just add points? what ux can (and cannot) learn from games

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Sebastian Deterding UXCamp Europe Berlin, May 30, 2010 cbn Just add points? what ux designers can (and cannot) learn from games

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Page 1: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Sebastian DeterdingUXCamp EuropeBerlin, May 30, 2010

cbn

Just add points?what ux designers can(and cannot) learn from games

Page 2: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

1

The Fun Theory

2

3

4

Why gamesare fun

Problems...

What wecan learn

There‘s a meme currently circulating in the UX community that the best way to motivate user behaviour is to make it fun – and the best way to make it fun is game mechanics. Today, I‘d like to (1) present this meme, (2) summarise the research on why games are fun, (3) show some problems with applying game design in other contexts, and (4) point out what we can actually learn from game design.

Page 3: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

1

The Fun Theory

So on to point number one.

Page 4: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Can we get more people to use thebottle bank by making it fun to do?

The most articulate version of »The Fun Theory« is a recent viral video campaign by Volkswagen Sweden that runs by that name. Here‘s one example how they use game mechanics to motivate users to use the bottle bank.

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Thefuntheory.com

»Fun is the easiest way to change people‘s behaviour.«

On the campaign website, you‘ll find more videos, a (now closed) competition and the core idea: »Fun is the easiest way to change people‘s behaviour.« (One thing I always wonder is: What happens on day 2? What is the »replay value« of these designs? But more on that later.)

Page 7: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

1982: Thomas MaloneTo wit, the idea that we can deduce heuristics for designing more enjoyable applications from video games is nothing new. If you look up the scholarly HCI databases, you‘ll already find papers on this in the early 1980s, the first heydays of video games (http://bit.ly/csscek.)

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Work made fun gets done!

1994: The Fish! StrategyIn the 1990s, there was a business bible craze around »The FISH! strategy«. Briefly, it states that for employees to be productive and creative, they have to be intrinsically motivated, which is best achieved by a playful attitude towards their work. (In a sense, Dan H. Pink‘s recent business bible »Drive« is just a reiteration of this focus on intrinsic motivation.)

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Games With A PurposeMaybe the most well-known application are the »Games With A Purpose« by re:captcha inventor Luis von Ahn, like the »ESP Game«: On the surface, players earn points by guessing which word comes to mind of an anonymous counterpart when seeing a picture. In the background, the inputs are used as highly accurate image tags.

Page 11: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Book OvenAnother example is »Book Oven«, a web platform for book publishing. The platform crowdsources the otherwise tedious act of proof reading by presenting users with small snippets of text. Users earn points for every snippet checked, and can compare themselves with other users on a leader board – to apparently amazing effects:

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Hugh McGuire

»One editor told me: Your bite-sized edits is Crack Cocaine for proof readers.«

cofounder, bookoven.comAccording to co-founder Hugh McGuire, a lot of professional proof readers who do this kind of thing for a living during daytime log into Bookoven in the evening to do it for free.

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twitterIn a very similar way, Twitter has recently crowdsourced its translation – again with small snippets, points earned per snippet, and levels. Even these bare bones mechanics seem to work quite well: To achieve level 11, one has to translate 1484 snippets – and I know quite a number of people in my twittersphere who are at level 10.

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2

Why gamesare fun

So the obvious question is: Why? Why is this so motivating, so much fun? What exactly is at work here?

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Just add points!

The answer I find reiterated over and over in most of the current debate in UX design is: »Just add points (and leaderboards)!« Points are seen as a kind of monosodium glutamate you can spice up any interaction or product with.

Page 16: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

FoursquareFoursquare best exemplifies this approach: To motivate a desired user behaviour (check-ins), users earn points for performing it. The points are then displayed on leaderboards to stimulate competition, and users can achieve levels or badges with a certain number of points or combination of check-ins.

Page 17: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Raph Koster

»Fun is just another wordfor learning.«

a theory of fun for game designHowever, this approach is way too simplistic if seen in context of the wealth of thought and research in game studies and game design. Personally, I think that Raph Koster most concisely summed up what we currently know about why games are fun when he said: »Fun is just another word for learning.«

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Raph Koster

»Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun. With games, learning is the drug.«

a theory of fun for game designNow, »fun is learning« sounds quite counterintuitive at first. What Koster means (and what is backed up by research on intrinsic motivation) is that the fun of games is the positive experience of mastering something: a new skill, a solved puzzle, a recognised pattern. We win a game by noticing and then mastering the rule patterns – and this experience of competence creates fun.

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We flee from We flee intohttp://www.flickr.com/photos/sulamith/1342528771/sizes/o/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/photonquantique/3364593945/sizes/l/

To give you an example: The same kind of mathematics that school kids usually despise in school is actively sought out and performed by them with intense focus and joy in Trading Card Games like »Magic: The Gathering«, where mastery requires complex multiplication, fractions, and statistic analysis of which card combinations form a winning deck. So what makes the difference?

Page 20: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Raph Koster

»Fun is just another wordfor learning.«

a theory of fun for game design

under optimal conditions

What separates games from school (and what we have to add to Koster‘s definition) is that games create optimal conditions for learning. Fun is learning – under optimal conditions. And games show us just what exactly those optimal conditions are.

Page 21: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Jane McGonigal

»Reality is broken.Games work better. … Games are the ultimate happiness machines.«

ux week 2009In a sense, this is the point researcher and game designer Jane McGonigal makes: Games take to heart many principles of positive psychology, which is why they are far more enjoyable than everyday life. So – what are those principles? Let‘s return to the crowdsourced twitter translation. Even this simple interface already shows many of the most important design principles.

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S.M.A.R.T. goals

Principle #1: Games set specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timed short- and long-term goals (you might say they do time management 101 for the user). Short-term: I am level 4 and want to get to level 5. Long-term: Level 11! In contrast, think of how often in life (or school) we have no, unclear, vague or even conflicting goals? Not so in games.

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Clear, bite-sizedactions and choices

Principle #2: The available actions to achieve our goals are made explicit – and prepackaged so that we can directly execute them. Twitter presents the text we have to translate directly and in small doable portions: 1 Action = click & translate 1 sentence. Game menus in point-and-click adventures are overviews of objects and verbs – we »just« have to decide which action is the right one (cf. designer Sid Meier: »A game is a series of interesting decisions«). In everyday life, the actions and choices available to us are mostly unclear, vague or not packaged into immediately doable steps, i.e. »lose weight«, »write that novel«, »get rich«, ...

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Clear action–goalrelations

Principle #3: The relation between the available actions and choices and our goals are clear. It is uncertain whether we succeed in performing the action (here: translate the text), but how success brings us closer to our goal is immediately visible with numerical exactitude. Conversely, do we know in everyday life whether a chosen action will really bring us closer to our goals, and how much so?

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Clear status

Principle #4: Our current status ist absolutely clear. In games, we always know »where« we stand – spatially (via map displays), in terms of our skills and possessions (listed in menus, inventories and character sheets), in relation to our goals (points and mission stats) and in our relation to other players (visualised in leaderboards or social graphs).

Page 26: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Excessive positive feedback

Principle #5: Games give instant, unambiguous, excessively strong positive (and negative) feedback. My favourite example is the Pachinko-like game »Peggle« by Popcap Games. The goal is to shoot all orange pellets from a screen with a bouncing metal ball. Here‘s what happens if you clear the last orange pellet of a level:

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Scaffolded challenges

That‘s the kind of feedback I‘d like to get for a successful project. But on to principle #6: The challenges we face, the goals we strive for get a little more difficult with each step. On twitter, we have to translate a little more each level to reach the next one. Why is this important?

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»flow«

Diff

icul

ty

Skill/time

anxiety

boredom

flow: the psychology of optimal experienceMihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The answer comes from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: We usually feel best when the challenges we face perfectly match our skills. More, and we are stressed, less, and we‘re bored. Since we constantly learn and improve our skills, the challenges must grow with our skills – otherwise, boredom ensues.

Page 30: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1524/the_chemistry_of_game_design.php

ChunkingAnd this is where twitter partly fails: Harder challenges are not just »more of the same« (i.e. earn more points), but different and more complex ones. Good games let you master one simple thing, then another one, and then they chunk both into a more complex combination of the two which you have to master, and so on. (Above is a skill atom and the complete chunking chain for Tetris.)

Page 31: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Social comparison

Game designers test and balance this difficulty curve of their game until it perfectly matches the learning curve of their audience; often, the difficulty dynamically adjusts to player performance. Now to the seventh and last principle: Games create social comparison to facilitate both social learning and motivating competition. Twitter does this subtly by displaying who‘s in the game and at what level.

Page 32: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

The well-formed actionhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/30279269@N04/3946300019/

Personally, I call these the principles of well-formed action, as they not only apply to games, but capture part of what makes any everyday action satisfying and motivating – »optimal experiences« in the terms of Csikszentmihalyi or Jane McGonigal. Games provide a kind of crutches purpose-built to facilitate and guide well-formed action.

Page 33: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Quick recap

• Clear status, goals, actions, decisions, goal-action relations

• Excessive feedback

• Scaffolded challenges matched to the users‘ growing skills

• Chunking

• Social comparisonSo if we just follow these principles when designing our applications, they will be just as much fun as games – correct?

Page 34: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

3

Problems...

Well, yes and no. These are certainly generally valid and valuable principles for the design of any interaction. But I see three broad problems with the direct transfer of game design to software or websites.

Page 35: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Diff

icul

ty

Ability/Time

game design

usability

Proble

m

#1

The first problem is a conflict of cultures and goals: Usability and UX come from the world of tasks and productivity. Our primary goal has always been to make applications as easy as possible, to keep the learning curve as flat as possible – boring, but simple. If you‘d ask a usability engineer to optimize a video game, this is what probably would come out:

Page 36: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

http://lostgarden.com/2008/10/princess-rescuing-application-slides.html

On the other hand, game designers come from the world of fun and leisure. If you‘d ask a game designer to craft a bus ticket machine that is »exciting«, his solution might look like this:

Page 37: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Ticket

Drag point throughmaze to receive ticket

Imagine the engaging suspense of this game with the added time pressure when you see that your train will arrive in just a minute … And to ensure that this doesn‘t get boring once you figured out the labyrinth ...

Page 38: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Level 2

Ticket

Drag point throughmaze to receive ticket

… there‘s level 2!

Page 39: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Conflict ofinterest

gameEmotionIntensityDuration

workTasks

EfficiencySpeed

Behind these different cultures of thinking and design is a manifest conflict of interest: The whole point of games is to create intense emotions, and to prolong their experience as much as possible. By contrast, productivity software is all about getting your work done as efficiently and quickly as possible. How you feel is at best a secondary consideration.

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Onlysometimes

gameEmotionIntensityDuration

workTasks

EfficiencySpeed

Only sometimes, ensuring intrinsic user motivation is so essential that emotion becomes conducive to or even a prerequisite for task completion – say, in creative work or unremunerated user work. Another case are end-user products where the quality of experience is part of the selling proposition or market differentiator. In those cases, we have to ensure usability and fun/emotion.

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Proble

m

#2

Game Designers are mightierProblem number two: Game designers are far more powerful than designers of software or websites. What do I mean with that?

Page 42: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

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Let‘s assume for a minute that Microsoft Word would be Super Mario Bros.

Page 43: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

If this screen would be a typical screen of a user typing a document on Microsoft Word, which elements of this screen would an interaction designer be able to design?

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Page 44: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

What we design(the tool)

Answer: The interaction designer would only be able to design Mario: the tool the user uses to affect his/her world.

Page 45: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

What the user/manager designs(goals)

What we design(the tool)

The goals the user has to achieve with said tool are not set by the designer, but by the user her/himself (or a third party – like his/her supervising manager): Write a report of X pages about Y until Z.

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What the user/manager also designs(objects and environments)

Likewise, the objects that the user works on with his/her tools and the broader environment of his/her task is set by the user or a supervising manager: the texts to be referred to, the colleagues who can be asked, etc.

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Diff

icul

ty

Skill/Time

game design(HR) Management!

Yet the difficulty curve emerges from the relation of skills, tools, objects, environment and goals: How difficult something is depends on what I try to achieve with which tools in which environment. In games, this complex whole is designed by the game designer. In work life, it is »designed« by our supervisors and HR people (a.k.a. »job rotation«, »job enrichment«, etc.).

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Business Process Reengineering?http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=3225718

Put differently, if we as designers wish to craft a fun, engaging difficulty curve in productivity contexts, we have to step away from designing the application in isolation and tackle the whole work context – which isn‘t interaction design anymore – it‘s business process reengineering.

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let users easily integrate their environments and goals into our systems?

How might we ...

One middle step might be to ask ourselves who we might help users to integrate their environments and goals into our rule systems – just like a GTD time management application helps users to organise their life by offering a structure and workflow that they then populate with their own tasks.

Page 50: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Two examples for this approach are the time management application RescueTime, which essentially tracks the amount of time you spend with different applications (and on different websites) and allows you to set goals (e.g. »no more than two hours of YouTube per day«), or Chore Wars, which allows you to make household chores a part of an Online Roleplaying Game.

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Proble

m

#3

http://www.flickr.com/photos/musebrarian/443103590/sizes/o/

The third and last problem I like to call the »Tom Sawyer problem«: In the famous novel by Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer has to paint a fence white and is derided by some passing friends who go fishing. By insisting that he‘d rather paint the fence than go fishing, Tom is able to persuade his friends that painting is actually fun – and has them pay for the privilege of painting the fence for him.

Page 52: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Mark Twain

»Tom ... had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.«

the adventures of tom sawyer (1876)There are two things happening in this story. One is the psychological mechanism known as the »hard-to-get« phenomenon: If something is hard to get (e.g. expensive, almost sold out, etc.), we usually conclude that it must be very valuable.

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Mark Twain

»If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.«

the adventures of tom sawyer (1876)The second (and in our context, more relevant) thing is a core psychological and social difference between work and play: We usually experience as work what we have to do by some external force, whereas to experience something as play, we must feel that we have chosen to do it voluntarily. (kthx @stephenanderson for pointing me to Twain‘s story.)

Page 54: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Johan Huizinga

»First and foremost, then, all play is a voluntary activity. … It is done at leisure, during ›free time‹. Every child knows perfectly well that he is ›just pretending‹, or that it was ›just for fun‹.«

homo ludens (1938)This actually goes back to the earliest definitions of play. According to the doyen of game studies, Johan Huizinga, the two core features of play are: (1) It is done voluntarily, and (2) it is a »make-believe« activity without serious consequences. (There‘s a rich discussion on how games often do have consequences – think Russian Roulette – but we don‘t have the time to dive into the scholarly details here.)

Page 55: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

⎫⎬ ⎭

voluntaryno serious consequence

Now if you take a second look at all the examples where game mechanics work just fine – ESP Game, Bookoven, twitter translations – you‘ll find that they are all voluntary »leisure« activities that don‘t have any serious consequence for the user. They are indeed »just a game«.

Page 56: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Work PlayThis explains why one and the same activity – analysing spreadsheets – is experienced as work (and people demand payment for it) in one case, and in another case (like the Online Roleplaying Game »Eve Online«), it is experienced as fun (and people pay for it). In the game, analysing spreadsheets is done voluntarily and has few serious consequences (the same is true for Trading Cards vs. school).

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Chinese Gold Farminghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/juliandibbell/234192868/sizes/o/in/set-72157594279649151/

Another example: In China and elsewhere, there are employed professional players who earn virtual items in Online Roleplaying Games that are then resold for real money on platforms like ebay. Although these players definitely play a game, they experience this as work.–It is not done voluntarily (they have to sit their 8 hours), and they get into trouble if they don‘t achieve their daily quota of virtual gold.

Page 58: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

»Just pretending«So how we experience a situation very much depends on how we and the people around us frame it. Think of the movie »Life is beautiful«, where a Jewish son and father are held in a concentration camp. The father is able to present this situation of utmost consequence and involuntariness as a game of hide-and-seek to his son – hence the son experiences the situation very differently.

Page 59: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Games With A PurposeAnd this is not just a matter of fiction. Take the ESP Game. Google was so fond of the concept and its success that it bought the idea and rebranded it as the »Gooogle Image Labeler«.

Page 60: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Google Image LabelerWhat was presented as a fun game of mind reading is now presented as work for Google. The game mechanics stay the same, but the framing is different – and the user stats tell us that the Image Labeler is much less successful than the ESP Game in engaging users.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlerone/405730185/sizes/o/

What we design

To summarise: Again, what we designers craft is merely the tool.

Page 62: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Who decides whether this is play

(or playing is allowed)

However, whether the interaction with that tool is experienced as fun, engaging play or not depends on the user and his/her social context. Together, they define whether what they currently do is »just a game«, voluntary and without consequence, or a serious matter, no joking around. I can say for myself that meeting XYZ is »just a game«. But if my colleagues don‘t play along, I won‘t succeed.

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induce a playful attitude?

How might we...

This means that if we want to create the experience of play, the design challenge is not how to include game mechanics, but how to induce a playful stance in the user towards the activity they are engaging in – what game philosopher Bernhard Suits called »the lusory attitude«.

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Easter Eggshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/indy138/2852103473/sizes/o/

One possible way to achieve this are easter eggs – small, surprising, delightful details that the user will only discover by chance and that have no functional value at all (like this lawn gnome in Half-Life 2). There is something about such intentional non-functional excess that signals a momentary license be non-serious, non-instrumental.

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Easter Eggshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/titanas/1051688629/sizes/o/

The business card printing service moo.com does a good job in this: Not only is their copywriting and design with little drop characters consistently playful, but there are many lovingly-crafted-yet-nonfunctional details that surprise and delight – like this imprint inside the cardboard box around a set of cards that you only discover when you take the box apart before throwing it away.

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Quick recap

Tutorials

SocialNetworks»Leisure«

Productivitysoftware

Music etc.To summarise again, game mechanics and inducing a playful attitude to create »fun« experiences usually works best where (1) the designer can craft the goals and environment as well (e.g. tutorials), and (2) the usage context is one of voluntary, consequence-free leisure time, like social networks, music recommendation sites, etc. Game and play are less suitable for hardcore productivity contexts.

Page 67: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

Ribbon HeroMicrosoft‘s Office tutorial game »Ribbon Hero« for instance is a good application of game mechanics in productivity contexts. The game sets the goals and the materials to work on. Also, learning a new tool usually happens under less supervision and is a more self-structured activity than other work tasks.

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AttentOn the other hand, I assume that the e-mail management application »Attent« by Seriosity, which adds a virtual currency to e-mail, will likely clash with instrumental attitudes and demands in the workplace and hence not produce a similarly engaging experience (though I have no data to prove that and am happy to be disproven).

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4

What wecan learn

But all is not lost: As I said, there are contexts where game design can help in designing engaging applications, and there are general design principles to be learned from game design. More specifically, I think that UX designers can take three things from game design.

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Design Patterns (of course)

NarrativitySocial comparison

Customization Real Money TradingIntermittentreinforcement

Collecting Points

Baroque visuals

Lesson

#1

The first thing are design patterns like the principles of well-formed action. I won‘t go into detail here because (1) there are too many of them and (2) other people have covered this area, so have a look at the resources referenced at the end of this presentation.

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Configure, don‘t addhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/8147452@N05/2913356030/sizes/o/

One caveat though: As with interaction design patterns, »more« does not equal »better«. Take Chess: Chess has a very unique experiential quality of intense focus and ratiocination. If you add the game mechanic of time pressure (i.e. speed chess), the experience does not just become better, it completely changes. Game design is about such configuration of mechanics, not mere addition.

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Rule Design

Lesson

#2

The second lesson to be taken from game design is rule design. If you are on facebook, you will undoubtedly have noticed these recommendations displayed in the sidebar of your dashboard. There‘s a rule (and recommendation engine) deciding when and where which recommendations are displayed in reaction to which user behaviours.

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Daniel Brown

»In designing transactional and content-rich web sites, rules provide an underlying structure that governs the experience: what is displayed, when it’s displayed, and how it responds to user actions.«

designing rules, ia summit 2009As Daniel Brown pointed out in his talk at the 2009 IA Summit, more and more elements on websites and web applications become dynamic in this sense. It is no longer one interface to every customer, but the interface dynamically adapts in reaction to user behaviour – and this adaptation is governed by underlying rules.

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AestheticsMechanics Dynamics

Marc LeBlanc

mda: a formal approach to game designHow do we design these rule systems so that we achieve an intended user experience? This is the core competence of game designers. They offer us models to understand these relations, like Marc LeBlanc‘s MDA model. Put simply: The game rules (mechanics) afford the interaction between user and system (dynamics), which affords the user experience (aesthetics).

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aesthetic

Frustratingend game

mechanic dynamic

PovertyGap

+$ +-$ -

MonopolyOne example: In Monopoly, you buy streets and houses with money, which earn you more money. Conversely, if you lose money, you have to sell houses and streets and hence earn less money. In the game, this leads to a slowly growing but largely irreversible poverty gap, which makes for a frustrating end game for the losing player. Other games have a more balanced and hence enjoyable end game.

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Mafia WarsAnother example: On login, the facebook game Mafia Wars allows players to gift one virtual item to their friends on Mafia Wars, and every item one receives can be reciprocated once. (Letting you gift another person first without any immediate benefit to yourself is a smart use of the persuasive principle of reciprocity, by the way.)

Page 77: Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

aesthetic

Bond, obligation

mechanic

Free gifton login

dynamic

Mutualgifting

Mafia WarsOverall, what this game mechanic does is spur a dynamic of mutual gifting among players, which affords a mutual sense of bonding and obligation among players that effectively binds the players to the platform itself.

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Testing & BalancingAgain, a caveat: In its first version, this mechanic produced a very »spammy« dynamic and hence not the intended aesthetics, which is why Mafia Wars recently redesigned it. The lesson here: Rule systems need just as much iterative testing and optimising like any other design aspect, and this is what separates good game design from bad or mediocre.

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Depth: Foursquare ...Another important quality of rule design is depth. As game designer Sid Meier said, a good game is »easy to learn, difficult to master«. This is why foursquare often becomes boring quickly: Once you understand the basic mechanic, there‘s nothing new to learn and master. Whatever fun remains is derived from the social metagame of competing with peers for the mayorship of some place.

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… vs. FoodspottingContrast this with Foodspotting, a kind of foursquare-meets-Yelp! where people recommend specific dishes in specific restaurants to each other. Again, there‘s a desired behaviour (spotting foods), there‘s points and badges …

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… vs. Foodspotting… but if you take a look at their »About« page, you‘ll see that the rule system actually introduces two different kinds of points – »noms« and »reputation« – that interact with each other. I haven‘t used Foodspotting enough to qualify how successful this system is, but it‘s definitely a move in the right direction of »deeper« rule systems.

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FarmVille

Lesson

#3

The third and final lesson is that not all games and gamers are alike. Game design offers us a greater precision and clarity in speaking about just what we mean when we say »fun«. FarmVille for instance is the most successful social game so far that definitely delivers fun to tens of millions of users.

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Fallout 3Now look at Fallout 3, one of the most successful recent roleplaying games, which again most definitely delivers fun to its millions of users. But is it the same kind of fun as with FarmVille? Most certainly not. So the question is: Which different kinds of fun are there? What kind of fun appeals to which demographic? And which kinds of fun might not mix so well?

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Nicole Lazzaro

four fun keys

Hard FunFiero

People FunAmusement

Easy FunCuriosity

SeriousFunRelaxation

emotion < choice < mechanic > choice > emotion

Nicole Lazzaros »4 Fun Keys« are but one (good) answer to such questions (for another take, see Marc LeBlanc‘s 8 kinds of fun). Put more generally, game design gives us models, theories, empirical data and vocabularies to better understand and thus design for the different kinds of fun that exist.

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Recap

1. The core fun in games is learning under optimal conditions.

2.To create it, we must be able to design goals and environments as well.

3. Play depends on voluntary contexts without serious consequence.

4.Game design gives us patterns, models and words for emotion and rule design.

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Read more books!

Raph KosterA Theory of Fun for Game Design★★★★★

David W. ShafferHow Computer GamesHelp Children Learn★★★☆☆

Byron Reeves & J. L. ReydTotal Engagement ★☆☆☆☆

Johan HuizingaHomo Ludens★★★★☆

James Paul GeeWhat video games have to teach us about learning ...★★★★★

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow: The psychology ofoptimal experience★★★★★

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On Slideshare

Dan SafferGaming the Web: Using the structure of games ...★★★★★

Amy Jo KimPutting the Fun in Functional:Applying Game Mechanics ...★★★★★

Jane McGonigalThe User Experience ofReality★★★★★

Stephen P. AndersonThe Art and Science of Seductive Interactions★★★★★

Aki JärvinnenGame Design for Social Networks★★★★☆

Nicole LazzaroThe Four Keys to Fun★★★★★

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On Slideshare

John Mark JoslingPlaying On! Interface lessons from games★★★★☆

Nadya DirekovaGame Design for Web Designers★★★☆☆

Kars AlfrinkPlayful IAs★★★★☆

Holger DieterichWhat can we learn from game design?★★★★☆

Daniel BrownDesigning Rules★★★★★

Amy Jo KimMetaGame Design★★★★★

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On Slideshare

Philip Fierlinger*Designing a Game Changer★★★★☆* with kind thanks for the cover »inspiration«

Aki JärvinnenWorkshop: Game Design for Social Networks★★★★☆

Want more?You might follow me on Slideshareto receive updates on slides I favorite.

Vily LehdonvirtaWhy do people buy virtual goods?★★★★☆

Jonathan BoutelleGame-inspired RIA Design★★★☆☆

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Even more stuff

Daniel CookThe Princess Rescuing Application★★★★★

Marc LeBlancMechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics★★★★★

Daniel CookThe Chemistry of Game Design★★★★★

John FerraraPlayful design (book in progress)★★★★☆

Jane McGonigalThe engagement economy★★★☆☆

Stephen AndersonWhen data gets up close and personal★★★★★

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Even more stuff

PlayfulConference series★★★★★

Jesse SchellDesign Outside the Box★★★★★

Jesse SchellGamepocalypse blog★★★★☆

David CarltonCritical Compilation★★★★☆

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You should follow them on twitter

aquitoAki Järvinnen

NicoleLazzaroNicole Lazzaro

WhatsthehubbubKars Alfrink

getmentalnotesStephen P. Anderson

avantgameJane McGonigal

amyjokimAmy Jo Kim