Gamification: The Application of Game Design in Everyday Life

Gamification: The Application of Game

Design in Everyday Life

Abstract: As ―gamification‖ lingers between a world changing concept and a

meaningless buzzword, a more formal approach is needed in order to

understand and elaborate the phenomenon. This thesis aims at clarifying the

dimensions of gamification, assess its current expression, and offer alternative

views and approaches to it. Through the critical analysis of its constituent parts,

it sheds light on the practical, rhetorical and ideological discourse of

gamification. It offers an ontological analysis of the dominant gamification model

and argues against it on the basis of its limits and efficiencies, explaining how

perceiving games as systems is both counterintuitive and counterproductive in

the context of gamification. Instead, it counter-proposes an alternative mindset,

a grounded theory interpreting the motivation of players for engaging and

playing with artifacts. Based on that, it offers a conceptual toolset for

establishing ―playful mappings‖ between users and artifacts aimed at

gamification designers. As such, a series of functional designs are offered as

exemplifiers of the theoretical arguments presented.

Keywords: Games, Gamification, Game Design, Interaction Design, Social Play,

Reflective Design

Dedicated to all the patient individuals that suffered my gamification rambling for

more than a year. You wholeheartedly deserve it.

Table of Contents

0. Foreword ................................................................................................................................................. 6

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 7

2. Inquiry: Gamification Now? ................................................................................................................ 13

2.1 Games ............................................................................................................................................. 15

2.1.1 The Hard-Core ........................................................................................................................ 16

2.1.2 The Rise of the ―Casual‖ Game ........................................................................................... 19

2.1.3 The Internet Experience ........................................................................................................ 25

2.2 Studying the Game ....................................................................................................................... 29

2.2.1 The Theory of the Game ........................................................................................................... 30

2.2.2 It‘s the Game Design Stupid! ................................................................................................... 32

2.2.3 The Game of Play and the Play of Game ............................................................................... 34

2.3 The Playful Interaction Design ..................................................................................................... 35

2.3.1 Planet Interaction Design: Game Design in Orbit? ........................................................... 36

2.3.3 Persuade to Design or Design to Persuade ....................................................................... 39

2.3.4 The Play of Design ................................................................................................................. 42

2.3.5 The Design of the Critic(al) ................................................................................................... 47

2.3.6 Interaction Design as a Whole Aesthetical Experience .................................................... 50

2.4 Work, Leisure and Play ................................................................................................................. 53

2.4.1 The Values of Work and Leisure .............................................................................................. 55

2.4.2 The Erosive Quality of (Instrumental) Play ............................................................................. 57

2.4.2 The Hole in the Whole ............................................................................................................... 59

2.4.3 The Ideology of the Pointless Point ......................................................................................... 60

3. Exploration: Gamification for Dummies ............................................................................................ 62

3.1 The model ....................................................................................................................................... 63

3.3.1The Core Activity ...................................................................................................................... 63

3.3.2 Tapping into the Activity ........................................................................................................ 64

3.3.3 Investing on the Activity ......................................................................................................... 68

3.2 The Alternatives.............................................................................................................................. 69

3.2.1 The „Pull‟ .................................................................................................................................. 70

3.2.2 (Against) Trivialization ............................................................................................................ 83

3.2.3 Reflection ................................................................................................................................. 91

3.2.4 (Regulating) Social Play ........................................................................................................ 97

3.2.5 Coda: Advice on How to Read this Chapter .................................................................... 100

4. Composition: 5+3 Proposals .......................................................................................................... 101

4.1 The Bundy Clock ......................................................................................................................... 102

4.1.1 Points for Consistency ......................................................................................................... 103

4.1.2 The Scout boy Worker ......................................................................................................... 104

4.1.3 The Lenient/Ruthless Clock ................................................................................................ 105

4.1.4 ‗/worked‘ ................................................................................................................................ 106

4.1.5 ―Office Coffee Cliques‖, a Game Played at Work............................................................ 108

4.2 The Thankbox .............................................................................................................................. 110

4.3 MovieTaste .................................................................................................................................... 112

4.4 Adult Challengers ........................................................................................................................ 114

5. Assessment: Evaluating with(out) Points ....................................................................................... 116

5.1 Different Clocks, Same Time ..................................................................................................... 116

5.1.1. Points for Consistency or Consistent Points? ................................................................. 116

5.1.2 The Scout boy Worker ......................................................................................................... 118

5.1.3. No Clock is Lenient ............................................................................................................. 120

5.1.4 ―/worked‖ (Works?) .............................................................................................................. 121

5.1.5 Clique Logon ......................................................................................................................... 123

5.2 Thanking the Box ......................................................................................................................... 124

5.3 The Taste in Movies .................................................................................................................... 125

5.4 Challenging Adults ...................................................................................................................... 126

5.5 Concluding remarks .................................................................................................................... 127

6. Coordination: A Step towards Gamification .................................................................................. 128

6.1Gamification Checklist ................................................................................................................. 130

6.2. On, Off, For and Against Criticism and Cynicism .................................................................. 131

6.2.1. Paradox 1, The Belief in Games and the Belief in the Belief in Games ...................... 132

6.2.2. Paradox 2: Belief in Systems ............................................................................................. 134

6.3. (Instead of) Epilogue .................................................................................................................. 135

7. Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................ 137

Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................. 137

8. Appendix I ........................................................................................................................................... 148

8.1 Aki Järvinen .................................................................................................................................. 148

8.2 Jonas Löwgren ............................................................................................................................. 152

8.3 Kars Alfrink .................................................................................................................................... 157

8.4 Richard Bartle ............................................................................................................................... 161

8.5 Sebastian Deterding .................................................................................................................... 163

Gamification: The Application of Game Design in Everyday Life May 2, 2011

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0. Foreword

This thesis was written during the course of a year, starting in May 2010 at the IT-University of

Copenhagen. Our inspiration was on fact that even though at the time very much had been

said and written about gamification as a topic and a concept, very little effort had been put for a

systematic and grounded approach.

One year later, we find ourselves paradoxically facing almost the same situation; many

arguments for and against gamification, with proponent and opponents arguing on the blog-o-

sphere whether the future will or will not be gamified. As such, we hope that this text will aid the

readers move beyond the ―hostilities‖ of the debate and shed some light in its practical,

rhetorical and ideological basis.

This Master's Thesis was researched, developed and written under the supervision of Miguel

Sicart, MTG Head of Department. We would like to acknowledge his invaluable support and

guiding through Master‘s Thesis, especially when it was mostly needed. Furthermore, we thank

all the interviewees, Aki Järvinen, Jonas Löwgren, Kars Alfrink, Richard Bartle and Sebastian

Deterding for their valuable time and for sharing their knowledge and opinions.

Christos Iosifidis


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1. Introduction

In February 2010, as part of DICE conference, Professor Jesse Schell gave a presentation in

which he drew a possible future where games, or aspects of games, will have invaded every

part of our daily lives (Schell, 2010). Channeled primarily through marketing, games will ―steer‖

people‘s everyday interactions with services, products and other individuals towards more

focused, overt and engaging experiences. Individuals will be more motivated, more efficient

and happier with very little effort and cost.

The basic principle is that (simple) game design and the power it can have over people‘s

behavior will transform our relation with services, products, policies and everything else that

can be monitored, tracked and modeled into gamespace. The core element in such approach

is the use of technology in order to track human behavior. By tracking a multitude of everyday

human actions, businesses and governmental services can set goals for individuals and reward

them for achieving them. The premise is to create a sense of progress through a sequence of

small achievements that are attached to extrinsic rewards. Rewards then can be practical, like

receiving tax breaks for walking three kilometers every day, or aesthetical, such as having a

digital ―flower‖ growing in your car‘s dashboard for driving more fuel-efficiently. Thus for Schell

the real strength of such an approach lies in the value of data a monitored human activity can

generate. When tracked, recorded and stored, this data can not only be used for manipulating

behavior through explicit rewards, but more importantly can create a sense of personal

responsibility through posthumous fame and reputation; since this data can outlive their

source, they are attached to its legacy.

However the concept was not new; the prescription of game design in non-game uses had

been examined and developed both in theory and practice before and it came with many

names and colors. Gabe Zicherman who is credited with the term ‗funware‟, advocated for the

use of game mechanics in marketing as a form of game-like loyalty programs:

―Funware is the art and science of turning your customers‘ everyday interactions into

‗‗games‘‘ that serve your business purposes.‖ (Zichermann & Linder, 2010, p. 20)


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Similarly, Amy Jo Kim suggested that by ―laying a rewards system onto an existing activity‖ we

are practically creating a ―meta-game‖ and as such, we can develop it, based on existing

knowledge from game design (Kim, 2009).

But in addition to the theoretical standpoints, practical applications of game design in

marketing had already made their appearance. Bunchball, a technology company, developed

their version of marketing-as-game into a service that integrates points, leader boards,

challenges and leveling in websites. They titled this approach ‗gamification‟:

―[Gamification is the integration of] game dynamics into your site, service, community,

content or campaign, in order to drive participation.‖ (Bunchball.Com, 2010)

Gamification as a term proved not only popular, but also served as an umbrella for a broad

range of concepts that merged games with non-game contexts. Ideas such as Jane

McGonigal‘s concept of distilling problem solving value by playing videogames and Byron

Reeves‘ proposal of using games as means of increasing work productivity became part of the

peculiar space of gamification.

Nonetheless, even though the idea of gamification had not been new, the apocalyptic future

that Schell described shocked even the initiated ones. Fears, obstacles, ethical concerns but

primarily opportunities started springing from all directions; game development professionals,

technologists, interaction designers, marketers and academics. Consequently, the spotlight fell

overnight onto a field that had rarely before met any particular mass media or industry

attention. Game design in general, as well as particular elements of it (―game mechanics‖)

became instantly the epicenter of an effort to create models, methodologies, frameworks,

theories and applications that would utilize its potential outside the realm of games.

This unexplored land opened up the way to an ―El Dorado‖ effect in the field of digital services;

more than a dozen of new technological startups in the last two years have promised to

―gamify‖ the whole world1

. At the same time different kinds of theorists of design, (and not),

advocated for the potential of applying a ―game layer‖ on top of things, while the blogosphere,

1

Scvngr (www.scvngr.com), Badgeville (www.badgeville.com), Booyah (www.booyah.com), Gamify

(www.gamify.com), Veri (www.veri.com) are some of the most known exemplars here.


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and the digital press in general, was filled with discussions around badges, points and other

reward systems as well as many arguments about motivation2

.

However, despite all the debate, the discussions and the arguments about the use of game

design in non-game applications over the last year, very little has been said about game design

itself. It is thus important before we appropriate any new ways of utilizing game design, to be

able to answer what it is that makes us believe that such an approach can contribute to making

better services, products and interactions in general. Only then, we can examine how game

design can be implemented in the design of non-game applications in meaningful and practical

ways.

Hence this thesis has a threefold goal:

1. To identify the dimensions of gamification and look critically into their past and present,

asking the critical questions of how and why game design has become so relevant into

the design and development of non-game applications. In other words, we need to

situate the reality that makes gamification as a practice and theory applicable in

everyday life. We are not interested in a dry description of gamification, but rather in

building a convincing argument about what gamification means for everyday life, game

design and games at large. As such, we will try to avoid the popular approach of

engaging into an argument about the effectiveness, viability, the social and ethical

concerns of gamification and instead try to analyze the conditions that ―fertilized‖ it.

2. To critically examine existing gamification methods and propose not only new

approaches which will constitute a conceptual toolset, but also a mindset for designing

gamification solutions.

3. To set the scene for the theory and practice of game design to become part of a

broader disciplinary field responsible for the understanding, design and the

materialization of products and services.

Thus we see several challenges with this thesis. First of all we need to be critical assessors of

all the existing literature, theory and lore on the subject of gamification. We recognize that there

is a lot of hype and ―buzz‖ surrounding gamification nowadays, so we need to be able to

2

The phenomenon grew so much, that for many game theorists and designers it was impossible to

escape having, or expressing an opinion about gamification (to name a few see Bogost, 2010; Juul,

2011; Sirlin, 2010).


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distinguish between future casting, speculation, actual practice and grounded theory in order

to address the current its context.

However, this work is not solely a critical analysis of the existing texts and applications; it spans

into the field of appropriating new ways of using and thinking of game design in non-game

applications. As such we need to address game design in a specific context, a context that is

composed of many different historical, social and cultural realities.

Consequently, we adjudicate to deal with these challenges as a design task in itself and as

such, we need to utilize a method for approaching it. We are inspired by Löwgren and

Stolterman‘s division of the design process in five distinct phases (inquiry, exploration,

composition, assessment, coordination) and we are adapting it in the context of this work to fit

the modalities of text. As Löwgren and Stolterman successfully note, a design method is ―never

simply used but rather appropriated‖ (Löwgren & Stolterman, 2004), thus we are not just

prescribing a methodological pattern but we interpret this five step process as a way of thinking

and reflecting upon our task. Hence, we also have to remain conscious about the

shortcomings of our approach; approaching gamification as a design issue entails design

assumptions that are fundamentally subjective. Thus, we would like to abdicate any objectivity

over our normative approach; our proposals, solutions and conclusions are the results of a

subjective interpretive approach and as such they should not be regarded as absolute truths.

In Chapter 2, we start with inquiring the current design situation, the context in which a

discussion about using game design in everyday life is relevant. We examine the realities that

constitute this context in an effort to connect the historical, cultural and social developments

with the present theory, practice and criticism of gamification. More specifically, we shall look

into three components of gamification, videogames, the academic study of games and

interaction design.

We start with videogames because we see gamification as an extension of their cultural

penetration across multiple levels. Over the last decade we have witnessed a radical

transformation of the type of videogames played, their audiences and the developers that

create them. We believe that gamification as a phenomenon has developed over these

transformations and in order to appropriate it as such, we need to understand them. For this

task, we will look into the scholarly study of games as an emerging academic field; we focus on

the development of game design theory as an interpretive tool for comprehending the

motivation behind gamification. We will also look into interaction design as the ―institutional‖


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field responsible for the design of interactive products and services. We are particularly

interested in the tradition of play in interaction design both as a design method (Ehn, Sjögren,

& Möllerud, 1992) and as a design subject (Gaver W. W., 2002), as well as examining how

gamification as a process can be interpreted by interaction design.

Finally, we try to summarize our inquiry with an investigation of the role of work, leisure and

play in everyday life, giving an ideological interpretation to gamification.

Then we move onto an exploration phase (Chapter 3), where we will explore the space of

possible dimensions of embedding game design in everyday life. We examine the dominant

gamification model not only as it is deployed by commercial practitioners, but also on

theoretical and conceptual levels, elaborating its core principles. We then compose an

alternative mindset of gamification, drawing distance from the dominant model and offer views

and formulations of possible attitudes and practices which we believe will enable designers in

the future to expand the landscape of possibilities for gamification.

After redrawing the possibility space, we then utilize it to compose our design proposals

(Chapter 4). Made as functional design concepts, we treat our proposals not as suggestive

products themselves, but as the outcomes of an investigative process that have been

developed and evolved simultaneously in our design process.

As such, we are using them here as mediums for a critical analysis (Chapter 5), in which we

attempt o reexamine our assertions and assumptions in a reflective and learning manner

(assessment phase). We are not interested here in the actual commercial potential of our

design proposals but whether the hypotheses they were developed upon can enable new

dimensions in the way we treat the application of game design in everyday life.

In summary, we attempt a first step towards a coordination process (Chapter 6); we lay down a

comprehensive account of our arguments in an effort to structure our extracted knowledge and

offer a perspective to the possible futures of gamification.

Finally we offer the reader a broader spectrum of opinions, ideas and answers to the questions

we asked ourselves. In appendix I, there is the transcripts of a series of interviews we

conducted in October 2010 with many influential designers and theoreticians that had taken a

very active role in the existing dialogue about gamification and share their views on its past,

present and possible future.


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2. Inquiry: Gamification Now?

As we have already mentioned, we regard our pursuit to examine the possibilities of applying

game design in everyday life as a design challenge. As such, we need to firstly examine the

broader context of such a challenge. We need to be able to explain not only our motives but

also the practical, theoretical and social dimensions that make these motives relevant.

Consequently, we need to understand how we have reached the point where not only the

discussion, but also the actual practice of game design is stretching beyond games and

reaches real life applications. For this, we need to encapsulate a design situation that spans

beyond the scope of how we can practically employ game elements in product and service

design. It is our firm belief that in order to be able to describe design processes that use game

design outside its original scope and purpose, we need to be able to comprehend the realities

that ―urge‖ us to invent and prescribe such processes.

Thus before we prescribe the epistemology of gamification we need to capture its ontology. For

example, as Nocera illustrates, the concept of credit card as a ―replacement‖ for palpable

printed money could only be implemented on a commercial scale during the historical and

financial realities of the 1960‘s (Nocera, 1995). Similarly, we need to be able to understand why

replacing existing practices with game mechanics or embedding game design elements in

marketing campaigns makes practical and evolutionary sense in the context of contemporary

life; in other words, why gamification as a concept can become a reality now.

In order to do so, we must uptake the role of the researcher, trying to interpret the present by

creating a coherent narrative drawn from the past and spanning tenaciously to the future. For

that, we will not only examine the events, trends and historical developments that led to such a

state in retrospect, but also the context that these occurred in.

In the following parts we identify three constituents of gamification and attempt an analysis on

how they have come to converge into the gamification present. We start by examining games,

and particularly videogames, as the field which has the most detrimental effect on everyday life.


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We shall examine how videogames have been transformed over the last ten years, changing

the paradigm from a commodity targeted to male teenagers, to a widespread pastime activity.

Our effort is to trace the social, cultural and technological events that were part of this

transformative process and connect them in order to compose the present of gamification.

We thus see gamification as a phenomenon, a reality that is partly theory, partly practice and

mostly a possible future, a state that many aspire and even more deprecate. We understand

then that gamification as an issue is subjected to a great deal of speculation and exaggeration

and as such, we feel that before examining it, we must frame it in realistic proportions.

Consequently, we must answer what gamification is and what it means, avoiding the utopian

and dystopian motives that are so often attached to it.

As such, we will then look into the academic and theoretical developments of the study of

games. We shall examine how game rhetorics have diffused not only in popular culture, but

also in academia; we will indentify common threads between the developments of the

systematic study of games, the rise of videogames as a cultural phenomenon and commercial

game development. Our focus is the scholarly examination and criticism of game design as a

field of practice and how this process pushed the boundaries of both our understanding of

games as well as their effects on the players.

We shall also look into the developments in the field of interaction design research and

practice; the field that has had an almost institutional role in the development of electronic

goods and services over the last decade. The nature of our investigation is twofold; on one

hand we are interested in the way that interaction design as a broad discipline can

accommodate game design. We shall look into existing practices, methods and mindsets in

interaction design that have been pushing towards a convergence –if not a complete bridging–

with these of game design. Our secondary target is to identify the reasons that such

approaches and practices have been kept away from the present expression of gamification

and what can be learned from them.

Interaction design has a far older, stronger and more concrete theoretical and practical basis in

the design of interactive services and products than game design and as such, we believe that

it should not be excluded from an examination of gamification. Its grounded theory and rich

practice can be the basis for a gamification approach that can be the foundations upon which a

broader disciplinary field could evolve.


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Finally, we will bring this triptych together in order to examine the core concepts that underlie

games, game design and interaction design; we identify the notions of work and leisure as the

epicenter of a greater transformation in the social and individual sphere of everyday life. We will

follow that transformation through time and we try an interpretation of gamification‘s ideological

extensions.

2.1 Games

Gamification is not about games, in fact as a subject gamification is deals with everything else

but games. Despite the irony here, the modus operandi of gamification advocates and

practitioners is to focus on services, products and campaigns that are not games (i.e. applying

game design knowledge on non-game contexts). Hence games in the current perception of

gamification are of secondary order; games and gamification are only indirectly connected

through game design which in turn is perceived as a static entity, directing the design of both

games and gamification solutions.

In this part, our effort is to show that gamification is indeed much closer to games than the

current thinking positions it. To do so, we will examine the historical trajectory of videogames

over the last two decades. We choose videogames, because they have been the primary

expression of games in modern culture and concentrate the essence of game diffusion across

society and technology. We specify that period, because during that time we witnessed a

tremendous transformation of videogames as a medium, as technology and as business.

Of course we realize the difficulty in encapsulating the historical trajectory of videogames, let

alone their cultural and social impact, in just a few pages. Nonetheless, we can identify the

major historical factors that contributed to the evolution of the technology, business, design

and culture of videogames and try to appropriate their meaning; it is in our view, the first step

towards an understanding of the amplitude and magnitude videogames posses right now in

our everyday lives.

Perhaps the first and most significant point we must focus on is indeed the present;

―videogames are everywhere‖ is the critical thesis of many gamification advocates (see Schell,

2010; Zichermann & Linder, 2010) and is indeed true. Over the last decade we have witnessed

an explosion of videogames with more individuals across all ages playing them. The diversity


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of that audience spans not only beyond sex, but also age, social and ethnic groups; more

people are spending more time and more money on videogames (Graft K. , 2010).

However, in order to reach that point a significant change had to happen; the stereotype of the

male teenage gamer had to be overcome.

2.1.1 The Hard-Core

The stereotype of the male teenage gamer has been historically elevated to a status of a cross-

cultural phenomenon3

, engaging popular media, public opinion, academia, even the market of

videogames itself in a vicious circle that often led them ―trapped‖ inside it. This phenomenon

was manifested through what we call the ‗hard-core videogames complex‟, a set of

interconnected relationships between developers, publishers, specialized press and gamers

that gave rise to a videogame culture of exclusion.

Tracing such complex is a complicated task since it involves many factors that are difficult to

untwine. Perhaps the best angle of approach is the examination of the innovation model that

the videogames industry based its growth during the 1990s. After the bust of the 1980s4

,

videogames had not only to be reintroduced to the market, but also to present convincing

innovation developments. It was at that point that we trace a clear disposition from the

industry‘s side to connect its own growth trajectory with that of technological advancements.

One might express the view that the growth trajectory of the videogames industry historically

had never been independent of the overall technological one and indeed the former was based

on the advancements of the latter (i.e. microchips). However, during the 1990s, the

development of videogames was clearly orientated towards pushing the technological

boundaries it was operating under.

3

It is perhaps indicative that so many reports from both Asia and North America about young

adolescents that have died out of exhaustion after playing videogames non-stop for days have made the

major news networks over the last years (for example, see ―Chinese online gamer dies after three-day

session‖ (BBC News, 2011) and ―Nintendo getting sued over wrongful death‖ (Berghammer, 2002))

4

See Kline et al. Ch.6 for a detailed examination of the ramifications of the 1980‘s videogames industry

bust.


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The manifestation of this innovation strategy took shape with a peculiar razor and blades

business model5

. The core concept of which was to push on the market very use-specific

hardware at under-cost prices in order to increase sales on videogame software, which was

sold at a significantly high profit margin. However, by trying to sustain high technological

innovation, videogame hardware (gaming consoles, 3D acceleration cards) remained

significantly expensive (See Figure 1) even when marketed below development costs. This

subsequent result was the exclusion of a broad customer base that could not, or would not,

invest a considerable amount of their disposable income to get into the videogames market.

Thus the target was that small segment of the market that would make such an expensive leap.

Figure 1. Videogame console prices, adjusted for inflation (Source: Gizmodo, 2006)

Such individuals would not only invest actual capital but also personal capital (time &

attention), consequently taking an almost active role to the way videogames evolved as a

medium. Videogames were designed around a very specific and tight target audience which in

turn would engage with the medium on a personal level, essentially generating a climate of

5

See Kline, et al. 2003, Ch.5 for a more elaborative analysis of the manifestation of the Razor and Blades

model from the videogames industry.


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cultural introversion. This ―recycling‖ of game design, thematic, experiences and culture at

large, has not only segmented the market to a small audience, but also penetrated culture and

society, feeding it with bad stereotypes and fears about videogame players and videogames in

general. Such a divisive factor not only added additional entry barriers in the market, but has

contributed to the perplexity with which gaming is often still faced.

Consequently, gamification as one can easily imagine, could never be enabled on a broad

scale under the prism of the hard-core videogames complex and indeed as we shall examine in

the next section abolishing it was the first step. Both technological and rhetorical

transformations would have to occur before videogames become an activity for a broader

audience instead of a selected few. However, despite the barriers the hard-core videogames

complex raised for the ―democratization‖ of gaming and consequently for gamification, it

enclosed in its core a concept that, we argue, has been the basis of the inspiration of

gamification; engagement. Engagement in the sense of the fervor with which hard-core gamers

partake not only the act of playing videogames, but also with the medium and its culture(s).

As such we view this engagement of the hard-core players with all aspects of the hard-core

videogames complex as an ideal for gamification. In fact, engagement as a concept is very

often cited as the ―holy grail‖ of gamification and indeed is rapidly conquering a very significant

position in contemporary rhetorics of economics and business administration. From this

position, many gamification advocates embellish their arguments by juxtaposing the

engagement and loyalty hard core gamers portray with the tedious, trivial office workspaces in

contemporary businesses. Reeves and Read for example, in their book ‗Total Engagement‘ pick

up the playing behavior of MMO6

gamers in order to shape a paradigm of processes and

guidelines that executives should practice. Similarly, Zicherman in his book, ‗Game-based

Marketing‘, is using console gamers‘ usage data to portray how devoted these gamers are to

their gaming activity in comparison to other kinds of consumer behavior.

6

Massively Multiplayer Online (Games)


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Our point here is not to classify hard-core gamers from non hard-core but to highlight the role

of the hard-core videogames complex in the existing rhetorics of gamification. We witnessed a

transition in the examination of hard-core videogames and gamers, from dismissive skepticism

to a more open approach that underlies admiration and colonialism; from marginal

phenomenon of subculture, to a model that enables opportunities and can be exported into

other fields:

―A brief perusal of Yahoo‟s World of Warcraft widow support group is a reminder that

time dedicated to game-play can lead to unpaid bills, unbathed children, and unwalked

dogs. Still question the power of games?‖ (Zichermann & Linder, 2010, p. 33)

In fact, these kinds of rhetorics are not only limited to gamers and games, but very often game

developers themselves are viewed operating under the limitations of the hard-core videogames

complex:

―Many independent game developer shops are trying to feed content to a handful of

publishers who have strong distribution capabilities. Most have dreams of writing the

next World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto but are having to work hard just to keep their

heads above water and might welcome the chance for paid work helping you execute

on your vision.‖ (Reeves & Read, 2009, p. 239)

However, even though we trace the rhetorical roots of gamification in the hard-core

videogames complex, we do not perceive rhetorics as the most significant contribution of

videogames in gamification. For that we will have to look into the ―democratization‖ of

videogames that was brought by casual games.

2.1.2 The Rise of the “Casual” Game

Even though as we argued in the previous part gamification was inspired by the hard-core

videogames complex, it would never be enabled before it was abolished on a broad social

level. The necessary transformation came through a technological revolution that changed not

only the way videogames were made and perceived, but society and technology in general.


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The rise of personal electronic devices, small electronic devices and affordable computers was

the catalyst for an unprecedented transformation of human-technology relations. As the need

for increased productivity grew larger in an information age, it became clear that the

topographical boundaries of digital technology had to be pushed; digital technology remained

mainly stationary until the beginning of the 1990s7

. Thus as they became more mobile and

affordable, cell phones, digital organizers and computers started moving away from the

productivity-oriented environments of work, ―following‖ their users back to their homes.

Positioned in different contexts, these devices started being used and operated not as work

tools, but as facilitators of social and personal life, essentially intruding the whole spectrum of

everyday life activities.

The immediate consequence of such a transition in context was a discord between the

intended and actual usage of these technological artifacts. Digital devices such as mobile

phones were originally designed for work contexts and as such, they were oriented towards

productivity and efficiency. But as they moved away from the workplace, in the pockets of their

owners, these phones were transformed into leisure devices used to enrich the personal and

social interactions of their users.

The demand was soon picked up by the market, which started embedding functional

characteristics into these digital devices that spanned way beyond productivity; ring-tones,

wallpapers, image/video capturing/playback and of course videogames. Thus the rise of

personal electronic devices went hand in hand with the rise of a new market that was set to

―transform‖ these productivity-oriented devices into artifacts that can be used for leisure.

One could easily see the opportunities for the videogames industry here; a broad new

audience that already possessed the means to run videogame software and was indeed eager

to embed it into their lives, could enable a new massive market for videogames. However

before that could happen, two important obstacles had to be overcome.

7

Of course mobile computing and mobile phones were commercially used even before the 1990s, but

such realities were true for a selected few. By setting the chronological bar in the 1990‘s we are trying to

include mobile digital technology that was massively availably on a broad commercial scale.


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First and foremost, development platforms in this new context had to be appropriated

differently. This widely available mobile technology was far from game consoles and high end

gaming PCs; their specifications and limitations were not controlled by the videogames

industry and thus they had to be seen as external constants in the development process.

Consequently, the technologically oriented development model had to be abandoned;

technology no longer acted as a carrier of innovation but as just a carrier of the videogame.

Secondly, the needs, demands and consequently the expectations of this new audience had

been incommensurate to that already offered by the industry. The new potential players had

limited or no familiarity with the hard-core games, underdeveloped skills for understanding and

playing them and no evident incentive to put the effort into it. They were characterized, as

Jesper Juul describes it, by an unrefined ‗player repertoire‟:

―During your lifetime, you collect knowledge from the games you play, and you use that

knowledge for understanding new games. […] To play a new game is to learn new

skills and conventions. […] Your playing of that game paves the way for playing future

games. (Juul, A Casual Revolution, 2010, pp. 76-77)

It is thus obvious that the supply for this new type of players had to be radically different from

the existing, not only in terms of technology but also design, essentially shifting the orientation

of the innovation model. This meant a change in the growth paradigm for the videogames

industry; moving from a technology-centric approach, to a new model where the main effort is

on appropriating the opportunities that mobile technology is enabling, in relation to the

expectations and repertoire of this new audience.

This dilemma, termed as the ‗innovator‟s dilemma‘ (Christensen & Raynor, 2003), ―blinded‖

most established players in the market who failed to seize the opportunity, sticking to their

sustaining innovation model in fear of alienating their existing audience. This opened the space

for new players to set a new trajectory of disruptive innovation in the field of videogames and

claim this audience for their own. Indeed this demand was addressed by companies like

PopCap and Big Fish which targeted for a broad audience with limited player repertoire by

pushing simple, low cost games that could run on this new easily accessible technology.


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Figure 2. Bejeweled, PopCap Games (left), Azada, Big Fish Games (right)

‗Casual games‘8

, as they are termed, like Bejewled and Azada (Figure 2), became commercial

breakthroughs, encapsulating the spirit of accessibility not only in the range of platforms and

hardware they can run on, but also in their design. In his book ‗A Casual Revolution‘, Juul

attributes to casual game design the primary role in the success of casual games, since as he

explains:

―it gives a game a flexibility that allows the players to use it in different ways.‖ (Juul, A

Casual Revolution, 2010, p. 62)

For Juul, flexibility is what differentiates casual games from „hard-cores‘, a use quality/design

affordance that is channeled through five distinct design components/attributes of casual game

design:

1. Positive fiction. The familiarity and overall presentation of the settings, casual games are

set in are positive (e.g. sports, restaurants, popular cartoons etc.) whereas hard-core

games are very often based on unfamiliar and aggressive settings (e.g. war, aliens,

horror etc.).

2. User friendliness and usability. While hard-core games require a high level of

familiarization along with a refined skill set (player repertoire), casual games rely on

8

It is not our intention, nor in the scope of this thesis, to provide a sufficient definition for casual games

but to extract some basic denominators that are shared among these new types of games.


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interfaces and skills that can be picked up by players with much unembellished

repertoire.

3. Better gameplay time management. Casual games allow for easier interruptibility as

Juul terms the affordance of a game allowing the player to interrupt the game session.

In other words, casual games do not require from their players lengthy time slots for

playing, allowing them to interrupt play at any time. Essentially, casual games make it

easier for the player to manage their overall gameplay time.

4. Forgiving gameplay and scalable difficulty. Extra design effort is put on the learning

curve of casual games and how they handle failure; they must allow the player to take

small incremental steps towards difficulty while administer failure with forgiveness (not

necessarily leniency).

5. Positive feedback. Casual games are often characterized by an excess of positive

feedback to the player that is not only expressed literally but also aesthetically. (Juul, A

Casual Revolution, 2010)

Thus flexibility in casual game design for Juul addresses the relationship between game and

game player directly. Although flexibility as a use quality can be easily transferable to a player-

technology examination, Juul exhausts his analysis of casual game design with a cross-

examination of game and player, in an effort to bridge a methodological gap between two

schools of thought, the player centric view and the game centric one:

―The better solution is to see how a game can be more or less flexible toward being

played in different ways, and a player can be more or less flexible toward what a game

asks of the player.‖ (Juul, A Casual Revolution, 2010, p. 53)

We believe that there is a significant factor to casual game design missing here; technology, as

we have described in the beginning of this part, shaped both casual game design and game

players. As such, the transformation of the use context for the technology that casual games

are developed and played on altered the act of gaming both temporally and spatially.

It couldn‘t be otherwise. Moving away from the stativity of the hard-core gamer, who is

delimited by the immobility of the game console and the TV, to a mobile gamer that can


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potentially play anywhere, requires an examination of casual game design that goes beyond

the player and the game. Thus along the ‗casualization‘ of game design, we also have to

consider its ‗mobilization‟. As much as gameplay became more flexible, leaving the boundaries

of the hard-core videogames, so did the play-space, which now can be traced across all

topographies of daily life. Parks, buses, toilets and even work; videogames started ―elbowing‖

in spaces and times that would otherwise be considered dead, like commuting, waiting, and

small work breaks, essentially becoming part of the everyday routine for many individuals, not

in the hard-core, ritualistic mode but in a time-killer activity sense.

Thus casual game design not only allowed for videogames to enter into the lives of ordinary

individuals, but to also penetrate ordinary life as an activity. In that sense, we can speak of a

―democratization‖ of videogames; as videogames break free of the hard-core videogames

complex, they ―move‖ in the hands of the ordinary, but they also move into the topographical

spectrum of ordinary life. Games are indeed everywhere nowadays, but that is because people

started seeking them everywhere; games are also becoming parts of the lives of many, but that

is because many have figured out how they can become such.

For gamification, this process signals the beginning of possibilities. As videogames populated

the daily routines of millions through the ―Trojan horse‖ of casual games, we are faced with a

rhetorical dissonance; how do we overcome the hard-core videogames complex and examine

the phenomenology of this process? This question gave rise to new approaches towards

videogames coming from different angles, from academia, to publishers, developers and

press. New journalistic movements, like the „New Games Journalism‘, new game distribution

channels, like digital downloads and new genres of videogames, like social games, came

along the last decade as a result of such a re-examination of videogames. Similarly, we believe

that gamification can be viewed a broader interpretive approach of the phenomenon of

videogames‘ democratization as seen from a cross-examination between business and

marketing. Thus if the hard-core videogames complex has been the inspiration of gamification,

the abolishment of it has enabled its actualization.


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2.1.3 The Internet Experience

In the previous part we argued that the democratization of videogames required a re-

interpretation of the medium both as an artifact and as an activity. However, one might also

rightfully argue that products are always in a constant state of re-examination and re-

interpretation by their makers/developers, who seek new technological advancements in order

to increase their value. Indeed, even though the argument is valid, we believe that in such

transformative processes, external factors and phenomena act as signifiers for the need for

action and change, while technology acts as an accelerator of this evolutionary process.

We thus make the argument here, that the abolishment of the hard-core videogames complex

and the democratization of videogames only enabled the upcoming transformation by

broadening the horizons for videogames; the actual transformation was materialized and took

shape by the rapid expansion of the internet.

We do realize that discussing the development of the internet, especially over the last decade,

is indeed a hard task; how could the word ―internet‖ incorporate the breadth and depth of

change that is still ongoing in multiple dimensions? Hence we perceive and use the term here

in a literal and instrumental sense; as a global computer network that eliminates distances for

the exchange of information, communication and interaction. As such, in the sphere of

businesses and economy, the power of the internet translates into the driving force for

commoditization of goods and services:

―Indeed, the Internet is the greatest force of commoditization ever known to man, for

both goods and services. It eliminates much or the human element in traditional buying

and selling. Its capability for friction-free transactions enables instant price comparisons

across myriad sources.‖ (Pine & Gilmore, 1999, pp. 10-11)

Thus as internet connectivity, speed and mobility kept growing exponentially over the last

decade, the videogames industry, along with all other industries, faced the hard realities of

commoditization. Pine and Gilmore describe this point in time as a milestone in a long

evolutionary process of businesses; they argue that goods and services must undergo a

development process in order to reform and increase their value or get commoditized and


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become plain resources. Consequently, goods and services must enter the field of experience

economy, where businesses no longer sell plain goods or services, but holistic experiences

that customers evaluate higher and thus are willing to pay more for.

However this transition is neither static nor modeled uniformly for all goods and services; this

means that there is a continuum of variable states between commoditization and experience

that businesses can explore and operate, as they try to find the optimal value of their goods

and services. Pine and Gilmore term this continuum as the progression of economic value,

since the more commoditized a good or a service is, the less value consumers see in it (see

Figure 3).

Figure 3. The progress of economic value (source: Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 22)

The points to be stressed out here are that commoditization as process is ―pushing‖

businesses to reexamine their best operative state. This does not mean that all businesses will

be pushed out to the ends of this spectrum; there will still be some operating in goods and

services, but certainly the competition margins will make most of them pursue better value in

the experience economy end or compete for lower prices in the commodities part. Thus with

the advent of experience economy we are faced with the paradox of the two ends (see Figure


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4); as more and more businesses move onto transforming their experiences into products and

services, these products and services become heavily commoditized9

.

Figure 4. The paradox of the two ends in experience economy.

For videogames and primarily for the videogames market, that transition is primarily comprised

of a radical change in the distribution model. The retail model gave way to digital distribution

channels which meant faster, more approachable services with lower operating costs for the

videogame consumers. Old and new videogame publishers and distributors utilized the

internet and turned the acquisition and access to videogames software into a service, operated

centrally. With this core concept at the center of such a transition, we have witnessed varying

models that are clearly aiming to reposition videogames in the new experience economy.

However, even though all these models are employing digital publishing and distribution

channels, they are all focusing on different levels of commoditization of videogames. While

services like Steam and Direct2Drive are putting more emphasis on discount strategies, gifting

and sharing among friends, Microsoft‘s Xbox Live service is targeting the competitive and

explorative aspect of players by using an achievements system which rewards active players. It

becomes apparent then, that the goal here is to alter the relationship between the player, the

videogame and the provider. In that relationship, the videogame itself is commoditized, while

9

In other words, the consumers‘ willingness to buy is evolved around the choice for a memorable

experience or a very low price commodity.


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the emphasis is on the experience of using the service and interacting with other users and

friends.

Perhaps the most evident example of this transformation lies in ‗social games‘, multiplayer

games that are using social networks (primarily Facebook) as publishing and distribution

platforms. Social games are not just MMOs, but rather highly commoditized videogames which

operate on top of existing social strata and aim at enriching and extending the interactions

between the players/members. As such, most social games are offered for ―free‖, operating on

a free2play model that allows everyone to participate, but then selling richer social interactions

for those that are willing to pay for the premium. Thus both players‘/consumers‘ and

developers‘/publishers‘ relationships with the game itself are of second order; for the former

the game is only the means with which they can enact social interactions in the digital social

network, while for the latter it is the means with which they can capitalize on these interactions.

Thus as videogames are entering the realm of experience economy, they too are faced with the

inescapable paradox of commoditization; videogames as artifacts are getting commoditized

and the signals from these new approaches are the evidence of this transformation.

What does this mean for gamification? We see the shift of the videogames into the field of

experience economy and their subsequent commoditization as a core expression of

gamification. We argued earlier that even though the internet is speeding the transition towards

the experience economy for all fields of production and services, the models for such a

transition are yet under exploration. As such, many attempts not only are focusing in ad-hoc

approaches but on generalized models that could potentially be applied for all goods and

services. We thus view the current approach of gamification as such an attempt. By drawing

paradigms from these exploratory models we have presented here, proponents of gamification

have been advocating for transitioning the consumer-producer relationship into the field of

experience economy through the path that videogame publishers and developers use.

But we also see the commoditization of videogames as part of the current expression of

gamification. While videogames value as artifacts becomes harder to retain, it is natural to see


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them used as a form of ―magic dust‖; the argument is that if videogames can be given out for

free as part of a service, they could also be used in any other service. We thus believe that

arguments such as using game mechanics to transform services and products can only be

seen as a consequence of this low perceived value of games and game mechanics.

2.2 Studying the Game

In the previous segment, we tried to sketch the connections between gamification and games

as they have evolved over the last years. In the last part we concluded that apart from the

business and practice of videogame development, the systematic, scholarly study of

videogames has also been a significant contributing factor that shaped the current gamification

situation.

Traditionally, games had been the study subject of scholars that are interested in historical,

social and cultural aspects of human activity and as such, they had always been studied in

relation to something else. In our examination above, we tried to establish a level of

chronological continuity in order to connect the evolution of videogames with events and

phenomena that took place in a broader cultural, social and historical context.

All games are made and played by people who are part of greater social, cultural and historical

contexts and as such, videogames as artifacts do reflect the developments and processes that

take place in these contexts. Thus we believe that there is an aspect of a continuous exchange

between games, society, culture, history and technology.

It couldn‘t be otherwise; our examination shows that games have changed considerably in very

short time, a change that is reflected in the ontology and epistemology of our everyday life. A

change which has also been reflected in academia, where we also witnessed an

unprecedented effort to approach videogames in a scientific manner in order to understand

their nature as well as the relationship people develop with them on individual and social scale.


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2.2.1 The Theory of the Game

It would be nonsensical to consider that such a sheer diffusion of videogames would pass

unnoticed by the academic and scholarly world. In fact, videogames have been scrutinized,

examined and analyzed more than ever before over the last decade. Thus, in parallel with a fast

growing and rapidly changing industry, the need for the development of a scholarly space that

would allow for videogames to be examined as an independent field of study and practice

emerged.

‗Game Studies‘ is the term that is used to describe the new academic field that brings together

scholars who want:

―to shed new light on games, rather than simply use games as metaphor or illustration

of some other theory or phenomenon.‖ (Aarseth, 2001)

As such, game studies have been characterized by a strong multidisciplinarism and a drive to

set games in the center of epistemic analysis. Of course these two characteristics were a result

of the historical and academic environment that this new field emerged in. On one hand, there

was a big knowledge gap between games as a scholarly subject and games as the product of

a fast growing industry, while at the same time there was a wide lack of academic precedence

in academic practices and research approaches for studying games. As a consequence, Game

Studies have been ―populated‖ primarily by ―scholarly immigrants‖, drawing influences and

conventions from a wide range of already established disciplines.

Thus under the umbrella of game studies, many different angles of examining games started to

emerge; from the technological aspects of videogames to the cultural and social ramifications

of virtual worlds and the business of game development, game studies attempted to fill that

knowledge gap at a very fast pace. Naturally this polyphony resulted in an abundance of new


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ideas and voices which joined not only the core of game studies but also its now formulating

periphery10

.

It is in these theoretical incubators that we position many of the scholarly approaches to

gamification that have emerged over the last years. In the previous part we argued that even

though gamification has often been advocated in disassociation with games, there are deep

rhetorical and ideological roots that connect the two. Similarly we argue here that game studies

have been the basis of the theoretical and analytical argumentation of gamification.

Indeed a closer look at the evolution of game studies over the years and especially the trends

on research will reveal that the context of examination has changed dramatically. After the initial

years of setting the videogame in the epicenter of the epistemic research, we have witnessed a

gradual shift towards more post-phenomenological examinations. Initially with a broadening of

the research context to include the player and then extending it even further to the player-game

relationship, the focus over the last few years has been displaced towards the ―player

experience‖. As such, this gave rise to more holistic approaches and as a result, elements

outside the strict boundaries of games became part of the examination (see the ―Contextual

Game Experience‖ model, Mäyrä, 2007 and the ―Model for Expanded Game Experience‖

Kuittinen, Kultima, Niemelä, & Paavilainen, 2007). By including experiential factors that exist

outside the boundaries of the game or the play session, we displace our focus from (game)

actions to player (emotions), to (social) interactions/meanings/consequences. Consequently,

by theoretically and rhetorically ―exposing‖ the game in such broader contexts, a cross-

exchange of rhetorics and analysis between these elements was enforced, essentially setting

the research context beyond the spectrum of the player/game relationship. We thus see

gamification as a consequence of that rhetorical/research ―spillage‖.

However, this phenomenon should not be seen unidimensionally; the extension of the research

context has also been the catalyst for a quick and dynamic growth in the field of game studies.

10

One should be amazed how until the mid-90s academic publications on games spanned to under a

dozen every year, while in 2010 there are more than a dozen of academic journals focusing solely on

videogames.


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A significant and valuable body of knowledge has started to formulate; by researching games,

not only a knowledge gap is filled, but that knowledge can be applied in a broader scope that

surmounts games themselves. By understanding games, we can reflect upon society,

technology, culture, and popular ideology and we can appropriate them in new ways, applying

that knowledge to transform them.

It is also on this body of knowledge that gamification is basing its theoretical standpoints. We

could argue that gamification is using this knowledge as a basis for re-interpreting the role of

games in everyday life and integrating them in a way that will aid the growth and innovation of a

broader videogame market. Hence, it shouldn‘t surprise us that the majority of gamification

advocates have emerged and operated from within this broader scholarly examination of

games.

However, there are two particular aspects in this scholarly effort that stand out; the study of

game design and the study of play, a combination that has the transformative power to alter

both the perception and constitution of our ontology.

2.2.2 It‟s the Game Design Stupid!

Perhaps the most significant contribution of game studies has been the documentation and

development of game design theory. Before the rise of game studies, game design had been

relatively unknown to everyone else outside the games industry, where it had been exercised

on the basis of lore and intuition, remaining largely undocumented as a practice and under-

exposed to theoretical analysis and criticism. This obscure status of game design was radically

changed with the advent of the systematic approach to game research and development.

Starting with professional designers at first and followed by scholars who could see that game

design should have a core position in game studies, a collective effort to devise and document

a cohesive and coherent language that could help understand games as artifacts started to

emerge.


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In the years that followed, game design was recognized and understood as the primary tool for

conveying and designing the player experience. As such, game design became the field of

experimentation and innovation for games; the study and development of game design beyond

the borders of its existing practice, enabled game developers to suggest and develop new play

experiences that could engage players in new ways. Undoubtedly, the changes and evolution

of games over the last decade wouldn‘t have been feasible, at least not at such rates, without a

collective effort to understand, define and explore game design as a discipline. Similarly we see

gamification as an attempt to take game design outside the field of games, to redefine it by

giving it new shapes and contexts.

However, as with all domains of design, this process assumes a constant assessment, criticism

and negotiation in order to align theory and practice with the realities they operate in. Thus,

due to its rapid growth, game design is often seen as being in a constant state of flux, where

truths and answers are constantly seeking new balances. Hence, along with revision and

opportunities, confusion and doubt appear. In fact, there are a lot of misconceptions and

misunderstandings about game design which span from mass media (it has been quite

common that mass media, even well respected ones have shown shocking ignorance of game

design in their coverage of games or their culture. See Guardian, 2010, Johnson, 2008,

McCabe, 2008 and Murray-Watson, 2007) to people that often refer to it (a good example of

this is actually many individuals that use terms such as ―gamification‖ and ―game mechanics‖

in a buzz-word fashion without showing any signs of understanding their meaning) and actual

practitioners of it (individuals that do practice game design, but without acknowledging it).

Confusions such as these though, only emphasize the importance of a constant scientific study

of games and indeed this text would not be, if game design could be solidified and described

in a stable state. Indeed if gamification has proven something, it is that in order to push further

the boundaries games and game design, a widespread social edification about games must

occur, a state that Zimmerman terms, gaming literacy:

―Gaming literacy turns the tables on the usual way we regard games. Rather than

focusing on what happens inside the artificial world of a game, gaming literacy asks


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how playing, understanding, and designing games all embody crucial ways of looking

at and being in the world.‖ (Zimmerman, Gaming Literacy: Game Design as Model for

Litaracy in the 21st Century, 2009, p. 188)

It is thus our belief that game design has an ―adhesive‖ quality; it lies between the academic

development of games studies, games themselves and their evolution into a massive popular

phenomenon. Indeed, in a situated reality where videogames are part of our daily life and

culture, the epistemological effort is not, and should not be, limited to a descriptive role, but to

an exploratory one. By pointing at possibilities that open up with the understanding of the

player-game relationship, scholars of games can draw the layout in which game design can

materialize into the connective element between games and play at large.

2.2.3 The Game of Play and the Play of Game

However, along with new appropriations of game design the need for understanding new

instantiations of play emerged. In recent years, we have been witnessing a turn in game

studies on the examination model for games. Many game scholars have displaced the focus

from games themselves to the phenomenology of the act of playing with games. By studying

the player instead of the game, theorists attempt to position the state of play as it is enaced and

perceived through technology.

Similarly, many gamification advocates have recently raised the question of the importance of

play as a motivational factor instead of an approach that emphasizes game mechanics. Indeed

many of the gamification advocates have been criticized for focusing too much on the

importance of extrinsic motivation, ignoring the pitfalls of rewards (for an extensive critique on

external rewards see Kohn, 2001). Consequently, many new texts and debates on gamification

show that the paradigm is shifting from rewarding players to empowering them. Regardless of

how this change of stance has been triggered, it is important to acknowledge the existence of a

new challenge for game theorists; the new study of play.

Indeed we believe that game design has been and will always be delimited by our

understanding of play. In their seminal work, Salen and Zimmerman acknowledge that by


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positioning games into the space of play, framing games as a subset of play (Zimmerman &

Salen, 2004). As such, play has the power to transform the game:

―Transformative play is a special kind of play that occurs when the free movement of

play alters the more rigid structures in which it takes shape. The play actually

transforms the rigid structure in some way. Not all play is transformative, but all forms of

play contain the potential for transformation.‖ (Zimmerman & Salen, 2004, p. 305)

Thus, we believe that these new trends, both in game studies and gamification stem out from

the limits of game design in relation to our understanding of play; in order to expand the

boundaries of game design we must first broaden play‘s horizons‘.

2.3 The Playful Interaction Design

So far we have shown that gamification is indeed rooted both in the evolution of videogames

and the academic developments in the field of game studies. However, there is one aspect of

gamification that is very rarely addressed or debated; interaction design. Even though

gamification advocates argue for the use of game design and game knowledge in the

development of non-game products and services, it is often omitted that interaction design has

an almost institutional role in the development of such applications.

This stance raises the question of game design‘s position in relation to interaction design as

well as interaction design‘s role in the domain of gamification. Indeed such questions are

difficult to answer, especially because there is no precedence; for a very long time interaction

design and game design had been operating in complete seclusion, with very little

communication and knowledge exchange.

As such, our effort here is to trace common threads and topics. It might be that the current

expression of gamification revolves around the hype and attention that videogames are

attracting, but as we have already examined, as game design acquired a more formal structure

many theoreticians and practitioners of other disciplines became interested in it. This fact

makes us believe in the existence of parallel – if not converging – lines inside interaction and


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game design. Consequently, a broader gamification discussion necessitates an examination of

interaction design.

2.3.1 Planet Interaction Design: Game Design in Orbit?

A quick look at the most recent interaction design handbooks will reveal that the state of

interaction design is in turmoil. Indeed, many theorists and practitioners of interaction design

agree that it is hard to define and encapsulate interaction design in its entirety. Once relatively

small and very specific, interaction design nowadays tends to be referred to as an ―umbrella‖

under which many different disciplines, trends, ideas and practices coexist and operate.

As we argued in the previous parts, design cannot be treated as static and as such, its

practitioners are always in search of new methods, goals, mediums and meanings. Interaction

design has originally emerged due to the need for a systematic approach in the development

of goods and services that combined labor and digital technology. As such, interaction design

has initially been focused on maximizing the productivity and efficiency of both labor and digital

technology.

However, with the advent of home electronics, this scenery started changing. Interaction

designers quickly realized that the context of use started shifting; from the productivity-heavy

environments of work, people started using digital technology for pleasure and recreation.

Consequently, a revision of the principles and methods was deemed necessary. But, as

technological and social advancements continued to evolve, new approaches, disciplines and

trends started to emerge; it thus became clear that for interaction design to work, it had to be

addressed contextually. As such, interaction design is very often viewed as a composition of

disciplines:

―disciplines such as information architecture (IA), industrial design (ID), communication

(or graphic) design (CD), user-experience (UX) design, user-interface engineering (UIE),

human-computer interaction (HCI), usability engineering (UE), and human factors (HF).

In addition, many of these other disciplines are also new and still discovering their

boundaries. Figure 5 clarifies the relationships.‖ (Saffer, 2006)


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Figure 5. The overlapping disciplines of interaction design (source: Saffer, 2006)

Hence, if we address interaction design in such a compositional manner, then positioning

game design on this formation would be a matter of setting subjective boundaries (for example

see Figure 6). However, we believe that such an approach is far from useful or practical.

Bounding game design around interaction design does not help us define discrete roles in a

possible cross-fertilization, neither understand how interaction design intertwines with

gamification. To do so, we need to examine the trends and directions that interaction design is

taking while in this flux state.


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Figure 6. Positioning game design on the interaction design map

Indeed over the course of the last decade, many different approaches and directions have

been pursued within the field of interaction design creating a multifaceted and rather

segmented ensemble. Our focus here will be on four approaches that can exhibit both

proximity and relevance with game design and gamification. Thus we first look into a recent

discourse in interaction design that focuses on human behavior and persuasion. Then, we

examine an unlikely notion for interaction design: play; regardless of the ostensible

disconnection between the lightness of play and the rigidness of interaction design‘s roots in

productivity applications, there have been both theoretical and practical attempts to bring play

in interaction design as a way of appropriating new methods and meanings. Similarly, we also

look into the quintessential aspect of reflection for both game and interaction design; we are

interested in how designing for reflection can be both informative and empowering for

gamification. Finally we approach the most recent development of interaction design and how

new attempts to bring more holistic discourses into the field can converge with gamification.


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2.3.3 Persuade to Design or Design to Persuade

In the last few years there has been a rather popular discourse inside interaction design that is

focused on influencing peoples‘ behaviors. ―Persuasive‖ design is orbiting around the notion of

behavior, both for users of interactive products as well as for products themselves; the core

view of that movement is that both users and interactive products generate and react to

behaviors. Consequently, interactions are framed as expressions of these behaviors and thus

the designer is not designing for specific interactions but for a desired (sub)set of behaviors

and reactions to these.

Although the premise of this discourse is not new (HCI and affective computing more

specifically, have long decoupled the user-artifact relationship as an exchange of behaviors on

the level of machine input and output. For more see Picard, 1999) it has never been suggested

before as an approach for influencing the user‘s behavior as a whole. As such, the designer is

not only taking the role of designing appropriate responses to specific behaviors, but shaping a

whole set of behaviors that can influence the user at large.

Some of the most apparent, and cited, examples of this discourse are very much tied to the

idea of persuading their users to change their behavior in terms of energy efficiency. Designs

like IDEO‘s ‗SmartGauge‟ dashboard for Ford‘s hybrid cars (see Figure 7), where a digital plant

is responding to how energy-efficient the user‘s driving behavior is:

―The more efficient a customer is, the more lush and beautiful the leaves and vines,

creating a visual reward for the driver‘s efforts.‖ (IDEO, 2009)


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Figure 7. Efficiency Leaves, a visual representation of fuel-efficient driving in Ford‟s Fusion dashboard.

Or the ―The Ténéré‖ power plug (see Figure 8), which is using an Organic Light Emitting Display

(OLED) to create a visual narrative of a tree11

in order to encourage energy conservation

behaviors:

―The tree dynamically changes and the particle shows current power use, [in order to]

deliver a meaningful and emotional link between energy use and environmental impact‖

(Ju-Whan, Yun-Kyung, & Tek-Jin, 2009)

Figure 8. “Ténéré”, a power plug design supporting energy conservation behaviors.

Perhaps an example better known within the gamification circles would be the DDB &

Volkswagen‘s ‗Piano Staircase‘ installation in the Odenplan metro station in Stockholm (see

Figure 9). The staircase next to the escalator was not only ―defaced‖ in order to look like a

11 See Ténéré tree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbre_du_T%C3%A9n%C3%A9r%C3%A9


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piano keyboard, but was also connected weight sensors on every step with a digital sound

system, generating different piano key sounds every time a commuter walked on it12

.

Figure 9. Piano Staircase, a design for persuading subway commuters to use the staircase over the

escalator.

The goal of such designs is to achieve a certain influence, a change in the behavior of their

users not through a mode of informative feedback and rational processing but as Ben Cerveny

argues through the activation of the user‘s ―aesthetic sensibilities‖:

―The way you actually elicit engagement and interest from someone is to appeal to their

aesthetic sensibilities.‖ (Ben Cerveny in Ashlock, 2009)

Thus, the standpoint of this approach perceives users as emotional rather than information

agents. Accordingly, the role of the designer is to aim at triggering emotional responses that

align the user‘s behavior with the intended one; as Robert Fabricant argued in his notorious

presentation, interaction designers should address the user‘s primordial cognitive systems and

not their rational space (see Fabricant, 2009).

However triggering emotional responses by challenging the user‘s aesthetic sensibilities is not

the only way to persuasion. Robert Fabricant also advocates for an integration of existing social

norms into interactive systems in order to achieve not only personal influence, but social.

12

The developers claim that 66% more people than usual chose the staircase over the escalator (the

result comes from an undisclosed period of observation).


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Endeavors like ‗Project Masiluleke‘, which attempts to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South

Africa by merging mobile technology, and PCM (Please Call Me) messages in particular, with

healthcare information, counseling and referrals to local testing clinics (for a detailed

description of the project see Pop! Tech, 2009).Thus, by scaling the model even further,

designers can create social impact by embedding powerful social norms into digital interaction

systems.

We thus see similarities with gamification both on theoretical and practical level. Most rhetorical

aspects of the current expression of gamification address human behavior; the prime

gamification argument is that games shape (playing) behavior at such extent, that their design

can be harnessed to influence consumptive (Zichermann & Linder, 2010), working (Reeves &

Read, 2009)and social behavior at large (McGonigal, 2011). At the theoretical level, we most

often see the above argument being grounded in the theories of ‗Flow‟ (Csíkszentmihályi M. ,

1991) and ‗Operand Conditioning‘ (Ferster & Skinner, 1957) (in that games challenge us and

leverage our primal response patterns; for more see next chapter). However, more recently we

have also been witnessing a trend in gamification applications to put more emphasis on the

conventions of social exchanges (i.e. in gifting, boasting, sharing etc.; again for a more

thorough analysis see next chapter). As such, we view gamification as part of this upcoming

movement across interaction design in the sense of common rhetorics and aspirations.

2.3.4 The Play of Design

In the previous part, we saw how a rather new trend in interaction design is attempting to

broaden the scope of design by introducing models that are focusing on user behavior, not as

reactions to interface use, but as a process of awareness, beliefs, values and decisions.

However, there is one particular aspect of interaction design that is very hard to ignore when it

comes to (re)contextualizing and (re)addressing the scopes and mediums of the design

process: play. Play has a rather long tradition within interaction design and indeed has always

been used as a path for exploring new boundaries.


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As many interaction design practitioners and scholars have pointed out, when play enters the

design ―equation‖ new possibilities open up both for the design process and the end product.

As Löwgren et al. point out:

―From the early days of role playing and "mocking it up" in participatory design (Ehn

and Sjögren 1991) and up until today there has been a thread of playful participation

that cuts across the distinction between design and use‖ (Löwgren, Binder, & Malborg,

Playing in reality, 2009, p. 7)

And indeed, as play enters the design process as a method, it unavoidably mitigates into the

end product itself. Design in general and interaction design in particular have been

characterized by their openness to creativity and experimentation; values that can only be

manifested in loosely governed labor relations. Thus, activities such as role-playing (see

chapter 23: Buxton, 2007) and toy-playing (see chapter 24: Buxton, 2007) are now regarded as

parts of the basic toolset for every interaction designer.

The premise of play for both design process and end product is the reduced level of control.

The traditional design thought demands a firm grip on controlling the design process which in

turn will result into tighter products on which the user can exert high levels of control. However

when play is introduced in the design process this rigidness is confuted; the designer is ―giving

up‖ some of the control over the process for a more explorative and serendipitous approach.

Similarly, when play is then mitigated to the end product, the user is deprived of full control in

order to facilitate its playful use; this way, new meanings and understandings of the product

can be appropriated and developed further.

Of course such an approach does not always guarantee innovative or good design. But when

methodological and perceptual boundaries have to be pushed, play is a good strategy. As we

have already discussed (2.2.3), play can take the role of a transformative catalyst

(transformative play) which can alter the rigid structures that bound it and provide new

meanings. As such, this discourse is viewing both designer and user as playful creatures:

―characterized not just by [their] thinking or achievements, but by playfulness: curiosity,

love of diversion, explorations, inventions and wonder.‖ (Gaver W. W., Designing for

Homo Ludens, 2002)


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‗Ludic Design‘, as it has been termed by Bill Gaver, dismisses all traditional interaction design

models when it comes to designing leisure technology for a more open-ended approach that is

focused on play. For Gaver, play is the antipodal of work; like Huzinga, Gaver sees in play the

qualities that can ―free‖ individuals from the toil of work and the confines of result-oriented

activities. Thus in order to eliminate competitiveness, Gaver proposes an approach on play with

four characteristics:

1. It is situational in the sense that it always depends on circumstances.

2. Affords playfulness instead of competition; by allowing the user to express her curiosity

and experimentation instead of confining her with rules and goals.

3. It takes (mostly) physical form but is also very often highly conceptual.

4. It is unpremeditated, lacking formal structure; by raising questions instead of providing

any answers.

The examples of this approach are most often didactic rather than practical; thought-provoking

home objects like ‗The Pillow‘ by Anthony Dunne (Dunne, 2008; Dunne & Gaver, 1997; see

Figure 10), which is an inflatable pillow with a light block that emits light patterns based on

ambient electromagnetic radiation. The Pillow is primarily an aesthetic object but it can be used

to challenge the culture of wireless communications and provide the user with a discreet

voyeuristic experience over the invisible radio space (Dunne, 2008). A similar example is the

‗Drift Table‘ (Gaver, et al., 2004; see Figure 11), a small coffee table with a circular view port on

top, through which a slowly scrolling aerial photography of the British countryside can be seen,

controlled by the weight of objects on the table (Gaver W. W., Designing for Homo Ludens,

2002).


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Figure 10. The Pillow, by Tony Dunne.

These artifacts operate against the ―models of normality, usually referred to when new

functional possibilities are being developed‖ (Dunne, 2008), being intentionally ambiguous by

overstating or understating their meaning. This way, their users must speculate their use

instead of planning it, giving them the space to appropriate new meanings. But they also target

a broader notion of pleasure; instead of rewarding their users with quantifiable feedback, like

persuasive designs do, they attempt to:

―intrigue and delight at all levels of design, from the aesthetics of form and interaction,

to functionality, to conceptual implications at psychological, social and cultural levels.‖

(Gaver W. W., 2002)


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Figure 11. The Drift Table, by Bill Gaver.

Thus, ludic design is an attempt to bring discovery, reflection and consequently impact not

only for the user but for the designer and her methods as well. It requires new understandings

of both user‘s needs and methods to address them. To achieve these methods, Gaver et al.

propose a mindset for designing for ludic interaction based on four directions:

1. Support social engagement in ludic activities. Ludic design should aim at eliciting social

interaction and exchange.

2. Allow the ludic to be interleaved with everyday utilitarian activities. Ludic activity can be

spontaneous and unpremeditated; as such, ludic design should afford for ludic activity

to emerge within the whole spectrum of everyday activities.

3. Don‘t expect ludic designs to leave everyday activities untouched. Ludic designs take

both space and time, thus their spatial and temporal attributes will affect the lives of

their users beyond a conceptual level.

4. Don‘t seek to meet users‘ immediate desires. Ludic design works against

instrumentality and as such should not try to address existing user needs; even when

such needs emerge through ludic activities, ludic design should abstain from

actualizing them.

We thus see in ludic design the call for a radically different design attitude, instead of moving

from learning to implementing, we often see the inverse; implementing a design and then

learning from how users appropriate it. An attitude that we see more and more influencing all

branches of design; like the urban planning project ‗Re-imagining Chinatown: An Interactive

Planning Process‘ (Rojas, 2009) that takes the ludic activity of structuring landscapes with toys

(LEGO bricks) into a shared vision for city planning. Visitors of the exhibition participate in a

shared ludic activity, shaping a toy scale model of a neighborhood which will then help the

urban planner understand how people perceive and envision their community.

Indeed, it might be that most ludic designs nowadays might not be addressing leisure

technology, but the principle of looking critically at the traditional standpoints of interaction


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design, work, efficiency and design research, has influenced a whole wide spectrum of

interaction design theorists and practitioners. For example, Sengers et al. see ludic design as a

challenge for technological design at large:

―In the context of HCI, ludic design explores the limits of technology design practice –

what it is we may design for, what methods we may use – by proposing a specific set of

values that contrast sharply with those currently at the center of technical practice:

functionality, efficiency, optimality, task focus.‖ (Sengers, Boehner, David, & Kayne,

2005, p. 52)

In that context we see both parallel and crossover lines between ludic design and gamification.

First of all, is the obvious element of play that both share; it might be that the current

expression of gamification is primarily steered towards games rather than play, but as we have

already argued, it would be nonsensical to discuss games without addressing the role of play

in them. As Salen and Zimmerman argue:

―Within PLAY, we explore games as systems of experience and pleasure as systems of

meaning and narrative play; and as systems or simulation and social play.‖

(Zimmerman & Salen, 2004, p. 302)

It is this explorative quality of play that could also be a component of a wider gamification

paradigm; as we have already argued, gamification requires both new interpretations of design

and new practices. As such, both play as a design component and ludic design as an

approach, are necessarily parts of a gamification discussion (a discussion that we address

more thoroughly in the next chapter).

2.3.5 The Design of the Critic(al)

Critical design is a design approach/stance developed by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby that

also moves along the methodological, ideological and rhetorical lines of ludic design. We view

it as a more radical approach towards technological design; an attempt to subvert the existing

assumptions, intuitions and values of consumer products design, ―pushing our relationship

with the medium of electronic technology to the limit‖ (Dunne & Raby, 2001, p. 8). Whereas

ludic design focuses on the design of leisure technology, critical design views all electronic


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artifacts as ‗post-optimal‘; focusing on design attributes that go beyond optimal efficiency and

functionality. Consequently, the emphasis is once again on the aesthetic qualities of the

designs:

―In a world where practicality and functionality can be taken for granted, the aesthetics

of the post-optimal object could provide new experiences of everyday life, new poetic

dimensions.‖ (Dunne, 2008, p. 20)

However, Dunne sees in aesthetics a more subversive role; the aesthetic qualities of a design

can become the vehicle with which the existing values of design at large can be critically turned

on their heads. Notions like user-friendliness and usability are reversed, in order to expose their

underlying ideology and culture and challenge their users‘ conceptual models.

Thus, critical design methodologies are against all normal, established practices. By actively

designing for ‗user-unfriendliness‘, the designer can add distance between the user and the

artifact; this way ―sensitive skepticism‖ is triggered, bringing attention to the ideological content

that transparent designs most often conceal. Similarly, by twisting the functionality of familiar

designs against their established normality, the designer is pushing the user to not only

imagine (new) uses for them, but also establish new levels of consciousness about her

relationship with technology. Chindogu inventions are prime examples of such artifacts (see

Figure 12); ‗(un)useless‟ inventions that are composed of familiar concepts operating as critical

motors for reflecting upon the effect of technological artifacts in our lives:

―Chindogu are inventions that seem like they‘re going to make life a lot easier, but

don‘t. Unlike joke presents built specifically to shock or amuse, Chindogu are products

that we believe we want - if not need - the minute we see them. They are gadgets that

promise to give us something, and it is only at second or third glance that we realize

that their gift is undone by that which they take away.‖ (Kawakami & Papia, 101

unuseless Japanese inventions: the art of chindogu, 1995, pp. 6-7)


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Figure 12. „Baby Mops”, a Chindogu invention for making your children work for their keep13

.

Hence, the role of the critical designer is to provoke and learn; provoking by designing artifacts

that address unusual psychological needs and desires like the ‗Truth Phone™‘, a phone with an

embedded voice stress analyzer that allows the receiver to know if the other person is lying.

Then, by observing these ‗psychological narratives‘ that the users are drawing through the

(mis)use of the artifact, the designer can create ―alternative contexts of use and need‖ (Dunne,

2008).

In that sense, the critical designer is a conceptual designer, addressing neither concrete needs

nor functionality but rather conceptual models. Thus, critical designs do not need to be

physical, or implemented at all, the concept of a critical design is enough to encourage the

critical process for both user/observer and designer. As such, critical design very often

operates on the fringes of criticism; in fact, most theoretical and practical concepts of critical

design operate hand in hand with interactive art:

―Interactive art is an area of a new creation of medium, which enables us to explore the

world in order to know it better, more precisely, or which even changes the world by

13“After the birth of a child there's always the temptation to say "Yes, it's cute, but what can it do?" Until recently the answer was simply "lie there and cry," but now babies can be put on the payroll, so to speak, almost as soon as they're born. Just dress your young one in Baby Mops and set him or her down on any hard wood or tile floor that needs cleaning. You may at first need to get things started by calling to the infant from across the room, but pretty soon they'll be doing it all by themselves. There’s no child exploitation involved. The kid is doing what he does best anyway: crawling. But with Baby Mops he's also learning responsibility and a healthy work ethic.” (Kawakami, 2004, pp. 280-281)


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creating it. Interactive art is not a given form of art, not an established medium yet. The

process of creating interactive art is still the process of understanding the world.‖

(Masaki Fujihata in Leopoldseder & Schöpf, 2001, p. 81)

Despite the contextual and subjective bias of critical design, we believe that reflection is an

integral part of the design process and use experience. Consequently, critical design, or the

reflective aspects of it, should be considered as parts of gamification. Since the basic premise

of gamification is to enforce motivation for activities that otherwise operate in lack thereof, it

should also afford, or enhance reflection upon these activities and their ideology for both users

and designers.

2.3.6 Interaction Design as a Whole Aesthetical Experience

In the previous parts we examined three approaches/trends of interaction design that we

believe bring relevance to the discussion of gamification. Despite the fact that some of them

are seemingly far from the interaction design tradition, we identified them as potential

candidates for an explorative process due to their instrumental and didactic potential. Indeed

we could argue that their theories and methodologies could be transferred to constitute a

proposal for yet another trend in interaction design, instead, we join the many that advocate for

the need to bring more holistic approaches to interaction design (McCarthy & Wright, 2004).

We thus view all the above approaches as steps towards that direction. In fact, there are

already many interaction design researchers and practitioners that are arguing for a more

holistic examination of the interaction experience, taking into account a context that is

composed not only by technology and user, but history, culture and society. Examples of this

stance can be traced almost across all trends of interaction design; from ubiquitous computing

(Dourish, 2001; Dourish, 2004; Chalmers, 2001), to ludic design (Graves Petersen, Ljungbladb,

& Hakansson, 2009; Hakansson, 2009) and HCI (Sengers, et al., 2004; Boehner, Vertesi,

Sengers, & Dourish, 2007; Boehner, Sengers, & Warner, 2008; Djajadiningrat, Overbeeke, &

Wensveen, 2000) there have been calls for a new design paradigm, based on the


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instrumentality of aesthetic interaction14

. A ―deliberation‖ of aesthetics in interaction design,

where the aesthetic qualities of the artifact are determined contextually, not only as a result of a

visual performance, evoking emotional and intellectual responses (Löwgren, 2008).

It is this new common perception of the aesthetical dimension of interaction design that seems

to ―bring‖ together all these, formerly segmented, trends. It couldn‘t be otherwise; as Petersen

et al. insist, the aesthetic is always appropriated rather than attached inherently to the artifact.

As such, the aesthetical qualities of an interactive artifact are manifested by the social-historical,

bodily and intellectual dimensions of the context that the interaction is taking place in

(Petersen, Iversen, Krogh, & Ludvigsen, 2004). Thus the role of the aesthetic interaction:

―is not about conveying meaning and direction through uniform models; it is about

triggering imagination, it is thought-provoking and encourages people to think

differently about the encountered interactive systems, what they do and how they might

be used differently to serve differentiated goals.‖ (Petersen, Iversen, Krogh, &

Ludvigsen, 2004, p. 271)

Figure 13. Framework for Analyzing Experience (McCarthy & Wright, 2004)

This radically different approach on the relationship between user and interactive systems

demands new design models, both conceptual and practical. Among the various proposals, we

distinguish McCarthy‘s & Wright‘s ‗Framework for Analyzing Experience‘ and the ‗Five Different

14

One can trace this generalized ―demand‖ also by examining the rhetorics of all these authors. It is very

common that we see ―neosemanticizing‖ (Riggs, 1989) phenomena of synonymy (multiple terms for one

concept) and polysemy (additional meanings for familiar words) for concepts like emotion, motivation,

mood etc. that hint that the only segmentation in the field is indeed semantic.


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Perspectives on HCI‘ by Petersen et al. The former breaks down the aesthetical experience in

four distinct threads (emotional, compositional, spatio-temporal and compositional) and then

structures around them a sense making model, based on six processes (Petersen, Iversen,

Krogh, & Ludvigsen, 2004; see Figure 13). The latter is an extension of the 1984 Bødker &

Kammersgaard model (Bødker & Kammersgaard, 1984), sets the aesthetic experience as the

medium of HCI:

―aesthetic interaction aims for creating involvement, experience, surprise and

serendipity in interaction when using interactive systems, […] promotes bodily

experiences as well as complex symbolic representations when interacting with

systems; [it] creates a frame for allowing the user to express herself through the

interaction.‖ (Petersen, Iversen, Krogh, & Ludvigsen, 2004, p. 274, see Table 1)

Table 1. The Five Different Perspectives on HCI (Petersen et al., 2004)

We thus see that both models are spiraling around two common elements; the aesthetic

experience as the central quality that characterizes the medium, and the treatment of the user

in the user-artifact relationship as an appropriating agent.

Accordingly, in the field of videogames, Hunicke et al. describe an analytical model for

decoupling the game player experience in three distinct components, Mechanics, Dynamics

and Aesthetics (Hunicke, LeBlanc, & Zubek, 2004). Their emphasis is to move games from the

field of media to field of artifacts:


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―Fundamental to this framework is the idea that games are more like artifacts than

media. By this we mean that the content of a game is its behavior not the media that

streams out of it towards the player.‖ (Hunicke, LeBlanc, & Zubek, 2004)

This orientation of the MDA framework has made it particularly popular among both game

scholars and practitioners. Consequently, we see why many gamification advocates using it as

a main analytical and design tool to support their arguments and methods (see (Kim, 2011)).

As such, we also view gamification as part of this shift of focus towards holistic approaches

centered on the user aesthetical experience.

2.4 Work, Leisure and Play

In the previous parts we tried to sketch the landscape that gave rise and context to

gamification. Our effort so far has been focused on bringing relevance to the concept; in other

words we tried to set ourselves in a position to understand ―how have we come to this? what

makes the application of game design in everyday life relevant?‖ We identified three critical

constituent parts to gamification: (i) the intrusion of games in all aspects and dimensions of

everyday life, (ii) the important developments and evolution in game design and (iii) a shift of

the scholarly, rhetorical and practical design discourse towards more holistic, more open

contexts. However, even though this framing can provide the space for a broader approach on

gamification, we still need to question the positioning of this framing.

Our examination of the events and evolution of the above constituents, led us to not only

highlight their radical transformation over the last years, but also expose the intertwined

relationships that govern them. Such relations are not just conceptual but also practical, often

having direct and immediate effects. As such, when we acknowledge that both practice and

theory have changed over the last years, we must also assume more significant changes as

well. Such changes are often hinted by the rhetorics and ideology of these constituents, thus in

order to unearth them, we need to draw distance and examine the broader context that binds

them together in order to construct new concepts like gamification. We believe that such is the


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only way to answer the answer the question of ―why now, what is the catalyst that sets

gamification in such a tenable position?‖

Hence, we need to address the ideological roots of gamification. To do so, we will examine the

concepts of work and leisure.

Why work and leisure? It is work and leisure not because we view them as the two poles

gamification attempts to bridge, but rather because we believe that their radical transformation

opened the landscape for gamification‘s current expression; in other words, gamification as

ideology can only be operative through a lack, or malfunction, of the order that sustains and

governs the domains of work and leisure.

In the previous chapter, we talked about the invasion of casual games in both temporal and

spatial dimensions of everyday life through mobile technology (2.1.2). For leisure studies

scholars Gant and Kiesler, mobile technology is making harder to draw the distinctive lines

between work and personal life:

―As we become more mobile, enabled by wireless technologies, we use the technology

at our discretion. When an employee uses his personal cellular phone to call his wife

from the car on the way to a sales call, is he on work or on social time? What if he is

calling her from the lobby of his building, or his office? Does an employer who provides

the cellular phone to his employees have the right to call them during evenings or

weekends? Clearly, for the growing ranks of the technology-enabled workforce, wireless

technologies make it difficult to draw a distinction between work and social life.‖ (Gant &

Kiesler, 2002, p. 130)

However there is something more than this evident overlap of the two notions, facilitated by

technological advancements. We would like to suggest here, that it is not just the spatial and

temporal aspects of work and leisure that are getting increasingly intertwined, but their very

nature and notion of such.

As such, we will argue for an alteration of work and leisure in both ontological and

epistemological dimensions. We believe that the suggestion for such an argument lies at the

core of gamification‘s premise (to enforce motivation and engagement for activities that

otherwise operate in lack thereof) and therefore, such alterations might not only be conceptual


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but also very pragmatic. Consequently, our examination should not be a superficial

rhetorical/philosophical questioning of the nature of work and leisure, but an interpretive one,

elaborating the meaning of work and leisure in the context that gamification is addressed.

2.4.1 The Values of Work and Leisure

The first step towards an interpretive examination of the development of work and leisure over

time is to set a starting point; an initial position upon which we shall depart from. To do so, we

shall not place work and leisure in opposition but we will offer a layout of their respective

values. In that way we circumvent the problem of defining over-changed concepts such as

these, while still provide the reader a concise interpretation. The basic obstacle, is going

beyond the dichotomy of work and leisure and examine leisure as not the opposite of work, or

the other way around, but rather see both under a prism of possible values.

As such we attribute to work a set of eight core values, a sub-set of social values since work is

a social concept:

Achievement: The value of pursuing, achieving and failing to achieve quantifiable goals.

Lucidity: The value of knowing your place/role and conform. Work operates against any

ambiguities; in work there are no surprises, positive or negative.

Finity: They value of being of finite magnitude. In classical economics, work as a state is

considered binary: you either work or you do not work. In that sense, work has a

beginning and an end.

Satisfaction: The value of gratification for a job well done. The more trivial the job, the

better; tasks/jobs like sorting papers, or washing dishes are the zero level examples of

work as a medium for satisfaction.

Fairness: The value of consistent and pre-mediated input and output.

Evaluable: The value of being able to receive value. Work is quantifiable, and thus it can

be measured and evaluated.


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Engagement: The value of mediated action. In work, one has to take physical/mental

steps; no work can be done without action.

Participation: The value of collective awareness. In work, one must be aware of the

collective functionality/ruling that surrounds work.

Likewise, we attribute to leisure a set of six core values:

Incitation: The value of physical/intellectual activation/instigation. Closely related with

intrinsic motivation, leisure has the distinctive characteristic of working against

boredom.

Fantasy: The value of shaping desire. Only through leisure one can learn how to desire;

get in accordance with their true desires, wants, needs, dreams and aspirations.

Individuality: The value of being oneself. Contrary to work, leisure is perceived and

exercised differently by individuals. However, despite its subjective nature, leisure is

―insulated‖ by a common concession about the freedom of getting understood

differently.

Impeccability: The value of being devoid of any guilt. Leisure is not just self-justified, it is

beyond justification; as such, any time spent in leisure is time well spent.

Consumption: The value of enjoying the fruits of one‘s work. While work is associated

with production, leisure is mostly connected with consumption, the fundamental

component for any production to exist. In this context, leisure does not only create the

needs but also provides the space for their saturation.

Reflection: The value of getting in accordance of one‘s body/environment and their

surrounding relationship. Leisure provides the context and space for understanding

one‘s state of being.


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2.4.2 The Erosive Quality of (Instrumental) Play

As we have already shown, the spatial and temporal divisions of work and leisure have been

abolished; using computers to play games at work is already a great issue15

, perhaps a bigger

one than work-related phone calls in after work hours. However, these divisions are not the

only ones abolished; work and leisure have long been ―invaded‖ by the variants of instrumental

play16

.

Instrumental play abolished all divisions between work and leisure though the fixation of the

goal. Instrumental play, or finite play as James Carse terms it (Carse, 1986), is the play that has

a goal other than itself, a quantifiable, finite goal. As such, instrumental play materializes

through competition and conquest, an endless agôn that is ―played out‖ across all aspects of

social life:

―Every situation is win-lose, unless it is win-win — a situation where players are free to

collaborate only because they seek prizes in different games. The real world appears as

a video arcadia divided into many and varied games. Work is a rat race. Politics is a

horse race. The economy is a casino.‖ (Wark, 2007 [6])

Consequently, not even work is spared; quite on the contrary, work is the ideal space for all

antagonisms, which now take shape though work metaphors and even work–time itself:

―The old class antagonisms have not gone away, but are hidden beneath levels of rank,

where each agonizes over their worth against others as measured by the price of their

house, the size of their vehicle and where, perversely, working longer and longer hours

is a sign of winning the game. Work becomes play. Work demands not just one‘s mind

and body but also one‘s soul. You have to be a team player. Your work has to be

creative, inventive, playful — ludic, but not ludicrous.‖ (Wark, 2007, [11])

So when the ―office lights‖ turn off, the worker-player cannot rest, cannot enjoy the values of

leisure, instead he seeks the enjoyment of work elsewhere, into the gamespace of the

videogame:

15

See (News.com.au, 2011)

16

Not all kinds of instrumental play are deemed as negating forces for work and leisure. T.L. Taylor for

example, examines instrumental play as part of the ―power‖ players‘ playing experience (see Taylor,

2006).


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―the work that is being performed in [massive online] video games is increasingly

similar to the work performed in business corporations.[…] Everyday, many of them go

to work and perform an assortment of clerical tasks, logistical planning and

management in their offices, then they come home and do those very same things in

MMORPGs. Many players in fact characterize their game-play as a second job.‖ (Yee,

2006, pp. 3,5)

But the gamespace of the videogame is full of treadmills and Sisyphean tasks, and despite the

claims of the gamification advocates17

, the worker-player cannot find the lucidity and fairness of

work he aches for, because there is no work, it is all instrumental play:

―If it is a choice only between The Sims as a real game and gamespace as a game of

the real, the gamer choose to stay in The Cave and play games. The contradiction is

that for there to be a game that is fair and rational there is still a gamespace which is

neither.‖ (Wark, 2007 [49])

Thus the only things that are left, are trivial dilemmas18

and ―themes‖ of leisure-play, such as

sports and arts:

―Now they become work, disguised as games, just as games become the disguise of

work itself. The sporting metaphors and slogans migrate from leisure to work — and

back again. They cease to be metaphors and become mere descriptions, in a language

stripped of any terms other than those of competition. Almost every moment is swept

into a relentless agôn.‖ (McKenzie, 2007, [16], [156])

As such, both work and leisure are negated and equated; negated by instrumental play, they

both lose their values and are rendered meaningless and empty under the strife of agôn.

Equated as in combined in a uniform space of instrumental play composed of non-work and

non-leisure, the whole topography of life is filled with competitions and antagonisms:

―While the counter-culture wanted worlds of play outside the game; the military

entertainment complex countered in turn by expanding the game to the whole world,

containing play forever within it.‖ (McKenzie, 2007, [16])

17

Many gamification advocates relate the lack of motivation and engagement in work with the clarity of

feedback and level of fairness they receive. Most notably Schell argued that contrary to work

environments, games provide clear feedback (Schell, 2010).

18

Such as: ―would you rather be a Starbucks worker or a starship captain?" (Castronova, 2007). Of

course the dilemma here is non-existent since the values of work no longer exist.


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Thus under this prism of the negative equivalency of work and leisure we give gamification two

possible ideological interpretations.

2.4.2 The Hole in the Whole

Our first interpretation is rather pragmatic; we argue here that gamification in its current

expression can only be ideologically operative under a double negation of work and leisure.

The grounding for our argument here lays with the fact that gamification necessitates

significant levels of abstraction from the initial subject of game design (i.e. games).

As we have already examined, there is a general direction of design towards more holistic

experiences. We first encountered it in our examination of videogames, where we saw that their

transition into the experience economy required a radically different approach from videogame

developers and publishers; moving from videogames as the product, to videogames as part of

an integrated user experience with a service. We then also saw it in the rhetorics of game

studies, where the paradigm of examination has been shifting towards the player experience on

different levels (social, aesthetical, emotional). Similarly, in our examination of the most recent

developments in interaction design, we witnessed the steering of discourse towards more

holistic approaches, aiming at generating personal and social impact.

It is thus obvious that there is both a rhetorical and a practical effort to account for more factors

in the design process. Accordingly, we argued that we view gamification as a similar effort of

holistic approaches to game design, expanding its design subject in order to include concepts

such as productivity and engagement.

However, this distantiation process of stepping further and further back from the initial subject

of a design domain is only one side of the coin, the other is the trap of reaching a level of

abstraction that becomes not only larger than the design subject but also renders the scope

unrealistic. As such, instead of designing technology, interactions or games, we are addressing

problems and concepts that cannot, and should not, be resolved unilaterally by design. Hence,


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the only way that such a process of abstraction can secure the ideological legitimacy to be

operative, is through the negation of such concepts.

As such, gamification in its current expression can only be ideologically operative as a

consequence of such abstraction. The premise of a holistic game design approach is passing

through significant levels of abstraction. However, if we abstract too much from the concept of

productivity and broaden the context of engagement in videogames too wide, then we are no

longer addressing productivity or engagement as such; instead our examination is on work and

leisure as holistic experiences and gamification in that context looks like an ambitious attempt

to design and regulate a space bigger than a game, work, leisure and essentially life itself.

Thus, the only way such an attempt can only be operative is if work and leisure are essentially

negated19

(though the variants of instrumental play). In that sense, gamification has only the

affectation of designing for engaging or motivating interactions within work or leisure contexts;

in reality there cannot be any as such, since both work and leisure are negated.

2.4.3 The Ideology of the Pointless Point

Our second interpretive approach deals with gamification as ideology. As we have already

made the case, when both work and leisure are negated, the enjoyment of their values is lost;

into that domain of negation, their experience is rendered meaningless and empty. In the face

of such a problem, how do we maintain appearances and substance, in order for them to

remain operative? Paradoxically, our answer/remedy so far, at least on ideological level, seems

to always come as the coincidental of elements that caused the problem. Work with more

(instrumental) play, leisure with more (instrumental) play.

In philosophical terms we could explain such a paradox as another expression of what Slavoj

Žižek describes as universalized Prohibition in the absence of Law. As such, the lack or

abolishment of a higher Order that governs life/work/leisure translates paradoxically not into the

19 As in non-work and non-leisure, work and leisure without any values.


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allowance of excess (of work‘s and leisure‘s enjoyment of values) but into complete prohibition.

A stance that Žižek finds widespread in everyday ideology:

―On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant

property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat., beer without alcohol... And the list

goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare

with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare.‖

Such is the ideology of gamification in its current expression; adding more work and leisure

without the enjoyment of their values. Thus, we can claim gamification operates ideologically in

the same domain as hedonism; one can have as much work and leisure as they want, as long

as these are deprived of their values:

―Today‘s hedonism combines pleasure with constraint: it is no longer the old notion of

the right balance between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian

immediate coincidence of opposites: action and reaction should coincide; the very

thing that causes damage should already be the remedy. The ultimate example is

arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the USA, with the paradoxical injunction: Do

you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!(that is, of the very thing that causes

constipation).‖ (Žižek, 2003)

As such, gamification emerges as the ideal ―chocolate laxative‖ for the negated, by

instrumental play, notions of work and leisure. ―Does instrumental play not allow you to enjoy

the values of work and leisure? Have some gamification (agôn)!‖


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3. Exploration: Gamification for Dummies

In the previous chapter we tried to encapsulate the realities that enabled gamification and draw

the landscape for a broader approach to it. Thus now we are in a position to explore this

possibility space and propose methods and models that would form the basis for such an

approach. However, before we move into exploring any new possibilities we must first examine

the existing ones. This is the only way we can guarantee a comprehensive approach that

accounts for all possible expressions of gamification.

Thus, this chapter is structured in two sections; in the first one we will attempt to layout the

dominant model of gamification as it is implemented and advocated through popular

applications. We shall not limit ourselves to a superficial description, but we will try to explain

and highlight the theoretical and evidential arguments that such applications are grounded

upon. As such, we will try to formulate a composition of ideas, proposals and examples of

actual implementations that are now found in the domain of gamification.

In the second section, we propose our own approaches to gamification; we do not only seek to

give concrete models and examples, but a way of thinking about gamification. As such we start

with an alternative perspective on how games ―draw‖ us in, pulling us into playing (with) them;

an approach that is based on the decoupling of the relationship between player and game, not

in the structural characteristics of play, but the emergence of playfulness. Based on that, we

then layout our propositions, addressing the issue of trivialization, the role of reflection in

gamification and how game designers can tap into the elusive domain of social competition.


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3.1 The model

In this part we try to explain the basic gamification model, as it is seen on the majority of actual

applications that either are claiming, or referred, to be gamified. Of course the existing

applications of the model vary; however we view these variations as minor differences that do

not alter the core principles of the model. As such, the following overview can be seen as an

abstracted summary of the fundamental aspects of the current expression of gamification on

the practical level.

3.3.1The Core Activity

The initial point of all gamification applications is the core activity; the core activity is central to

the application‘s concept in the sense that it is tied to a user need; the core activity must either

satisfy or evoke a user need. As such, the core activity can be already exercised by the user or

not, and it can be physical or mental. The basic principle of the core activity is that it can be

tracked and monitored.

Monitoring then takes the form of logging, performed either manually by the user or

automatically with the aid of a digital hardware or software sensor. The difference here is what

Rogers & Muller term implicit and explicit interactions (Rogers & Muller, 2005) and is a

significant one as it raises issues with both technology and surveillance. Regardless of the

political and legal debates, the technological advancements of the last decade generated a

reality where implicit interactions with technology and digital monitoring are integrated in

everyday life.

Indeed, most gamification applications have been made possible through these technological

advancements. On one hand, we have the mobile phone and its increasingly diverse sensing

capabilities, which have been rapidly expanding vertically. Mobile phones now incorporate

GPS20

trackers, gyroscopes, light sensitive detectors, data matrix readers and thermometers,

20

Global Positioning System


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essentially transforming them from communication devices into overloaded sensory

information handlers; an old context aware (Schilit & Theimer, 1994; Dey, 2001) and ubiquitous

computing (Dourish, 2001) vision, now realized through the mobile phone (Bell & Dourish,

2007). In parallel with the sensory overloading of the mobile phone though, we also have seen

a rapid expansion of the ―wiring‖ activities through the internet; common daily activities that

involve social, financial and personal exchanges are now done over the net. As such, most

common core activities for gamified applications are tied to mobile phone and internet use;

check-ins (enter a designated territory), sporting activities (running a route), social activities

(meeting friends) and electronic transactions (electronic donations), are some examples.

It becomes apparent then, that gamification as seen through its dominant model is deeply

connected to these technological advancements; the fact that all these activities can be

monitored through the use of technology provides the necessary substrate on which the

dominant model of gamification can operate. As such, the goal of the gamified application is to

tap into these activities and provide a service that facilitates and enhances them.

3.3.2 Tapping into the Activity

As we saw in the previous part, the activity is only the starting point for a gamified application.

The actual service refers to the scaling of this activity. By scaling we mean the way the activity

is guided and paced over time. This process translates into a clear and definitive objective, a

goal that is either set by, or negotiated between the user and the application, and a progressive

path of short and intermediate goals leading to it. This structure of short, intermediate and long

term goals is what gamified applications are basing their product cycles on. As such, an

example of such a goal structure in a gamified sports tracking application would be, a kilometer

run (short-term goal), a half-marathon run (intermediate-term goal), national running champion

(long-term goal).

Thus, the role of the application is to reinforce these goals through a series of challenges that

will keep the user motivated, immersed and energized. An approach we view very much rooted


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in Csíkszentmihályi‘s Flow theory (Csíkszentmihályi M. , 1991), that advocates for a close

match between the skills and capabilities of the user with the difficulty/scope of each challenge,

in order to sustain a high level of engagement with the activity. As such we see Flow theory not

only as a grounded argument for such approaches, but also as the stronger connection

between gamification and game design as both are expressed today. Indeed,

Csíkszentmihályi‘s work has influenced many academic and practical fields, and a closer look

to the most popular and widely acceptable textbooks of game design will reveal that the

dominant player-centric design approach is in fact grounded on Flow theory:

―Objectives give your players something to strive for. They define what players are

trying to accomplish within the rules of the game. In the best-case scenario, these

objectives seem challenging—but achievable—to the players. […]When players talk of

challenge in games, they‘re speaking of tasks that are satisfying to complete, that

require just the right amount of work to create n sense of accomplishment and

enjoyment.‖ (Fullerton, Swain, & Hoffman, 2008, pp. 60, 86)

Consequently, we find that the rhetoric of the optimal challenge has shaped game design; as a

result, many different approaches of deploying progressively challenging goals have been

explored not only in theory but also put in practice. Methods about both long and short term

difficulty progression (Sweetser & Wyeth, 2005; Chen, 2007), as well as automated difficulty

adjustment (Bailey & Katchabaw, 2005) have been named, proposed and tested over the

years.

Thus, whether gamification advocates term this approach as ―user progression‖, or ―scaling‖,

or ―user guidance‖ of the core activity, we believe that makes little difference. The argument

here comes directly from Csíkszentmihályi who warns us that flow is very much dependent on

the attitude of the user towards the activity and thus cannot be bestowed or forced through a

process of distributing challenges but it rather has to be addressed contextually

(Csíkszentmihályi M. , 1991). As such, it is not surprising that gamification advocates have

been also stressing out the importance of addressing core activities that are already motivating


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for the user21

(Kim, 2011). It couldn‘t be otherwise; no matter how well a challenge is scaled to

fit the user‘s skills, it cannot function if the user is not motivated enough to pick up the

challenge in the first place22

.

However, strategic distribution and scoping of the objectives is only one part of the process,

the other is feedback; the way the application communicates these objectives and

acknowledges progress. Again, the norm of communicating feedback in gamified applications

is rooted deep into the traditions of game-centric design and as such it needs to be clear and

direct:

―When a game has clearly defined goals, the players know what needs to be done to

win, to move to the next level, to achieve the next step in their strategy, etc., and they

receive direct feedback for their actions toward those goals.‖ (Fullerton, Swain, &

Hoffman, 2008, p. 88)

Thus, every action that is part of the core activity must not only be logged but also

acknowledged. As such, the result is very often a positive reinforcement strategy which

essentially rewards the users not only for their overall performance, but for every action. For

example, Microsoft‘s ‗Ribbon Hero‘, a gamified tutorial application for introducing core

Microsoft Office features, is rewarding the user for every step taken in the tutorial (see Figure

14).

21

The term Csíkszentmihályi is using is autotelic. It derives from the Greek words auto (self) and telos

(goal), thus it describes an activity of which the motivation and goal is the activity itself.

22

An example here would be a user-optimal marathon training program; no matter how well the program

could account for the runner‘s fitness, physique etc. it would never work if the user is not interested in

running a marathon.


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Figure 14. Ribbon Hero (Microsoft)

We find this positive reinforcement strategy inspired by casual game design23

; as we discussed

in the previous chapter (2.1.2 The Rise of the ―Casual‖ Game), casual games are

characterized by an excess of positive feedback, that is very often associated with their appeal

(Juul, 2010). Whereas in casual games this excess of positive feedback is primarily driven by

aesthetic rewards (often termed juice or juiciness, for more see Juul, 2010; Gabler, Gray, Kukic,

& Shodhan, 2005), in gamified applications it takes the form of quantifiable ones, points,

badges and virtual items.

Thus, the goal here, contrary to casual games, is not to reinforce the objectives by appealing to

the senses of the user, but rather by creating a social and personal investment. In that sense,

the model does not aim towards the user‘s aesthetic delight but their rationality24

. As such,

points, badges and virtual rewards assume an instrumental role in the model.

23

Even though positive reinforcement in games has been a standard in game design before the

emergence of casual games, we argue that the unprecedented appeal of casual games to a massive

new audience along with the abundance of positive feedback they overwhelmed their players, led many

to see a correlation between the two.

24

We use rationality here in an economics-rational choice theory sense (wanting more/better rather than

less/worse of a good, points, badges etc.)


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3.3.3 Investing on the Activity

We ended the previous part with the three types of rewards which gamified applications

reinforce challenges and objectives: points, badges and virtual goods. Despite the fact that all

three types are quantifiable, we find that used in different ways.

Points are probably the most flexible form of reward from the above. It can be used as a

scoring system, a progression meter, a scale of rank, or even as a currency; their (perceived)

value has a level of referentiality to their quantity, which makes their use almost unavoidable in

gamified applications. Leader boards, is the most common use of points, a hierarchical listing

of users that aims at activating competition among them by affording direct, quantifiable

comparisons between them.

Points though, can be also used as meters of progression over the scaling process; essentially

operating as progress bars, they can either just signify relative progress or divide it in different

stages/levels (leveling). This way, not only the progress of the user can be monitored and

represented, but also interactions and functionality can be scaled up to suit their progress (i.e.

an application can have new, advanced and expert users with respective functionalities a a lot

of which scale up depending on the users‘ levels/amount of points).

Finally, points can be used as currency, a virtual currency that can be redeemed to something

of value. That could be some tangible or virtual good (i.e. a free Latte or a virtual hat for the

user‘s avatar) when then transcribed its value to the amount of the point(s) used to acquire it: in

that sense then points become a monetary regulating power that are operating as means of

exchange.

Badges are also very popular among gamified applications; they are mostly used as direct

rewards for achieving goals. As such, badges operate on a different level from points. Whereas

points create direct competition, badges afford mostly indirect relationships. Badges can be

grouped to create sets and collections, and as such they can be used to create artificial

scarcity in order to drive competition through social recognition (the satisfaction of completing


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a collection/set and bragging). As such, badges are mostly used to denote important

milestones or events (achievements), which in turn can be scaled vertically (breadth) and

horizontally (depth) to create even more pairs of achievements-badges.

Finally, we have virtual items. Even though badges can be broadly seen as virtual items, it has

been established that in the context of gamification they are different. The difference is usually

attributed to the tradability of virtual items as opposed to badges which are more personal and

usually not exchangeable. Thus, virtual items are also used as scarce resources for collection

completion, but they are more oriented towards social exchanges, like sharing, gifting and self

expression. As such, virtual items and badges are primary tools for creating personal and

social investment for the users. Usually addressed through customization (i.e. avatars and

gear, virtual spaces and decorations etc.) these tools are essentially raising exit barriers from

the application and generating revenue for the application administrators through direct (pay

for virtual good) or indirect purchases (pay for points or currency that buys virtual goods)25

.

Of course, as it is already obvious, these approaches are not mutually exclusive and can be

used in variable combinations depending on the situation and the target audience. As we have

shown, different approaches afford for different interactions and as such can attract different

types of users.

Regardless of the types of users though, the goal of the model is a double user investment of

instrumental type; investment on the activity, expressed through progression, achievement and

reward and investment in the application itself, by attributing and assigning personal and social

value to the manifestation of these rewards.

3.2 The Alternatives

In the previous section we examined the dominant model of gamification. We showed how its

foundations and core assumptions are based on the same principles as player-centric game

25

For a more detailed discussion on the use of virtual items for direct profit see Hamari & Lehdonvirta,

2010


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design, resulting in an instrumental, challenge-oriented approach. It thus becomes apparent

that such an approach limits rather than expands the concept of gamification.

As such, before we start our explorative process into new methods and practices of

gamification, we believe a mental calibration to a new mindset is necessary. Consequently, we

would like to start by exploring a core, but not exclusive aspect of games; their indomitable

allure to ―play‖ them.

3.2.1 The ‘Pull’

On 21st

May 2010, Google, as part of the 30th

Pac-Man anniversary, created the most interactive

Doodle26

up to date (Figure 15); every time a user was visiting the front page for a quick web

search, a small Pac-Man game was loaded waiting for them to play. As one of the most popular

videogames of all time, the image was very familiar with most users who just had a go with it.

The statistics for the time spent on that little game were staggering. ‗RescuTime‘, a company

specializing in productivity tracking and optimization, calculated 4,819,352 of man-hours extra

(36 seconds more on average per user) spent on Google‘s front page on 21st

May, as a result

of the Pac-Man anniversary Doodle.

Figure 15. Google‟s Pac-Man 30th anniversary Doodle

So what are the qualities of (some) games that can imbue people so much motivation so that

they put aside anything else in order to play them, and how can we extract them for other

26

A Doodle is a modified version of Google‘s logo, usually themed around an event, holiday or a

memorial (for more see http://www.google.com/logos/)


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uses? The answer is indeed a rather complex one, with many different theoreticians and

philosophers offering their own explanations about what is that makes game so alluring.

However, despite the differences in all these models, a look in the bibliography of game design

will reveal that the dominant model is based on an instrumental approach of the player

experience of pleasure; an experience of pleasure primarily based on the cognitive psychology

notion of chunking and pattern recognition. As such, games are often viewed as series of

cognitive exercises, puzzles the solution of which leads to pattern deciphering, turning the

whole player experience of pleasure into a learning process:

―Games are […] concentrated chunks ready for our brains to chew on, […] they serve

as very fundamental and powerful learning tools. […] Fun from games arises from

mastery, from comprehension. […] Fun is just another word for learning.‖ (Koster, 2005,

pp. 34, 36, 40, 46)

This perspective of games as mediators for learning experiences, leads to game design

approaches of play that are falsely dichotomized between the play act and the experience of

that act; in other words between play and playfulness. For game design theory, this very often

translates into much more rigorous and thorough focus on the former rather than the latter,

essentially addressing play only within the formal elements of games (see Zimmerman & Salen,

2004; Koster, 2005).

The reasoning behind such a unilateral approach is attributed to two factors. First and foremost

are the spatial and temporal characteristics of the transition of play with/in games; the

conscious, voluntary and essentially autotelic passage of the individual into the game‘s context.

This de facto assumption of the ―lusory attitude‖, as Suits terms it (Suits & Hurka, 2005), as a

mandatory component of play within games very often leads to an uncritical stance about how

it was construed in the first place.


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As such, many theorists perform an analytical division, which separates the attitude from the

act, placing the role of ―pulling‖ the player into the play experience, or imbuing the lusory

attitude, beyond the boundaries of game design27

:

―Designing the seduction of a game means understanding all of the formal, social and

cultural factors that contribute to the player‘s experience. It is important, for example, to

understand how marketing, promotion and distribution work in the game industry.‖

(Zimmerman & Salen, 2004, p. 333)

The other factor is of course the subjectivity of such process; the lusory attitude is a subjective

expression and as such, it ―resists‖ strict ontological analysis. Thus, it is left to the subjectivity

of the player to determine the circumstances under which they adopt the attitude. As Bernard

Suits claims, the lusory goal, the reason for participating in the game, is a shared goal among

all humans:

―Finally, the goal of participating in the game is not, strictly speaking, a part of the game

at all. It is simply one of the goals that people have, such as wealth, glory, or security.

As such it may be called a lusory goal, but a lusory goal of life rather than of games.‖

(Suits & Hurka, 2005, p. 53)

Of course subjectivity is an issue, and indeed we do not argue against it here, but our

argument goes against the inconsequence of such an analytic division. By drawing the line of

the gamespace, the above analysis does not only divide the space and time of play and non-

play, game and non-game but also the motivation for approaching the game and playing it:

―First, players are seduced into entering the magic circle of a game. Second, players

are seduced into continuing playing.‖ (Zimmerman & Salen, 2004, p. 333)

This dichotomy here raises a discontinuity that is problematic not only for analytic purposes but

also practical28

. We believe that gamification is only intensifying this paradox due to the spatial

characteristics of gamified applications; how is the lusory attitude of game construed when the

27

As such, it should not come as a surprise that many gamification arguments and actual applications

come from individuals that have limited or no background in game design but rather come from a

marketing or technological background.

28

How does the game and the game designer account for this ―deception‖? Couldn‘t this be also seen

as the root of the long and deep problem between game developers and game publishers about what

sells (i.e. recognizable IP or good game play)?


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―game‖ in the application is seamed in with everyday life, eliminating the gamespace

boundaries players/users have to cross?

Thus, we would like to offer an approach that would examine these two levels – the play form

and the play experience – as a unified process; we do not argue here against a conceptual

division, but an analytical one. It is the only way to avoid the logical mistake of confusing them

by a strict ontological division:

―Without recognizing that these two levels exist, the two are easily confused, and one

can feel comfortable assuming that he knows the one from the perspective of the

other.‖ (Stevens, 1978, pp. 321-322)

We would like start by rejecting the somewhat naïve belief that all games have some special

structural or design qualities that make them irresistible to play. Instead, we suggest that it is

rather the process of interacting with a game; people are driven to the act of playing a game, a

process that takes place in time and space. Hence, we have to look into the spatial and

temporal characteristics of the broader play situation between player and game, in order to

encapsulate the process of player motivation.

Perhaps a useful and maybe good way to start understanding this relationship is to examine its

temporal characteristics. There is certainly a range of processes that take place even before the

actual use of the game; when the potential player (an individual that has not yet started playing,

but is in the process of deciding to do so) is confronted with the game. In that situation Juul

positions the inception of the subjective cognitive process between the videogame and the

player, with the latter not only coming to an understanding of the former‘s use and structure,

but also having a strong compulsion to play it; he terms it ‗the pull of videogames‘:

―look at the video game shown in [Figure 15]. If you have ever played Pac-Man, you

know your mission is to eat the dots and avoid the ghosts, and from a brief glance at

the screen, you may already have planned where you want to go next in the game. This

is the pull of video games, and indeed, of non digital games too. You can see what you

need to do in the game, you can see, more or less, how to do it, and you want do to it.‖

(Juul, A Casual Revolution, 2010, p. 2)


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Obviously, Juul frames the pull around the subjective experiences of the player; not everyone

has played Pac-Man before and thus cannot feel its pull. In addition to this, Juul also adds the

personal taste of the player, and the time required, in the set of criteria that determine the

activation of pull. Obviously then the pull as a concept could not only be limited to videogames;

it can be applied to any finite situation between an artifact and a user:

―Consider the jigsaw puzzle shown in figure [Figure 16]. In all likelihood you know how

you would complete it. You can imagine the satisfaction of moving the final piece, of

finishing the puzzle. The jigsaw begs you to complete it. […]In music, or in stories, we

experience a similar type of pull: When Frank Sinatra sings ‗‗I did it my—‘‘ we want him

to end the melody on ‗way‘. There is a pull toward the final note of the song, the tonic in

musical terms.‖ (Juul, A Casual Revolution, 2010, p. 2)

Figure 16. Complete the puzzle (image ©kowalanka Fotolia.com)

By finite here, we mean that the interaction between the user and artifact has to have a clear

point of completion (i.e. when all the dots in Pac-Man level are eaten, when the last puzzle

piece is placed, when the verse of the song is sung). In that context of leads and endings, finity

takes the form of bounding them in individual processes that are communicated between user

and artifact.

In that broader context, the pull may be used as a term to describe a feeling, or a situation

between the user and the artifact; it refers to that almost uncontrollable sensation of using the

artifact in a specific way, when perceived and intended use come together. Thus the pull is not

about the artifact or the users themselves, but for a specific situation, where the former is


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―communicating‖ to the latter, the action that needs to be taken so that their synergy comes to

a consensual conclusion.

The important step here is that of the analysis of the relationship between user and artifact; it is

not attributed to the level of properties of the artifact or the user, but rather in their synergy. The

pull not only hints at, but predicates a dialogic process between user and artifact, a sequence

of messages that are exchanged and interpreted. Of course under these terms the pull as a

concept operates descriptively; it does not say anything about what is the content of these

messages nor the way they are deployed and interpreted.

In order to refine the concept of ―pull‖, we shall examine Khaslavsky‘s and Shedroff‘s proposed

model of seduction, which is a more analytic attempt to explain the inner workings of intrinsic

motivational factors that mobilize users to interact with artifacts. For Khaslavsky and Shedroff

seduction is a process that characterizes the whole continuum of interaction between the

artifact and the user. Contrary to the pull, seduction is understood as a three step process:

1. Enticement. Grab attention and make an emotional promise;

2. Relationship. Make progress with small fulfillments and more promises, a step that can

continue almost indefinitely; and

3. Fulfillment. Fulfill the final promises, and end the experience in a memorable way.

(Khalavsky & Sheroff, 1999, pp. 46-47)

Obviously the most apparent observation we can extract from this model is that Khaslavsky

and Shedroff are also employing a dialogic rhetoric to analyze the user-artifact relationship. In

this dialog, messages are exchanged and deployed into a field of expectations and promises

that is created between the user and the artifact. As such, imagination becomes a kind of

messenger, a cognitive agent that populates/fuels both expectations and promises by bridging

the chronological gap between seduction and actual use:

―Interactivity is a stimulation of the power of imagination. By the power of imagination,

one tries to see what will happen a few milliseconds ahead. This brings a future to the

present. It is a bridge between a past and a future. Only interactivity can make such a


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jump, enabling us to escape from the chronological cage.‖ (Masaki Fujihata in

Leopoldseder & Schöpf, 2001, p. 85)

In that sense, when interacting with an object, imagination is activated, and fills in both spaces

of promises that the artifact is surrounded with, as well as that of their own expectations, in a

way that is forecasting the eminent result. The actual conclusion of that process (see finity

above) though is determining how these expectations and promises are mapped together (see

Figure 17).

Figure 17. A dialogic model for user/artifact relationship

Despite the apparent division here, we should stress out once more that we address these two

steps as a unified process. Thus, even though the fueling/filling of the expectations and

promises dimensions precedes their actual validation, or falsification, they should not be

considered independent processes; if done so, then they are reduced to mere ―daydreaming‖

and the constant of experiencing reality.

Thus, based on that analysis and by looking at both theories of seduction and ―pull‖, we can

see that their authors hint at a perfect overlap between expectations and promises. This not


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only requires from imagination to populate these spaces equally, but to make them identical as

well; what is promised, is what is expected, is what is played.

However, this perfect matching of expectations and promises is very often contradicted by (the

same) design theorists, who call for designs that surprise and go beyond expectations; even

Khaslavsky and Shedroff suggest the design of seductive experiences not by mapping

perfectly expectations and promises but rather by employing ambiguity and surprise:

―Surprises you with something novel; Goes beyond obvious needs and expectations;

Leads you to discover something deeper than what you expected;‖ (Khalavsky &

Sheroff, 1999, pp. 48-49)

We thus face a critical paradox; how can surprise and ambiguity in the user-artifact relationship

be accommodated together with their total lack thereof? How can intended and perceived use

coincide, while leaving space for other possibilities? Indeed this paradox is very common

amongst design theorists (Overbeeke, Djajadiningrat, Hummels, & Wensveen, 2002), who very

often either overlook it, or try to surmount it by attributing it as part of a dynamic user-artifact

relationship, like a ―dynamic gestalt‖ (Löwgren & Stolterman, 2004).

However, a closer look to the analysis of the attempts that bring this paradox into light will

reveal that the ideal candidates proposed for incorporating both the surprise and its lack

thereof, are in fact videogames:

―Except for some computer games, software is generally absent from lists of seductive

products‖ (Khalavsky & Sheroff, 1999, p. 45)

We believe that it should not come as a surprise that many design theorists point at

videogames in order to exemplify operative designs of this paradox. Indeed our own analysis

and motivation has been initiated with videogames as the pivot point; it is thus relevant, to

revert back to the player-videogame relationship and examine the characteristics of the

messages exchanged, in order to understand how expectations, promises and imagination can

work in a hyperbolic manner.


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Hence, examining the player-videogame relationship within a dialogic context we can‘t fail to

indentify that the messages exchanged are indeed messages of play. The same way that

Gregory Bateson describes the exchange of metalinguistic signals in mammalian play, we can

claim here that govern the paradoxical relationship of player and videogame:

―»these actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by

those actions which these actions denote.« The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does

not denote what would be denoted by the bite. […] Play is a phenomenon in which the

actions of »play« are related to, or denote, other actions of »not play«.‖ (Bateson, 1972,

pp. 180, 181)

As such, the exchange of messages is in fact a meta-communicative, second order process,

operating in symbolic virtual space29

(Žižek, 1998), where expectations and promises are

related to, or denote, other non-expectations and non-promises. In other words, the

expectations and promises that are fueled by imagination are neither confirmed nor falsified but

they rather remain as potential to be (un)delivered30

.

Following Bateson‘s methodology, we ―frame‖31

the player-videogame relationship under the

prism of a premise system where we discern three types of messages, a triadic constellation of

possible exchanges that describes how the relationship becomes operative:

1. Messages of the sort of mapping (an) expectation to (a) promise; the types of

messages that resolve into binary matching of expectations and promises, which either

confirm or falsify them.

29

Žižek is using the Lacanian triad (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) to elaborate how symbolic processes

have to be experienced in a virtual space in order to be operative. His examples include symbolic

authority and beliefs. For the former to be perceived as effective and actual it must not be fully actualized

but remain virtual on the level of threat, otherwise it is undermining itself. For the latter, he argues that

beliefs operate in a virtual domain, in the sense that none has to directly believe; they become operative

by presupposing that some else believes, thus it is enough to assume that someone else believes in

order to have an operative belief. In both cases, virtuality is an essential element for them to be

operative; if a threat is actualized then undermines itself and similarly someone that believes too

immediately, too directly is losing subjectivity, ending up looking like a puppet.

30

In the same way that Bateson also analyses threat as possible future: ―The clenched fist of threat is

different from the punch, but it refers to a possible future.‖ (Bateson, 1972, p. 181).

31

A psychological frame.


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2. Messages which simulate the mapping of (an) expectation to (a) promise; the types of

messages that neither confirm nor falsify expectations and promises.

3. Messages which enable the receiver to discriminate between the two above messages.

As such, the third type of message is setting up the frame upon which the paradox is based,

essentially leaving space for only three possible outcomes from a user-artifact relationship:

a) A full and perfect overlap between expectations and promises; when all expectations

are promised and confirmed (see Figure 18, a). This is a perfect mapping.

b) A partial mapping between expectations and promises; when some expectations and

promises are confirmed and the rest are falsified (see Figure 18, b). That is an partial

mapping.

c) A framed mapping between expectations and promises; when some expectations and

promises are confirmed while the rest are not falsified, remaining as potential (see

Figure 18, c). This is the mapping that we term playful mapping between expectations

and promises.

Figure 18. Possible resolutions of the user-artifact relationship


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Instantly one sees the important element here; playful mapping are not so much dependent on

the expectations and promises that are confirmed but rather to the ones that fall in the second

type of message exchange. That is to say, that playful mappings are not so much about the

delivery of all expectations to the user but of the ones left as future potentials.

Of course, we do realize that not everything can be left as potential and some expectations

must be mapped with promises. However, the pull operates under the premise that some

expectations and promises will never be validated or falsified. Indeed such premises are quite

common in games; sometimes used both on micro (i.e. to pull/push the player from one

action/level to the next) and macro (i.e. to pull/push the player though the entire

game/interaction) levels. For example, in Pac-Man the expectation/promise of ending the game

by clearing a level is never validated or falsified, pushing the player from level to level. Valve‘s

Portal is also a good example of an operative macro-potential premise; throughout the game

the player is promised that at the end of the game ―there will be cake‖, a promise that is neither

confirmed nor validated at any point throughout the game, essentially creating a mythology

around it that spanned and spread beyond the boundaries of the game itself32

.

However, we argue here that such mappings are not only met in games but in everyday

objects and processes as well. Thus, the pull is not bound on some universal characteristics

shared across all artifacts, but rather on the ―plasticity‖ of these characteristics. For example,

take a simple utility artifact such as the paperclip; how else can we explain the transformation

of a paperclip into a sculpture (see Figure 19) other than a playful mapping between the user

and the artifact?

32

A quick search on the internet will reveal the extent that the mythology of Portal‘s ―cake‖; videos, fan

sites and even dedicated dictionary entries show how motivating a playful mapping with a videogame

can be.


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Figure 19. A paperclip dinosaur

Hence, in the center of notion the pull, we position the relationship between the user and the

artifact; that is to say, that in the above example, the playful mapping of a paperclip is not

solely attributed to the user or the paperclip itself. It is after some ―friction‖, a level of familiarity

and intimacy with the physical and immaterial (i.e. digital) attributes of the artifact that playful

mappings can occur. As Hans successfully contemplates:

―At one level, novelty and repetition—and the play between them—determine the

context of play, for play clearly needs both. It is the repetition involved in any playful

context that makes the difference possible at all; for whereas in the strictest sense there

may be no repetition, everything differing to some degree even in its ―repetitions." the

sense or repetition provides the structure which allows the difference to be introduced.

In this regard, all play shares one thing with games: a familiar structure that allows one

to play with the unfamiliar. This familiar structure is not universal: it is contingent upon

the particular context of play. Nor is this familiar structure always the same.‖ (Hans,

1981, p. 28)

We thus acknowledge both the perpetual nature of the interaction processes as well as the

necessary element of learning. For we see the former as a round of steps/loops between the

―fuelling‖ of expectations and promises during the overall relationship and the latter as the

confirming/mapping of some expectations and promises. As such, we see learning as the

unavoidable scaling of the confirmed expectations and promises, as the users realign them

over the steps of exchange. Thus, it becomes clear that if we treat user and artifact as static

entities, then inevitably we shall run onto a mapping of the second type, where the relationship

between the user and the artifact translates all expectations and promises into a perfect

mapping (all that is to learn, is learnt).


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To overcome this deadlock, Salen and Zimmerman suggest that despite the static structure of

games, their temporal component allows for a multiple of possibilities, termed possibility

space, and as such every play instance will be a unique experience for the player:

―But the experiential path that a player takes through the space will vary each time the

game is played. Every play of the game will be unique, even though the rules of the

game, its formal structure, remain fixed. This quality of games, that a game provides the

same consistent structure each time but a different experience and outcome every time

it is played, is a powerful engine that sustains and encourages play. We refer to this

concept by the shorthand term same-but -different.‖ (Zimmerman & Salen, 2004, p.

340)

However, we would like to draw the attention from the structural elements of the game, and

position it on the possibility of the temporal alteration of the player. We believe, that the

players/users not only modify the expectations and promises over time, but also get altered

themselves; it is this continuous change of the player/user that creates the space of infinite

possibilities. Thus, the context of play changes because the player has changed and the

concept of ―same-but-different‖ translates into ―same-game-but-different-player‖. As such, this

transformative process for the player/user is a creative one; the seeing of something out of

something that is not, and that has not been.

It is this creative process that gamified applications should aim for. We believe that the role of

gamification in the design of everyday life products and services is not to drive us through a

process of achieving goals, but to enable this transformative process. Thus, the role of the

gamification designer is to devise methods that will initiate such processes.

Concluding here, we would like to emphasize once more, the importance of moving beyond an

approach of play and playfulness with/in games–as–rigid systems. Instead we offered here a

dialectic decoupling of the user-artifact relationships and we showed how playfulness and play

even though conceptually different, they are both constituents of a unified process which we

termed as pull. Armed with this knowledge, we shall now move into elaborating some design

guidelines that can help the gamification designer to design for pull, eliciting playful mappings

between the user and gamified applications.


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3.2.2 (Against) Trivialization

From our previous discussion about the concept of pull in games it should already be clear that

there is a certain element of repetitiveness or a cyclical process of duplication that comes with

the iterative discourse of the user-artifact relationship. We suggested that in order to maintain a

frame of playful mappings through time, the user must keep realigning their perspective.

Essentially, they must keep altering themselves through every iteration in order to keep

operating the distinctions between first and third type of messages (from the triadic

constellation).

It is time now to suggest that it is this issue of user realignment that perhaps the premise of

gamification is attempting to address. We term it here trivialization, and we see it as a

malfunction of the user-artifact relationship, in that the user has lost the ability to set up frames

of interaction in such a way, that the triadic constellation of messages becomes inoperative;

third type of message are not decoded and thus we have only perfect and partial mappings.

We thus view trivialization as a process met mostly in high productivity spaces. The reason

seems fairly obvious; when many decisions and actions need to be taken repeatedly in a very

complex context, shortcuts need to be employed. These shortcuts take up the role of authority

that wears off all rules and canons, essentially rendering them impractical and overall

dysfunctional.

Thus, we could read trivialization as a mindlessness state/mode of human operation where the

subject is submerged in a context (i.e. a specific task) (Langer, 1989). As such, we view

trivialized aspects not only in workspaces but also in all aspects of everyday life as potential

areas of interest for gamified applications. Our motivation is based both on the potential of

such applications as well as their impact. Following Hans‘ lead, we believe that trivialization

with its systematized and standardized actions, creates the necessary basis for the potential of

play. As such, we see that trivialization as a process which has inherently elements of play and

it is this context that any gamification application must tap into.


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Thus the goal of a gamified application is to aid the transition of the user towards a state of

mindfulness where this context can be enabled:

―Mindfulness may be seen as creating (noticing) multiple perspectives, or being aware

of context.‖ (Langer, 1989, p. 138)

There are different methods through which such a transition can achieved, but probably the

most effective one is surprise. In the previous part we saw Khaslavsky and Shedroff suggest

the use of surprise as part of a seductive strategy and indeed, we believe that surprise is also a

critical element of the pull. In the context of trivialization, surprise, the intrusion of an

unexpected or alien element will ―force‖ a context difference which in turn, will demand from

the user a mindful response. The process, also known as von Restorff effect (see Von Restorff,

1933), is indeed a powerful tool in the hands of the gamification designer, since it presupposes

an existing condition of mindlessness or at least a state of limited context awareness. In that

sense, trivialized processes are prime examples of candidates for using surprise as strategy.

However, even though surprise as a strategy can be very effective, it can also be very limited.

As we already mentioned, the premise of surprise is in fact a trivialized process, a process

whose subject is operating mindlessly and as such, the transition between mindlessness and

mindfulness, or mundane and novelty cannot be applied repeatedly. Consequently, surprise

must be used with prudence and should aim at creating a long-lasting effect rather than a

gimmick; the ideal case of a surprise would entail a permanent change in the user state, who in

turn, would be alert and conscious for new potential contexts and not revert back into

trivialization space.

There are various techniques of introducing surprise with variable advantages and drawbacks.

One of the most used examples of introducing surprise, especially in software applications, is

‗Easter Eggs‘, usually witty system responses (messages, graphics, sounds, behavior etc.) to

unexpected or erroneous functionality (systemic crashes, invalid input etc.). Easter eggs have

largely been associated with computer software and even more with videogames since the

term has been nailed by Atari when Warren Robinett (developer of the first graphical adventure

game ―Adventure‖, who left intentionally a secret/undocumented item serving only as a way to


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access the developer‘s signature33

; see Robinett, 2006). However we do not view Easter Eggs

here in the context of the videogame subculture that followed ―Adventure‖34

, but rather as

temporal unexpected events that bring tension in the fabric of a constituted reality but still take

place within that reality, essentially strengthening playful mappings.

As such then, Easter Eggs are third type messages that validate playful mappings. It is this

transitory nature of them that can make trivialized process operative, yet playful. Thus their

limitedness is their strength; a permanent Easter Egg is a feature, an expectation that is always

met by a promise and result and as such is rendered trivialized in itself. However, even though

Easter Eggs are of transitory nature, their effect can be long-lasting, creating memorable

interactions that are able to generate mythologies that in many cases surmount the

activity/game itself. As such, not all Easter Eggs are equally powerful; the timing, the impact

and the uniqueness of the Easter Egg are crucial to its effect. For example, two very similar

cases, the Firefox‘s and Chrome‘s crash Easter Eggs (see Figure 20, a and b respectively)

have very different effects. While Firefox‘s case is using a direct, more personal language

(―Well, this is embarrassing‖) to display an error message, Chrome‘s case makes a cultural

reference to an underground culture (―He‘s Dead, Jim!‖).

Figure 20. a)Firefox‟s 3.0 Easter Egg error message; b) Chrome‟s Easter-Star Trek reference-Egg error

message.

33

An interesting discussion, but perhaps beyond the scope of this thesis, would be the critical analysis of

the emergence of this first Easter Egg, considering authorship in videogames.

34

Our argument here against it is that Easter Eggs in games became so well established, that almost

operate as a feature, essentially losing their surprise potential.


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As such, we see Chrome‘s case as a much stronger example of an Easter Egg implementation;

while Firefox‘s message, even though witty, is bound to ―wear off‖ soon, Chrome‘s case is

building on top of an underground culture in which fans derive pleasure by repeating a

memorable script line as part of constructing new mythologies (Jenkins, 1992, p. 76).

Figure 21. Chevrolet Orlando Play-Doh full scale replica in the streets of London.

Perhaps it does not come as a surprise then that this notion of Easter Eggs has been recently

explored and implemented by marketers; examples like ‗Toy-Racer‟, Chevrolet‘s Orlando

promotional campaign in the UK, which had a 1.5 tones, full scale Play-Doh replica of the car

(see Figure 21) placed in random London locations. The goal of such campaigns is not only to

create a so-called ―media stunt‖, but indeed, reaffirm playful mappings with the artifact:

―Hopefully our launch will appeal to the inner-child in every parent and it will become a

firm family favorite.‖ (Turton, 2011)

Similarly, flash mob35

campaigns like Saatchi & Saatchi‘s dance flash mob event for T-Mobile in

London‘s Liverpool Street station (see Figure 22), are also ideal exemplars of both the temporal

nature and surprise of an effective ―Easter Egg‖. Such events remain memorable and generate

35

Flash mob events are ―public gatherings of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile

phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again.‖ (Oxford English Dictionaries Online, 2004)


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a feeling of spontaneity precisely because they question the fabric of the constituted reality of

everyday life36

.

Figure 22. Saatchi & Saatchi‟s dance flashmob event for T-Mobile in London‟s Liverpool Street station.

We thus see Easter Eggs as more than rewards for explorative behavior; they can key the user

into different states and frames, altering trivialized processes to playful mappings.

Another way to break the norms of trivialization is ambiguity. We would like to propose

ambiguity here as the means of interpreting a trivialized process by its subjects; as Gaver et al

note:

―by thwarting easy interpretation, ambiguous situations require people to participate in

making meaning. This can involve the integration of previously disconnected

discourses, the projection of meaning onto an unspecified situation, or the resolution of

an ethical dilemma. In each case, the artefact or situation sets the scene for meaning

making, but doesn‘t prescribe the result.‖ (Gaver, Beaver, & Benford, 2003)

Thus for Gaver et al. ambiguity does not refer to a property of the artifact, but rather to the user-

artifact relationship, essentially a property that can lead to playful mappings of a trivialized

process through appropriation. Hence, whereas Easter Eggs come as a surprise to the user-

36

Our argument is that we shouldn‘t be misled here; the fact that they are meaningless (at least on

appearances, of course there is a promotional campaign which will be connected to the event, but

usually these events are not experienced as endorsed by a brand), unpoliticized, devoid of demands

and claims (contrary to political demonstration for example) is only adding to their strength. Thus if such

events were orchestrated as targeted campaigns for poverty, underdevelopment, climate change and so

on, like many gamification advocates suggest (see McGonigal, 2011) then that advantage would be lost,

losing their efficiency.


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artifact relationship, ambiguity comes as a question. Of course in the context of trivialized

processes, the user operates under mindlessness and as such, it is up to the artifact‘s

attributes to set the question. In that sense ambiguity can take many forms, setting different

questions to different situations and processes.

Gaver et al. distinguish three different types of ambiguity (see Gaver, Beaver, & Benford, 2003):

1. Ambiguity of Information, where the representation of information gets over- and under-

defined in order to elicit a sense of incompleteness, requiring from the user to ―fill in‖

the missing/incorrect parts.

2. Ambiguity of Context, which arises when the familiar artifacts or processes are set

inside alien contexts, forcing the user to combine seemingly incompatible meanings.

3. Ambiguity of Relationship, which is a much more personal type, challenging the very

existence of the relationship and the user‘s beliefs and values.

Based on this classification, Gaver et al. propose a detailed series of tactics for enhancing

these different types of ambiguity (see Gaver, Beaver, & Benford, 2003):

For enhancing ambiguity of information, the designer can:

o Use imprecise information representations to emphasize uncertainty and push

the user into filling the gaps.

o Over-interpret data to encourage speculation; the use of exaggeration can be

used to puzzle the user and essentially turn him from planner to speculator.

o Expose inconsistencies to create a space for interpretation; the use of

deliberately incompatible information in order to challenge the user‘s interpretive

skills.

o Cast doubt on sources to provoke independent assessment; by obfuscating the

source of information the user is challenged to affirm their validity.

For creating ambiguity of context, the designer can:


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o Implicate incompatible contexts to disrupt preconceptions; by combining

contexts that bear not match, the designer can juxtapose and challenge existing

mental models.

o Add incongruous functions to breach existing genres; by adding unusual

functionality to existing genres, the designer does not only create new genre

possibilities, but can also form a critique for the modalities of the established

ones.

o Block expected functionality to comment on familiar products; the reverse of the

above, by taking away expected functionality, the designer can also comment

on existing, well established designs and processes.

For provoking ambiguity of relationship, the designer can:

o Offer unaccustomed roles to encourage imagination; by designing idiosyncratic

artifacts, the designer is ―asking‖ their users to adopt unusual roles.

o Point out things without explaining why; closely related to ambiguity of

information, instead of over-interpreting data, the designer can also highlight

data without explaining why in order to create a sense of questioning their

significance.

o Introduce disturbing side effects to question responsibility; by introducing

disquieting implications to the design, the designer can take the user ―out their

comfort zone‖.

Even though the above list seems fairly thorough, we believe that it is neither exhaustive, nor

definitive. As with surprise, we view ambiguity as a powerful tool for the gamification designer

but also one with many limitations. First and foremost, it must be used with caution and

measure; as Gaver successfully notes, introducing ambiguity indiscreetly can very easily result

in self-indulgent, confusing and frustrating designs that are easily dismissed (Gaver W. W.,

2002). Moreover, within the context of our trivialized processes examination, ambiguity is not

enough by itself; confronting ambiguity within a mindless state does not guarantee the

transition to mindfulness. The experiment/example of Wittgenstein with the ambiguous figure(s)

of a duck/rabbit (see Figure 23) shows that even though we might be challenged by ambiguity


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we are not necessarily making reflective viewing of the situation (i.e. the deterministic factor of

which of the two we see rabbit or duck is not a matter of expectation but rather luck/angle of

viewing etc.), or in the words of Langer: ―We can be simultaneously mindful (on a molar level)

and automatic (on the molecular level).‖ (Langer, 1989, p. 153)

Figure 23. Wittgenstein‟s “duckrabbit” drawing

Hence, we would like to conclude here, that both surprise and ambiguity have the potential to

become the levers that alter trivialized processes into playful mappings, taking the user from a

state of mindlessness to mindfulness. However, they are not unconditional; they both need to

be balanced and adjusted to the situation, being adapted to the characteristics of each

trivialized process. Thus, we should stress that any gamification attempt over trivialized

processes must take into account the existing rules and schemas37

that govern the process.

Consequently, a systems approach cannot work; by viewing trivialized processes as systems

whose ―faulty‖ components can be replaced by games (as systems), we fail to address the

broken user-artifact relationship. The role of the gamification designer then is to design

strategies that will enforce not the bypassing or subversion of the rules but their playful

interpretation.

37 Something that hold true for all gamification approaches to existing applications and products.


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3.2.3 Reflection

In the previous chapter, when we tried to encapsulate the context within which gamification

arose, we addressed the peculiar case of critical design. We then drew the parallels between

critical design and gamification and stressed out the importance of reflection both for users and

designers.

Thus, we believe it is time now to elaborate the role of reflection we see for gamification. Based

on our analysis of the pull, we highlighted trivialized user-artifact relationships as targets for

gamification and proposed some methods for subverting that trivialized relationship into playful

mappings. It is this element of subversion, the passing from mindlessness to mindfulness that

draws the connective link between our vision of gamification and ‗critical reflection‘, as Sengers

et al. term it:

―critical reflection [refers to] bringing unconscious aspects of experience to conscious

awareness, thereby making them available for conscious choice. This critical reflection

is crucial to both individual freedom and our quality of life in society as a whole, since

without it, we unthinkingly adopt attitudes, practices, values, and identities we might not

consciously espouse. Additionally, we recognize that reflection is not a purely cognitive

activity, but is folded into all our ways of seeing and experiencing the world.‖ (Sengers,

Boehner, David, & Kayne, 2005, p. 50)

As such, we do acknowledge that critical reflection does not always address our direct

relationship with artifacts or technology at large, but rather processes that can incorporate

technological, interpersonal and social dimensions. The role of reflection in gamification is

more didactic than instrumental.

Thus, we would like to propose two approaches of critical refection that gamification can relate

to: a lenses approach to data readings and the power of pretending.

For the former we have to pick up the line from our trivialization discussion in the previous part.

There is a core element within trivialized processes that many times passes unnoticed;

trivialization processes are most often accompanied with a large volume of data that is

generated by the activities taking place in them and remain outmoded. As such, we believe that


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this data could be the source and trigger point of a reflective process which would involve the

user tracing the behaviors and rules that govern that trivialization.

Contrary to ambiguity strategies discussed in the previous part (ambiguity of information in

particular), we propose here a lenses approach to trivialized data. The lenses here refer to the

prism through which the data are read; not directly a data visualization and representation

approach, but rather a method that determines the depth of the data presented to the user.

Hence, the role of the gamification designer in such a case, is to create these lenses as a

measure of critical distance, moving the user from macro-to-micro and from macro-to-micro

readings of data. Thus, by configuring the distance between the user and the data, the

trivialized process is generating, the gamification designer creates a ―clash‖ between the

perceived relative and the recorded absolute, enabling the space for new interpretations of the

process.

Existing applications of this approach usually afford multiple lenses, allowing the user to

―calibrate‖ the critical distance. For example, Ippei Matsumoto‘s ―Life Counter‖ (see Figure 24),

lets the user choose how many years they would like, or expect to, live and start the counter;

once activated, it counts down the selected time span at four different rates: the number of

years, days, hours, or seconds to go are shown on different faces. Of course we do realize that

the example here is highly conceptual, but the important point is that even though the reflective

process is initiated by the designer, the critical distance is decided by the user; depending on

which side the user chooses to display, the effect of the counter upon the reflective process is

different.


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Figure 24. Life Counter by Ippei Matsumoto

Perhaps a more concrete example would be the sports-tracking application ―Endomondo‖,

which monitors the user‘s sport activities (jogging, swimming, skiing etc.), tracking every move.

That data is then collected and presented to the user in daily/weekly/monthly reports with

analytical statistics and metrics about their performance; the user can then analyze their

exercise sessions and plan further workouts (see Figure 25).

Figure 25. Endomodo offers the user a detailed report about their workout activities


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The workouts here are the activities that generate the data that if not tracked and stored by the

application, would be perceived only relatively (i.e. running around the park/block etc.). Thus

the role of technology here is neutral; it passes no any normative judgments about the workout

(i.e. if it was fast, slow intense etc.). Then, the role of the application is to take that tracked data

and present it as a chronicle of past events (workout) in absolute format, the depth of which is

regulated by the user (i.e. monthly, weekly, daily, per workout, per phase, per step etc.).

However we shouldn‘t be deceived here, the application is not addressed to professional

athletes that need a detailed tracking of their performance development, but regular and casual

everyday users. For it is the ―clash‖ between the above relative of ―running around the block‖

and the thereafter absolute the application is offering. As such, after the workout they can

reflect on what a ―run around the block‖ means, for their body/heartbeats/fitness/health and

their topographic endeavors (i.e. exploring routes).

Again here, the application is only offering the lens with which the user can look back and

reflect upon the activity; the critical distance must be found by the user. Thus the role of the

gamification designer is to facilitate critical reflection, not design explicitly for it. Whereas critical

design tries to unveil the ideology of technological artifacts, applications such as ―Endomondo‖

aim at exposing the user to the different layers/levels of their relationship with an activity; it is

then through this process of moving/reading between the layers that helps the user engage in

playful mappings with the activity.

Thus we propose a design attitude here that is not forcing the context within which the

reflective process takes place but rather one with more subtlety, where the user is building the

reflective context, making the process more intimate and personal. As such, we would also like

to propose an approach that is based on the power of pretending. As Russel Davies in his

illustrious presentation in Playfull ‘09 successfully noted, the power of pretending has been

―pushing‖ individuals to overcome the mundane:

―when I walk through the crowds on Oxford Street a tiny part of me is pretending I'm an

assassin slipping steely-eyed through the crowds in order to shake the agents on my

tail. And I bet it's not just me. I'm not saying I'm massively deluded, just that, very often,


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some bit of us is always trying to play those games, to make mundane things more

exciting.‖ (Davies, 2009)

Again, we see the connection between the transition of contexts, from the mundane to the

enacted, imaginary, playful. The critical point here however is that with pretending, the fantasy

must remain at a critical distance, elusive, lingering between the real and imaginary:

―But it's not just a matter of dressing up. A successful pretending object has to

delicately balance pretending affordance with not making you look like an idiot. That's

why so many successful pretending objects are also highly functional. As anyone who's

been down the Tactical Pants rabbit-hole can tell you it's easy to obsess for ages about

exactly the right trouser configuration for your equipment (ooh-er), all with a perfectly

straight face. But every now and then you have a moment of self-awareness and realise

you're just pretending to be a cop or a soldier from the future or Val Kilmer. And of

course, what you're really doing is both things at once. You're being practical and

thinking about function and you're pretending. But you need some plausible deniability -

the functional stuff needs to be credible. Which is why pretending objects that are too

obvious don't work. You're no longer pretending in your own head, you're play acting in

the world.‖ (Davies, 2009)

Once again the awareness of the critical distance is coming from the pretender, encapsulating

the element of reflection in a different way than critical design. We see the difference in the way

that both contexts and their exchange are treated. Whereas an intrusive alteration of context will

―force‖ the reflective process, that is to say that the transition of mindlessness-to-mindfulness

will be externally imposed, the power of pretending gives space to the user to reflect within his

own context/terms38

.

Thus for the power of pretending to be operative, a double-fold strategy must be employed,

ensuring the credibility by maintaining the artifact functional while reducing the hidden

38

Dunne‘s ―para-functionality‖ method is superimposing the designer‘s criticism on the artifact,

rendering it authoritative, impersonal and didactic:

―They challenge the impossibility of the possible. It is not enough to look and decode their visual

iconography: they must be used. Through use, or at least by modeling a scenario of use in the

mind, the observer discovers new ways of conceptualizing reality.‖ (Dunne, 2008, p. 67)

Actually this least denominator is also paradoxically the maximum; since most of these items are only

used in museums and galleries it is impossible to use, but only create scenarios of use. Even when they

do get out of a gallery context, they are highly conceptual and didactic limiting themselves to modeling

their use. Thus "understanding" them is (more than) sufficient, they (may) challenge your curiosity and

mental models, but as soon as their dialectic potential is deployed they are rendered useless.


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elements to the minimum of an ensured subtlety. And while the former is almost ensured within

the context of gamification (otherwise it would be a gamified application but rather a game), the

latter is in most cases not; most gamified applications try to capture the attention of the user

and heighten it. And there is the critical paradox, because for the power of pretending stems

from ―inattention, not concentration‖ (Davies, 2009). Hence, ―less is more‖ in this case, for

there is a hard balance between cuing and imposing.

It is not a surprise then that most successful examples of harnessing the power of pretending

come from industrial design. Fiat‘s Tipo dashboard (see Figure 26), which became an 80‘s

sensation, ―transforming‖ a family car into a futuristic transport vehicle by digitizing all

numerical indicators. The balance between functional and imaginary here is paradigmatic; the

dashboard was as operative as any other, the function of the automobile remained the same,

but the experience of driving it, was transformed by the power of pretending.

Figure 26. Fiat‟s Tipo digital dashboard

But yet again balance is pivotal; while Tipo‘s dashboard elegantly balances between too few

and too many clues, another Italian design for a (concept) car‘s39

dashboard (see Figure 27)

loses its credibility by ―trying too hard‖ to place the same cues that Tipo‘s design does so

elegantly.

39

Lancia Orca was only a concept car, developed by ItalDesign for Lancia; it was never commercially

released.


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Figure 27. Lancia‟s Orca dashboard

Perhaps a helpful metaphor of thinking about the power of pretending for gamification designs

would be ―toys for adults‖; incorporating the same principles as regular toys, but with enough

resonance so that their use can be ―accepted‖40

.

3.2.4 (Regulating) Social Play

In the beginning of this part we talked about how the pull translates into playful mappings, a

premise frame which in order to be operative must rely on a meta-communicative domain of

dialectic exchanges. We also proposed how gamified applications can construct and restore

such exchanges, in order to achieve playful mappings. However, there is a plethora of similar

interactions that already exist, especially in the social strata, which remain untapped by

gamified applications. Thus, the question is ―how can we design gamified applications that

build up on the existing playful mappings found in every day social interactions?‖

We would like to focus here particularly on a domain of underlying social competition, a space

of latent antagonistic relationships which resists systematization or any kind of external

40

Contrary to kids, adults very often need some stronger justification in order to use a toy, usually tied to

a utilitarian result. The example here comes from Davies again, who proposed the wrist watch as the

―ultimate‖ pretending item; indeed the wrist watch has a utilitarian role, but it is the ―pretend value‖ that

most consumers pay for and not the utility of it (Davies, 2009). As such, we see this as one more

argument for a contextual, situation-based approach to gamification design.


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authority. In fact, for this space to operative, any authority at all must come from within, and

thus the traditional gamification model, which addresses this space as a system to be

regulated41

, faces many problems. As such, in order to design applications for this space of

unregulated social competition we once again need a different approach.

But first we need to elaborate on what we term here as unregulated social competition.

Unregulated social competition is a domain of rivalry relations between individuals that are part

of a broader social system but remain unregulated by formal or symbolic regulatory authorities

(law, belief systems etc.). In fact, examples of such relationships can be found almost in every

social activity. Imagine a party situation, individuals will participate in all kinds of competition

over the course of the party and thereafter; who is the most fashionably dressed, who is the

best dancer, who knows all the latest song hits etc. People in all kinds of social situations will

undergo numerous challenges, competing against others, over goals, that are set arbitrarily

and subjectively by social collectiveness.

While most research on competition has been focused on areas where such is regulated, very

little is known about how people form and engage into these rivalry relationships. We believe,

that is due to the fact that such relationships can hardly be examined in an objective manner.

With trends, opinions and tastes changing not only over time, but also over the population of a

network/system, a ―fluid‖ dynamism is generated which is very hard to be examined,

scrutinized and judged in a vacuum.

Indeed, it is this fluidity that such systems operate under, that makes them inherently resilient

to any external regulation. Contrary to the rigidity of agôn, found in all sports competition and

subject to objective regulation, social competition has almost always no winners or losers. The

reason, is its resistance to objectification; it is almost impossible to regulate a competition of

―the most fashionably dressed individual at a party‖ in a universally accepted manner, when

personal taste and subjective judgment render it perplexing.

41

We have already raised our objections to system-centric view of games when it comes to gamification.

We believe that the domain of unregulated competition is just another example that validates the

argument against such a perspective.


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In practice, the only way that such competition can come to any resolution is through closed

social agreements. Social groups, cliques or any other social constructs in which their

members have more or less similar subjective judgments are the only ones that can ―play and

resolve‖ a game of social competition. Thus the challenge of the gamification designer is

twofold:

On one hand, we have the transient spatial and temporal characteristics that define the

participants in this type of play; it occurs in closed groups, the members of which, share

a close proximity of judgments. This is fundamental for a consensual resolution based

on socially shared judgement. Moreover, these groups are formed dynamically,

changing both members and context.

At the same time, we have the transient nature of the criteria on which judgment is

passed in these resolutions. Even within closed groups, the criteria with which judgment

is passed, are in a continuous alteration. They are reformed and revalidated so often,

we can claim that every resolution process is unique.

Thus, it obviously becomes apparent that these two practically limit any attempts to broaden

the space for a more persistent and participatory competition to take place. Consequently we

believe that the role of the gamification designer in such situations, is not to systemize through

the introduction of rules, but to address these two constraints, ―unlocking‖ the space of

unregulated social competition into a space of persistent social play. The goal, is to ―free‖

social play from its transient limits and open it up to a broader base.

One way that such a solidification of social play can be approached is through a collective

formulation of judgment criteria. Crowdsourcing techniques like crowdvoting, can help create a

set of judgment criteria that are both more permanent and universally acceptable.

Consequently, instead of imposing an external authority, we counter-propose a grassroots

judgment through massification and averaging. Thus the goal for a gamified application is not

to try to contain social play within rigid structures, but allow for the user to scale up the

structures by creating continuity and persistence in judgments. This way, gamified applications


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can open up the base of social competition to a greater scale, offering users a new persistent

gamespace/arena of social competition.

3.2.5 Coda: Advice on How to Read this Chapter

We do realize here the contradiction between the first (3.1) and the second section (3.2) of this

chapter. Whereas in the former we layout a rigorous model applicable to almost any situation,

our own suggestions in the latter are not concrete techniques, meant to be deployed over any

situation. As such, we rather view them as design guidelines, a conceptual toolset for the

designer‘s repertoire. Consequently, they must be viewed contextually on an ad hoc basis; not

all problems and situations can be solved through a platform of rigid models.

As such, we believe that a great deal of thought and process experimentation is needed before

we ascribe conclusions about the appropriateness of an approach to a design situation. As we

saw, most of the above guidelines are operative under the condition that they are used with

measure and precision. We thus believe that the potential and possibilities of gamification lie

within these fine balances and in not the introduction of new ―game mechanics‖ within the

existing model.


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4. Composition: 5+3 Proposals

It is time now to compose and present our design proposals based on our explorative phase.

Our challenge here has not only been to deploy examples and practical concepts of the

theoretical standpoints of the previous chapter, but to make our proposals relevant and

applicable.

We thus tried to employ the same (design) methodology as we have been carrying on in this

work; that is examining a problem under the prism of design. As such, we tried to investigate

potential and existing problems and issues, and approach them with a gamification attitude in

mind. At the same time, we wanted to propose multiple solutions for one problem, effectively

showing and juxtaposing the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches, as well as

testing their appropriateness.

Hence, we divide this chapter in two sections. In the first one, we shall address a particular

problem within workspaces. We shall propose five different solutions, each based on a different

approach, taken from the ones we described in the previous chapter. In the second section, we

propose three different applications for three different situations; instead of applying

gamification on existing problems, we try to identify possible targets for a ground-up approach

to gamification.

Even though we view all our design proposals as concepts, they are highly functional; in that

their functionality can be explored and mediated through actual use. All of them can be

accessed and run from the accompanied CD-ROM, or through the web at:

http://itu.dk/people/chio/Thesis


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4.1 The Bundy Clock

As we mentioned above, we treated our conceptual proposals as pragmatic design challenges,

aiming to address existing and possible problems. We also mentioned that we want to offer the

reader a comparison of possible solutions addressing the same problem. As such, we shall lay

out five solutions all addressing a real workspace problem: ―can an automated attendance

monitoring system, encourage workers to consistently check for to work on time?‖

The subject of my first application has been the checking in and out of the workspace42

.

Traditionally done manually, using old mechanized clocks43

(see Figure 28, a), contemporary

solutions involve automated systems, based on either electronic tokens, which are usually

limited to big industrial workspaces (see Figure 28, b), or utilize the logon process of computer

workstations (see Figure 28, c). This latter version is the one I shall examine and base our

applications upon.

Figure 28. Different attendance tracking systems.

By using an individual username and password, the system can record and track when the+

employee logs on to his workstation, essentially recording his total working hours; this

information is kept on a data center and is usually used for payroll and project management.

However, regardless of the version used, there are two significant issues that employers have

to deal with the use of such systems. First and foremost is trivialization; when performed on a

daily basis, the process tends to become rudimentary, unpleasant and is more likely to be seen

as unnecessary, leading to problems and undesired work behaviors. Secondly, the automation

42

Mostly known as time and attendance systems, they are traditionally put into use for calculating with

precision the working hours of the employees as well as analytic/statistic purposes.

43

See Bundy clocks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_Clock)


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of the process does very little with the inherent problem of employees turning up late, or

leaving early. Thus the challenge at hand is: ―Can we design a logon process that can work

against trivialization, as well as afford for the employees to be consistent?‖

4.1.1 Points for Consistency

We name our first solution ―Points for Consistency‖44

which we believe reflects its functionality.

Every time the user/employee logs on to her workstation on-time, they receive points. The

points are calculated by a formula that takes into consideration multiple factors, like how many

minutes early the check-in is performed, how many working days in a row they have been

consistently checking-in on-time and how much earlier they check-in for work relatively to other

workers (i.e. an amount of points equal to the amount of fellow workers that haven‘t checked-

in). The specific formula is:

where c is a constant of points (depends on the size of the group/workforce), m is a modifier

calculated by the number of weeks which the user has been on-time (all five days on time), e is

the number of minutes before expected logon (how many minutes early the logon has been

performed) and w is the number of employees that have not yet logged in for the day.

This information appears on a small panel window after the successful logon to the workstation

computer and it appears while the operating system is loading up (settings and preferences)

making it almost impossible to miss or avoid (see Figure 29).

44

The digital concept can be found in the folder: ./Thesis/Logon/Points/ or at:

http://itu.dk/people/chio/Thesis/Logon/Points/


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Figure 29. Points for Consistency, points accreditation

These points are then added to a total history of points earned, and put against a leader board,

so that the user can compare how far/close she is from the top users (see Figure 30).

Figure 30. Points for Consistency, leader board

4.1.2 The Scout boy Worker

Our second solution is based on specific expressions of the behavior we want our automated

attendance system to afford45

. As such, we are using a badges/achievements system to

attribute to the user every time they exhibit such behaviors.

45

The digital concept can be found in the folder: ./Thesis/Applications/Logon/Badges/ or at:

http://itu.dk/people/chio/Thesis/Logon/Badges/


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Figure 31. The “Early Monday” badge

Thus, every time a user logs on the workstation the check-in time is compared against a range

of criteria; if one of these criteria is met, the user is awarded with a badge/achievement. This

badge/achievement is then added to the user‘s collection and can be viewed either in a

statistics panel at the workstation or be uploaded/posted on a social media profile (Facebook,

Twitter etc.) (see Figure 31).

4.1.3 The Lenient/Ruthless Clock

Our third solution termed the ―Lenient/Ruthless Clock‖46

is a basic logon system with a

modifiable clock. Whereas in standardized systems, the time settings of the workstation are

synchronized and ―locked‖ by the central report server, this version allows, and even

encourages, the user/employee to alter the clock settings of their workstation before login on

so that they can manipulate the starting time of their shift and be on-time (see Figure 32).

46

The digital concept can be found in the folder: ./Thesis/Applications/Logon/LClock/ or at:

http://itu.dk/people/chio/Thesis/Logon/LClock/


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Figure 32. The Lenient/Ruthless Clock

However, once the user changes the clock settings, they get temporarily ―locked‖, meaning

that they cannot be adjusted again within eight hours. Consequently, even if the user turns the

clock back in time for ten minutes in order to be on-time, the time settings remain, and thus

they still have to work a full eight hour shift and not for seven hours and fifty minutes47

.

The goal is of course to give the user a sense of gratification for perceiving that they are on-

time even when they are not, while at the same time keep shifts at a consistent duration (i.e. no

loss of labor).

4.1.4 „/worked‟

The next solution is inspired by the World of Warcraft‘s ―/played‖ macro command, which

displays the total amount of time played by the player divided in minutes, hours, days months

47

We assume a standard eight hour shift; it could be adjusted to the shifts of each employee individually.


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etc. divisions48

. Similarly, this solution presents to the user a panel of statistics about their

working times every time they logon to their workstation49

.

Figure 33. A detailed data table about working behavior

The information is a detailed representation of all the working hours of the employee including

overall time spent at work, absolute numbers and percentages about late/early, check-ins,

overtime etc. (see Figure 33).

The panel appears on screen when the operating system is loading up (settings and

preferences) making it impossible to miss or avoid, while remaining discreet since it does not

interfere or obstruct the whole process since the interaction is minimal and brief.

48

An example output would be: ―Total time played: 17 days, 16 hours, 49 minutes, 19 seconds‖

49

The digital concept can be found in the folder: ./Thesis/Applications/Logon/Stats/ or at:

http://itu.dk/people/chio/Thesis/Logon/Stats/


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4.1.5 “Office Coffee Cliques”, a Game Played at Work

Our final proposal for a gamified automated check-in system is much closer to a traditional

(board)/social game than any of the above50

. It is a weekly game that all employees can play at

the beginning of the work day through the logon interface.

The premise of this game is that every Monday, the users will undergo a recruiting process

when they logon to their workstations in order to form ―coffee cliques‖, groups of four that

compete every morning of the week for ―coffee favors‖. The goal is to ―owe‘ as few favors as

possible to other teams while ―being owed‖ as many as possible.

Figure 34. Office Coffee Cliques, assembling a new clique

The game starts every Monday morning; when the users logon to their workstations they have

a series of options; if a user is unclaimed by someone else then he should invite/claim three

other unclaimed users to join his ―coffee clique‖ (see Figure 34). When these users logon, they

will be informed they have been claimed by that user and now belong to that group. When all

users are claimed, a new round begins. Every morning of the week each user has to select one

out of three possible actions whenever they logon (see Figure 35):

50

The digital concept can be found in the folder: ./Thesis/Applications/Logon/Cliques/ or at:

http://itu.dk/people/chio/Thesis/Logon/Cliques/


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1. Make coffee for himself.

2. Make coffee for two of his clique members.

3. Ask someone outside his clique to make him some coffee.

Figure 35. Office Coffee Cliques, choosing daily action

The result of each action is determined by the actions of other users on that particular day:

If someone outside the user‘s clique asks him to make him coffee while he is making

coffee for himself, then the clique is awarded with one (1) point.

If the user is preparing coffee for two of the members of his clique and someone outside

the clique asks one of them to make her coffee then the clique is awarded two (2)

points.

If the user asks someone outside the clique to make him coffee and none is making

coffee for her (either herself or someone from he own clique) then the clique is awarded

with three (3) points.

At the end of the week (Friday), the clique with the most points wins a symbolic, palpable

reward51

and a new round begins.

51

In the form of a group reward, something like a fruit/wine basket or a paid dinner etc.


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4.2 The Thankbox

The Thankbox52

was conceived and developed based on our search for the mundane in

everyday life. As we analyzed in the previous chapter, our goal has been to identify trivialized

processes operating under mindlessness and force a shift in the perspective/context of the

user.

As such, we tried examining all the trivial processes that employees usually undergo through a

workday. One of the most apparent and early examples that came up, was a ―thanking ritual‖

that most often goes through email, SMSs, messengers and other electronic means of

communication. There are many instances where a piece of advice, a tip or a ―heads-up‖,

delivered through a telecommunications channel and must be replied by a simple message of

thanksgiving using the same medium.

This electronic form of etiquette is only partially trivial, since in most cases it hasn‘t gone

through a standardization process. This lack of standardization is often causing problems,

since it is usually disruptive, non-productive and thus forgotten or skipped.

52 The digital concept can be found in the folder: ./Thesis/Applications/ThankBox/ or at:

http://itu.dk/people/chio/Thesis/ThankBox/


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Figure 36. Nodes, a thanksgiving action in Thankbox

Hence with the Thankbox, we tried to not only imbue a playful framing on the process, but also

address this lack of standardization. The application is split in two parts/boxes. The first part

(Nodes) is an attempt to convert the thanksgiving process into an efficient, yet playful toy that

takes all the connections of the user‘s network (work network, social network etc.) and creates

a diagrammatic graph with nodes and links. Then the user has to select one of the nodes

(attached with a name) and thank the user corresponding to it (see Figure 36); the action is

then sent and stored in a central server which holds an archived dataset of all thanksgiving

actions.


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Figure 37. Cloud, a text cloud representation of all the thanksgivings received

The second part of the application (Cloud) is based on that dataset to generate a graphical

representation of all the people that have thanked the user, in the form of a text cloud; the more

thanksgivings received by an individual, the bigger their name appear in the cloud (see Figure

37). Thus the user can see from which nodes/individuals of their network they have received

most thanksgivings.

4.3 MovieTaste

MovieTaste53

was developed as a paradigm of how the domain of unregulated social

competition can be unearthed and utilized by gamification applications. The issue the

application is addressing is the elusive subject of taste in film-viewing. As most readers know,

there is always a form of antagonism in social situations about which individual has a good/bad

taste in films. Of course, matters of taste are by nature very subjective and as such, we do not

see the above issue as a problem; on the contrary we see the potential of such competitive

forces and as such we would like to propose a way that could be utilized to facilitate a much

more persistent and open social play.

53 The digital concept can be found in the folder: ./Thesis/Applications/MovieTaste/ or at:

http://itu.dk/people/chio/Thesis/MovieTaste/


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Hence, our solution was not to create a game application that would drive the players through

challenges and goals in order to reward/attribute the ones with the best taste in films, but rather

an application that allows them to engage in a competitive form of social play on their own

terms.

Figure 38. MovieTaste

Hence in MovieTaste is social application, both in terms of nature (i.e. it gains meaning only

through social/shared use) but also in practical terms (i.e. it is functional over social networks).

As such, users connect through their social network account to the application and by utilizing

the search functionality they can build their own film collection. Based on that collection, the

application is aggregating average ratings of each film from the Internet Movie Database

website (IMDB.com) and creates an index of ratings for the ―taste‖ of the user in films in

general, and for each genre (see Figure 38). Then the user can then select which of these

ratings they want to share with their friends, and also exchange film

suggestions/recommendations.


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4.4 Adult Challengers

Adult Challengers54

came as a proposal for a context where not only a combination of

approaches is required, but also social and personal sensibilities need to be addressed. As

such, we propose a different take on adult dating web services. We view the most important

problem with such services the uneasiness of the average user to provide the service operator

with sensitive personal information. Thus, whereas the dominant model of dating websites

requires a level of trust between the user and the service operator in order to be operable, we

suggest a playful approach that can build a much stronger bond of trust between users.

Adult Challengers shapes the process of sharing personal information as a form of inter-

personal (inter-user) challenges. All users can initiate a challenge over another user; in the form

of sharing some personal information (add preferences and details), creating content (post

videos, photos) or participate in activities related to the service (joining events)55

. The

challenge, along with a personalized message and a starting offer is then made public and

takes the form of an auction (see Figure 39).

54 The digital concept can be found in the folder: ./Thesis/Applications/AdultChallengers/ or at:

http://itu.dk/people/chio/Thesis/AdultChallengers/ 55

Obviously the list is not exhaustive here and the examples both here and in the digital application are

only the indicative.


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Figure 39. Adult Challengers, creating new challenge

Every user can bid for every challenge and when the auction time runs out, the winner and the

winning bid are conformed. If the challenged user accepts and executes the challenge, the

winning bid is transferred to his account and the challenge is credited to the highest bidder.

Thus the goal is to set a virtual economy running with ―challenge points‖ being traded through

auctions for personal details and content while users engage in playful interpersonal and social

exchanges.


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5. Assessment: Evaluating with(out) Points

In the previous chapter we sketched out our gamification solutions to different problems and

gave a brief overview of the reasoning behind their design. In this chapter we shall perform a

more rigorous analysis.

Even though, as we noted earlier, all our design concepts are functional, we chose not to test

them on a large scale; their functionality serves the purpose of elaborating their design

approach rather than stressing out their commercial potential. Thus, we view them as test

concepts and as such our assessment will be conceptual rather than quantitative.

Hence we start by examining our ―Bundy Clock‖ proposals, comparing the different

approaches regarding effectiveness and sustainability. We are not interested in declaring

winners and losers here, but rather show how the different approaches can elicit different

results in the long term. Next we shall assess each of our other solutions individually, trying to

highlight our design choices and argument for them.

5.1 Different Clocks, Same Time

5.1.1. Points for Consistency or Consistent Points?

We chose the use of points for our first proposal because points have the

advantage/disadvantage of equating their award with specific behaviors; we can assess

behavior, or even performance of a specific behavior, and award/deduct respective points.

Thus in this case we selected three specific behaviors from the employees:


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1. Come to work on-time; logon before a specific time.

2. Be consistent; have the least late days as possible.

3. Show devotion and enthusiasm; try show up earlier at work than others.

Hence the formula calculating the rewarded points after logging-on to the workstation reflects

the value of such behaviors.

Of course, one can clearly see the advantages of finity and fairness56

such a solution affords;

every user knows what to expect, in that the rules of the ―game‖ are clear, fixed and

unquestioned. In that sense, the calculating formula takes up the role of the regulating

authority, administering the process of checking in to work.

However, this type of points-for-behavior ―gameplay‖ will unavoidably lead to strategic planning

and micro-management of the behavior; instead of motivating behavior, the application will

motivate the collection of points. Thus the first problem arises when users will pursue the

collection of points by all means; this translates into a manipulative attempt in order to twist the

system against its static authority (the formula in this case)57

.

Moreover, there is also an issue of options; in this solution, the user is only left to compete

against other users on the leader board. Eventually this relentless strategy will reach a critical

point where a leading small group58

will keep pursuing the top positions of the leader board,

while the critical mass of users will just ignore and disregard the overall application59

. The

above problem was indeed an existing one for a gamified application; Foursquare, during its

last production iteration (version 2.0) faced harsh criticism when many users started (ab)using

56

You know what points you may score, even before you logon.

57

A similar argument is made by Kohn connects the inefficiency of rewards with the governing nature of

the rewarding authority and the loss of the user autonomy:

―rewards are usually experienced as controlling, and we tend to recoil from situations where our

autonomy has been diminished.‖ (Kohn, 2001, p. 78)

58

In which the user types could either be competition driven individuals (see Bartle‘s achievers Bartle,

2003), or dependants; individuals who are tied to the reward of points (which clearly is not the case for

most applications of gamification)

59

One could even claim that such an approach is utterly useless, since the initial motivation for designing

such a solution is to motivate employees that are not a competitive by nature.


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third party applications like ‗MayorMaker‟60

to gain advantage over the way Foursquare was

developed and earn points easier. The result was the creation of castes between the top

leaders of each leader board and the followers.

Finally, one even more significant problem with this proposal is that points must reflect a value

of something noteworthy, either in direct monetary sense or in social value. With a significant

number of users gradually dismissing these points over time, we see that any kind of social

value is doomed to be reduced to zero.

We thus conclude that a points approach has limited effectiveness and life-span; it fails to

address our problem in a way that is relevant for all users, it becomes less effective over time

and is essentially rendered practically useless in depth of time. In that regard, the only option is

to ―artificially‖ extend its complexity in order to mask the direct relationship between the points

awarded and the behaviors exerted, by (over)complicating the points calculation formula such

as the one used in this solution. Nonetheless, we regard it as a poor option, failing to alter

significantly the user(worker)-artifact(logon system) relationship.

5.1.2 The Scout boy Worker

In the previous part we saw that our attempt to approach our design problem with a points-

based solution proved to generate more problems that it solved. Thus, by deploying a badges-

based proposal instead, we tried to overcome some of these problems, while maintaining the

spirit of rewarding the user for specific behavior.

As such, our strategy was to expand both horizontally and vertically all desirable user

behaviors in order to create a matrix of conditions. Thus, the initial three behaviors (on-time,

consistency, devotion) had to be translated into more explicit classes which then could be

combined to create a sufficient range of variable (micro) behaviors. Then, we scaled up these

60

See http://mayormaker.com/.


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(micro) behaviors in order to add depth and duration to the overall process; Table 2 elaborates

the process we followed.

Scaling/Behavi

ors

Checking in on

time

Checking out

on time

…

.

Checking in on

time on

Mondays

Checking out

last

Daily Checked in on-

time badge

Checked out

on-time badge

…

.

Turned off the

lights badge

Weekly

Straight in week

badge

Straight out

week badge

…

.

Early Monday

badge

Office caretaker

badge

…. …. ….

…

.

…. ….

Monthly Straight in

month badge

Straight out

month badge

…

.

Morning rooster

badge

Last man

standing badge

Table 2. Behaviors-Badges matrix

Thus we see that by scaling (micro) behaviors we can diversify the conditions for a

badge/achievement award and consequently afford for different types of users. Competition

driven users can be addressed by setting competitive achievements, like being in the top-five

or max-week-performance targets; for more adventurous users, we can ―hide‖ achievement

conditions in complex behaviors like an employee that logs on first and logs off last while for

enhancing social interactions we can include conditions that require some basic level of social

exchange among workers like a group achievement for the best department61

.

Hence, it becomes rather obvious that the whole user experience is more personal (single

player) than our points approach; instead of competing against one another with the system

regulating the winners/losers, the users are challenged and rewarded on a personal level with a

system that is pushing them to be more serendipitous. Consequently, in order to induce social

value to the rewards and enable some basic social exchange, we added the option of

exhibiting/portraying the badges over social networks.

61

Again here, we refer to the four basic Bartle player types (see Bartle, 2003), but it obviously we could

expand them to the extended 8-types model or a custom framework based on play-personas (see

Canossa & Drachen, 2009)


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However, even though our badges approach is less problematic compared to the previous

point-based one, it does have the disadvantage of having a finite point of saturation. By this, we

mean a state where most of the achievements are awarded to all (interested) users – thus

rendering them inoperative. The solutions to this inherent problem are both costly and short-

termed; constant support and development of (micro) behaviors and achievements is not

always feasible or cost-efficient. For example in our problem, the desirable behaviors are so

limited that after some point it is no longer possible to extend the behaviors-rewards matrix by

combining (micro) behaviors; in this case scaling up is the only solution. However scaling is

not always the best option, since linear upscaling very often turns the whole process into a

boring grind.

Hence, we conclude that using badges is overall a better approach; it eliminates significant

problems of our points approach and it maintains the main principle of conditioning (rewarding

specific behavior). However, the cost and viability of such a solution are neither reduced nor

expanded respectively. As such, we do not view a badge approach as a panacea for all design

situations, but we reserve our opinion to claim that it can be both operative and efficient on

some others.

5.1.3. No Clock is Lenient

A rather different approach, this proposal was based on the idea of disengaging the notion of

being on-time for work with the login process. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, the

login of an employee on their workstation, is not only a trivial process of authentication, but

also signifies the employee‘s working hours, overloading the process with additional

characterization; being on-time, or being late for work. We view this additive significance as a

source of friction since its serious consequences can be at conflict with its trivial nature.

This collision between the trivialness of the process and the seriousness of its consequences is

abrogating any possibility for playful mappings. We argue that it is this ―external‖ authority (the


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algorithm, or supervisor that judges if the login and consequently the employer is on time for

work) that acts as a negating agent for any explorative or playful attitude of the user.

Thus with this proposal, we tried to reshape the seriousness of the action of logging in on-time.

Of course, being on-time in a workspace environment is important and very much a serious

matter for managers and work coordinators, but individuals will always, either by circumstance

or just nonchalance, ignore it and be late. Instead of punishing/non-rewarding them, perhaps

we could refute the importance/seriousness of the idea/notion of being on time.

By allowing the user to adjust the time settings, so that he can always logon on-time, we are

essentially turning the whole notion on its own head, but not in order to legitimize the

belatedness, but rather to create a space where the authority in question is absent, so that the

user can then reflect on his own behavior. In that sense, we designed the solution

instrumentally in order to become a vehicle for reflection, thus the experimentation with the

clock settings take up the form an exploratory process where the user is seeking meaning, or:

―a mechanism for developing new values and goals, for learning new things and for

achieving new understandings‖ (Bartle, 2003)

Consequently, we view this proposal as an instrumental approach towards forcing a reflective

process; by allowing the user to be curious and explore the possibilities of adjusting the time

settings, the process attempts to be a pivotal point of reflection of the overall idea of work,

working hours and being on-time. As such though, we believe that an objective assessment of

this solution‘s efficiency and viability is rather unfeasible. The aim of it, is neither to be used in

the long term, neither to adjust the users‘ actions; it is rather to make them be reflective of their

actions and raise their awareness during work time.

5.1.4 “/worked” (Works?)

As we mentioned in the previous chapter this version was inspired by World of Warcraft‘s

―played‖ macro command. It is rather obvious here that both Virtual World software and

automated time and attendance systems share the feature of tracking and logging the exact


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use time of their users, which represents a strict, absolute measurement stored in digital form.

This hard data is most often dismissed, it may exist in absolute terms only in data centers and

timesheets, but in the users‘ minds it exists as relative measure62

.

We believe that is not only the volume of data itself, but the overall trivialization process that

enforces this macro reading; as a process, or a behavior becomes more and more mundane,

the outcomes of that process become less scrutinized, and the distance between them and the

subject of the process grows larger63

.

Thus, with this solution, we attempted to reshape this data and present it in an informative

manner. The application is neither over nor under stating information, but is rather affording a

micro reading by extensive detailing.

As such, we foresee a clash between the perceived, relative measure of working hours and the

enforced micro reading of the hard data that the logging on process records. Our aim is

precisely this clash of the perceived relative and the recorded absolute; the dynamics of such

an impact can provide the distance required between the user and the action of logging on for

the instantiation of a reflective process.

The desired outcome of such a process is for the user to discover new meanings in the notion

of work and working hours. Through that we hope that new understandings of the role of work

and its overall significance in one‘s everyday life will arise, and that new attitudes and stances

will emerge towards one‘s commitment and consistency towards it. Thus, once more, we view

the assessment of this solution problematic; its efficiency and viability are not relevant with its

goals. However, in comparison to our previous approach we see a greater flexibility here;

whereas in our ―lenient clock‖ solution the reflective process is driven by the application, in this

case, the application is only providing the lens with which the user can initiate it.

62

A typical example of this would be an answer to the question ―How long have you been working on

this post?‖ which most commonly will come in format of ―Almost two years now‖ or ―It‘s been four

months now.‖ etc.

63

It couldn‘t be otherwise, in the previous example, consider someone returning an answer like

―31.556.926 seconds overall‖, it would sound rather obscene.


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5.1.5 Clique Logon

We view our last proposal as a bit more eradicated into a game; instead of ―borrowing‖ some

game elements, or just reward structures, such as points and badges, we followed a

grassroots approach and designed a game out of the logon process.

The users/players play a game of cooperation with a new round starting every week. The

overall process is not solely based on creating an incentive for login-on-time, but to also

promote camaraderie amongst fellow workers. The aim is to bond different groups of users and

afford communication and collaboration without fostering an unwanted environment of extreme

competition.

For that reason, both mechanics and thematics of the application are borrowed by practices

and behaviors already present in workspace environments. This way, we are not aiming at

creating or altering the reward scheme of a trivial process, or just ―prettifying‖ it, but rather

isolate the mundane and trivial elements of it, and re-tailor the whole process around them in a

way that makes them more interesting, engaging the users in playful mappings with it.

We thus believe that such an approach can have both effective and long lasting results. By

concluding the game every week, we open the space for users, making it more flexible for them

to engage at their own pace and rhythm, in contrast with other solutions which require

continuous and almost uninterrupted attention/engagement. Moreover, by making the game

cooperative we achieve two things. Even if some users become disinterested, the social

structures (groups) can still be operative. In addition to that, the fact that these groups are

temporary creates, an environment of familiarity and immediacy in the workspace. Hence, even

if the game becomes saturated in the long term, the possible positive benefits are considerably

adding weight towards such a solution.

Thus, concluding our proposals for the automated time and attendance system, we would like

to highlight once again that by not addressing specific actions or behaviors but contexts of


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application we can design gamified applications that can highlight, reflect and turn trivialized

processes into playful mappings.

5.2 Thanking the Box

The Thankbox is our first proposal that was designed with a grassroots approach; that is

instead of gamifying an existing application, we tried to bring gamification to address a

problem of trivialization within an existing context. As such, we looked into the trivialized

process of thanksgiving in productivity-oriented contexts such as the workplace, and used its

existing rules and canons as guides for our design.

However, as we mentioned in the previous chapter, we view this electronic form of etiquette as

not fully trivialized, since it lacks the element of standardization. Thus with the first part of our

proposal (Nodes), we tried to address this issue by creating a ―digital toy‖ that allows the user

to perform standardized actions of thanksgiving across their social/work network. The choice of

a toy approach is rather obvious here; our goal is to elicit playful mappings with the activity, the

thanksgiving process must be a brief, but still pleasant experience. In that sense it must be

both more efficient and more pleasing than any other alternative (SMS, email, messenger etc.);

that is the only way we see a trivialized process being operative in the long run.

Then, by storing the data of each thanksgiving action, we are creating the foundations for a

lens approach, giving the user the means to find the critical distance for a reflective process

between her and the action of thanksgiving within the active context. Thus, with the second

part of our solution (Cloud), we are using the above dataset to create a graphical

representation of all the thanksgiving activity the user has received. The use of text cloud as a

data visualization technique is again chosen with the same criteria as in Nodes; instead of

using a utility-connoted representation like graphs, charts or absolute numbers, we prefer a

subtle metaphor (i.e. the more thanksgiving actions received, the bigger the name appears).


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We thus view ThankBox as the result of a combination of approaches; subverting the trivialized

process by standardizing it, while using the data generated to afford a different reading on the

process. As such, its goal has been to be used as a proof-of-concept for both designing

gamification solutions from the ground up as well as synthesizing new ones, using multiple

approaches.

5.3 The Taste in Movies

As we mentioned in the previous chapter, MovieTaste was developed as a paradigm

application of using gamification to unearth unregulated social competition in the field of taste

in film-viewing. Its goal is not to create a rigid structure by rule-making, but rather to allow for a

broader social play to emerge through the opening of competition to a greater scale.

Thus, our methodology was based on making the judgment criteria more open, accessible and

persistent. This goal was achieved by using of IMDB‘s64

rating system, which is based on user

polling65

. Consequently, by averaging these ratings to the user‘s selection/collection of films the

application is giving a socially objective (or democratically objective) score on the user‘s taste.

Thus, crowd-sourcing here takes up the role of a regulating authority; it is no longer the

subjective tastes and opinions of closed groups that ascribe a rating to someone‘s taste in

films but the objective averages of crowds.

The repercussions of this approach are two different interaction loops, one between the users

of the application and one between the application and the crowd-sourced judgment criteria.

The former refers to the activities that connected users of a social network engage into; as Solis

argues, it is not the connections (relations) of a social network that are important, but rather the

activities and interests that are shared between these connections (relationships) (see Solis,

2010). As such, we see MovieTaste contributing the same way that social games do within

64

Internet Movie Database (ww.imdb.com)

65

IMDB.com allows all its users to rate films from a scale of 1-10. This functionality has been so popular

that the rating is often used as metric for the overall reception of the film.


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social networks, by adding a layer of interaction and communication to the lightweight social

substrate of social networks (Löwgren, 2010, see Appendix).

In addition to that, we also see a continuous interaction loop between user and content through

mutual judgment; in that the user is rating the film which then rates his taste. We view that

closed loop as a catalyst for a new context of interpretation, reflection and ideological

examination of user generated content and crowd-sourcing; whereas traditional crowd-

sourcing applications are put in the practice of problem solving, MovieTaste can be seen as an

application that its use self-justifies itself (i.e. the ―problem‖ that it solves is the ―problem‖ that

creates).

5.4 Challenging Adults

Adult Challengers as our final proposal here was developed as an example of how our

proposed methods can be used within existing services. However, instead of employing an

additive strategy (just adding game elements), we chose a more holistic approach, redesigning

an online dating service with our vision of gamification in mind. That way, we can ensure that

the end result will not only be more approachable and pleasurable for the end user but also

make commercial/business sense.

As such, we identified the element of trust with online dating services as the most important

aspect we had to build upon. Thus, we approached adult Challengers with a mix of

approaches; on one hand we tried to turn the existing antagonism found in such services into

persistent social play. By looking at the development of online dating services, we realized that

there is a strong element of competition that gave rise to products and services which are

targeting users with specific preferences/characteristics (i.e. elitist dating services). This

antagonism though, is often centrally regulated by the service operator, whose criteria and

policies are usually hidden or unrevealed. That is why we tried to translate this authority from

the service provider to the end users, which are now operating under a form of open market

which assumes the regulatory control of the service. This way, the users are not recipients of a


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―closed‖ service, but rather loose administrators of an open play-service (―playvice‖) regulating

it to their needs.

Thus the role of the service provider is to make sure that this kind of open social play is

operative. As such, we proposed a virtual economy approach centered on a virtual currency

(challenge point) system. Hence, while the playvice is user-regulated, the service provider

becomes the monetary regulator capitalizing on the exchange rate (virtual-to-real currency).

Consequently we see Adult Challengers as a commercially viable solution; by reducing the

regulatory effort and cost for the service provider and dislocating its capitalization source from

advanced services to virtual currency regulation, we are essentially proposing a very similar to

social games model. We thus see the enabling of open social play as a gamification approach,

in accordance with both business and user goals and perspectives.

5.5 Concluding remarks

In this chapter we tried to revisit and analyze our practical proposals in a manner that

elaborates advantages and disadvantages of each theoretical method listed in our exploration

chapter. We also tried to showcase how different approaches can be operative either

individually or in conjunction with others and how they can make sense for both users and

developers.

In the next chapter we will try to summarize and conclude our findings and experiences and

map a possible future for gamification, based on our understanding of the field‘s potential.


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6. Coordination: A Step towards Gamification

We set out in this thesis with a threefold goal; to identify and analyze the dimensions of

gamification as the application of game design in everyday life, to examine its existing methods

and explore possible new approaches, and finally, blaze a trail for its future.

In our inquiry step (Chapter 2) we tried to lay down a set of constituents, converging paths that

all led to the rise of gamification as a subject. We started by examining games, especially

videogames, and their evolution through the last two decades. As such, we attributed

gamification‘s ideological substrate to the intricate social, economic and cultural dimensions of

the hard-core videogames. Then we looked into the rise of casual games and we inscribed the

role of mobile technology in the democratization of videogames as the force that enabled

gamification. Finally we viewed the power of the internet as the force towards an experience

economy transition in the domain of videogames. A transformation that we argued shaped

gamification both rhetorically and practically.

We then turned to the scholarly study of games as a leeway for the development of an

expanding body of knowledge about games. We highlighted the significance of a systematic

study of game design and the importance of developing new theories of play as vital steps

towards a widespread ―game literacy‖.

We also looked into interaction design, as the institutional domain for the design of interactive

applications and services and we tried to interpret game design‘s and gamification‘s roles in

relation to it. To do so, we examined relevant interaction design trends/subdomains such as

persuasive design as an interaction design approach for targeting and shaping behavior; ludic

design as a playful approach to exploratory design and critical design as a design approach


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geared towards reflection. We concluded the discussion about how recent trends in interaction

design attempt to deploy more holistic approaches, combining such various subdomains and

show how the emergence of gamification can be read as such.

Finally, we sought the ideological roots of gamification and attempted an interpretation of the

analytical implications that surround gamification both as practice and rhetoric.

By setting the context of our examination, we then moved to our exploration step (chapter 3).

We started by describing the dominant model of gamification and we tried to elaborate,

systematize and analyze it by dividing it into three parts. In the first, we positioned the core

activity as the subject of gamified applications; we explained why monitoring this activity is the

base of a gamified application and we tried to interpret the role of technology in understanding

gamification as expressed through this model. In the second part, we saw how the organizing,

planning and scaling of that activity connects gamification with game design and finally we

explained how gamified applications essentially aim at the investment of the user in the core

activity and subsequently in the application itself.

We then moved onto elaborating our own vision for gamification. We insisted on the

importance of a radically different mindset, moving beyond an instrumental approach of the

player experience of pleasure. As such, we argued against the division of play as an act and

playfulness as the experience of that act, and developed the notion of pull as a unified theory

that attempts to explain both how players are both drawn to a game and why they play it. We

grounded our theory on Bateson‘s notion of meta-communication and examined the user-

artifact relationship dialogically. We thus proposed the concept of playful mappings as a

potential explanation for both play and playfulness not only within games, but with artifacts in

general.

Hence we then organized a set of stances/approaches that we view as the basis for a broader

gamification interpretation. We talked about trivialization and trivialized processes as

malfunctioning user-artifact relationships, resulting in non-playful mappings. We advocated for


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the use of surprise and ambiguity as approaches for treating such relationships, realigning

users from mindlessness to mindfulness and restoring/creating playful mappings.

We also addressed the role of reflection in our vision of gamification; we proposed a lenses

approach in which the designer sets the lenses through which the end user can reflect by

drawing a critical distance from an activity. We also constructed an approach based on the

power of pretending, in which the designer is enriching a functional artifact with cues which can

aid the user‘s balance between awareness and pretending, essentially reflecting back on the

activity in his own terms.

Finally, we introduced the domain of unregulated social competition as a potential target for

gamification. We explained how designers can tap into the underlying antagonistic relations of

social groups and organize persistent social play by creating universally acceptable judgment

values.

As such, we then turned onto our composition step (chapter 4), proposing variable solutions

based on our examined approaches. We tried to combine different approaches in different

contexts as means of testing them and in order to reveal their strengths and weaknesses. Our

effort was focused on exemplifying how our suggested approaches can be combined to make

solutions that make sense both for businesses and end users.

Finally, we tried to further illuminate our design decisions by assessing our proposals and

providing a first account of their efficiency and viability. As such, we are now only left to

conclude our work by listing the most important lessons learnt throughout this process.

6.1Gamification Checklist

Gamification is not a layer, model or a set of game mechanics. Gamification is a

process, a design process. As such we advise the reader to follow a design method to

structure that process; thus identify the context first, explore it, propose your solutions

and assess them; inform yourself and others about what you learnt and start again.


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Whether you build from the ground up or on existing applications, products or services

set the context they take place in your first priority. Whenever are you addressing

problematic functions and operations, reconsider their functionality/operation; adding

points will not make them less problematic.

Move beyond the model. We proposed an alternative vision of gamification and tried to

prove that it can be operative without the need to refer to the existing model.

Design on an ad-hoc basis. All designers know that there is no silver lining in design.

Likewise for gamification you should adapt your approach to the users/product owners

needs and the use-context of the application.

When it comes to gamification, don‘t think of games as systems. We have argued many

times already that such a mindset can be very limiting for gamification. Instead think of

playful mappings; consider how you induce playfulness on the user, not how you

administer it through instrumental gameplay.

Finally, always consider the methodological and ideological implications of the design

methods you are deploying; juxtapose them with your motivation for using them and

reflect on their meaning.

6.2. On, Off, For and Against Criticism and Cynicism

While these final words are written, there has been a rather evocative criticism against

gamification, or at least the dominant model of gamification as we portrayed it in the

exploration chapter. The main (counter) arguments are primarily focused on the ethics66

,

effectiveness, viability67

and relevance68

of the model, but they often take the form of personal

66

For example Bogost (Bogost, 2010) and Juul (Juul, 2011) argue against the ethical shortcomings of

the current gamification model.

67

Haque for example is primarily questioning the points-leader boards relationship in the method in

regards to its long term viability (see Haque, 2010).

68

Robertson is arguing for a semantic disassociation between the current gamification model and

games:

―That problem being that gamification isn‘t gamification at all. What we‘re currently terming

gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and

representing it as the core of the experience. Points and badges have no closer a relationship to


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attacks69

. Even though we believe we have already addressed many of the issues these

arguments raise, we feel the need to both take a stance, but also attempt to explain the

reasons behind such a rhetorical backlash.

As such, we would like to link our potential explanation with the notion of ―belief in games‖.

What we term here ―belief in games‖ refers to a double dimension of belief systems in relation

to games that we view as malfunctioning. This twofold paradox starts with the way belief is

treated in regards to games.

6.2.1. Paradox 1, The Belief in Games and the Belief in the Belief in Games

Most game theorists have addressed belief in games either from the perspective of make

believe or voluntarism. The former, refers to the idea of constructing a belief out of a game‘s

virtual systemic elements, while the latter often expressed as the voluntary acceptance of these

elements as a requisite to play the game. We view both cases as an expression of the same

concept; the adoption of the conditions that fabricate a reality is necessary for that reality to be

sustained and be operative. In the domain of games this translates into the acceptance of the

game rules, the structural elements of the game‘s temporal and spatial dimensions.

Even though many theorists will argue that not all games require the above elements of belief

in order to be operable, we argue here that for the dominant model of gamification to be

operative, there needs to be a level of belief in it. It couldn‘t be otherwise; whether it is points,

badges, leader boards or virtual currency, there needs to be a level of belief in their value (i.e.

they have to be valued by the users) for them to operate. We are not suggesting a catholic level

of belief but on the contrary a rather loose one. In our analysis of the pull, we positioned the

games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards.[…] Gamification, as it

stands, should actually be called poinstification, and is a bad thing because it‘s a misleading title

for a misunderstood process.‖ (Robertson, 2010)

69

It has been noted lately that many proponents of gamification have been targeted by critics, namely

Jane McGonigal, who has perhaps received the stronger ―blow‖ after a book release that drew a

dramatically positive dimension of reality which could be achieved just by the addition of game elements

(see Chaplin, 2011; Champion, 2011)


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exchange of message in what Žižek terms the space of ―symbolic virtual‖. Within this space,

beliefs operate not by believing too directly, on the contrary believing is not even necessary; it

is enough to assume that someone else believes in order to have an operative belief. And isn‘t

that the case for example with Monopoly money? If asked individually, all the players will admit

that naturally they do not really believe that the flimsy paper notes are of real value, but

naturally, for the course of the game they will all act as if they do, not wanting to ―ruin the

game‖ or disappoint the other players.

Thus the one can already see the problem with having a Monopoly player believe too directly in

the value of these notes. Uneasiness, awkwardness and anxiety emerge; it is not only the

rapture of this reality, in this case the ―ruining‖ of the game, which generates them, but the

difficulty to accept such a behavior can exist70

. Paradoxically, the most common reaction to

such absolute believers is to occupy the symmetrical opposite position of trying to abolish the

belief, in this case to prove that Monopoly money has no value at all.

Thus the problem of gamification and the subsequent criticism can be read through this

contradiction in a dual way. On one hand, there is the threat that the virtual elements of the

gamification model, like points and badges will be, or in some cases are already71

, undermined

by the people that believe too immediately in them. The other aspect of this contradiction lies

perhaps on a different, meta level; on the belief of the power of belief in games. That is to say

that all other levels of reality can be translated in this symbolic virtual structure and thus the

whole experience of reality will be operative as such; like some gamification proponents argue,

that many, if not all, ordinary, everyday operations can be actualized and be operable within

this symbolic virtual space (see McGonigal, 2011)72

. Thus we acknowledge that most criticism

70 Žižek argues that when a person takes their beliefs to a direct level, actualizing them fully they are undermining them and themselves (Žižek, Cogito and the unconscious, 1998). 71 The focus is again on gamification proponents whose rhetorical level is very often close to that of Monopoly player who claims that could buy their weekly groceries using their “rent” earnings. 72

We could mention two actual and living examples here, Edward Castronova and Jane McGonigal.

While both researched and worked with concepts that are very close to notion of belief in games, the

former with virtual economies in Virtual Worlds and the latter with alternate reality games, they only

received criticism, and grew distance, from their peers and the academic/researching community when it

seemed that they perhaps ―went too far‖, believing in the power of belief in games too immediately. For


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over gamification lies within the above double paradox. On one level, the criticism is focused in

a potential dichotomy between believers and non-believers on a greater social scale, rupturing

not game but social realities, while on a second, deeper level, the very existence of the notion

of belief in games is seen as under potential threat when the ―belief‖ itself is polarized by its

―believers‖.

6.2.2. Paradox 2: Belief in Systems

The second of aspect the paradox of the belief in games lies in the analysis of games as

systems. So far we have argued many times why an examination of games as systems when it

comes to gamification is not useful. However, there is perhaps one more; the view of games as

systems, equates the belief in games with the belief in systems.

As such, we argue here that perhaps gamification as a concept and as motivation was the

symptom of this false equation. Maybe gamification can be read as the attempt to replace the

―malfunctioning‖ components of an existing system (work, society, government etc.) with

―working‖ components of games-as-systems. Once again, there is an intricate duality in this

paradox; on one hand, there is the belief in systems, in that even when the system fails there is

neither the need for addressing a system change nor questioning the very existence of the

system but rather an attempt to identify the erroneous components of the system and replace

them. On the other hand, as game ―components‖ take their place in out-of-game systems they

both bring and acquire a level of authority; it is this (external) authority that very often is

criticized as not being applied game design but rather applied politics.

Thus, the problem with an approach of games as systems, is that even as fragments, these

games will always be seen as systems, and not as games, when taken within a context such as

gamification.

the former the trigger point was considered an ambiguous presentation during which he proposed an

almost Matrix-like exodus to the ―fantasy‖ of Virtual Worlds as a safe refuge from terrorists (Castronova,

Keynote: "Perfidious Economy", 2007), while for the latter was the release of a book which proposed a

total gamification of everyday life along the lines of alternate reality games (McGonigal, 2011).


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6.3. (Instead of) Epilogue

We started this thesis with Jesse Schell forecasting a future for gamification; we thus only find it

appropriate to end it with our own. Our forecasting however does not have to do so much with

the practical aspects of gamification but rather with its shortcomings for games in general.

Thus we would like to start with an anecdote that we find very relevant when discussing the

future of gamification.

At the very birth of Game Studies, or the scholarly study of games, the field faced a crucial

(academic) challenge; the vast underexplored land of games became the landscape for an

academic ―El Dorado‖ which was soon roamed with scholars of different backgrounds. Some

treated it as the land of opportunity, where new thought and practice could flourish while some

others as a new land of potential academic colonialism, where games could be just a part of a

bigger existing academic field (namely literary studies, media studies, computer science etc.).

The inescapable conflict materialized in a rather polemic climate which has been noted in the

academic history of the field as the ‗narratology-VS-ludology‘ debates. ―Narratologists‖ argued

for a study of games as narrative forms that should be approached with narratology theory,

while ―Ludologists‖ stood for a study of games on their own terms acknowledging that they are

unique mediums different from stories and film. The result was on the side of ludology and

indeed Game Studies is nowadays an independent academic field.

So how does the ―narratology-VS-ludology‖ conflict ascribe in our gamification forecast? The

future of gamification we foresee passes through a very similar conflict with games being again

at the epicenter of it. The similarities between the ground that gave rise to the ―narratology-VS-

ludology‖ conflict and the landscape within which gamification lies are only contributing to our

prognosis. The same way that they looked like a promising ―El Dorado‖ for the first explorers of

Game Studies, games nowadays seem more than ever a domain of opportunities for different

kinds of individuals with variable backgrounds, understandings and ambitions. As such, we see

games as the apple of discord on levels that span way beyond a semantic dimension, like

marketing, business, design and technology. Thus we foresee an existential challenge for


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games as many claim them or parts of them for their own domain; if the ―narratology-VS-

ludology‖ conflict was about what the game IS then this conflict will be WHOSE the game is73

.

What does this mean for games and gamification then? It means that when discussing about

games, game design, game mechanics and gamification, it is always important to be critical

about the motivation of the speaker. For it is the motivation of ‗gamifiers‟ that will undoubtedly

direct/judge the future of it at large, both in the way they are designed, but also in their very

nature and the way they are perceived. As with the ―narratology-VS-ludology‖ conflict the

resolution was weighted on the motivation of ―Ludologists‖ to study games for their own sake,

acknowledging that there are unique qualities that cannot be examined under the prism of

existing methods, we believe that we should also be wary of the motivating factors that drive

individuals into talking and claiming things about games, game design and gamification.

73

Of course it is hard to miss the irony here; while ludology ―won‖, leading to a study of games as formal

abstract systems, it also laid the ground for others claiming parts of such systems.


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8. Appendix I

The following pages are excerpts from interviews conducted for this thesis during October

2010. The interviewees represent span form professionals of game and interaction design to

academic scholars and theoreticians. The connecting element among them is their interest in

the concept of gamification; the interviewees not always agree with each other and indeed one

can read both very optimistic and cynical responses in the following lines. We hope that his will

give the reader a and wider perspective on gamification.

8.1 Aki Järvinen

Transcript, Skype interview with Aki Järvinen, Lead Social Designer at Digital Chocolate

Copenhagen, October 5th

2010

CI: What‟s your explanation, how we‟ve come to this? How have we reached this point

where the discussion, even the actual practicing of game design in non-game services and

products has become so widespread?

AJ: That is a good question. I think that basically, it has to go hand in hand with the fact that

peoples‘ attention span is diminishing in online environments, because pretty much all the

applications that you are referring to are online applications right?

CI: Yes, that‟s what we have been seeing so far.

AJ: So for the people that are doing business online and are trying to capture the attention

of users/customers/players, evangelists of gamification seem to believe that a playful way to

engage attention and retain those people to come back to your application site or service is the

way to go. I think that there is where gamification found fertile ground.

That is my initial answer; we are reaching a point where people have the attention span of five

seconds when they are online and there seems to be a school of thought that believes that

game mechanics is the way to grab and prolong that attention beyond these five seconds. I


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haven‘t really thought about that sort of broader history of how we have come to this, but this

would be my spontaneous answer.

CI: Alright, so what do you think gamification is about, the players/users or the

game/service?

AJ: I do think it‘s not about the game. It‘s really about finding any means possible to keep

people attached to a product or service and actually make them pay for it. In principle they start

paying for it if they find some utility, some use, some sort of added value to it and of course

these gamification processes are trying to add value by entertaining the user, making the use

of the product or service entertaining, social and so on.

I think that‘s why mostly the people driving gamification, at least to my knowledge, don‘t have

necessarily a game development background. They are more likely to employ game designers

for these ideas. Thus I would say it‘s more about marketing, rather that game development if

you think about it in the context of what kinds of professionals have started this movement.

CI: I would like to stay on that; apparently these people are arguing as you said that

gamification is adding value to a product or service. But is that process is also taking something

out of it? Can gamification backlash?

AJ: Sure, I do believe that there is some kind of naïve thinking when you have a suboptimal

product or service and then just by adding some badges and achievements to it, you can say

that ―we gamified our service and its rocking!‖ I think it‘s well articulated by Sebastian

Deterding, in his ―Just add points?‖ presentation, where he is arguing that this copy-pasting

game mechanics on top of an existing activity works best when there is not that much at stake.

For instance, if you are doing something that is voluntary, something that is intrinsically

motivated, then you can enhance this experience by adding game mechanics, or game reward

structures on top of that service. Flickr could be a good example of this, where people tend to

like sharing photos because it‘s so convenient and easy; and then you can accelerate and

enhance, or enrich, this experience by rewarding these people with game-like goal structures.

But if you are developing a productivity-based tool or just something that has serious

consequences for a company or a business, for instance, then it might be that gamification is a

very risky approach. Of course, I don‘t have any hard proof that those principles work, but

intuitively I do think that there is some wisdom there.

CI: I have recently read that you are also arguing that gamification is not really a layer you

can just out on top of anything.

AJ: Yeah, I agree

CI: So could you explain to me what gamification is for you, in relation to how much space is

there for innovation within gamification?

AJ: I do think that there is room for innovation; I always like to think so. About the thing

argument, it was last week that this back and forth between Facebook and Google where Eric

Schmidt announced that Google is going to take their services to the next level by adding a

social layer to them and then Mark Zuckerberg replied that you can‘t just add a layer of social

services, it needs to be inherently social to start with.


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So I think that gamification is somewhere on the same line, regardless who‘s going to with this.

I don‘t have any good practical examples, but if I was facing a task of gamifying a service or an

application, then I would try to align game mechanics and game design techniques with the

origin of the use case, or form of use that the service, or application, or site is meant for. And

that means that you will most likely explore many more game mechanics and game design

techniques rather than those that we see all around and in that case it would lay some ground

for innovation in the area.

CI: I know that you have written about “game mechanics”. How do you feel about the use of

the term?

AJ: Well, the older I get, the less passionate I become. I just can‘t bother nitpicking about it.

I still believe, deep in my heart, that it is a lazy use which is in line with this sort of marketing

bullshit, you know. I recently saw a tweet that wrote that there are twenty startups suggesting

that they are going to gamify the world and I think that most of those are playing on that ―game

mechanics‖ discourse that‘s turned the term into a buzz word. «So how do you gamify services

and applications? You put ―game mechanics‖ in them». Of course that doesn‘t mean anything,

is such a broad concept.

I think that in order for the term to be useful you need to understand how ―game mechanics‖

relate to what the player does and the goals that you set as well as what kind of mechanics are

more probable to produce an experience, in terms of emotions and feelings, and then what are

the motivations of the players and what kind of game mechanics feed and motivate users and

players towards certain tasks.

I mean that any self-respecting professional working on this area will have their much more

refined division of game mechanics. Thus, then it‘s a matter who do you talk to. If I would be a

consultant for gamification, I would probably have to use the term in this kind of ―sales talk‖

way, but when it comes to organizing my thinking, I would have a much more fine-grained

division. So I think it is really a matter of context in that case.

CI: So then in your view, who should be practicing gamification design? And then how do

you explain this mosaic of non game-related entrepreneurs that now make up the gamification

industry?

AJ: Even with the danger of falling into using stereotypes, I do not think that a game

designer, who has been working on a certain AAA console titles, has a very clear

understanding of what works and what doesn‘t; I don‘t think that this [game designer] is the

optimal description for someone practicing gamification. I do think that the optimal person

would be somebody familiar with interaction design and knowledgeable about game design

because, in my opinion, these two intertwine here. Usually the context of use or play in this

case, to some extent, is very different than the circumscribed video game play experience.

I do not know where these people that evangelize gamification come from. It seems that it is a

mix of technology startups and marketing people, probably something like opportunists

looking for a ―buzz word‖, or ―hot sauce‖ that they suppose will transform their clients‘

products.


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Again, if I was given the opportunity to make a startup offering gamification services and

consulting, I would probably try to recruit people that have interaction design background but

also some knowledge of game design.

CI: I like that you are mentioning interaction design here, because in interaction design in

general and in specific branches of it like Critical Design, there are more extensive, older and

established traditions of design for ludic interaction. But if you juxtapose them with the practical

dogmas of gamification, as it is evangelized today, you see that there are many contradictions.

What is your take on these contradictions?

AJ: I do have the take that we haven‘t really seen a sophisticated approach on gamification

from a business perspective yet. At the moment, there is no top-class design company like

IDEO who is pushing that way of gamification. However, in some sense they [IDEO] have been

doing that for years and years in a way; they have employed different design disciplines and

they have put design and user experience first. In such a way you are ―forced‖ to think about

different ways to motivate people and different ways to create experiences. Also, another

example is toys; if you design toys then you gamify objects in a way.

So I do think that this gamification we are discussing today is, if not a bubble, an opportunistic

concept that is used without understanding of the whole toolset and probably without

understanding much about design anyway. But that of course does not mean that they couldn‘t

create something interesting; the pace in online business is fast and if you just manage to

produce solutions something interesting might come up and in the process we might have a

much clearer definition of gamification. Those are basically my thoughts.

CI: Alright, one last question. So far we have been witnessing gamification solution very

closely tied to social media; so can we gamify anything?

AJ: Formally I think yes. Of course it relates to what I said earlier, that gamification

techniques and design solutions should ideally align with the more utilitarian use of a service or

a product. If you don‘t start from an origin or intent and motivation of use then you are not

really practicing gamification, you are designing games. You must have some existing thing

that you want to gamify in order to be consistent with this thinking. I do think that in theory you

can gamify pretty much anything, but I don‘t know if it will work, if it will be socially acceptable,

or ethical? All these questions arise. You could for example gamify something atrocious like an

undertaker‘s job, but I think that would be socially and ethically suspicious.


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8.2 Jonas Löwgren

Transcript, Skype interview with Jonas Löwgren, Professor of interaction design at the

School of Arts and Communication, and Medea Collaborative Media Initiative, Malmö

University


2010




JL: For me it seems to be fairly straight interpolation of a general trend that is seen in

interaction design for maybe five or ten years. If we go back to 1990s, interaction design was all

about usefulness and usability and figuring out what the purpose was and using software for

reasonable, rational kinds of tasks; basically an HCI kind of perspective. And that was

meaningful at that time because we used interactive services almost only at work.

Then what happened was that the Internet exploded in people's homes. Consumer products

started to come out and they were interactive, playful, that were about interactive media in

different ways. Mobile Internet also started to emerge and all these things worked in the same

direction; to make people start wanting great experiences. You know, fun and entertainment

and pleasure. And when people got that at home, it became harder for them to be comfortable

with the boring, dull, grey, sensible kind of rational applications that they had to use at work. So

for them it was different aspects of the same thing. They couldn‘t figure out why the internet at

work should be so bad and boring when the Internet at home was fantastic.

I think that maybe what you see in gamification is another example of the same direction. What

you have seen in academia and research in interaction design is the massive growth of the

concept of experience. Also people who have been training in psychology and HCI started

thinking about ―ok what is pleasure? What is experience? How can we measure it and how can

we design for it?‖ For the next year‘s CHI, the overall theme is going to be experience and that

is a significant statement for that community which has always been rooted in HCI and

instrumental kinds of perspectives. So I suppose for me, gamification of non-game services

and products is an example of the same kind of trend.

CI: Right, I like that you position it so far back, since it is often claimed that gamification, as a

phenomenon, appeared in the past two years. I am also intrigued that you are positioning it into

that space, when things that were meant for productivity and other kinds of serious work

invaded home and acquired a different context. So in that sense, can you see the whole world

being transformed into a big design situation?

JL: No, I think that this kind of perspective would be useful when it is useful. When there are

situations that are inherently about fun/pleasure, or could be made into that, then by all means

go ahead. But I can also image that there are many situations we don't want to have to play a

little game to get your documents from the server. Basically, what I think is that we have

opened up the spectrum of experiences. It used to be focused only on the side of the sensible-


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rational-instrumental. Now we have opened up the spectrum. But the initial part about sensible

and rational is still there. And there are obviously examples of experiences that should be

sensible-rational, perhaps even serene or of awe-inspiring.

CI: Is gamification is a layer?

JL: I think gamification should not be a layer. I‘m thinking here of the notion of serious

games which has been used in learning technology for quite some time now and most of the

examples you see are of the form: «You want kids to learn math; so you give them some math

exercises on the computer dressed up as a game and if the pass/answer the exercises

correctly then they get to shoot monsters for five minutes and then another set of math

exercises». Is just too obvious, too silly, it‘s a trick basically. And those kinds of approaches are

really not the way to go.

CI: I liked that you mention the example of serious games, but still, I would like to hear your

explanation; why people believe that even this approach has something to offer? What is that

games inherently have that could change the reality behind that boring exercise?

JL: I think that most people and most good designers and most researchers today argue

that you don't do that. You don't gamify something that is not a game. But what you can do is

you can create interesting playable games that have also learning effects. So if you take it from

scratch and you build a game that is actually interesting to play, in a way that you also need to

learn stuff in order to proceed in the game, then it is a different story and that is kind of

pedagogically motivating as well. I think that‘s where the state of art is in serious games.

But there's also another aspect which is that sometimes at least in schools today you need to

be very pragmatic. You can't always do what's best pedagogically sometimes you just need to

make those five guys sit down and shut up for fifteen minutes so we can teach the other kids.

And if you have a layered kind of game, some entertainment, slapped onto some math

exercises that will keep those boys happy for fifteen minutes and keep them quiet then it

actually serves a purpose. Even though pedagogically is a crappy idea, it is pragmatically very

sensible idea because the whole situation in classroom is such that you need to find a way for

those five boys to occupy themselves and basically sit down and be quiet for fifteen minutes

and you can‘t do it in any other way, because they will start throwing pencils at each other,

while if you put them in front of this game, they will happily sit down and there is in fact some

little math in it, so it doesn‘t go totally wasted. So those suspects are also part of the everyday

design sort of space.

CI: Alright. In your opinion who should be practicing gamification design?

JL: I have to make a reservation here since I don't know very much about these debates

and I haven't read these people you are talking about. So without knowing so much about the

field, my general answer would be that ―gamifiers‖, would work with other kinds of designers in

collaboration. They would work with the people who design media today, with people who

design services, with the people who design applications and utility/productivity kind of

programs and they would add their expertise to the multidisciplinary mix of these design

process. It wouldn‘t be that good I think, if they saw themselves as some kind of outside force,

some kind of avant-garde who would just take the stuff that everybody else is doing and then


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trying to gamify them afterwards, because then they would be adding these silly layers on top

of things that were thought different.

Instead, if we were to compose a team that would do an overhaul of the website of a

municipality, for example; looking at public services such as information on housing or some

form of civic applications handling, I think it would be a brilliant idea to engage gamification

people from the start in that process to help look out for the ludic, or pleasurable, or the

intrinsically motivating aspects of what would otherwise be seen as boring, administrative

tasks. Then perhaps together with those people you could redesign the whole tasks or the

whole service offering in a new kind of way. And that would be so much more powerful than

doing the website first and then some consultant comes along and puts a layer of ‗Mario

Brothers‘ on top of it, because that would be silly. So that is basically what I think.

CI: So what about productivity and utility. What does gamification mean for productivity-

driven solutions?

JL: I think this is a classic example of that you shouldn't separate instrument from the

aesthetical. I mean this is an old, very old debate in HCI and interaction design. Like I said,

interaction design started with the instrumental; productivity-utility-relevance-usefulness and

then when experience and pleasure started coming into the mix, people tried to keep them

separate and talk about the productivity value and the entertainment value something that I

think is a fundamental mistake because people don't do that kind of separation. People are

whole people and when they use an application, they use their whole body and their whole

mind. So even when you are doing spreadsheets in Excel there are aspects of aesthetic

experience involved and you can tap those if know how to do it and make the very serious,

very strict, businesslike kind of task more motivational, more pleasurable, even more

productive.

The starting point here is to not separate the instrumental and the aesthetic but rather to realize

that there are just two sides of the same phenomena, the same experience. And that means for

your question that if you do gamification well, you will be able to create services, products,

interactive experiences n general that are more intrinsically motivational, while at the same time

they don't take anything away from the productivity, the utility. So in fact that would be an

addition to the total rather than taking something away, that‘s what I think but I don't really

know the good examples here again, I don't know the field very well.

CI: I like that you mention intrinsic motivation, you see there is a strong tendency for

comparing the feedback from games, with the complex feedback exchange in our daily

interactions. Would you agree with a glass/black box examination of life in terms of feedback?

JL: Instinctively my reaction would be to say that the kind of unambiguous feedback that

you get in simple games doesn't do anything for you in terms of coming to terms with life and

with work and with being human. I think the key really is that feedback is complex, ambiguous,

socially founded and to me at least the strongest motivational factor for people in any situation,

if you want to generalize to an absurd level, is other people. We are fundamentally social

creatures. It‘s much more important for me what people I know and care about do, think that if I

see something on the screen that says you have twenty -eight points more to go before you

reach the third level. That‘s superficial, that‘s just a gambit; something I can spend five minutes


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on when I am bored. But what is important to me in the long-term, both professionally and in

my private life, is other people and the social and communicational aspects of life. That's where

the real motivation comes from.

A conclusion from that observation for gamification would be that the way forward for

gamification is multiplayer games; social games, games like Farmvile on Facebook, which

obviously means something, adds another layer of communication to the lightweight social

kind of substrate that Facebook is. That‘s to me an interesting example of gamification now I

think of it. If you compare in your mind Facebook without Farmville and Facebook with

Farmville you can see that Facebook with Farmville provides a slightly richer channel for

communication. A slightly better chance of getting into some sort of lightweight engagement

with another person that you would probably not have engaged with hadn‘t been for Farmvile.

So Farmvile in that reading serves as a communicational prop; something you can use as

crutch to facilitate communication and add a little more richness to your social play which

Facebook is essentially about. Facebook is not very much about utility of course it's more

about social play. And Farmvile adds some tools, if you will, to play that social game in a

slightly more rich way. So that‘s an interesting example of gamification. Maybe, or maybe not, I

don‘t know if it fits the exact definition of gamification.

CI: Not entirely, at least in the way that is currently used, since it is regarded that it must

serve a non-recreational purpose.

JL: Ok, I see. If you want you can analyze Facebook and Farmvile to serve a non-

recreational purpose. Such a reading would be about assessing your place among other

people, working on your self-esteem, working on your self-image, working your identity,

growing as a person and keeping in touch. So there are several social purposes of Facebook

that I could argue or not recreational but maybe it‘s till really not the kind of thing you are

thinking about.

CI: I think you are still right, because the core of your answer is that you we can‟t think of

gamification without thinking the social; that gamification is essentially meant to enrich social

interactions.

JL: That‘s where the real power comes from. But you could probably find examples of

purely individual tasks that would be more engaging to people if they were gamified. But again

to me the most powerful motivation engine is the social. ESP games are also examples of

gamification of intrinsically boring tasks which you turn into interesting challenges just by

gamifying them. But the whole point of those games is that they are social games. You

compete with another person or with other people and you see your score on the high score

lists where you compete with other people. So if you did it in isolation you would get fed up

with it after five minutes. But as it happens in a social context, it can keep people occupied for

hours.

CI: So what does this mean for interaction design? Do you think that gamification as it it‟s

going to shift the cores of interaction design?

JL: I see interaction design is moving as moving already, like I said in the beginning,

towards a more holistic view of experience design. When you design for both pleasure and


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productivity at the same time in almost any design situation, you consider all those aspects.

What I think gamification perhaps could speed up that process, by introducing specifically the

notion of gaming and gameplay and the kind of intrinsic motivation and ludic pleasure that

comes with gaming.

In interaction design, we have the occasional pioneer who talks about ludic interaction already;

Bill Gaver is famous name in this field. But if he was supported by some people who could

show with specific examples how something apparently productivity oriented was gamified and

people felt that it was more engaging, more interesting and they did better work with it, then his

position would get strengthened even further and that would support the ongoing shift in

interaction design towards a holistic experience. That‘s what I think.

CI: That‟s very interesting, because Bill Gaver‟s design for Homo Ludens approach, is so

very far from how gamification is advocated today and that has been generating, at least for me,

a lot of controversy about having the two co-existing. But it seems that you claim that even such

a gamification approach would strengthen Gaver‟s point at least within the interaction design

community.

JL: Again this may be because I don't know the field, but I made a very simple argument

here. If Bill wants us to design for Homo Ludens, then one thing that we can do for Homo

Ludens to make her happy, is to give her games and gameplay, because that's one of things

we do when we play. And it is also appealing to many people. So game design should be part

of the competence mix for a team wanting to design for ludic interaction. That is the place at

the table where a gamification evangelist could put his seat and contribute.

If had a table with a team who was said: ―ok we are going to design for ludic interaction

because we believe in Bill‖; then they could clearly benefit from saving a chair for someone

from the game design field, it seems kind of obvious to me. It‘s a bit of a surprise when I think

of it, that Bill has never worked with game designers as far I know. That seems a kind of an

obvious setup for project already back in 2005 maybe, when he did these pillows and wrote

this paper about Homo Ludens. At that point it's slightly surprising that he didn't realize that he

should be working with a couple of game design companies because they should know a lot

for Homo Ludens and play. But it seems that he had never made that connection and that‘s a

little strange because it is like an obvious connection now that we talked about it.


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8.3 Kars Alfrink

Transcript, Skype interview with Kars Alfrink, independent interaction and game designer,

founder of Hubbub


2010




KA: That‘s a good question. From a personal perspective, I was working as an interaction

designer, this was 2006, and I ran into a several projects or things that reinvigorated my interest

in game design because when I was studying interaction design back in art school, I was really

interested in games as a form of interaction design. So from that perspective, I did a lot of

game-like projects back then.

After that, I went into the field of interaction design and at some point around the August of

2006 I saw several projects, mostly in the area of pervasive games and alternate reality games

that I found really interesting as an interaction designer. Then I decided to spend some time

diving into the field and see how it progressed. It was at that time that ‗Rules of Play‘ had been

published and I started reading that.

So there are two things already. One is that, these games that weren‘t typical video games

anymore started emerging and two is that a much more rigorous theoretical basis had been

developed in the game design community; so the knowledge had been shared and had

become much more shareable and understandable also for interaction designers. So when I

started reading, I could identify a lot of that knowledge as an interaction designer, but also

identify the differences. Thus, you could really appreciate design as discipline much better

around that time.

I think those were two seeds, at least for me personally, to start thinking that we have reached

this point where on the one hand it is a band of people who think it is okay to design games

which aren‘t the typical videogames, while on the other hand there is this understanding of

game design as a discipline that is not tight, that is not medium specific if you will. Again, I

found so refreshing about ―Rules of Play‖ for instance, is that it defines game design not in

terms of any particular medium. I think that this opened the way for what people call

gamification, which I think is horrible term. I guess that's the basis for that development.

It‘s been this kind of progression as I see it; on one hand, more people, or at least some

people, outside the field understanding what game design is about and on the other hand this

acceptance that games are not about joypads and pixels on screens etc.

CI: You do mention that GD is not really bound to a medium to be applied on. How do you

see the view that we can gamify everything now, that the whole world now shifts towards a

design situation which awaits game design to be applied on it?


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KA: To be honest, I think that this notion of gamification is kind of problematic. Ever since

this moment I described, of me being interested in games again, diving into and gradually

progressing into making games, saying goodbye to doing your typical interaction design for

the Web and moving into games, I've always struggled with his notion of making utilitarian

software game-like. What does that mean anyway? So I actually don't believe you can just

gamify anything unless you define gamifying something as ―just adding a points‖ mechanism

or an achievements‘ mechanism to an experience that in all other respects isn‘t playful at all.

So the answer is yes and no.

CI: Is gamification as a layer?

KA: No, it‘s easy to think about it like that, but if you grasp, if you actually sit down and start

designing something, it doesn't work like adding another layer. Of course you can have a

layered experience but I don't think the most productive way of doing this, is actually taking

something then adding a layer. It doesn't appeal to me at least. I don't really prefer to work in

that manner anyway. I am always interested in systems. On a more abstract level, making a

system more playful is to make it more open to tinkering, more open and looser so that people

can play around with it.

On a very abstract level, gamification for me is to make something more playful, something

different from the examples you see in examples that Jesse Schell is talking about. For

instance, if you think of it in those terms then it quickly becomes apparent that it's not layer; you

are adding something to an existing system, because at the lowest level it is still a very rigid

system that's about efficiency for instance.

CI: So what are the implications in productivity and utility, do we abolish them since

everything must become playful?

KA: It is kind of decadent actually, if you think about it. This idea that people are working

with these tools and software and it is boring and they should be having more fun. Thus, we

game designers can make it more fun and when they have more fun they can do more work or

they can do their work better. Ultimately that is the point right? The Jesse Schell example with

the toothbrush that gives you points; ultimately the idea there is that you become a better

toothbrusher, which has nothing to do with play because at the end there still the principle of

usefulness and I don‘t know if that is a paradox, but is certainly a contradiction to some extent.

So I think that the danger is that work doesn‘t become play but play becomes work in a way.

So people are told they are playing but actually they are still working.

CI: But Jesse Schell, and excuse me for becoming his advocate here, claims that games are

much better at providing clear feedback, much more unambiguous feedback than reality. Thus,

in this sense, should we be examining real life as a series of glass/black box processes?

KA: You know, feedback is a very basic interaction design concept. I think that some of

these ideas are just a reframing of just proper interaction design to be honest. Because the dull

notion of clear and discernible feedback is something that interaction designers work with all

the time.

So you could also understand this gamification thing as just a different way of saying that some

stuff needs to be designed in a more proper way. But then I don't agree with the idea that just


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making stuff have better feedback, instantly turns them into something playful or game-like. But

in general, I think that is okay; I think it is a good thing to strive for good feedback in any kind of

interactive system. But that does not mean that we're making everything game-like.

CI: Do you see a shift in interaction design. Do you think that this gamification

movement/trend is going to change up to a certain degree interaction design?

KA: Certainly I think that, at least some people who are involved in this domain, have an

interaction design background and gamification as a field is influencing interaction design, but

interaction design is also a field in a turbulent phase at the moment anyway.

On one hand there are people who kind of moved away from the craft-like aspects of

interaction design and are interested in applying interaction design in a strategic,

organizational level, which is tied to the field of service design. And then you have people

becoming disenchanted about the ―old principles‖ of interaction design; especially with the

whole user experience idea, user-centered design methods etc, essentially revaluating the

principles of interaction design, what should and should not represent. I also think that this

persuasive design thinking that's been happening for a while is also something that's

connected to this gamification idea. So actually interaction design as a field is fragmented.

Thus, this is just another or another facet of vary multifaceted field anyway. I don't think that

interaction design will become this playful/ludic thing; it doesn't have to be either.

CI: So who should be practicing gamification?

KA: That‘s a trick question. I don't know if anyone should. In the kind of Jesse Schell talks

about?

CI: Yes you could use Jesse Schell‟s talk as a reference, since he hinted that these

embryonic examples of gamification are very early and they lack game design; so the future of

gamification will be even brighter when game designers get more involved. So would you agree

that game designers should be practicing gamification?

KA: I don‘t know. I work with game designers, interaction designers and product designers,

people who have all kinds of backgrounds and I think potentially a lot of those, if not all, can

deal with this problem in some way. Obviously game designers have a better understanding of

the motivational side of things, something that interaction designers have much less affinity

with, but then what your typical interaction designer, and I am generalizing here, has more

empathy for people with other backgrounds than your typical game designer who's interested

in designing videogames.

But I work with people from all different backgrounds who are all exceptions to this rule, so I

don‘t think it would be fair to say that anyone with a certain background should have a kind of

monopoly in doing gamification. Again, obviously I think you would need a mix.

CI: So how would you explain the mosaic of the gamification evangelists, who don‟t

necessarily come from a games background, but rather, a technologist or marketer one.

KA: This is true, and this is something that I find disturbing. But if you would want to sit

down and do a project that would involve gamification, then I think you would need a mix of


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backgrounds but I am aware that the push to do this kind of stuff, certainly comes from

different backgrounds.

I think you're right in saying that, a large amount of the push isn't given by people who, and

sorry if I am being harsh, aren't that interested in peoples‘ well-being per se. They're either

interested in seeing what they might be able to do with a new kind of technology, or all these

pervasive technologies, as a kind of grotesque experiment, or applying these points and

achievements systems as just a repackaging of old loyalty programs which have been very

successful in the past and some of them are very well designed but I wouldn't call them playful

and game-like at all. I've always been, and that‘s a personal flaw, very distrustful of people in

marketing, so there you go.

CI: One last question. What do you think gamification is about or what should it be about?

Players/Users or the Game/Service-Product?

KA: I think it is about things and the systems that you might build and not so much about

people and effects you might have. However, I think, and this is a personal philosophy, it

should be the other way around. So far it has been mostly about ―imagine all this cool stuff we

could do if we had X. and Y.‖, but not so much about the player. So what it is really good for

and what it isn‘t that good for; and in what ways could you add some playful elements to things

and in what cases you shouldn‘t. Sebastian [Deterding] for instance, argues that in some cases

it is actually harmful; it is not helpful at all. So the feeling for the kind of context dependency for

gamification is lacking.


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8.4 Richard Bartle

Correspondence, e-Mail interview with Dr. Richard A. Bartle, Senior Lecturer and Visiting

Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, UK, co-writer of the first

virtual world, MUD (1978), and author of "Designing Virtual Worlds".


2010




RB: My explanation is that games are regarded as a low form of entertainment not worthy of

serious attention. Otherwise, we'd have gone past this point years ago. Most of the people who

discuss game design can't do it, don't know what it can do, and are only jumping on a

bandwagon anyway; some are genuine, but too few of them are game designers for us to see

much impact.

CI: What were the key factors/events/trends for that?

RB: Computer games became commercially successful, therefore they became important.

However, research funding is not geared for games, and even if it were there are too many

people who don't understand them and are afraid of them. For this reason, games can't be

studied as games, except in a few enlightened countries (eg. Scandinavia) or countries in

which commercial opportunity trumps social concerns (eg. the USA). Otherwise, if you're a

games researcher then you're only going to get funds if you can promise something worthy

from them (entertainment not being "worthy" in this context). This means we get serious games.

It's like film in the 1930s: would governments back then fund movie development? Well

perhaps for educational purposes (which is why the UK is great at documentaries) but not for

pure entertainment.

CI: How do you feel about the term “gamification”?

RB: I'm fine with it - I've used it myself for decades. I'm not so keen on its current usage,

though, which seems to have little to do with making something into a game and more to do

with making something use techniques that came from games. It's no more games than Su

Doku is arithmetic.

CI: What does gamification mean bout the product/service?

RB: It means it's so unappealing on its own that people have to persuaded to use it by

means of cheap psychological tricks that they'll grok soon enough anyway.

CI: Can we gamify anything?

RB: No. We can't gamify games.

CI: We hear a lot about adding value to products and services by applying gamification (or

using game mechanics to enhance the experience). Does it only add value? What does

gamification take out?


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RB: It would rather depend on what you wanted to gamify. Some things are inappropriate

subjects - funerals, for example. You CAN gamify them, but the experience would be worse all

round for most people.

My concern about the current view of gamification is that it doesn't add any game. Its over-use

could have a detrimental effect on games.

CI: Is gamification viewing "users as players" or "players as users"?

RB: In its current form, it's viewing "players as objects". I loathe it.

CI: Jesse Schell argues that games provide a much clearer feedback (unambiguous) than

reality.

RB: They CAN, but there's nothing about games that says they MUST.

CI: Would you agree to an examination of everyday life as a series of glass/black box (in

terms of feedback) processes?

RB: There's more to it than that. Some of the best things in life happen in the imagination,

where there is no feedback at all.

CI: Who should be practicing gamification?

RB: Under the contemporary definition, only people who are trying to discredit it.

CI: How do you explain this mosaic of (primarily) non-game related entrepreneurs and

evangelists that gamification as an industry is composed of?

RB: Game designers know better than to do this. They actually care about their players.

CI: What does this (gamification) mean for Game Design?

RB: More work for game design consultants. Yay!

CI: And for the video games industry?

RB: It's only peripheral for the video games activity. It's like asking what Youtube clips mean

for the movie industry. There are some outliers that feed into it, but the rest are completely

separate.


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8.5 Sebastian Deterding

Transcript, Skype interview with Sebastian Deterding, PhD researcher in communication

science at the Graduate School of the Research Center for Media and Communication,

Hamburg University, is well known about his international talks and presentations on

persuasive design and gamification.


2010




SD: My personal way dates back when I was starting a PhD in Utrecht, Netherlands, on

serious game design and the design of persuasive games and I came to the conclusion that as

the German saying goes ―serious games is basically shooting sparrows with cannon balls‖. It

means that it is a huge amount of effort and it is a huge amount of design work if you want to

persuade people by doing this. My conclusion was actually that when you want to influence

people‘s behavior, using design principles behind games and apply them in the actual context

of the activity where the people already are, is a much more effective and efficient way, than

building a game and hope that people will seek out your game, will play it and will learn

something by playing it and then change their behavior.

So, coming from the whole persuasive design perspective here, my personal way in, was this

realization that if you want to persuade people, or if you want to persuade people to change

their behaviors, trying to apply game principles in the context where people already are, where

the behavior is happening, is a much more promising venue than building serious games. That

is the angle where I came from.

I think though, that if you want to find out how the industry got there, you have to look from

both sides; you have to look at the game design part and you have to look at the interaction

design part. At the game design part I think it is basically the serious games and especially

alternate reality games community, with Jane McGonigal on the forefront, and pervasive games

people, that tried explore how we broaden all these up to include more and more everyday

reality. Their focus is still building real full-fledged games, so this is one side. The other side,

where the industry got there is interaction design and what you can see in interaction design is

that around 2008, the discourse in interaction design pretty much shifted towards the notions of

behavior and persuasion. We saw persuasive technology suddenly again taking up; you saw

people like Robert Fabricant [Frog Design] at the IXDA 2008 keynote saying ―Behavior is our

medium‖; you see how the whole interaction design movement starting to realize that they are

not just trying to make things visually appealing and extremely usable and easy, but what they

actually try to do is to influence and shape people's behavior. And from that impulses, as far as

I can see, certain people like Steven Anderson with his ―Seductive Interactions‖ came to the

idea that games are potentially a pretty nice place to look at this since games are obviously

very good at shaping people's behaviors, to keep them playing simply. So that is where the

interaction design discussion came from, to look at games.


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Finally, I think in the industry, that if there hadn‘t been Farmvile and its tremendous success

and if there hadn't been Foursquare and Foursquare being all the craze at the relevant industry

events like ―South by Southwest‖, I think it would have a much harder time picking up. So if

you have the game design movement with the alternate reality and pervasive games moving

there, and the interaction design movement that is coming from a persuasive technology angle

where certain people planted the idea: ―hey games is a good place to look at‖ and finally two

successful industry cases that seeded the interest of the professional industry. Now you might

claim that Farmvile is not really gamification, but I think it got mixed up in the whole thing as

regards social media in general. So the social media people being the big industry‘s stream

right out, just saw Farmvile and said ―wow this is really picking up users and they are really

making money, what can we learn from that about social media?‖ and that was sort of

answered by Foursquare where they saw that ―yeah sure we can turn or take parts of Farmvile

into interactive applications.‖

CI: I like that you have already put a lot of things into the equation; so I‟ll pick up from the

last thing you said about the industry noticing these new types of users (playing games on

Facebook). So is gamification viewing the players as users, or the users as players?

SD: To a large extent it depends who you are asking and how they are framing it. I think

there are two framings. One is the framing from people coming from game design, again Jane

McGonigal on the forefront, who will say ―well this is basically getting people to develop a

playful attitude at their whole life, that‘s what is all about‖. It is about instilling a player role

towards other applications and towards other stuff, that‘s their framing.

I think the framing that is currently predominant in the interaction design field, where the whole

applications are happening, is not about play and players at all. The framing is much more

about nudging users; it‘s a very a very behaviorist framing of the user as sort of the gullible,

manipulable mass than being an active user, or even an active player. So I think that asking if

it is about the player or the user is the wrong framing of the question.

CI: You have also recently made the argument that gamification, as applied and evangelized

nowadays, is not addressing all types or player, or users. So, do you believe there should be a

player/user type profiling approach to gamification?

SD: I‘d say not necessarily profiling. Ask again what is the background, why do people use

personas in interaction design in the first place? And the basic reason for personas, by Alan

Cooper, was to say ―well usually our engineers and our product managers are not the users,

and if we want them to have a clear idea of what our users are, or the users we aspire to,

perhaps we have to give them not quantitative numbers but a mental image they can have in

their heads‖. The point about personas is to be user-centered or user-centric in your design

and that I very much agree.

The work I am trying to do is basically exactly that: to say how different social contexts and

different usage contexts effect the way game design patterns affects us; or what kinds of

design patters actually work or don‘t work, or might have a worse effect. Thus, in that sense I

would say yes. But I would say it is not necessarily profiling, it is more just the fact of:


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Doing formative user research, if the outcome could be a persona or something else; I

don't really care about the concrete form or shape of the outcome. But doing formative

user research to understand what context what tasks, what people you design for.

And of course do A LOT of prototyping; prototype to figure out whether your game

mechanics work with your audience, whether they produce unintended consequences.

So the answer is basically get away from the same kind of mindset we observed with social

media which is basically feature-centric: ―Is this is all about the features right? Just add a tag

cloud to your website and the uptake and spread is going to go through the roof‖, which is

completely wrong.

It is basically being user centric in your design which includes user research and iterative

prototyping and usability testing; so the whole hard design work still applies to gamification as

well as to any other application as well as to well designed games. And you know very well that

these are play-tested to the death as well.

CI: So thus would you stand for a more holistic approach on the users/players of

gamification as playful beings, instead of a player/user types approach?

SD: To a certain extent, I would say that is too early to say, because we have seen too little

actual work and too little uptake of actual work to say whether a framework with three types,

four types, or how many other types of users is actually able to cover 80% of the use cases or

the design cases or not. I think trying to be more specific and trying to figure out other different

types or not, is just work that remains to be done. In that case I wouldn‘t want to venture other

than: there is certainly difference and it‘s not one size fits all but how many sizes there have to

be, or if you cannot shoehorn it into a model of four sizes or five sizes very much remains to be

seen.

CI: Alright, let me ask you something else then. You are using the term game patterns; some

others use the term game mechanics. How do you feel about the use of these terms?

I think the truth is getting mixed up all time currently. In my second presentation at ‗Playful

2010‘, basically what I tried to call out was: ―look everything that people are currently doing in

gamification, what they call ‗game patterns‘ or ‗game mechanics‘ are not really game

mechanics they are patterns of feedback design that are taken from games right?‖ A badge is

the form of feedback or status display, a pattern of user interface design that we know from

games. This is not a game mechanic whereas game mechanics are basically the molecules of

a game rule-set; of a full rule-set that constitutes a game rule-wise that we can recognize and

that we can implement over and over again. Something like ―time pressure‖, or ―resource

management‖, or something like a time-based ―resource refilling‖ and so on and so on. All of

these in my definition, in that way I'm talking about, are real game mechanics and I find that the

current discourse about gamification hasn‘t even began to look into these kinds of game

mechanics, neither do they differentiate between them and between other repeatable design

patterns that you can take from games which obviously go beyond game mechanics per se.

CI: So is there also an effort to extract as much as we can from games, trying to figure out

everything that we can take and apply or do you see more that the silver lining formula has been

found, namely points, leader boards, badges etc.?


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SD: At the current point, what I see, what is offered by the industry is pretty much badges

and leader boards and points. So I would hope that the design work that I see, that the options

that have been offered by people, that the things that have been looked in by researchers will

quickly move beyond that. But as things go, this seems to be the solutions that are most easily

implemented in the existing websites. Because it is basically just another form of

recommendation systems and we have been using and applying recommendation systems for

a long, long time on all kinds of websites. This is where I see why the discourse is very much

focused on that.

Personally I see at least three different ways to step beyond that. So you have these very

narrow patterns of feedback design that people apply and I would say they are even more

design patterns to come from games, including game mechanics. What is not looked into

currently is to what extent the actual game design process which focuses on creating an

enjoyable user experience and essentially differs from other interaction design processes. So

what can we learn from the design process. And the third thing is what Bill Scott talks about

lenses, ―design lenses‖; taking a certain perspective on an object. So is there something such

as a ludic lens in design with certain principles and goals you design for, certain approaches to

an application when you design it.

Thus, currently they are just focusing on feedback patterns not on the full-scale of design

patterns including game mechanics and I would say hopefully the discourse widens to

something as al ludic lens, widens to game design as a process and widens to patterns

including game mechanics but at this point it's very much down to feedback patterns.

CI: So, keeping that mind, who should be practicing gamification?

Game designers who are open to interaction design and there are not that many of them.

Ideally I would say, a concert, a partnership of game designers and user experience designers

together. I don't see that any single person, at this moment in time, has all the necessary skills

and knowledge to do this. Thus, I would say you should get a team together of a user

experience designer who understands his trade, who understands especially user research,

that understands the necessities and design goals of productivity applications and a game

designer who actually understands how game mechanics work.

CI: So then, how do you explain this mosaic of non game-related entrepreneurs that now

make up the gamification industry?

SD: Once again you have to split the crowd. You have to split the crowd into those that

come from game design, Jane McGonigal and co. who have this game design lens approach

and the others which are, at this point, mostly coming out of the web startups scene and have

little to none exposure to game design as a practice. Maybe they played videogames in their

past but they don‘t grasp the game design as design. Also those who see this as a new form of

marketing and typical metrics driven startup design at this point. So they will get stats about

how user perform, how you convert them and use this stuff to convert more users but they're

not looking at it from a game design perspective and what they are seeing is just ―this is a

gorgeous new possibility to do supercharge loyalty programs you don't even have to use real

incentives, we can just use virtual incentives, that's enough‖. Finally then of course you have

Jesse Schell, who I think frames the whole situation as a new kind of adver-games than


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marketing or the Jane McGonigal take which would say ―well this is about expanding a playful

approach across all sphere of life‖.

CI: You have also recently argued that these existing gamification approaches applied on

the web can lead into disrupting implicit social norms, with the example of “Akoha”. So my

question would then be, couldn‟t that be done in way so that we can reach some kind of

collective, or personal reflection upon these norms?

SD: It‘s an interesting thing if you want that intentionally as a designer, or it happens

unintentionally. In principle, sure, I can very much imagine that a good alternate reality games

designer would combat it from exactly this approach and say ―let‘s see if we add some game

mechanics here to have people discovered this‖. But then again I would say that he as a

designer would still be asked to come up with, or to design basically the context around it, so

that people will not simply be annoyed by this, but will realize or will be will be afforded an

opportunity to take the annoyment and discuss it with other people and discover whatever they

should discover. So it is one thing as an experimental artist to piss off people, it is a different

thing to frame pissing off people in way that they realize that you pissed them off intentionally

and that it is actually helping them understand the society they are living in.

CI: I see that you position yourself into a more, McGonigal/playful approach in this

gamification process than a game approach. In this context I would ask if you would be standing

for a “playfication” instead of a gamification?

SD: Not necessarily, because I'm very much also interested in how applying actual

mechanics, which I would see as part of rules systems and how they change social situations. I

find it also very interesting and I believe potentially very effective. Interesting if only because it

gives us a view into how the proceduralization of the society in general, or the way that more

and more of our social interactions are governed or structured by software, works and what

effect it has. So I think this kind of gamification in this sense is just a tip of the iceberg of a

much more pervasive process of software proceduralizing social interaction in general.

I also believe as a design take, it can also be very effective. The difficultly with playfication is

that play ultimately is an individual stance to the situation; it is like experience design; you can‘t

design experiences because that is a subjective phenomenon. You can design for certain

experiences. In the same sense you can‘t design playfulness, you can design for playfulness in

a certain situation. You can hope that the individual frames the situation that way. So I would

say yes, playfication is also interesting, but personally I'm actually at this moment more

interested in applying game rules and game mechanics in other contexts. What I am just trying

to argue is ―listen, a huge part of the fun of games comes from this playful framing of the

situation, it comes from this kind of situation or this state of mind or attitude rather than just the

rule-system‖.

Gamification: The Application of Game Design in Everyday Life

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