As a relative newbie to the indoor climbing world, I’ve noticed that I am at my Spiderman best when my climbing partner is challenging me to complete a higher-level route (at least higher than I am used to). Much like many other situations, the thrill of the challenge spices things up, produces better results and makes the whole experience a lot more fun!

The positive effect of a challenging situation is something that a bunch of people have started buzzing about online, and are trying to replicate in non-gaming environments.

What is Gamification?

As we’ve touched on before in regards to WoW or Second Life, the appeal of RPGs (Role Playing Games) lies in the fact that they blur the line between gameplay and real life. Gamification is about collapsing the last frontier and making “real life” as fun as gaming life, especially in very boring/dull/no-fun fields such as science or accounting.

David Helgason, from game development company Unity comments “It’s funny, because [accounting] has to be the most boring field, but I mean that’s the point. You can make it slightly challenging and give people little reasons to sort of play these tax tools — beyond, you know, not going to prison!”

Now, the question is: can we gamify the whole world make and make boring stuff more bearable?

Why People Love Playing Games

Brian Sutton-Smith gives an interesting interpretation of games as the perfect occasion for people to re-enact survival situations and therefore practice their survival skills and instincts, such as assessing risks and opportunities.

Game situations give us a safe, but real space where we can assess strategies of human sociability. Sutton-Smith’s summary is “we ‘potentate’ or die”. Kids, I hope you’re paying attention here, because this is your best excuse to play another few hours of The Sims or L4D2!!

Face Communities and Game Mechanics

Mindbubble and Headbox are evolving and growing. We are continuing to gather loads of users into research and co-creation projects – they’re always happy to earn a few quid or win an iPad in return for their precious participation!

2010 has been a year rich in improvements for our community platform, shifting from a pure online research community to a platform with its own social dimension.

Is gamification the next step towards the future of online communities? Can it be applied to our research communities?

Gamification in the Online Space

To me, in the digital & social space, the theory of gamification may be a bit limited, for the simple reason that:

+ The web, and especially the social web, is based on users volunteering, as opposed to, erm… work.
+ The web is already a massive playground.

Therefore, the gamification of online space has another, more subtle dimension: UX designers are more interested in using game mechanics to keep their users engaged with their website/software, like a permanent & personal challenge (to climb higher!).

To achieve that, users must have:

+ A personalised interest
+ A personalised recognition (by peers and also by the software/brand)
+ Intrinsic constraints, to create a challenging aspect & keep them focused on the app. – a bit like Joshua Porter explains for designers in Week 35 – http://52weeksofux.com/

However there are a few pitfalls to avoid in the design of a platform’s game mechanics:

+ Avoid trolling & grinding: these can happen when users with wrong intentions simply try to over-flood the system by either commenting a lot (more than necessary) or by starting arguments in the conversation.

+ Avoid discouraging “noobs” or users with a lower level of understanding of the online space while keeping “higher level” users engaged (something that Blizzard mastered with the design of World of Warcraft)

+ From a general perspective, adding challenges and ranking will make your users compete against each other in a fierce race to top the leaderboard, which can literally cause damage to the essence/social object of the community.

When the social object is to encourage users participation in market research and co-creation projects, the design of our game mechanics become all the more complex as we cannot risk bias research results by “incentivising” users with points and badges.

Too Much Game Kills the Gamification

With the release of Facebook places, a great competitor to Foursquare in terms of collapsing frontiers between games and reality, mayors, badges and other leaderboards are entering our everyday life, and gamification has become “the new online buzzword”.

But, as Naomi Alderman warns us in her article for the Guardian we must not succumb to the pitfall of gamifying every single activity in order to make it more “fun”: both because you cannot genuinely make a game out of any goal you have to reach, or task you have to perform in life, and also, you cannot always get authentic results by turning an activity into a game.

Because, as Alderman wisely concludes: “You run the risk of losing everything that made the thing worthwhile in the first place”.

So what are the right measures and balance to add a bit of game and engagement to boredom and routine?

As well Sebastian Deterding’s guidelines in the above presentation, there are rules to follow when using gamification and designing game mechanics, for instance:

1. The game itself is not fun. Fun comes from a good design.
Literally, you cannot “add a bit of gaming powder” to the recipe to make an activity or an app more engaging for users. The game mechanics should be designed, prototyped, tested etc, as part of the whole project.

2. Rewards are not achievements.
Once upon a time, companies/brands/bands were giving away free mp3s (indie bands still do it, while huge pop stars got their album leaked!), pretty computer backgrounds or other cool free stuff. In 2010 the reward can simply be points, badges or ranks (that goes with a pretty title you can share on your Facebook profile etc). But this cheap logic of giving points for action isn’t sustainable: accumulating points doesn’t make the users engage (they may be too bored to really start grinding…).

3. Good game design should be built around a well tighten, progressive story.
So what makes users engage? It’s the challenge of improving their result and reaching the next level – Reminds me of doing the same climbing route over again and again until I can’t feel my arms!

To conclude, this quote from Deterding’s presentation gives a perfect illustration on how tricky game design is and how the gamification process should be used carefully:

“It is an invariable principle of all play, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.”

James P. Carse finite and infinite games (1986)