Games People Play: The Rules of the Game

‘That’s enough about lessons,’ the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone: ‘tell her something about the games now.’

- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

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Have you ever wondered why your kids (or, based on the game requests in my Facebook feed, YOU) are willing to sit for hours playing computer games but trying to get them to sit and do their homework is like pulling teeth? Ten million people a day play Candy Crush, paying over $2,000,000 a day for the add-ons and upgrades to the free game, and the company that produces that game is worth $5.69 billion. Game makers know how to use psychological principles to motivate players to pony up a few dollars at a time to get those special boosts.

Business has taken what game makers know and applied it to boosting sales.  Have an app on your phone that gives you rewards for certain behavior? Every time you use it, you are playing their game...literally. Buy a cup of coffee and earn stars for a free cup. Make a certain combination of purchases and earn more stars. Visit twice in a week and earn 25 bonus stars, but visit three times to earn 100 stars. Each one of those activities is designed to increase the likelihood that you will buy more coffee.

What does this have to do with learning? Imagine if you could harness the power of game playing to motivate students to learn? What if you could take what the makers of Candy Crush know about making people spend $2,000,000 a day on a FREE game and use it to get your students to participate more in class? Suppose you used what Starbucks knows about motivating people to buy overpriced coffee and applied it to motivating students to study?

You can...it's called gamification, and it is based on sound, psychological principles of motivation and behavior modification. Gamification is a huge topic, so I will spend the next several weeks covering various aspects of.  Let's get started with the basics...what are the rules of gamification?

What is Gamification?

Gamification is "application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts." [Wikipedia]. In business, this application is designed to motivate people to buy a product, to increase brand loyalty. In education, this application is designed to motivate people to learn and solve problems. Gamification is not game-based learning, however. With game-based learning, students play a game from beginning to end to learn the course objectives. Gamification is layering game elements on to the traditional learning experience to increase motivation to learn.

I'm currently taking a course in Game Design from Adobe. In that course, we learned about "flow" as applied to games, where you get so wrapped up in playing that you lose track of time. the game is hard enough to be challenging but not so hard that you get frustrated. The concept of flow applies to any task in which you become so immersed in what you are doing that it takes up all of your concentration, and you are not affected by outside distractions.

When I saw that, I immediately thought of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal development. According to Vygotsky, learning takes place in that sweet spot where learners can achieve a skill with the help of a teacher or peer, but not on their own. If the task at hand is too hard, they cannot achieve it, and they become anxious. If the task is to easy, they can already achieve it on their own, and they become bored.

To me, there couldn't be a clearer parallel between game-playing and learning!

But it gets better.  In the live class, there was a discussion of flow in gaming and how you design games to optimize flow. A game with optimal flow would have:

• Clear goals
• Chance of completing task
• Immediate feedback
• Continuously challenging
• No distractions

Again, I was struck by the parallel between gaming and learning.  A well-designed learning experience has clear goals, lies within that zone of proximal development to make it possible for the learner to complete it with the teacher's guidance, provides feedback the learner can use, and is challenging enough to make it interesting...and provides no extraneous information to distract the learner.

The idea behind gamification in learning is to take what we know about making people want to play games and apply that to making them want to learn, that layering of game elements onto learning to help them get into the "flow" of learning.  I'll go into details about what those game elements are and how to apply them to learning in future posts, but for now, let's look at the two major categories of elements.

Game Mechanics vs. Game Dynamics

In simplest terms, the game mechanics are the rules and the rewards.  What are you supposed to do, and what do you get if you do it? Buy a cup of coffee and you earn a star is an example of a rule and a reward. String together enough of these rules and rewards, and apply them consistently or with a specific schedule, and you will get people to keep buying coffee.

But why they keep coming back is part of the game dynamics. Game dynamics are those parts of the game that adjust or modify based on different players preferences. People are individuals, and not everyone is motivated by the same thing all the time, so you need to change up your game once in a while.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, my coffee example is Starbucks.  Every time I get my triple shot nonfat raspberry mocha, I earn something like ten stars.  That's nice, but it isn't why I buy a triple shot nonfat raspberry mocha, so I won't make a special trip across town to get one just for the stars.  But once in a while, Starbucks sends me a special offer, where I can earn 100 stars if I buy my mocha and, say, a breakfast sandwich. I'm all over that, because I usually get a breakfast sandwich when I get my mocha anyway, so I will make sure to stop when that particular offer is in effect.

However, once in a while they offer bonus stars for making multiple visits in a week, 25 stars for two visits but 100 stars if you make three visits.  I don't think I have ever taken advantage of that offer, because I rarely visit Starbucks more than once a week, because it's on the other side of town, and it makes me later than usual for work (I am so not a morning person..). The reward for doing something I wouldn't normally do has to be pretty big to get me to do it, while the reward to do something I already have a tendency to do can be smaller.Taking advantage of the relationship between inclination and incentive is part of the game dynamics; what the inclination and incentive are would be mechanics.

(Starbucks is the master of gamification. That special reward for buying a breakfast sandwich doesn't just happen to be for the non-coffee menu item I buy most often, they track my purchases on my Starbucks app...and they were one of the first to let you pay with your phone. Getting a reward buying a sandwich is game mechanics; knowing what sandwich I'm inclined to buy is game dynamics. And making it easy to pay with my phone is just genius.)

So that's the difference between game mechanics and game dynamics - the mechanics is the what and the dynamics is the why. The tough part comes in understanding what will make some people do what you want them to and why, and for that you need to understand some psychology...which will be the subject of the next post.

(If you want to see what I have been learning in my Games Design class, check out my learning journal. You don't want to know how many hours I spent tweaking that volcano...talk about flow!)