I've talked some now about what gamification is and about what games are. It's time to get into the challenge of thinking like a game designer. Understanding problems through the lens of what I call game thinking, the core skill for gamification. And I'd like to start doing that. By posing a fundamental question. Why gamify? Why would you even think to take a site or a business process and try to make it more game-like? If you're interested in some serious results and achieving some real-world serious objectives. So let's look at an example. And try to think about why gamification made sense for this service. The example is Dodgeball. Dodgeball was one of the first successful smartphone applications. It was developed by a group of graduates from the Interdisciplinary Technology Program at NYU. And these guys like to, hang around in bars. So they built an app for people who like to hang around in bars. Here you see a screen shot of the web client, and dodgeball gave you this map that showed you, where you were, and then you could check in, and say here I am. I'm at this location right here. This bar that's on this street, and then you can see where your friends were, where other people were who were using the application where they have checked in, and this got some notoriety, started to get some pick up in New York and San Francisco ans places like that and in fact Google bought the company. But, dodgeball had a problem. The problem was that it's a chicken and egg situation. If lots of your friends are on dodgeball and there's lots of check-ins that you can find, then there's a great incentive for you to check-in as well. You want to get access to all the information, you get a lot of value from seeing all of your friends and you know they will get value from seeing what you're doing. On the other hand If you go to Dodgeball, and there's a blank map, not too much reason for you to bother checking in. So how does the service get to critical mass? Get above that level where there's a not, not enough activity to get people involved? So that was one of the basic challenges that Dodgeball had. After leaving Google, Dennis Crowley, one of the fathers of Dodgeball, started a new company that had a fairly similar basic structure. It involved going and checking in on a mobile client at locations that you would go to. But this time, his new company, Foursquare, implemented what we would now call gamification. So think about why would Foursquare use gamification? What are some of the aspects of this service that we saw originally in dodge ball that might lend themselves to a gamified approach? There's a number of different things that you might come up with and there's clearly no right answer but lets think about some of the aspects of this problem that might make gamification appropriate. The first is that Dodgeball had what we could call an engagement gap. It needed to get more people to engage with and use the service, and making the service fun, making the service feel more engaging and gamelike, is certainly a powerful way to do that. The second is that Dodgeball didn't have a lot of variety in it. Basically it was check in, or don't check in. And then, again, you could get some analytics or information, as well as seeing where your friends where checking in, but there weren't too many different things to do. And when things are unitary like that. Where it's either do something, or don't do something, It doesn't tend to engage people as much unless there's some very direct result that they get. If it's go to this website, click a button buy this product, then you can see the relationship. but if it's not that clear, if there's some value in the exchange but it's not as direct, having options having choices As we talked about in discussing games as meaningful choices could potentially make the experience more popular. Then next is that Dodgeball didn't really have any progression. Check in or not, you really didn't get anywhere by virtue of what you did. And so checking in the hundredth time was kind of like checking in the first time. Again, limited the motivation of players to want to participate actively in that system. The good news is that dodge ball was a very social application, it involved relationships with your friends and social interaction. Is very powerfully tied to games. Because we love to compete against our friends, we love to collaborate and share and team up with our friends. We love to have status vis-à-vis our friends, and also see what our friends are doing. And so all of that is potentially quite consistent, with the gamified approach. And finally there was an opportunity with a service like Dodgeball to make the action a habit. If you have to think each time, oh, I better get out my phone and go and check in, you're not going to do it all that much. If it's habitual, if it's just a natural thing that you do. You just kind of automatically, when you go to a new bar, or a club, or a restaurant, or even one that you've gone to many times before, you just pull out your phone and check in. Then you're much more likely to do it. So the challenge for Dodgeball, and for its successor Foursquare, was how to make this action a habit. Something, again, that is very well suited to games, which create this environment that encourages people to come back and come back. So there's, those are a few of the reasons that I think gamification seemed to make sense for Foursquare, the successor service to Dodgeball. So let's look at what Foursquare did. The most prominent that it did was implemented a concept called Mayorships. So, if you check in the most times Out of everyone who's checked in at that particular location da da da da you're the mayor on Foursquare. And here you see the badge, badge is another aspect of gamification [INAUDIBLE] I'll talk about. This is the badge you get of being the mayor of 10 locations at one time, it's actually the super mayor badge, but it's a representation of. that achievement of becoming the mayor, and For Square built a system that made it very easy to notify your friends on Twitter and Facebook that you'd become the mayor of a place, who you displaced as the mayor. It created this friendly competition which made the act of checking in something more fun, and something that had more of a Reward to it, not necessarily a monetary reward. Although some venues do give incentives to people who are mayors. But a reward in that you see something and other people see that you are on top when you become the mayor of a venue. Simple but potentially valuable use of Gamification. And then Foursquare built a whole other set of game mechanics around this check in process. So this was a screenshot from the Foursquare page of Dennis Crowley, the CEO of a Foursquare, and you see a variety of data points about what he's done and then here on the right you see the badges. Badges were an important element of what Foursquare did... They allow them to create much more richness of the service. Remember I said, choices are important and progression is important. Badges gave all sorts of options. Again, it's still just checking in, but now checking in becomes a much more variegated, kind of, activity. It depends where you check in, if you check in at a certain place, like a health club, you get a badge. If you check in at a health club a certain number of times, you get another badge. If you check in at say a conference, like south by southwest, there's special purpose badges you get that you could only get there. So suddenly this one act of checking in, becomes something that seems very rich, and complex, and nuanced for the users. It also is something that allows you to level up. So Foursquare implemented different levels within their badges. So checking into an airport gives you one badge. but checking into 20 different airports say, gives you a higher level of that badge, which is harder to get. And these are all examples of game mechanics built around the basic process of checking in. Did it work? Well Foursquare now has over 20 million users. They've raised over 70 million dollars in venture capital valuing the company over 600 million and they've successfully overcome challenges from major companies like Facebook that got into this social location marketplace. Now this Foursquare still has a long way to go and correlation isn't causation. That doesn't necessarily tell us that the game mechanics were the reason for their success. This is something that we'll come back to later. But it's worth thinking about how the gamification that Foursquare implemented ties back to the challenges that they faced. So consider how gamification addressed the engagement gap, the desire for habit formation. The need for more choices and more progression, and taking advantage of the social dimension of what Foursquare was doing. That's the kind of thought process that you need to engage in in approaching problems through the lens of game design...
