A couple of us attended The Fantastic Tavern‘s session on Gamification late last week in London. It was a popular session with over 250+ people sharing knowledge over a pint or 2 at the Brickhouse and helping out Cancer Research at the same time. Here are my thoughts on the night and I hope I got my facts straight.
The session was about the gaming culture developing around us in our everyday activities. From popular casual games like Angry Birds to fitness apps such as Nike+ (giving us encouragement), to the engrossing MMORPG games such as World of Warcraft. Games aren’t meant to be easy, it’s their challenging and addictive (“just one more go”) nature that engages us and allows us to escape from day to day life.
We spend alot of time gaming in its various forms, often without realising it. The presentations started with an amazing statistic on the hours spent gaming:
- The time spent playing World of Warcraft totals 5.93 million years. That is as long as we have been evolving as a human species!
Here are 2 more…
- 250,000 years spent playing Halo.
- 3 billion hours invested a week globally playing online games*
Then followed 4 quick fire presentations on the four M’s of gamification by the invited panel. The 4 M’s (in no order):
- Membership
- Meaning
- Mystery
- Mastery
Membership is all about how we define ourselves as belonging to a group or multiple groups. We also need to look at the opposite of this – exclusion. Sometimes being an ‘outsider’ is another form of membership that can drive behaviour. Tom Hopkins used the Stanford prison experiment to highlight how humans adapt and behave when in and outside of a group. He mentioned Abraham Maslow’s psychology theories on behaviour and how fulfilling the basic of needs motivates us to move on to more complex ones. We need to think about what drives membership, how it builds ‘friendships’ but also what is great about being an ‘enemy’. Just look at the Apple vs. Microsoft debates that rage on.
Meaning. Alex Lee mentioned the different motivations across gaming that can build meaning. The way we reward users can be based on accruing things like status, collection of points, badges or credits. This can be achieved by completing new levels in a game, gaining badges for completed tasks (foursquare), enlisting your friends to join in an event like Movember. Meaning is not defined just by skill level. The differences between WoW and Angry Birds are vast on the skill level and game genre but both reward users for effort and involvement in different ways. The others Alex discussed were:
- Celebrity Pedigree - Fun and engaging way to accrue points and breed, buy and sell celebrity dogs. (OK, so I am a sucker for a cute dog that’s a mix of Clarkson and Geldof=Poppy Pooches)
- Nike+ – An app that encourages you as you exercise. The voice of friendly encouragement when you need it.
- Movember – join a group, gather your friends and reward yourselves as well as others, like a charity. One takeaway Alex raised here was around gifting sites like JustGiving and how people feel about being compared with others on the value of their donations. Is this a positive or negative meaning? Would you like to be compared to others on the value you have contributed?
Mystery. Matt Bagwell hates golf. Well I think he does 
He took a simple game like golf as an analogy to explain mystery. The aim of golf is to get the small white ball into a hole. No mystery or mastery there but, when you add in more complex tasks to get it to the hole like distance, trees, sand bunkers, repetition, rules and skill level you begin to create the ‘mystery’. The core rule is to get the ball in the hole – how you get it there is up to you and there are many ways to achieve it. It’s about the freedom to make your own decisions, challenges and sometimes frustrations to get to the goal.
Mastery is the ability to master a task, level or activity and then build on it to maintain interest & increase engagement. Richard Sedley pointed out you have to make it difficult to master, but not impossible. Use obstacles and barriers to challenge users to find ways around a problem or environment. Reward often but randomly and build in different levels of complexity (easy to hard) to maintain the attention of users hope they will be repeat visitors or brand advocates. (I did not master the art of paper plane flying)
After our pep talk from the panel we went to work on brainstorming to help Cancer Research look at ways to use gamifcation to increase fundraising and awareness across their organisation.
Presenters’ links
- James Wallman – Future Lab
- Tom Hopkins – Fortune Cookie
- Alex Lee – Kempt
- Richard Sedley Foviance
- Matt Bagwell – EMC Consulting
- Microsoft Kinect – The gestural interaction demos looked pretty cool, but now we need to sweet-talk our boss to buy one for the office and see what we can develop for our clients. (due to increased beer consumption and noise this guy was a little hard to hear. Tough crowd and last session of evening)
- Further reading: 7 winning examples of game mechanics in action – Mashable
Special thanks to Matt Bagwell (@mattbagwell) and Michelle Flynn (@michelleflynn) and of course “DJ H” banging out the tunes! If your interested in this or future Taverners events head to The Fantastic Tavern site (or @TFTLondon). Photos on TFT Facebook page.
*(Jane McGonigal – The Gamification Summit 2011)
