GamificationUsing game elements to motivate

behaviour change

Geraldine Exton; Liam MurrayUniversity of Limerick,Ireland

What is Gamification?

• The use of game design elements in non-game contexts

Deterding

What is Gamification?

• separate from games: • core of a game - entertainment

What is Gamification?Nuanced difference:• “game-inspired” elements • To create a “sense of playfulness .. so that

participation becomes enjoyable and desirable”

Thom• But playfulness is not “essential”

Romero

What is Gamification?

• Gamified systems are “persuasive”Llagostera

• They “engage” people more fully with a taskFerro

• The core of a gamified system is “to incentivise involvement”

Romero

• Everything feeds into that core

What is Gamification?

Even games themselves can be gamified• adding layers of “metagames” • awards and achievements given outside a

game, for behaviour within a gameHuotari and Hamari

Criticisms• Gee:

Gamification can be good and gamification can be evil. It has been taken over, at least in America by business.

• When does motivation turn into manipulation?

Criticisms• [James will cover this in more detail!]• chocolate covered broccoli (Bruckman)• Exploitationware (Bogost)• Pointsification (Robertson)

• Gamification has an“impoverished, cynical, and exploitative view of games as inherently frivolous and mostly useless“

Ferrara

Why Gamification?• This is where motivation comes in:• persuasion• engagement

• Looking for motivational affordances to increase participation and engagement of participants• Game elements come to mind

• Therefore we need to connect gamification and motivation

Motivation• Self-Determination Theory

Ryan and Deci

• Three components to be fulfilled:

Motivation: Self-Determination Theory

• Competence • Ability to master optimal challenges that are

developmentally appropriate• Autonomy• Feeling of volition or choice

• Relatedness• Need to feel belonging and connectedness to others• Social connection

Potentially most important for charities

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

• Aware that people can move from amotivation to intrinsic motivation

• Spectrum of motivation

Ryan and Deci

 Amotivation Extrinsic motivation Intrinsic motivation

  External regulation

Introjection Identification Integration 

Perceived locus of causality

Impersonal External Somewhat external

Somewhat internal

Internal Internal

Gamification and Motivation• Taxonomy: • Linking specific game elements to these

components of motivation• Why?• Address criticism • gamification “tacks” elements all over the place

Ferrara• Work the motivational needs into the design

Gamification and MotivationTaxonomyTakes 16 elements found in gamesLooks at their target behavioursLinks these to Competence, Autonomy,

RelatednessShows why this is importantShows when it occurs in gamified system

Gamification and MotivationTaxonomyGame Element Competence Autonomy Relatedness

Achievements ●

Avatars ● ● ●

Badges ● ●

Boss Fights ●

Collections ● ●

Combat ●

Content-Unlocking ● ●

Discussion forums ● ● ●

Gifting ● ●

Leader-boards ● ●

Levels ● ● ●

Points  ●

Quests ● ● ●

Social Graphs ● ●

Teams ●

Virtual Goods ● ● ●

Design considerations• New approach from game designers:• Learn from our experiences

• Five guiding principles• Define the core message• Tie the message to the win strategy• Offer meaningful choices• Keep it real• Enable self-directed discovery

Ferrara

Gamification for behaviour change• Often gamification is applied in order to effect

behaviour change, and rewards are used in order to recognise this change

• Recyclebank is a programme to encourage recycling o in various communitieso offers points for recycling o points can be redeemed for services

Gamification for behaviour change

• Runkeeper is an app to encourage people to exercise, which offers rewards and achievements which can be used in the real world

• Similarly, Fitbit is a suite of products to chart fitness gains, with an online set of achievements and progress reporting

Gamification for charitiesOverview• Helps to build a strong community• Rewards specific behaviours• Keep reputation systems in mind (upvoting, etc.)

• Gamification offline – “social marketing”• Real world/virtual world link-ups

Successful examples of gamification

• Duolingo• Gamified language learning website• 100 million registered as of June 2015• 9/11 Competence• 4/6 Autonomy• 9/11 Relatedness

• Discussion forums• community of practice

Lave and Wenger• Community of learners helping each other

Successful examples of gamification

• Just Press Play – Rochester Institute• Gamified first year Computer Science• Achievement system• Online elements, real world elements• Older students voluntarily helped out

Decker and Lawley

• Success of blending social and face-to-face elements rather than just online

Caveats

• Longevity vs novelty– “Framification”

Lieberoth– Sure it works, but would it maintain interest?

Caveats

• External motivators detracting from intrinsic motivation

Cameron

• Very important consideration for charities

Conclusion• Know your participants• Understand their motivations• Offer meaningful choices• Remember intrinsic satisfaction & try not to

infringe it• Concentrate on social connection• With careful design you can (hopefully) avoid

the negatives!

ReferencesBogost, I., (2011) Persuasive Games: Exploitationware [online], available: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php [accessed April 7, 2014]

Bruckman, A. (1999). Can educational be fun. In Game developers conference (Vol. 99).

Cameron, J. (2001). Negative effects of reward on intrinsic motivation—A limited phenomenon: Comment on Deci, Koestner, and Ryan (2001). Review of Educational Research, 71(1), 29-42

Decker, A., & Lawley, E. L. (2013). Life's a game and the game of life: how making a game out of it can change student behavior. In Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (pp. 233-238). ACM

Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., & Nacke, L. (2011). From game design elements to gamefulness: defining gamification. In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments (pp. 9-15). ACM.

Duolingo (2012) Duolingo: Free Language Education for the World [online], available: www.duolingo.com [accessed Feb 24, 2014]

Exton, G. & Murray, L. (2014) Motivation: a proposed taxonomy using gamification [online], available: https://ulir.ul.ie/handle/10344/4279 [accessed Feb 24, 2016]

Ferrara, J. (2012a). Playful design. Rosenfeld Media.

Ferrara, J., (2012b) A note to the Gamification Summit: Surviving the backlash [online], available http://rosenfeldmedia.com/blogs/playful-design/a-note-to-the-gamification-sum/ [accessed November 23, 2014]

ReferencesFerrara, J., (2012b) A note to the Gamification Summit: Surviving the backlash [online], available http://rosenfeldmedia.com/blogs/playful-design/a-note-to-the-gamification-sum/ [accessed November 23, 2014]

Ferrara, J. (2013). Games for Persuasion Argumentation, Procedurality, and the Lie of Gamification. Games and Culture, 8(4), 289-304.

Ferro, L. S., Walz, S. P., & Greuter, S. (2013). Towards personalised, gamified systems: an investigation into game design, personality and player typologies. In Proceedings of The 9th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Matters of Life and Death (p. 7). ACM.

Fitbit (2016) Fitbit Find your fit [online], available: https://www.fitbit.com/whyfitbit [accessed February 25, 2016]

FitnessKeeper (2016) Runkeeper [online], available: https://runkeeper.com/ [accessed February 25, 2016]

Gee, J. P. (2015, May 11) Video Games and Digital Literacy in Education: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly [Webinar] Retrieved from https://breeze01.uclan.ac.uk/jamespaulgee/

Hodge, K., (2012) Best Bits – Gamification for charities [online], available: http://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2012/mar/23/gamification-charity-advice [accessed April 8, 2014]

Huotari, K., & Hamari, J. (2011). Gamification from the perspective of service marketing. In Proc. CHI 2011 Workshop Gamification.

Lieberoth, A. (2015). Shallow gamification testing psychological effects of framing an activity as a game. Games and Culture, 10(3), 229-248.

ReferencesLlagostera, E. (2012). On gamification and persuasion. SB Games, Brasilia, Brazil, November 2-4, 2012, 12-21.

Recyclebank (2004) Good Actions. Great Deals. [online] available: https://www.recyclebank.com/about-us [accessed September 24, 2014]

Robertson, M., (2010) Can’t Play Won’t Play [online], available: http://hideandseek.net/2010/10/06/cant-play-wont-play/ [accessed April 7, 2014]

Romero, B. (2014, September 19) Interview with Geraldine Exton and Liam Murray (Chapter in Doctoral dissertation, University of Limerick, Ireland, forthcoming. Full transcript available at

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wrvpxvjkp3tbynd/BrendaRomeroInterviewTranscript.docx?dl=0 )

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000a). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American psychologist, 55(1), 68.

Thom, J., Millen, D., & DiMicco, J. (2012). Removing gamification from an enterprise SNS. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 1067-1070). ACM.