The Gaming Industry, Gamification, and Work
Michael was voted a 2010 Influential Leader by CRM Magazine for his work on predictive social analytics and its application to Social CRM.He's a regular blogger on the Lithosphere's Building Community blog and previously wrote in the Analytic Science blog. You can follow him on Twitter or Google+.
Last time I summarized the debate at Wharton’s Gamification Symposium over “What is gamification?” in a short definition of this new buzz word. Today, I like to address a couple of questions posed at the symposium that is important for the advancement of gamification.
Q3: What can we learn from the gaming scholarship and the gaming industry to develop effective gamification?
The gamification community can learn a great deal from game designers and the gaming industry, because people will get tired of the same games over and over again. Eventually people will get tire of points and badges. These simple game mechanics will become annoyances and ultimately be despised.
Companies that use points and badges will be treated the same way as those that still use pop up ads and spam mail today. When that happens, we will need to borrow and evolve new game mechanics/dynamics from the game designers in order to continue to engage the players. The gaming industry will usually do a much better job coming up with creative and engaging attributes of game play, because they get paid just to do that.
For this reason, professional game designers often criticize the gamification community for their shallow gamification design and ignorance about the complexity of the players persona. However, as gamification becomes more prevalent, consumers’ expectation will change. Basic game attributes simply won’t work anymore. Then the gamification community will have to start picking up the pace within the gaming industry. They will be forced to take the player (i.e. consumers) much more seriously, and not only rely on Bartle’s overly simplistic gamer typology.
Q4: What can psychology and management teach us about the gamification of work?
An important function of management in the work place is to motivate the work force. However, management often fails to do so. In fact, because management often uses extrinsic incentives to motivate their work force, it often ends up decreasing people’s intrinsic motivation to work. This is a well know phenomenon in psychology called overjustification. In theory and practice, it is much more effective to use intrinsic motivators.
The difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is a subject of much debate, because external rewards can sometimes be internalized and become intrinsic to the individual. Yet intrinsic motivations can also be reflected and reinforced externally. According to Scott Rigby, the key difference between intrinsic vs. extrinsic has to do with the perceived locus of causality. If a reward is meeting the intrinsic psychological need of the player, then it is less important whether the actual reward itself is intrinsic or extrinsic. In other words, external rewards may work as long as they align with and reinforce the intrinsic motivation of the player.
There is a great deal of literature about our intrinsic motivations. They range from Maslow’s meta-needs; to Dan Pink’s autonomy, mastery, purpose; as well as Csikszentmihalyi’s flow. So management should focus on providing these intrinsic motivations. For example:
- The autonomy to do what the employees want and when they want
- The proper challenges that move employees into flow
- The rapid feedback of progression that highlights employee achievement (mastery)
- A moderate amount of social competition and social facilitation
- An equal opportunity for everyone self-actualize, and beyond (the meaning and purpose of it all)
In practice, however, this is very difficult. For example, if you give an employee some autonomy, individual productivity will tend to increase. However, this also creates a coordination problem, because by definition autonomy means employees will tend to work independently of others. Consequently, autonomous employees often overlook the common goal of the group, the team, and the organization. This often counteracts the individual productivity boost. So a good manager’s job should be to find the balance that optimizes both individual and group productivity at the same time by giving employees the proper amount of autonomy.
Likewise, it is very hard to always give the proper challenge to move employees into flow. Since most tasks at work are driven by the market and the customers, they do not come in a continuous range of difficulties. The next task that comes along is either too challenging or too easy for a particular employee. Therefore, employees are usually not in flow.
Conclusion
BTW, I will be traveling most of next week. That is why I decided to post this article earlier, since the last post was pretty short and simple. So, see you when I return. Finally, if you feel that I'm qualify to speak on this topic (i.e. Gamification: From Hype to Science), please help to vote for my SxSW proposal by clicking on the image to the right (you may need to create a FREE account to vote). Remember, Tomorrow (Friday Sept. 2nd, until midnight CDT), is your last chance to vote! Thanks, and I hope to see you there.
