves turns.
●​ Customization, you can choose your character and outside of the fight you can
change how it dresses and whatnot
●​ If in arcade or ranking mode you are in competition and progression mode on
autopilot
●​ Two players
●​ Scoring system. (this dot that turns red when you win a round is sort of a scoring
system in a way) some games even show you how much damage or how much
hp loss you did to your opponent in numbers to reinforce that principle even
more.

As a game designer you need to be able to decipher and

defrag and analyze how games are structured on a deeper
level and be able to identify the game elements, one of the
reasons for that is that, what we are trying to get to in the
end is the experience, the set of emotions and flow and
overall experience that a player will go through when
playing your game, the game itself is not the experience the
game is the set of rules and aesthetics and how the game
feels at the end it’s not the experience per se. Elements on
the other hand are the building block of the game so to
create an experience which is the final result you want you
need to build a game with a very well crafted and designed
set of elements, the elements are sort of the cells to the
body of games (which are not just PBLs as commonly
known or misknown actually to be specific) and experiences
that the game provides to the player.

One Framework for game elements (certainly doesn’t involve kol 7aga kol 7aga but a
very beneficial one) is the pyramid of elements by ……………..:
●​ Dynamics
1.​ Constraints, games create
meaningful choices and interesting
problems by not giving you
absolute freedom.
2.​ Emotions, for the game to pull an
emotional lever in you when
playing a game.
 3.​ Narrative. Making the structure of the game coherent and creating the flow
of it. This can be creating consistent graphic design that allures to a
specific tone, making the flow of the game in such a way where there is a
point behind things so there is a story instead of abstract meaningless
points and badges which if done in this way is garbage and ineffective.
4.​ Progression. Self explanatory.
5.​ Relationships. People interacting with each other, creating the social
element of it.
●​ Mechanics
1.​ Challenges
2.​ Chance. Introducing an element of unpredictability is very powerful.
3.​ Competition
4.​ Cooperation
5.​ Feedback
6.​ Resource Acquisition. Think gems,coins…etc things that are not badges
but you can sort of acquire and collect and do things later with them.
7.​ Rewards
8.​ Transaction
9.​ Turns
10.​Win states
●​ Components
1.​ Achievements
2.​ Avatars
3.​ Badges
4.​ Boss Fights
5.​ Collections
6.​ Combat
7.​ Content unlocking
8.​ Gifting
9.​ LeaderBoards
10.​Levels
11.​Points
12.​Quests
13.​Social graph
14.​Teams
15.​Virtual teams

An extraordinary big mistake a lot of people and companies make when designing for
gamification or actual games is that they think games are PBLs or Points, Badges,
LeaderBaords when in fact this is
 1.​ A big misunderstanding of gamification
2.​ Using only components and ignoring mechanics and dynamics (specially
dynamics) to achieve a game-like experience is a guaranteed way for making a
boring dull game with points and leaderboards assuming that those are gonna be
the gamification you need.

Limitations of elements:
As I have touched on before, THE ELEMENTS ARE NOT THE GAME. Adding elements
to a non game scenario won’t magically make a game out of it and that’s why a lot of
games and a lot of apps use “gamification” and they horribly fail because they haven’t
really gamified the app or created an experience for the player they just added elements
assuming that games are elements and the most of all elements are obviously the Good
Old PBL system.
Secondly, focusing on PBL actually overemphasizes rewards and this is actually a bit
counter intuitive but if you overemphasize rewards you demotivate the player not excite
them. Not all rewards are fun and not all fun is rewarding.
Actually, even google believe it or not committed this mistake, in 2011 they announced
google badges basically the idea was you get badges on the topics you read a lot about
so if you read a lot about jesus you get a jesus badge if you read a lot about basketball
you get a basketball badge..etc. and it went HORRIBLE. Why? Well first of all it was
●​ meaningless and with no narrative
●​ Badges signify achievements.
Achievement of what? Reading
blogs about a topic I like? Where is
the achievement here? This is not
me talking although that sounds
like me but as humans in general
we feel a need of deserving what
we got. That’s one of the reasons
why no matter who you are, even
a5wal bne2adam 3al kawkab will
feel better about something he
bought with his own money vs
someone else buying it for him.
Entitlement and deservingness are
at the core of who we are as
human beings.
 ●​ No mastery no progression no puzzle no community no nothing literally nothing
m4 hkammel asln 7asesha self explanatory 5alas. It’s stupid to assume a game
is just PBL. mkan4 7ad 8eleb.

Side Notes about gamification from a VC portfolio owner is silicon valley:

-Cooperation triumphs competition three to one, this is … 4ei2 mofage2 bnsbaly sra7a.
-Score are actually demotivating because they tend to motivate only when you are 90%
away from success so if there is 1000 people you need to be in the top 10% of those
fuckers to actually get motivated by scores and leaderboards. You need to be in the top
10% or else you tend to tune out.
-“At the end of the day, Gamification is about increasing engagement”
-Gamification as we know it today is more heuristics, not algorithms. Mfee4 3elm
mktoob mfee4 7ad lammh kolh f 7etta wa7da it’s more about watching the people who
did it right and learning from them through analysis you do on your own.

Behavioral psychology and gamification:

Exercise: think of a task you want someone to do and then think of at least 4 ways could
you motivate this person to do that thing?
●​ Talk about the positives of doing it
●​ Talk about the negatives of not doing it. We react better to fear, scarcity and
anxiety or negative emotions in general than to positive ones.
●​ Talk about someone else who IS doing it and how he would crush you if you don’t
do it and how fucked you are and will continue to be and tie an entire negative
identity to not doing that thing i want him or her to do. Create anxiety.
●​ I would try to create higher meaning around it. Doing that thing is not just about
you, it's for your family, your children, your future wife, the legacy, the greater
good ... .etc. Meaning. The greatest motivation upon most religions and cults
originated upon. The only thing other than sex that men have died for across all
of human history. I guess the two greatest motivators are Meaning and sex then.
I guess.

Operant Conditioning
The idea is that people don’t
always respond very well to
incentives. But very well however to
conditioning, if A then B if B then C
after enough of an intense
experience you will instinctively
follow that train of behavior.
Behavioral Economics

Drivers
●​ Loss Aversion
●​ Power of defaults
●​ Confirmation bias

Let's not look at abstract economic theory which says people will always respond
perfectly to incentives. So you've probably heard the old joke about, or maybe you
haven't, the old joke about that an economist is walking down the street and sees a $20
bill laying on the street and keeps on walking by. Because the economist says, well, no,
that can't possibly be a $20 bill there. Because if there were actually a $20 bill lying on
the street, someone would have picked it up. We know that people are incentivized to
pick up a $20 bill, so it can't possibly be there because economic theory tells me it must
have already been picked up. Ha-ha. Okay, well the point there is, in reality, people
don't always conform to abstract economic theory. So behavioral economics says let's
look at what people actually do, and one thing that they do is they feel much more
concerned about losses than gains. In theory, the additional satisfaction you get from
gaining $100 dollars should be identical to the satisfaction you lose by losing $100, not
so. People will take far more steps to avoid the loss than they will to achieve a gain of
equal magnitude.
Defaults are important. In economic theory, it shouldn't matter, for example, whether
something's opt in or opt out. So if the company you work for says check this box to put
money every year into your 401k. It should lead to exactly the same result as the
company says. This money will get put into your 401 K, unless you check this box to
say ,no don't do that. Turns out we know empirically that much more money goes into
the 401 K if it's the opt out. If by default the money goes in, even though it doesn't
require anything that hard to just check a box People tend to go with the faults.
Confirmation bias. People tend to see what they are looking for. If you think that you will
get a certain result, then you tend to find it. Our brains tend to want to see patterns,
whether or not they're really there. And again, economic theory in the abstract says that
shouldn't be the case. Behavioral economics modifies it and says, empirically we know
people behave in certain ways.

Reward Structure
Cognitive evaluation theory
●​ Tangible/intangible
●​ Expected/unexpected
●​ Contingency
-​ Task not contingent
 -​ Engagement
-​ Completion
-​ Performance

Reward Schedules
When exactly do you give a reward is extraordinarily differential in how people react to
rewards
Design Process
●​ Purposeful: you don’t just start gamification for the sake of it. You should have
purposes and goals in mind and gamification is your vehicle to get there (i.e. I
want to get more engagement, I want to have less churn, I wish to convert more
customers into the loyal referral tier of customers….etc)
●​ Human-Centered: the idea is it's designed around people. everything should be
based on the person. We are coming up with solutions for people. People are
going to use them, not robots, human beings are going to use them. And so,
what that means is, we always have to think about the experience. It's not just a
set of objectives or a set of metrics, although those will be important in
developing the system. It's real people, who have real lives, who want to do
things, or to reach objectives in their lives and they're going to encounter this
thing. They're going to encounter this designed artifact. Whether that is a website
like amazon.com or a shopping cart or a gamified system. They're going to
encounter it and they're going to encounter it as an experience. We discussed
the fact that the experience is greater than the game and greater than the game
element. Design thinking is about always pushing for the experience and trying to
keep in mind what that experience actually looks like to people . Remember that
the experience of the player is not the experience of the designer who's seeing
all the moving parts of the system from the outside.
●​ Balance of Analytical and Creative: we sometimes use analytical thinking, we
break things down into smaller parts. We try to come up with algorithms,
formalized ways of solving problems. But, sometimes we also need to be
creative. Sometimes we need to have hunches, intuitions. Sometimes things are
artistic and beautiful and elegant and you can't reduce it to a formula. Design
Thinking is about balancing those two things. If you just have analytics, just
numbers, just quantitative formal structures, your process will be too dry and
formal. You won't really address people's experiential needs and you'll miss lots
of opportunities for creativity and innovation. Because those tend to lie outside of
what the formulas tell us. We tend to use things like heuristics, vague sense of,
vague kinds of frameworks, when formal algorithms don't solve problems. And
sometimes we don't even have heuristic, heuristics, we just have individual
examples that we're trying to put together and find patterns around. So, design
thinking is about balancing those two things. And in particular, focusing on what's
in the middle. Focusing on what we do when there's some data, but insufficient
data to give us a clear, clean, structured algorithm. And that often involves what's
called abductive reasoning. Which was a term developed by Charles Sanders
Peirce. A philosopher who was one of the developers of the philosophical system
called pragmatism. And Peirce talked about abductive reasoning as a number of
things, but essentially about inference from insufficient information. So, we don't
 have enough information to reach a judgment. We don't quite know what the
solution is, but we've got kind of a guess, or a rough explanation. We start with
the best explanation that we've got, and then we make an inference from there.
That's what design thinking is all about. Jumping that intuitive leap that we can
make. But it's got to be based on a foundation. It's not just wild speculation.
We've got an initial best available explanation and then we try and jump from
there, make that abductive leap.
●​ Iterative: in short, we will never get it right the first time. We have an inference
based on insufficient information and we take a leep, make a decision based on
that and you learn as you go and adapt and change as you go and as you go you
as you watch people interact with your prototype (actual or mental) of your game
you see what they interact with the best and get you your desired outcome and
you iterate and improve accordingly.

6 Step Process for implementing Design Thinking

1.​ Define Business Objectives Increase Conversion, Social Sharing,Influencer
Marketing, Increase LTV, Decrease Churn…etc Those also are what defines if
the gamified system that was put was a success or a failure.
2.​ Delineate Target Behaviors I want customers to stay more on the platform, I
want them to check in every day to get a better learning experience and to not
forget about the product, I want them to purchase the 50% discount more, i want
them to redeem opening the app as FUN not WORK they have to do ….etc
3.​ Describe your players what motivates them, what are they like.

4.​ Devise activity loops

5.​ Don’t Forget the fun!!
6.​ Deploy the appropriate tools.
Gamification Design Framework
Professor Werbach’s six-step gamification design framework is described in lecture unit
7. To help with your final written assignment, below is a summary of each element.
Your submission should be organized around these six tasks. However, this is not a
precise template. You could start with an overview of your system, for example. And you
don’t need to address every specific question below; they are just offered to illustrate
the design steps.
1.​ Define business objectives. Why are you gamifying? How do you hope to
benefit your business, or achieve some other goal such as motivating people to
change their behavior? The first written assignment focused on this step of the
process, so you may wish to look back on your earlier submission and the peer
assessments for guidance. As you state your objectives, emphasize the end goal
or goals of your gamified design rather than detailing the means through which
you'll achieve this goal. Basically, if your gamified system does what you intend,
what specific positive results will it generate for your organization?
2.​ Delineate target behaviors. What do you want your players to do? And what
are the metrics that will allow you to measure them? These behaviors should
promote your business objectives, although the relationship may be indirect. For
example, your business goal might be to increase sales, but your target behavior
could be for visitors to spend more time on your website. As you describe the
behaviors, be sure to explain how they will help your system achieve its
objectives. The metrics should in some fashion provide feedback to the players,
letting them know when they are successfully engaging in the intended
behaviors.
3.​ Describe your players. Who are the people who will be participating in your
gamified activity? What is their relationship to you? For example, are they
prospective customers, employees at your organization, or some other
community? And what are they like? You can describe your players using
demographics (such as age and gender), psychographics (such as their values
and personalities), Bartle’s player types, or some other framework. You should
show that you understand what sorts of game elements and other structures are
likely to be effective for this population. For example, you might discuss whether
a more competitive or cooperative system would be better for this player
community.
4.​ Devise your activity loops. Explore in greater detail how you will motivate your
players using engagement and progression loops. First, describe the kinds of
feedback your system will offer the players to encourage further action, and
explain how this feedback will work to motivate the players. (Remember: rewards
are only one kind of feedback.) Second, how if at all will players progress in your
 system? This includes how the system will get new players engaged, and how it
will remain interesting for more experienced players.
5.​ Don't forget the fun. Although more abstract than some of the other elements,
ensuring that your gamified system is fun remains as important as the other
aspects. In order to fully explore this aspect of the design process, consider how
your game would function without any extrinsic rewards. Would you say it was
fun? Identify which aspects of the game could continue to motivate players to
participate even without rewards.
6.​ Deploy the appropriate tools. By this point, you've probably identified several of
the game elements and other specifics of your gamified system. If you haven’t
already, you should explain in detail what your system would look like. What are
some of the game elements involved and what will the experience be like for the
players? What specific choices would you make in deploying your system? For
example, you might discuss whether the gamified system is to be experienced
primarily on personal computers, mobile devices, or some other platform. You
might also describe what feedback, rewards, and other reinforcements the
players could receive. Finally, think about whether you’ve tied your decisions
back to the other five steps in the process, especially the business objectives.