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Coursera Gamification Class: Week 4 Review By Sudarshan Gopaladesikan - @MrGamify

*Note: We welcome all sorts of criticism. Also, please share on Twitter, Facebook, email, or even word of mouth. Thanks and be sure to check out http://gamification.co for more news and information! GAMIFICATION DESIGN FRAMEWORK 1. The Design Process a. Design Thinkingnot just design. This is a different way of problem solving. i. Purposive 1. Emphasis on the purpose of the object. What is the goal? ii. Human Centered 1. It is all about the human experience. After all, the experience needs to be great to be a success iii. Balance 1. There is a tradeoff between being analytical and creative. Design Thinking urges people to realize when it is smart to be analytical and when you need to dare to explore and be creative. iv. Iterative 1. This is the companys feedback loop. Prof. Werbach keeps stressing the importance of feedback. Iterating and gathering accurate results fast lets you slowly add/remove functions from your design until you find a solution that best fits your needs. b. Prof. Werbach D6 Framework i. Define Business Objectives (goals) ii. Delineate target audience (the desired actions) iii. Describe your players (What are their personalities?)

iv. Devise activity loop (Which game elements to use?) v. Dont forget the fun (optimal mix of game and play) vi. Deploy the appropriate tools (implementation plan) c. Here is the link to a slideshow presentation that explains design thinking in greater detail. I think having a basic understanding of design thinking helps better grasp the concepts learned in gamification. 2. Objectives and Behaviors a. At the end of the day, what will give your business value? How do you define goals properly? b. Foursquare i. Social SharingTo Foursquare, social information was valuable. They wanted to create a service that allowed them to generate social data. ii. Influencer MarketingFor being mayor, you got discounts. As a non-affiliate with Foursquare, your rec. for places to be is more authentic to the public crowd. As a mayor, discounts will make you continue going. Using reward systems to help drive value between Foursquare and its marketing partners. Genius. c. Objectives i. List and rank your objectives ii. Eliminate the means to an end iii. Justify your objectives d. Target Behavior i. What are your desired actions and outcomes? Specific, success metrics, analytics e. Specific i. I want my users to post, blog, share, buy, <insert verb> f. Success Metrics i. I will feel successful if my business gets <insert number> <insert metric> because it means we accomplished <insert objective> g. Analytics i. DAU/MAUdaily average user/monthly average user 1. Shows how engaging your site is. If people are coming everyday and the closer your daily average user approaches MAU, you are creating an engaging experience.

ii. Viralityare people talking about it and are people who are listening also spreading the word. iii. Volume of ActivityBecause we are giving out points, badges, etc., we can track what we are giving out. This will be our volume and a high volume means a lot of interactions are happening within our service. h. The slideshow takes a closer look into this topic, but with a focus on co-creation of objectives and is good enough better than perfect 3. Players a. Infographicthis type of information is simply who your users are in terms of age, weight, gender, etc. b. Psychographicthis type of information disregards physical descriptors and tries to evaluate people in terms of their motivations and personalities. c. Bartle 4 Types of Players i. Devised from observations of an RPG, but similar styles of thinking can be applied to real world situations. ii. Achiever, Socialite, Explorer, Killer d. Achieverinfluenced by points, leaderboards, badges, and they want to be recognized or achieve the highest possible result. e. Socialiteinfluenced by social graphs, clans, chat rooms, overall UI. They want to share what they are doing to the world. f. Explorerinfluenced by the ability to make a lot of meaningful choices without diverging too much from overall themed-experience. They just want to explore as much as possible to see what is available in a game environment. These people may not directly interact with your site often, but they are on the site frequently. Try to find ways to make explorers into social explorers g. Killersinfluenced by the game and nothing else. These people are mostly in it for themselves and will go at any length to achieve their own objectives. Anomalies to the game, but necessary. h. This slideshow takes a closer look at this topic with a focus on how to capture the entire target audience and how to figure out your target audience 4. Activity Loop

a. Engagement Loop i. Motivationthese are the elements you used that help motivate people ii. Actionthese are the actions you allow people to take after being motivated. iii. Feedbackthese are the built-in outcomes occurring after an action that give the user feedback. If feedback is encouraging and generally optimistic, people will go back to Motivation and repeat the cycle. b. Progression Loop i. There are Long term goals, Milestones, and Short term goals. ii. Through the journey of a player, there are constant save points or short term goals that need to be reached. After a certain amount of short-term goals, the environment lets the user know that he/she completed a milestone. After a couple of milestones, you have completed the long-term goal! iii. At the end of the long-term goal, the user must feel enlightened after the experience, and the business must have created value! The short-term goals and milestones should be user-centered with the long term goal wrapping up the entire experience with a business goal conversion. A perfect win-win. c. This slideshow takes a closer look at how short/long term objectives affect both the company and the user. 5. Fun and Tools a. There is a tradeoff between thinking about how to do something and doing it. The more you are doing, the less you are thinking because you are more aware of what you are doing. For example, when you are driving a car, there is in fact so much that goes on that you arent aware of because you are driving. b. Now make that fun and game-like. When designing fun, design experiences that make the user feel like the game is the world and he/she wants to get lost in it. Thats fun.

DESIGN CHOICES

1. Taking Stock a. Is this a Game?Slot machinenot really a game but super engaging because it has a great reward structure. b. Doing i. Marketing/economics ii. Incentives iii. Satisfying needs iv. Game elements v. Status vi. PBL vii. Reward viii. Make people do things c. Feeling i. Game design/cognitive psychology ii. Experience iii. Fun iv. Game thinking (deductive) v. Meaning vi. Puzzle vii. Progression viii. Make people feel awesome d. There are two major camps of gamification. Doing refers to using gamification to get people to do things. Feeling refers to using gamification to get people to feel like they succeeded in meaningful choices. The elements move downward, with the disciplines used to help achieve (viii). 2. Is Gamification Right For Me a. Motivation i. This refers to what is the motivation of your company and its end users. Motivation can be used either for creativity or to just make boring tasks more interesting. Is there sufficient motivation for both you and your company? b. Meaningful Choices i. When designing for your end user, can they make meaningful choices? How are you making sure that your users will feel like you have helped give them insight into something they wanted to know about while they provided you profit. The win-win.

c. Structure algorithms i. We live in the world of technology. As Badgeville CEO Kris Duggan said, If you can record it, you can reward it. He isnt far from being right. Can we take our gamified environment concepts and have a development team turn it into code? d. Potential Conflict i. Because we will be collecting data and giving feedback to our users, is there potential conflict that my feedback will stress our potential users? e. I believe that potential conflicts are something we should worry about greatly. When more than one entity is trying to judge and evaluate a user on the same thing, conflicts arise that are beyond control. At that point, we lose any attempt to reach Flow. 3. Designing for Collective Good a. Stack Overflow! Why was it so successful? b. It wasnt created when gamification was a term so people dared to explore using points, badges, and motivational metrics. c. Since this is a programming community, people here are geeks. i. They love grades, feedback, recognition, and are obsessed with numbers and ranks d. Using points, people are awarded if they do things such as answer questions, edit posts, contribute, etc. e. The badges are unique. These badges are simple labels that briefly explain what you have done. I believe this is where Stack Overflow hit the jackpot. i. The badges have something for everyone. People in the programming community have an appreciation to detail that the various badges offered ways for participants to express their appreciation to detail. This self-expression is important. f. The other key element is teamwork. Stack Overflow is a great example of how to have users make their users better i. Making your peers better is the action of doing something that may helps you but places an emphasis on helping someone else. (ex. Improve answers. Mentorship.)

g. If you wanted to see an example of Bartles Killer, take a look at the example in Stack Overflow. i. Unfortunately, there is always a small population of these people in forums. These people are the ones that are demeaning, disrespectful, etc. to other members. In a learning environment, negative vibes like that are not good for the environment. In other words, theyre the trolls on the Internet. 4. Designing for Happiness a. Positive Psychology i. Positive emotions ii. Engagement iii. Relationship iv. Meaning v. Achievement b. Flow i. High difficultyin short amount of time, they will quit because they are anxious ii. Low difficultyin a long amount of time, they will quit because they are bored. iii. End result, they quit. iv. How to keep users in between? Set clear goals, balance between difficulty, and give clear and immediate feedback. c. I think the most important thing when deciding how to give feedback is that you should make it look it is the users conscious that is teaching the user how to play in the environment. The more it seems that external sensors are not affecting the experience, the user will experience a more rich experience. 5. Amy Jo Kim Interview a. Great interview. I will spend more time commenting. Here were her basic points: i. Bartles player types are not the ultimate way to describe all players. We should look to describe players with collaborative verbs. ii. Gamification is just good design iii. Gamification is more than PBL. Proof is seen when you realize that PBL only gets you so far until users realize that it isnt meaningful enough.

b. I agree with Amy on almost everything. First, I believe that gamification is a subset of good design. Rather than being a hype term to describe good design, I believe that gamification is just a subset of all the different ways we can design. We have shown that we cant use games in everything, so we should view this as a intersection between games and design thinking. Using logic, an intersection would create a subset. c. Games seem to have a half-life. A players journey is not an infinite one. If it was, we would go insane. Players need to exit the Magic Circle because learning also happens when we are not directly involved with the gamed environment. Understanding the half-life will help people plan campaigns to meet their needs.